into a public document such as his annual message to Congress. Mr. Monroe, being the President, got his way.
He wrote:
The occasion has been judged proper for asserting as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subject for future colonization by any European powers . . .
And later, in the same message, he wrote:
With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered, and shall not interfere. But with the governments who have declared their independence, and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power, in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition towards the United States . . .
He had done a great thing, but he was not aware of it. He knew only that he had acted in an emergency and acted in the best way he knew. He did not have the consent of the Senate, and so he could not be thought in any way to be setting down an immutable determination on the part of the United States government.11 If his bet was called he could not declare war; only Congress could do that. He was not conscious of giving to the world a ringing doctrine, and indeed these two parts of his annual message were not at first called or thought of as a “doctrine” but rather as the Monroe “principles” or the Monroe “declaration.” 12
The President’s warning was dismissed in most European capitals as bluster, but London, after thinking it over, decided that it did not like it. Neither was there any applause from the Latin-American nations, who thought it somewhat condescending and, in any event, without any force behind it. In the days when Madrid still ruled that part of the world there had been stem insistence upon a trade confined to the mother country; but, though the guardacostas had been busy, there was a great deal of smuggling, prices stayed high, and many South and Central Americans could not buy all the things they wanted. Now that they were free and so was their trade, there was a scramble to sell to them, with Britain, she of the mightiest merchant marine, in first place. More, there was the Royal Navy. It alone, and unassisted by any fulminations from Washington, could hold off the Holy Alliance; and the newly freed nations of the south, knowing this, just at first failed to wax enthusiastic about Mr. Monroe’s strictures.
Spain had been forced to take back her old king, the stupid, stubborn Ferdinand VII, and he, of course, aided by France, could be counted upon to do everything that he could to reimpose limitations upon Latin-American commerce. Spain still controlled Cuba, an island often eyed enviously by some Yankee expansionists; but, though she had tried several times, she had not been able to reimpose her rule upon Santo Domingo, the eastern end of the island of Haiti.
England’s command of the king of the Mosquitos made the whole matter that much worse.
The Mosquitos (the name was originally Misskitos or Moscos, and it had nothing to do with the insect that bites) were an Indian tribe that dwelt in the swamplands of the east coast of Honduras. Once pure Carib, they had been heavily intermixed by shipwrecked and runaway African Negroes, and later too by a smattering of whites. They were naturally intelligent, but wild, seminomadic, and not numerous, not well organized. The British called them Sambos.
The Spaniards never had troubled to enslave this small tribe; and therefore, said the British, it never had been a part of Honduras but was in fact a sovereign state, its chief, the king of the Mosquitos, being an independent prince. He was also, for the most part, an invisible prince, for the British kept him well out of sight in the swamp, while his “private secretary,” an Englishman, really ran the country. Just where this country was, how far it extended, was not clear, for the Mosquitos’ claims were vague; but certainly it included at least the mouth of the San Juan River, where the English themselves had various settlers, Jamaican Negroes, and also a few descendants of the earlier hard-wood cutters who had been associated with the buccaneers. The king of the Mosquitos, it will be seen, was a very convenient person to own.
The whole matter was made even more complicated by the fact that New Granada (later Colombia) claimed not only the whole of the Isthmus of Panama—nobody disputed that—but also the east coast of Central America as far north as Cape Gracias a Dios, which was north of the mouth of the San Juan.
Costa Rica too had no respect for her neighbor’s idea of a boundary, but insisted that her sovereignty extended clear up to the west bank of the San Juan River, which would give her a say in any preparations for the digging of a Nicaraguan canal.
Central America could be called the Balkans of the New World, a powder keg, a pit of snarling, spitting little states not one of which was strong enough in itself to give a real power much trouble but any one of which might bring on a war between Outsiders. Spain and Great Britain more than once had been on the brink, and toward the end of the eighteenth Century they had in fact indulged themselves in a private side war, an undeclared war, over the Mosquito Coast, Belize, and the Bay Islands off Honduras. In the next Century it was the turn of the United States and Great Britain, the scene having shifted to Nicaragua. Ardent naval officers and overenthusiastic diplomats on both sides again and again threatened to bring about a major blast, their behavior being disavowed barely in time, for neither Washington nor Whitehall really wanted to fight.
Resentment of the British behavior in Central America was one of the reasons that Spain consented to join France in going to the aid of the Colónies in the American Revolution, so that the two nations actually were at war when the first Englishman invaded Nicaragua. He was only twenty-one, the youngest post-captain in the Royal Navy, and his his name was Horatio Nelson. That was in April of 1780.
It was a joint services Operation, and the army part was in charge of a Major Polson. Nelson was exuberant. “I intend to possess the Lake of Nicaragua, which for the present may be looked upon as the inland Gibraltar of Spanish America,” he wrote home. “As it commands the only water pass between the two oceans . . . by our possession of it Spanish America is divided in two.”
They were rowed up to a moldering castle located about halfway to the lake on the shore of the San Juan River, which is 119 miles long, and this they attacked with great spirit and in vastly superior strength, so that it soon fell. They got no farther. At just about this time General Fever appeared in the field, and the men began to die right and left. The expedition was all but wiped out, a total failure. Of the two hundred men from Nelson’s own ship, only ten survived. He was one of those ten, but he was a very sick man and was sent home. He never did fully recover his health; and he never even saw Lake Nicaragua, nor did he divide Spanish America in two.
The informal war that followed was featured by a great deal of running-down of flags and running-up of other flags as one side or the other claimed this island or that cape, at the same time disclaiming the opponent’s title. After the complete break-apart of the Central American Alliance in 1838, most of Great Britain s spats were with the republic of Nicaragua, which had a flag that was blue and white. The men from London designed and had made a flag for the Mosquito people, giving their land, for the first time, a name—Mosquitia. This flag bore a striking resemblance to the Union Jack.
Another of the newly independent republics, Costa Rica, which was more or less at war with Nicaragua—a boundary dispute—asked Great Britain to take it over as a protectorate. Washington heard of this through its assiduous envoys, and took alarm. Costa Rica claimed a goodly portion of the right bank of the San Juan River, and if this claim were backed by Britain it would greatly raise the cost of building a canal. Britain, however, was too busy with other acquisitions—so nothing came of the petition.
The comic-opera air of these proceedings disappeared when James Knox
