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Notes and Queries, Number 27, May 4, 1850
Notes and Queries, Number 27, May 4, 1850
THE MOSQUITO COUNTRY.—ORIGIN OF THE NAME.—EARLY CONNECTION OF THE MOSQUITO INDIANS WITH THE ENGLISH
The subject of the Mosquito country has lately acquired a general interest. I am anxious to insert the following "Notes and Queries" in your useful periodical, hoping thus to elicit additional information, or to assist other inquirers.
1. As to the origin of the name. I believe it to be probably derived from an native name of a tribe of Indians in that part of America. The Spanish Central Americans speak of Moscos. Juarros, A Spanish Central American author, in his History of Guatemala, names the Moscos among other Indians inhabiting the north-eastern corner of that tract of country now called Mosquito: and in the "Mosquito Correspondence" laid before Parliament in 1848, the inhabitants of Mosquito are called Moscos in the Spanish state-papers.
How and when would Mosco have become Mosquito? Was it a Spanish elongation of the name, or an English corruption? In the former case, it would probably have been another name of the people: in the latter, probably a name given to the part of the coast near which the Moscos lived.
The form Mosquito, or Moskito, or Muskito, (as the word is variously spelt in our old books), is doubtless as old as the earliest English intercourse with the Indians of the Mosquito coast; and that may be as far back as about 1630: it is certainly as far back as 1650.
If the name came from the synonymous insect, would it have been given by the Spaniards or the English? Mosquito is the Spanish diminutive name of a fly: but what we call a mosquito, the Spaniards in Central America call by another name, sanchujo. The Spaniards had very little connexion at any time with the Mosquito Indians; and as mosquitoes are not more abundant on their parts of the coast than on other parts, or in the interior, where the Spaniards settled, there would have been no reason for their giving the name on account of insects. Nor, indeed, would the English, who went to the coast from Jamaica, or other West India Islands, where mosquitoes are quite as abundant, have had any such reason either. At Bluefields where the writer has resided, which was one of the first places on the Mosquito coast frequented by English, and which derives its name from an old English buccaneer, there are no mosquitoes at all. At Grey Town, at the mouth of the river San Juan, there are plenty; but not more than in Jamaica, or in the towns of the interior state of Nicaragua. However names are not always given so as to be argument-proof.
How did the word mosquito come into our language? From the Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian? How old is it with us? Todd adds the word Muskitto, or Musquitto, to Johnson's Dictionary; and gives an example from Purchas's Pilgrimage (1617), where the word is spelt more like the Italian form:—"They paint themselves to keep off the muskitas."
There is a passage in Southey's Omniana (vol. i. p. 21.) giving an account of a curious custom among the Mozcas, a tribe of New Granada: his authority is Hist. del Nuevo Reyno de Granada, l. i. c. 4. These are some way south of the other Moscos, but it is probably the same word.
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:—