African slaves were shipwrecked on the Mosquito Coast as early as 1640 and interaction between them and the local Miskito population commenced.
The Rama have struggled against the Nicaraguan government and mestizo landowners for rights to their ancestral lands and have joined forces with the other Nicaraguan indigenous groups the Miskito and the Sumo peoples.
Much of its territory eventually passed under the control of Miskito raiders in the eighteenth centuries.
Garifuna soon defected to the Spanish and many settled around Trujillo, while others accepted land grants in the Miskito Kingdom.
Andrew Hendy was appointed honorary chief of the Miskito in 1894 by Zelaya's government.
Perhaps the most notable of these initiatives was the expansion of the kingdom's center to the south, first to Bluefields and then to San Juan del Norte, where he cooperated, with the support of British naval forces, with the expulsion of the Nicaraguan garrison and the annexation of the town to the Miskito Kingdom in 1848.
Two communities of Miskitos, with a total population of 3,200, were isolated during the storm.
On 25 June 1720, Nicholas Lawes, the governor of Jamaica signed a formal agreement with a Miskito king named Jeremy to provide 50 men to track down Maroons (former enslaved Africans who had escaped bondage) in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica.