Chap. VIII. THE REY-KING. 131 
authority of the King of Mosquitia, had come, to exact 
some services from them. On several occasions such 
exactions had been made, and parties had been sent up 
from Bluefields to press a number of men into the service 
of the king, or rather of his British tutors, for the purpose 
of cutting wood or doing other work on the river. The 
tribe of Indians to whom I paid a visit had lived some- 
what lower down, but had retired to these upper regions 
for the purpose of remaining unmolested by the govern- 
ment of the Rey-King — the title which, by a composition 
of the Spanish and English words for the character of 
royalty, they gave to the Zambo sovereign of Mosquitia. 
Don Tomas told me that they suspected " the son of the 
Rey-King " would come with soldiers to carry them down 
to the coast by force, and compel them to work there. 
When we arrived, all the individuals under the shed 
were completely naked, but the women hastened to put 
on an apron; the men, though more leisurely, did the 
same, and after a while the whole family, according to 
Indian notions, were in a becoming state for appearing 
before a foreign visitor. I observed that the more aged 
amongst them were suffering, or had been suffering, from 
cutaneous affections. Their skin, which, in a healthy 
state, was of a dark brown colour, showed large spots of a 
lighter shade, where it peeled off, and the marks of boils 
and sores were visible on different parts of their bodies. 
All of them were deformed by the disproportioned exten- 
sion of the abdomen. The expression of their faces was 
not disagreeable, though their features were more of the 
broad Mongolic than of the sharper type of the Aztec and 
Chorotegan races in the lower country. If my memory 
serves me well, their physiognomy bore a considerable de- 
gree of resemblance to that of the Indians of the southern 
k 2 
