One of the Virgin Islands in the West Indies has the name of Mosquito.
Some "Mosquito Kays" are laid down on the chart off Cape Gracias à Dios, on the Mosquito coast; but these probably would have been named from the Mosquito Indians of the continent. And these Mosquito Indians appear to have spread themselves from Cape Gracias à Dios.
It is stated, however, in Strangeways' Account of the Mosquito Shore, (not a work of authority), that these Mosquito Kays give the name to the country:—
"This country, as is generally supposed, derives its name from a clustre of small islands or banks situated near its coasts, and called the Mosquitos."
I should be glad if these Notes and Queries would bring assistance to settle the origin of the name of the Mosquito country from some of your correspondents who are learned in the history of Spanish conquest and English enterprise in that part of America, or who may have attended to the languages of the American Indians.
2. I propose to jot down a few Notes as to the early connexion between the English and the Mosquito Indians, and shall be thankful for references to additional sources of information.
I have read somewhere, that a Mosquito king, or prince, was brought to England in Charles I.'s reign by Richard Earl of Warwick, who had commanded a ship in the West Indies; but I forget where I read it. I remember, however, that no authority was given for the statement. Can any of your readers give me information about this?
Dampier mentions a party of English who, about the year 1654, ascended the Cape River (the mouth of which is at Cape Gracias à Dios) to Segovia, a Spanish town in the interior; and another party of English and French who, after the year 1684, when he was in these parts, crossed from the Pacific to the Atlantic, descending the Cape River. (Harris's Collection of Voyages, vol. i. p. 92.) Are there any accounts of these expeditions?
Dampier also speaks of a confederacy having been formed between a party of English under a Captain Wright and the San Blas Indians of Darien, which was brought about by Captain Wright's taking two San Blas boys to be educated "in the country of the Moskitoes," and afterwards faithfully restoring them, and which opened to the English the way by land to the Pacific Sea. (Harris, vol. i. p. 97.) Are there any accounts of English travellers by this way, which would be in the very part of the isthmus of which Humboldt has lately recommended a careful survey? (See Aspects of Nature, Sabine's translation.)
Esquemeling, in his History of the Buccaneers, of whom he was one, says that in 1671 many of the Indians at Cape Gracias spoke English and French from their intercourse with the pirates. He gives a curious and not very intelligible account of Cape Gracias, as an island of about thirty leagues round (formed, I suppose, by rivers and the sea), containing about 1600 or 1700 persons, who have no king; (this is quite at variance with all other accounts of the Mosquito Indians of Cape Gracias); and having, he proceeds to say, no correspondence with the neighbouring islands. (I cannot explain this; there is certainly no island ninety miles in circumference at sea near Cape Gracias.)