Robert Hodgson

Robert Hodgson served as Superintendent of the Mosquito Shore during the 1770s. His appointment was a sinecure that allowed him to engage in illegal slave trading of enslaved indigenous people in the interior that were the result of undisguised slave raiding by the Miskitu who inhabited the coastal zone from Rio Tinto, then known as Black River, in the north in what is now Honduras as far south as the San Juan River, that today divides Nicaragua from Costa Rica. Superintendent was a title then used in the British Empire to designate the British official who was appointed to regulare relations with the indigenous populations, often Amerindian, who inhabited territory that was nominally under British colonial rule. In the case of the Mosquito Shore, the Superintendent was technically under the government of Jamaica, which had formally outlawed the enslavement of Amerindians, in the context of the massive importation of enslaved Africans, in 1741. The Superintendent was charged with preventing such enslavement in Central America, although in fact Hodgson did not enforce the prohibition but rather benefited from it. The Spanish government did not recognize British authority along the Caribbean coast, as is clear in the seizure of the Morning Star, the ship owned by Dr. Charles Irving and Alexander Blair on which Vassa arrived in what is now Nicaragua at the mouth of the Rio Grande de Matalgapa in 1776. Hodgson's posting was a sinecure because he was the illegitimate son of the British Prime Minister, William Pitt, who acknowledged his paternity by assuring that his son held a position in an outpost of empire. Hodgson lived in Black River, which was then a small community and center of plantation agriculture but today is virtually abandoned.