Tracing the Trafficked in the Mosquito Shore Indigenous Slave Trade

In approximately 1727, the Miskitus on the Mosquito Shore (present-day Nicaragua and Honduras) sailed westward on one of their many turtling and slaving expeditions. On the trip, they sacked the Bacalar region and took an astonishing 900 Natives as captives, in addition to capturing dozens of turtles. Upon their return home, the Miskitus sold many of the Native captives as slaves—along with turtles—to English merchants from Jamaica, who turned around and exported these enslaved Indians to ready buyers in Jamaica, North America, and other parts of the Atlantic World. And this was just one of hundreds of such expeditions in the eighteenth century.

The scholarship on the Mosquito Shore Indigenous slave trade has slowly grown over the years, with growing interest in this 500 mile coastline as a major node of Indian slave trading that operated for almost 100 years between the 1680s and the 1770s. This Mosquito Shore Indigenous slave trade intersected with pre-existing Miskitu raids on their traditional enemies and newer Catholic Christian settlements to the interior, but it was fueled by English merchants who offered merchantable trade goods in exchange for captive Indians and turtle shells (which were a hot commodity on the European market). This paper focuses on the transshipment of Natives caught up in this trade, tracing them and others caught up in the Central American Native slave trade more generally, to locations in the Caribbean and North America.