Warwick, who had
commanded a ship in the West Indies; but I forget where I read it. I
remember, however, that no authority was given for the statement. Can
any of your readers give me information about this?
Dampier mentions a party of English who, about the year 1654, ascended
the Cape River (the mouth of which is at Cape Gracias a Dios) to
Segovia, a Spanish town in the interior; and another party of English
and French who, after the year 1684, when he was in these parts, crossed
from the Pacific to the Atlantic, descending the Cape River. (Harris's
_Collection of Voyages_, vol. i. p. 92.) Are there any accounts of these
expeditions?
Dampier also speaks of a confederacy having been formed between a party
of English under a Captain Wright and the San Blas Indians of Darien,
which was brought about by Captain Wright's taking two San Blas boys to
be educated "in the country of the Moskitoes," and afterwards faithfully
restoring them, and which opened to the English the way by land to the
Pacific Sea. (Harris, vol. i. p. 97.) Are there any accounts of English
travellers by this way, which would be in the very part of the isthmus
of which Humboldt has lately recommended a careful survey? (See _Aspects
of Nature_, Sabine's translation.)
Esquemeling, in his _History of the Buccaneers_, of whom he was one,
says that in 1671 many of the Indians at Cape Gracias spoke English and
French from their intercourse with the pirates. He gives a curious and
not very intelligible account of Cape Gracias, as an island of about
thirty leagues round (formed, I suppose, by rivers and the sea),
containing about 1600 or 1700 persons, who have no king; (this is quite
at variance with all other accounts of the Mosquito Indians of Cape
Gracias); and having, he proceeds to say, no correspondence with the
neighbouring islands. (I cannot explain this; there is certainly no
island ninety miles in circumference at sea near Cape Gracias.)
A quarto volume published by Cadell in 1789, entitled _The Case of His
Majesty's Subjects having Property in and lately established upon the
Mosquito Shore_, gives the fullest account of the early connexion
between the Mosquito Indians and the English. The writer says that
Jeremy, king of the Mosquitos, in Charles II.'s reign, after formally
ceding his country to officers sent to him by the Governor of Jamaica to
receive the cession, went to Jamaica, and thence to England, where he
was generously received by
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