Acting under the advice of the settlers who had remained, and of the British traders coming to their shores from Jamaica and Belize, the Mosquito Indians remained loyal to the friends who had deserted them, and still refused to recognize Spanish authority over their shore. The Spaniards then used force, but the Indians, entrenching themselves within the ruins of the old English forts, frustrated every endeavor to reduce them to control. in By the year 1796 England and Spain were again open conflict over European affairs on the continent, and for the time the conventions of 1783 and 1786 were held in abeyance. In the following year the naval forces of Great Britain shattered the fleet of the Spaniards off Cape St. Vincent, and thus opened the way to further encroachments in the West Indies, and along the Spanish Main. Resolved to make the most of this advantage, the settlers of Belize, who had already begun to feel cramped in their more confined quarters, began again to encroach upon the surrounding country, and finally succeeded in extending their boundaries to the west and south across the rivers Nueva, Wallis, and Siboon.' The English government also showed, by its fresh acts of aggression, that it no longer considered the treaty of 1786 binding; for, finding the Carib Indians of the island of St. Vincent in the West Indies growing too closely attached to French interests, the British authorities had them deported in a body, and landed,-to the number of 1 Cf. Map at end of volume. about four thousand, on the still uninhabited Bay islands. The Spanish government was now in an almost helpless condition, but fearing English contentions in the West Indies and Central America, it resolved to take some means to protect the colonies there from further attack. The Mosquito shore still lay open to encroachment, and having learned from long and bitter experience that the Guatemalan authorities were utterly unable to cope with this problem, the Committee on Fortifications of the Indies, to whom the matter was entrusted, now advised that the entire shore from the Chagres river in Panama to Cape Gracias, be turned over to the Vice-Royalty of New Granada1 to conquer and defend. A royal order to this effect was accordingly issued on November 20, 1803, but the actual transfer seems never to have been undertaken. The threatened attack on the coast did not take place, as England made peace with Spain soon after, and in the confusion of the Peninsula war which followed even the royal order was forgotten. Left to themselves again, the colonists of Gautemala, led by their Governor, Colonel O'Neil, with a naval force of some two thousand men, attempted to drive the English from Belize; but the Jamaican authorities, ever watchful of these settlements on the mainland, at once sent a warship to the scene, and again the Spanish were driven back. As the 1 The Presidency of New Granada had since been raised to the rank of a Vice-Royalty. colonists had taken the initiative in the matter, and broken the treaty of 1786 themselves by their unauthorized attack on the now legal settlement of Belize, the woodcutters also considered themselves no longer bound by the terms of the convention, and continued to pursue their encroachment far into the interior and down to the Rio Sarstoon in the south. Having appropriated all this land, they maintained, moreover, that it was theirs henceforth, by right of conquest; for, by force of arms and in time of war, they had driven back the Spaniards who had unlawfully attacked them. Unfortunately, the Napoleonic régime had, in the the meantime, so involved governmental affairs in Spain, that at the close of the Peninsula war, this point of sovereignty, brought up by the English woodcutters, was never formally passed upon. In 1814 the treaty of Madrid was concluded between England and Spain, who were really allies in the last campaign. By this treaty, and as if by an afterthought, the conventions of 1783 and 1786 between the same two powers were without further question reaffirmed in toto. Thus, in theory, the events which had transpired on the isthmus after 1786, were disregarded entirely and the status quo maintained. As a matter of fact, however, a horde of Carib Indians. now occupied the Bay islands, the Mosquitos still controlled their shore, while the settlers in Belize, under a Superintendent duly authorized by the colonial authorities, continued in possession of the tract of land they had seized upon, and ruled over it henceforth as they would. Thus the close of this long and varied struggle left the Nicaraguan canal route still in the hands of Spain. But the once formidable Spanish monopoly in the West Indies and the Spanish Main, was broken forever, and the line of Great Britain's insular possessions now extended in a semicircle, starting from Belize in the north and running through Jamaica, the Bahamas, the Leeward and Windward islands, the Barbadoes, and Trinidad, to join the mainland once more at British Guiana in the south, and thus enclose the Caribbean Sea.1 1 British Accounts and Papers, loc. cit., Vol. LXV. Doc. 966, No. 5, Enclosures 1-7. No. 18, Enclosure 6. U. S. Foreign Affairs, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. Pt. I., pp. 65, 66; Pt. III., pp. 360, 361. Pt. I., pp. 356–361. U. S. Foreign Relations, 43d Cong., 1st Sess. Hertslet's State Papers, Vol. XL., p. 953 ; Vol. XLI., p. 757; Vol. XLII., p. 153; Vol. XLIV., p. 244; Vol. XLVII., p. 661: Vol. XLVIII., p. 630; Vol. L., p. 126. R. M. Martin, "History of the West Indies." London, 1836. 66 Bancroft, loc. cit., "Native Races," pp. 713 and 793. History of Central America," Vol. II., p. 607. Squier, loc. cit., “Central American States," pp. 241-247, 582-584. CHAPTER V. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY CANAL PROJECTS. D URING the years of this protracted struggle between England and Spain for the political mastery of the isthmus, the more practical question of connecting the two seas by an artificial water-way almost sank out of sight. § 46. Scien tific Interest in the Transit Problem. Scientific interest in the transit problem was, however, revived at the very outset of the conflict, by La Condamine, the famous French astronomer. He and his confrères, Bouguer and Godin, were sent out by their government in 1735, to take part in an international scientific expedition to measure an arc of the meridian on the plain of Quito. During the years of his sojourn in Central and South America, La Condamine thus had ample opportu nity to make instrumental surveys along the isthmus, and, as a result of his investigations, he came to the conclusion that a canal might be opened up through Nicaragua to join the two oceans. In 1740 La Condamine presented an admirable paper on the subject, embodying these conclusions, before the Academy of Sciences at Paris, and called for some action on the matter of interoceanic transit. |