Empire, Identity, and Masculinity in Thomas Young’s Nineteenth-Century British Handbook of the Mosquito Shore

Abstract

This essay contextualizes Thomas Young’s Narrative of a Residence on the Mosquito Shore (1842) within the overall production of travel narratives to the Americas, the intellection of race, and the construction of British identity and masculinity during the first half of the nineteenth century. It analyzes the author’s representation of the Honduran climate, terrain, and raw materials, as well as the “customs and manners” of its Mosquito-Sambo population. It also sheds light on how the Mosquito-Sambos organized themselves socially and politically and utilized their “exceptional” status bequeathed to them by the British Crown to distinguish themselves from other indigenous peoples. In doing so, they complicated the era's ethnoracial ideas and conventions. Lastly, this article argues that Young’s narrative provides an insight into bourgeois values and masculine sensibility. Through the description and differentiation of the “other,” we are provided with a nuanced image of a middle-class British subject.