the mosquito coast is the name of the Caribbean littoral of Nicaragua, but whether it was to be truly a part of Nicaragua, a protectorate of Great Britain or the United States, or an autonomous or even independent region, was long in question. Spain had lost control of the area during the prolonged struggles with England in the colonial era, bequeathing only a shadow sovereignty to the local successor regimes. Only when Nicaragua exhibited a deepening nationalism under the presidency of Jose Santos Zelaya, did she mount an effective campaign to extend her jurisdiction to her eastern territories. By 1894 the Mosquito Coast had come under Managua's administration, and the long British dominance in the area was ending. Yet the fifteen years from 1894 to 1909 saw an intense struggle in which Nicaraguan attempts to rule the Mosquito Coast met determined resistance from its pro-British residents, and from a colony of American entrepreneurs determined to regain their former freedom from taxation and regulation. Ironically, the Nicaraguan government gained final and unchallenged control of the region only as it became a protectorate of the United States. As elsewhere in the Central American isthmus, colonial settlement and development in Nicaragua had been concentrated in the western half of the country facing the Pacific. The hot, unhealthy lowlands of the Caribbean coast were long inhabited only by a small population of native Indians. During the seventeenth century they steadily intermarried with whites and Negroes from the British colony of Jamaica and its outpost at Belize, who came to trade for local products, cut hardwoods, and carry on an illegal trade with the inland settlements by using the Indians as intermediaries. The resulting population were known as Sambo-Miskitos, and looked to British rather than Spanish colonial centres for trade and alliances. Behind the coastal region which they inhabited lay rough, thinly-populated highlands, through which overland communication