Miskito

The Miskito are the dominant Indigenous people of the Mosquito Coast, the Caribbean shore from Honduras to Nicaragua. Before European contact the coast was held by small egalitarian groups speaking an early form of Miskito, a Misumalpan language.

In the mid-1600s Africans from wrecked slave ships and runaways from the Providence Island colony settled around Cape Gracias a Dios and intermarried with them; the Spanish called these mixed descendants Mosquito Zambo. Allied with the English, who crowned their chief Oldman as king in 1660, the Miskito acquired firearms and built the Miskito Kingdom.

Their raiders struck as far as Yucatán and Costa Rica, seizing Mayangna and other captives for the Jamaican plantations. Even after Spanish forces began entering the coast in 1787, the Miskito kept their arms and kingdom, retaining their grip on the region to the end of the eighteenth century.