William Pitt’s Settlement at Black River on the Mosquito Shore: A Challenge to Spain in Central America, 1732-87

Abstract

URING the eighteenth century when William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, dominated English political life, a distant relative, also named William Pitt, established an unofficial English colony on the Mosquito Shore of what is now the Caribbean coastline of Honduras. It is unlikely that the two Pitts ever met. Nevertheless, had they done so, they would have discovered a common bond in their desire to undermine Spanish political and economic pretensions in America. Although the Mosquito Shore never attained official colonial status, by 1787 it contained approximately 2,600 British subjects scattered among a dozen small settlements on a 550-mile strip running east along the Honduran coast to Cape Gracias a Dios, and then south and east to Nicaragua's San Juan River. Together with Belize and Jamaica, the Shore formed an important triangular British power base, threatening the weakest link in Spain's New World empire. 1 The small town of Black River, founded by William Pitt in 1732 near Cape Cameron some 80 miles east of the Spanish frontier town of Trujillo, became the Shore's administrative center and a major, frustrating irritant to Spanish colonial administrators when, after 1740, Jamaican governors encouraged Pitt to develop his settlement into an entrep6t for contraband trade and a staging area for attacks on Spain's Central American possessions.