The town itself presents no features of peculiar interest; indeed, its similarity to towns in the southern part of the United States and the prevalence of the English tongue rob it of the sleepy charm which attaches to most Central American hamlets and almost make the traveller forget that he has left his native land. There is a plaza, or public square, without which no Nicaraguan town could be complete, and about it and along the broad main street are the principal buildings of the place. These are of wood, one or two stories high, neatly painted and frequently surrounded by tropical foliage. Cocoanut palms nod in the plaza and around the houses, while breadfruit and orange trees thrive wherever utilitarian or artistic considerations have overcome native inertia. Shops are numerous and better stocked than one would expect, while prices, owing to the fact that Greytown is a free port, are very low. A horse-railroad, over which a solitary car makes infrequent trips, traverses the principal thoroughfare, affording transportation facilities which, while poor, seem in excess of the demand. That the property is not remunerative may be inferred from the fact that one of our men, his sense of humor stimulated by deep potations, chartered the conveyance for a day for five dollars and, locking himself inside, spent the entire time riding to and fro, successfully

maintaining his position against the aggrieved public until the expiration of his lease.

While Greytown owes its international importance to its prospective value as the eastern terminus of an interoceanic canal, its position at the mouth of the Rio San Juan insures the passage through it of a considerable foreign commerce. A line of river steamers brings down rubber, coffee, dyewoods, and other products of the country, which are shipped abroad, chiefly by the Atlas Line steamships, and takes back various imported goods for consumption in the interior. Thus the town prospers, according to Central American standards, even while canal construction is at a standstill, but its citizens look forward with confidence to a resumption of work and a wave of prosperity which shall sweep them on to affluence. When we were there it was a town with a recent commercial past, a past in which the canal had seemed a certainty, and in which the three great dredgers now rotting in the lagoon were hard at work, bringing prosperity to every one. The bit of canal three or four thousand feet long, the teredo-riddled jetty, the giant dredgers falling to pieces in the harbor, and the deserted buildings slowly rotting away, are perishing monuments of a brave attempt to pierce the American isthmus,

CHAPTER III

T

HISTORICAL AND DIPLOMATIC

HE history of the Mosquito Coast is largely a history of British pretensions to territory and sovereignty and of consequent diplomatic controversies. If the prior claim of the aborigines be disregarded, Central America, discovered by Columbus in 1502, explored and colonized by Gil Gonzales Davila and Francisco Hernandez de Cordova, was properly a Spanish possession up to the revolution of 1821. But the natural preference of Spanish settlers for the sunny western slopes left portions of the eastern coast almost uninhabited save by Indians, and invited encroachments which were subsequently made the grounds for British claims to territorial rights and sovereignty. Early in the seventeenth century the Caribbean Sea swarmed with English, French, and Dutch buccaneers, who, encouraged while disowned by their governments, hovered among the coral reefs of Central America and the West India islands and harassed the commerce of Spain. English freebooters skirted along the Mosquito Shore, cultivated