This map (on which Guatemala appears decidedly Chilean) is the one that that lay on the table of Lord George Germain, 1st Viscount Sackville, Secretary of State of the Colonies in London, 1775-82.
He led a group of British policy-makers, by and large men who had never been to the Caribbean, who collectively had their ambitions sucked into Central America to a large extent by the map's exaggerated, enticing presentation of two water features: The Bay of Honduras and Lake Nicaragua.
(Appropriate perhaps, given the manner in which the whole Columbian Exchange might be said to have been kicked off by a man incapable of reading a map properly.)
Spain had been soundly defeated by Britain in the Seven Years War (ending 1763), but seeing that the victors had since lost many of their colonies on the North American mainland, the Spanish decided, opportunistically, that the time had come for yet another war, and duly declared it on June 16, 1779.
Belize rightly celebrates the Battle of St George's Caye, probably the most decisive moment in the settlement's history, which would take place a couple of decades later in September 1798, but this earlier conflict began with a surprise Spanish dawn attack on the same coral atol by a smaller Spanish fleet sailing out of the Bay of Chetumal. On September 15 that year they sacked the little township on the caye and carried off 101 European-origin and 40 African-origin inhabitants into captivity on Cuba.
The Brits were especially miffed at this as they had been preparing their own surprise attack on the Central American coast and did soon after stage a raid on the Spanish castillo at Omoa — now Honduras — where they forced a contingent twice as large as their own to surrender and made the unexpected discovery there of a large pile of gold.
Horatio Nelson had been on the Royal Navy ship which was assigned to lead this little adventure, but was transferred off it and given his own first command at the last minute.
It was the inland lake further south that had George Demain and co really enthralled however.
The fleet Oliver Cromwell had sent to the Caribbean in 1655, which ended up taking Jamaica, had originally proposed to find a way through to the Pacific and in effect, sever Spain's American empire in two and the idea persisted in London.
This apparent weak link in the whole extended structure was defended at the entrance to Lake Nicaragua by a humungous Spanish fort — el Castillo de la Inmaculada Concepción — which had four foot thick walls, a moat and a drawbridge.
Thomas Jeffreys's atlas of the region made said lake look pretty much like a 'Panama Canal' just waiting to happen, but as we can now more easily discern, matters on the ground were just a little bit less straightforward than they then appeared on paper...
The coastline of Central America from modern Belize down to Costa Rica was swampy, 'unwholesome' and largely unsuitable for the then prevalent Spanish economic model. But it very much suited another economic model, which involved a kind of symbiotic arrangement between the Spanish colonies and an offshoot of the British ones known as the 'shoremen', who in turn worked closely with the essentially autonomous Miskito community in the area.
The nub of this arrangement was the trafficking of contraband.
Both Spain and Britain forced their colonies to trade directly with the motherland, so that any sideways transfers between neighbours were considered illegal: an open invitation for smugglers and the formation of a kind of informal 'duty free zone' — a bit like the one which has been established more officially along the northern border of Belize today.
These zones of tierra de nadie were contested during wartime, but at times of treaty or truce they also performed some functions which all otherwise competing entities in the region found useful.
The shoremen were a mix of buccaneers who were starting to explore more legitimate trades, such as logging and smaller-scale plantation, and former indentured white labourers from the islands who had been displaced by African slaves as the sugar boom got going.
The Miskito meanwhile, were a blend of indigenes who had arrived from the turn of the millennium via canoe from along where Pete Hegseth is currently blowing up faster-moving boats, with more recently shipwrecked African slaves and mostly-white buccaneers, their name either a reference to the 'mixto' nature of their ethnic make-up or the muskets that they acquired in exchange for the 'Indian' women who became buccaneer brides.
Back in 1680 the first Miskito King, Jeremy I, had been crowned and handed a treaty in the name of his fellow monarch in London which guaranteed him and his successors a continuing supply of fine uniforms, other fancy clothes and oodles of rum.
Miskito Kings were not in fact the actual tribal leaders, but instead a sort of ceremonial figurehead for dealings with representatives of the wider British colonial project in the Caribbean. There were other native dignitaries in the 'court' of Mosquitia, bearing titles such as General Tempest and Duke of York (!)
An expedition intent on opening up the Pacific set off from Jamaica at the start of 1780, under the command of hastily-promoted John Polson. This time Nelson was very much present, as the 21-year-old Captain of the frigate HMS Hinchinbrooke.
The flotilla attempted first to rendezvous with 'our man in Mosquitia', James Lawrie, who had the important-sounding title of Superintendent-General and was in effect the only paid British official of any significance on the mainland.
From his underpopulated and pestilent patch Lawrie had long been selling the untapped potential of the Mosquito Coast to his distant superiors: ‘The beef I have killed there would not disgrace Leadenhall market.'
He had also greatly exaggerated the size of the armed force he could gather locally to assist Polson — 'one thousand soldiers' turned out to a motley crew (literally a unit of mixed racial heritage) consisting of a handful of shoremen and their slaves, plus little more than a hundred Miskito warriors.
Polson's expedition finally settled at Greytown at the mouth of the San Juan river, close to today's border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. It was late March with its imminent threat of precocious downpours. Nelson, sceptical about the whole enterprise, requested to join the up-river raid on 'Inmaculada'.
Lawrie had quite naturally underplayed the extent of the upcoming San Juan river trip and overplayed its navigability. The assorted Brits, Jamaicans and shoremen had little choice but to allow permit the Miskito in their canoes to exercise de facto operational control.
Yet upon reaching the island of San Bartolomé, five miles down river from the main fort, it was Nelson who led an attack by boat (possibly his first taste of combat) which resulted in the speedy surrender of the Spanish garrison. However, two of the sixteen escaped, thus costing the expedition any remaining element of surprise, and matters were soon worsened by further dithering by Polson who was now expecting five hundred fresh troops sent by Lawrie and preferred to wait.
Meanwhile, Inmaculada's comandante Juan de Ayssa had indeed seen the smoke rising above the forest and sent messengers to Granada requesting reinforcements. He had also been able to bolster his water supplies and bring all the nearby settlers in behind the fort's massive bastions.
These had only ever been assaulted once before — in 1762 — just prior to the end of the previous war, when buccaneers and Miskito warriors had managed to pick off Inmaculada's CO, but his daughter Rafaela Herrera soon gained her revenge by taking out the buccaneer leader with the cannon she had taken charge of herself.
Nelson and other officers now favoured another frontal assault, but Polson opted for something more akin to delay along with some positive activity. He ordered his men to ascend a nearby hill which overlooked the fort, thinking he might then bombard it a bit from there, but the jungle around the base of this hill was near impenetrable and the whole party panicked after they spooked a jaguar. So then they turned to the other, flatter, bank of the San Juan where they found an abandoned Spanish outpost from which they could prepare to fire at Inmaculada from a concealed position.
Nelson had established himself as the best artillery marksman and fired the first shot of the battle on April 13. A three day bombardment ensued, with Nelson managing to take down the Spanish flagpole with one well-aimed ball. But this was not really getting the attackers anywhere as they had a limited supply of ammo. They had started out with two hundred cannon balls, but many had already been lost as a result of capsizing on the inbound river journey.
The Miskito went out at night and picked up any that had fallen outside the walls for re-use, but any that ended up inside the fort, stayed there.
After a week reinforcements arrived for Polson, but so too did the wet weather and associated sickness. Nelson soon had the chills and was vomiting convulsively. The siege and stalemate looked to be about to turn very deadly for those on the outside, so finally on April 28 Polson gave the order to launch the all out frontal attack.
Lined up in front of Inmaculada's walls with his whole force and their scaling ladders Polson first sent a Spanish-speaking officer with a white flag up to the gates, just to check if the people holed up inside wanted to surrender. And much to Polson's surprise, they did. They were down to their last few gallons of drinking water.
Polson installed himself behind Ayssa’s desk and wrote to Governor Dalling in Jamaica: ‘I have the honour to inform your excellency that this castle surrendered to His Majesty’s arms yesterday at 5 o’clock pm,' who in turn informed his own boss Germain of the capture of ‘the inland Gibraltar of Spanish America’.
Even as these letters were on their way, the new owners of Inmaculada were becoming aware, like Napoleon in Moscow, that the destination of this campaign was not quite the prize they had hoped it would be.
The Miskito contingent in particular had come along in the hope of a share of fabled Spanish loot, and discovering that there was none to be had here, quickly vanished off into the forest.
This was also the moment that Nelson departed the theatre, ferried back to Greytown in a state that my mother would have described as 'at death's door'. He signed away his command of the Hinchinbrooke and was taken back to Jamaica where a freed slave called Cuba Cornwallis nursed him back to health using warm blankets and strange herbs.
The British regulars who remained knew the game was up, but launched a few forward sorties to the edge of the lake to show willing, at least until they were utterly ravaged by further bouts of disease, around ten dying every day. The majority made it back to the mouth of the river known to the Spanish as the Rio Morte, leaving a small contingent at Inmaculada.
The governor of Jamaica was still hoping to have another push, but a big boatload of troops arriving in Kingston from Britain turned out to be already largely laid low by fevers and dysentery.
On November 8 the officer left in charge at the fort was ordered to demolish it. This was in progress and only partially achieved when a Spanish force of two hundred men under Capitán Tomás de Juliá approached, and so the last Brits had no choice but to evacuate.
The San Juan raid is often cited as an example of some combination of bad luck and bad planning. This operation might be said to have sought its own ill fortune, starting with the use of the fanciful map, and then setting off only a short while before 'sickly season' on the isthmus.
Of the roughly 2000 men who took part, 380 survived. This included Nelson, just.
"No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts..."
