The monarchs of Mosquito were ignorant negroes, ruling a scattered tribe, the savage descendants of a slave cargo wrecked upon the coast in the seventeenth century. They were appointed at various times by British man-of-war captains, being installed or dethroned at the will of their masters. Nicaragua, while never acknowledging this authority, lacked power to assert her own over the comparatively worthless tracts of her eastern coast, holding possession only of the river and town of San Juan. In 1839, the reigning king of Mosquito, His Majesty Robert Charles Frederick the First, cancelled a debt contracted for sundry liquors and other royal supplies, by making a grant of territory amounting to twenty-two and a half million acres or more. The grantees, Peter and Samuel Shepard, transferred the grant to the Central American Colonization Company, an American Association. This was the foundation of what became afterwards known as the Kinney Expedition. The royal line of Mosquito may be classed among the unfortunate dynasties of the world. The first monarch, whose name is lost to history, was killed in a drunken brawl; his half-brother and successor was dethroned by a British captain, who placed a distant scion, George Frederick by name, on the vacant throne. The reign of the latter was short. His son, Robert Charles Frederick the First, was a merry monarch, "scandalous and poor," who sold his birthright to the Shepards for a mess of Jamaica rum and sundry pairs of cotton breeches. His son, George William Clarence, was reigning in 1850. The superior swiftness of American ships had enabled the United States to forestall their English rivals in seizing California; whereupon the latter took the bold step, in 1848, of occupying at the same time Tigre Island, on the Pacific coast of the isthmus, and San Juan del Norte, on the Atlantic, which latter place they christened Greytown, in honour of a governor of Jamaica. England thus had the keys of the isthmus in her hands; the canal, worthless without a safe entrance and exit, might fall to the lot of him who chose the barren glory of building it. But, strange to say, the United States possessed at that time a useful diplomatic servant in their minister to Central America, the Honourable E. G. Squier, one, moreover, whose claim to honour rests upon a broader basis than the thankless triumphs of public service. He promptly seconded the protest of Honduras against the utterly indefensible robbery of her territory, Tigre Island. His government took up the question, and the island was reluctantly given up.