Doc. No. 75. 



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wili to subvert subsisting governments by the sword, the inevitable con- 

 sequences must be a disregard of personal rights, weakness at home, and 

 want of character abroad. In your intercourse with the authorities of 

 Guatemala and other States of Central America, you will not fail to im- 

 press upon them our example, where all political controversies are de- 

 cided at the ballot-box. 



I have no doubt that the dissolution of the confederacy of Central 

 America has encouraged Great Britain in her encroachments upon the 

 territories of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, under the mask of 

 protecting the so-called kingdom of the Mosquitos. We learn that under 

 this pretext she has now obtained possession of the harbor of San Juan 

 de Nicaragua — probably the best harbor along the whole coast. Her ob- 

 ject in this acquisition is evident from the policy which she has uniformly 

 pursued thoughout her past history, of seizing upon every valuable com- 

 mercial point throughout the world, whenever circumstances have placed 

 this in her power. Her purpose probably is to obtain the control of the 

 route for a raflroad and a canal between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans 

 by the way of the Lake Nicaragua. In a document prepared, as it is un- 

 derstood, by Mr. Macgregor, and printed by order of the British Parlia- 

 ment, which has been furnished to me by Mr. Crampton, her Britannic 

 Majesty's charge d'affaires to the United States, Great Britain claims the 

 whole of the seacoast for the King of the Mosquitos from Cape Hon- 

 duras to Escuda de Veragua. By this means she would exclude from 

 the Caribbean sea the whole of Honduras south of Cape Honduras, and 

 the entire States of Nicaragua and Costa Rica, as well as the new Grena- 

 dian State of Veragua. Under the assumed title of protector of the 

 kingdom of the Mosquito, a miserable, degraded, and insignificant tribe 

 of Indians, she doubtless intends to acquire an absolute dominion over 

 this vast extent of seacoast. With what little reason she advances this 

 pretension, appears from the convention between Great Britain and Spain, 

 signed at London on the 14th of July, 1786. By its first article'^ his 

 Britannic Majesty's subjects, and the other colonists who have hitherto 

 enjoyed the protection of England, shall evacuate the country of the 

 Mosquitos, as well as the continent in general and the islands adjacent, 

 without exception, situated beyond the line hereafter described, as what 

 ought to be the frontier of the extent of territory granted by his Catholic 

 Majesty to the English, for the uses specified in the third article of the 

 present convention, and in addition to the country already granted to 

 them in virtue of the stipulations agreed upon by the commissioners of 

 the two Crowns in 1783." 



The country granted to them under the treaties of 1783 and 1786 was 

 altogether embraced in the present British provinces of Belize, and was 

 remote from what is now claimed to be the Mosquito kingdom. The 

 uses specified in the third article of the convention were merely, in ad- 

 dition to that of cutting wood for dyeing," the grant of the liberty of 

 cutting all other wood, without even excepting mahogany, as well as 

 gathering all the fruits or produce of the earth, purely natural and uncul- 

 tivated, which may, besides being carried away in their natural state, be- 

 come an object of utility or of commerce, whether for food or for manu- 

 factures; but it is expressly agreed that this stipulation is never to be 

 used as a pretext for estabhshing in that country any plantation of sugar, 

 coffee, cocoa, or other like articles, or any fabric or manufacture by means 



