Images of the Miskito Kingdom

Blog series Americas and Oceania

Author Leonardo Santamaría Montero, PhD Candidate in the History of Art at Cornell University and a 2025 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow.

The Mosquito Coast, also known as the Mosquito Shore or the Mosquitia, is a region on the eastern coast of southern Central America comprising parts of present-day Honduras and Nicaragua. Its name derives from the Miskitu, the Indigenous people who inhabited the region prior to the arrival of Europeans. Colonization brought significant demographic, political, and social transformations to the Mosquito Coast, driven primarily by the arrival of free Black people following a shipwreck in the 17th century and by interactions between local communities and other Central American Indigenous groups, as well as Spaniards, the British, Americans, and Germans, from the 16th to the 19th centuries.

Within this context, this multiracial society, constituted by a confederation of Indigenous and Zambo (Afro-Indigenous) communities, developed a political project known as the Miskito Kingdom, the Mosquito Kingdom, or the Miskito Nation, a sovereign polity under British protection from the 17th century until the mid-19th century, when its autonomy began to erode amid the competing territorial ambitions of the United States, New Granada, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

My doctoral dissertation, Visual and Material Expressions of Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous Sovereignty in 19th-Century Central America, analyzes the role of visual and material culture in the articulation of communal governance across different regions of the isthmus, including the Mosquito Coast. I examine how the Miskito Kingdom mobilized objects, images, and material practices to sustain political autonomy in the face of European and Republican colonialism. Drawing on maps, manuscripts, prints, photographs, royal regalia, and medals preserved in British, Spanish, American, and Central American collections, I analyze how these images and objects functioned as instruments of diplomacy, authority, and self-representation amid the political turbulence of the 19th century.

The British Library houses the imperial collections and numerous primary sources of British origin, as well as books produced throughout the Atlantic world that describe and portray the Mosquitia and its inhabitants through the lens of white sight, exposing the visual and textual processes through which colonial knowledge about the region and its peoples was produced and disseminated in Europe and the United States and intertwined with projects of settler colonialism and resource extraction.

During my three-week residency at the British Library as an Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow, I consulted a wide range of maps and printed publications produced in England, Spain, Germany, and the United States. These materials reflect European and American political and economic interests in the Mosquitia, as well as conflicts among global powers, particularly between the Spanish Empire, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The collection also includes a significant number of mid-19th-century maps produced in the United States that reveal growing American interest in the region, especially in Greytown.

The Library also houses numerous official British publications relating to the Mosquito Coast, including works on territorial disputes with Spain in the late 18th century and records of judicial inquiries into the notorious fraud perpetrated in the early 19th century by the Scottish soldier Gregor MacGregor against British and French settlers intending to move to the fictitious country of Poyais. Together, these materials provide important historical context for understanding the geopolitical dynamics of the region and offer valuable ethnohistorical information about the inhabitants of the Mosquitia.

One of the objects that most captivated me during my visits to the Maps Reading Room was a map of the Mosquito Coast dating from around 1740, produced during Robert Hodgson’s tenure as British superintendent of the Mosquito Coast. The map includes ink annotations detailing the locations of the residences of the King, the Governor, the General, and their men, as well as navigational directions and other useful information for future British visitors.

Another document of particular interest was The West-Indian Atlas (1775) by Thomas Jefferys, which articulates a distinctly British imperial vision of the Caribbean through an extensive collection of maps and allegorical illustrations. The inclusion of maps of the Mosquitia within the atlas reveals the ambitions and colonial imaginaries behind British engagement with the region, positioning the Mosquito Coast as part of a wider Caribbean geographical framework shaped by its longstanding historical, political, and commercial connections to the islands, particularly Jamaica.

Among the highlights of my visit was the opportunity to examine in King George III’s Topographical Collection a large-format volume containing maps, prints, and sketches of numerous territories across the world, including the Mosquito Coast. The map of the Mosquitia in the collection is associated with eastern Yucatán and the agreements between Spain and Britain regarding the exploitation of logwood and mahogany in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles (1783) and the Convention of London (1786), which required the evacuation of British settlers from the region. However, Spain never succeeded in establishing effective control over the Miskito Kingdom, which maintained its ties with Britain and was subsequently declared a British protectorate in the decades following Central America’s independence from Spain (1821). Miskito sovereignty was recognized by Britain and other nations by the mid-19th century, as evidenced by a map produced in Berlin in 1845 that delineates the “Mosquito State” with boundaries that differ from those recognized by Costa Rica and the Republic of New Granada, while accurately reflecting the Miskito’s range of influence along the coast of Central America.

The British Library’s collections also include books published in the United Kingdom and the United States that contain illustrations of the landscapes of the Mosquito Coast and visual representations of its inhabitants. One such example is the engraving Settlement at Fort Wellington in Thomas Young’s Narrative of a Residence on the Mosquito Shore (1842), which depicts a British flag flying over the settlement and thus visually asserts British colonial presence and influence on the Honduran section of the Mosquito Coast. Among the materials I examined were two editions of Adventures on the Mosquito Shore, published in London and New York by the American diplomat and writer E. George Squier in 1855 and 1891. The book’s illustrations exemplify the exoticized representations of the Mosquito Coast that circulated throughout the 19th-century Atlantic world, frequently contrasting the American narrator with local inhabitants and reinforcing visual tropes used to represent Black and Indigenous peoples. Collectively, these images reveal how visual culture participated in the construction and dissemination of colonial knowledge about the Mosquitia, its inhabitants, and its place within the imperial imagination.

During my stay in London, I also had the opportunity to visit the British Museum’s South America study room, where I examined a small group of archaeological and ethnographic objects from the Mosquito Coast, and the Prints and Drawings study room, where I consulted prints from the 18th and 19th centuries related to the British presence in Central America. These objects and images are closely connected to the documents I examined at the British Library, as they all were part of the British Museum’s library, making access to both institutions especially valuable for my research. Furthermore, I visited London’s art museums, an experience that enriched my training as an art historian and broadened my understanding of British visual culture, particularly its representations of royal authority, the Caribbean, and its peoples, helping me situate images of the Miskito Kingdom and its aesthetics within broader traditions of imperial visuality.