An obscure and seemingly minor incident in which no one was killed or even injured, this event has had a secret history, hidden — until now — for over a hundred years.

The US Secretary of the Navy ordered Cyane's captain, George N. Hollins, to demand reparations from the town’s residents for damaging property and stealing goods from an American-owned local steamboat business called the Accessory Transit Company (ATC).

[1] At that time, the American captain of a transit company steamboat that Borland was traveling on had shot and killed a native boatman in cold blood.

After the ultimatum expired, Miskito-British forces led by the King and Patrick Walker, and backed by two British warships, seized San Juan del Norte.

They also destroyed Serapaqui, where the British prisoners captured during the first attempt on San Juan del Norte were interned, and advanced to Lake Nicaragua, during which Walker drowned.

On March 7 Nicaragua signed a peace treaty where it ceded San Juan del Norte to the Mosquito Kingdom, who renamed it Greytown after Charles Edward Grey, governor of Jamaica.

In this document the two powers pledged themselves to guarantee the neutrality and equal use of the proposed canal, and to not "occupy, or fortify, or colonize, or assume or exercise any dominion over Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito Coast or any part of Central America", nor make use of any protectorate or alliance, present or future, to such ends.

In 1852, Britain occupied the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras and rebuffed the American protests claiming that they had been part of Belize before the treaty.

When asked by Secretary of State William Marcy about Punta Arenas, the transit company’s chief council, J. L. White, said they leased it not from Greytown but from Nicaragua.

This was untrue, but Marcy believed White and sent Hollins and the Cyane in March 1853 — about 16 months before the razing visit — to prevent Greytown from evicting the ATC from Punta Arenas.

I felt safe in taking this position on account of what you said to me on that subject.”[10] About 10 months later, when he learned of the broken-bottle assault on Borland and of a recent, purported theft of food from the company by residents (compounding the earlier property damage), Marcy sent Hollins and the Cyane back to Greytown, under Navy Secretary Dobbin’s orders noted above.

[12] They also resigned to protest his hiring of 50 Americans to remain on Punta Arenas as an armed, ersatz constabulary to guard the transit company and its employees.

If the scoundrels are soundly punished, we can take possession and build it up as a business place, put in our own officers, transfer the jurisdiction, and you know the rest.

[14]On the day before the Cyane razed Greytown, a much smaller Royal Navy schooner, HBMS Bermuda, was also anchored in the harbor, commanded by a Lieutenant W. D. Jolley.

He only essayed a half-hearted complaint of Hollins’s plans: “The force under my command is so totally inadequate … against the Cyane, I can only enter this my protest.” Hollins responded with: “I … sincerely regret … exceedingly [that] the force under your command is not doubly equal to that of the Cyane.”[15] British involvement in the Crimean War, together with the firm opposition of Britain's merchant class to a war with the United States, prevented any further diplomatic or military reaction from Britain.

[5] Despite both US and international outrage at the bombardment, the US government ignored the incident until President Franklin Pierce finally offered an official explanation five months later in his State of the Union message: “The arrogant contumacy of the offenders rendered it impossible to avoid the alternative either to break up their establishment or to leave them impressed with the idea that they might persevere with impunity in a career of insolence and plunder.

In that point of view, the fall of Greytown will doubtless cover with additional glory the military portion of the Administration, under whose auspices it was achieved.” [Reprinted in The Liberator.

][17] Two months after Greytown’s destruction, the Nashville Tennessean noted that local Democrats in Massachusetts resolved it was “proof to the world that the Administration is determined to … protect our citizens from injury and insult.”[18] But most papers were opposed.

And less than two weeks after the razing, the New-York Tribune proffered these alternative explanations for why the port was destroyed: “That [U.S.-owned steamboat] company [had] long desired to get rid of the town, which … was a hindrance to their supremacy and had defied their power.

The town being removed, it is supposed that project may be carried out with greater facility.”[19] And in late 1853 — seven months before the razing — the New-York Herald had reported that an American named David Keeling bought one-quarter of a huge tract of protectorate land from the king of the Mosquito Indians and another quarter of it from him, earlier, in 1851.

“We have lately learned,” the Herald continued, “that Mr. Keeling has associated with him, for the purpose of improving the lands embraced in these grants, several gentlemen in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York, and that measures are now being taken to forward the enterprise.”[20] Then on January 5, 1854, the New-York Times seconded this Herald report with: “The Mosquito King … has sold out to a Company of American citizens one half of the entire territory over which he claims to exercise dominion.

That the influence of [the enterprise] … will speedily spread itself all over Nicaragua and absorb the whole of that State with its inefficient Government, there can be little doubt.”[22] These twin intrigues against the town (the transit company and the land-speculators were in league early on) both eventually failed and largely disappeared from the written narrative.

Perhaps the last historian who still had sources on at least one of these sub rosa plots was the distinguished William O. Scroggs, who wrote in 1916: “It was to the interest of that [steamboat] corporation that Greytown be wiped off the map, and it had succeeded in inveigling the [US] government into doing this bit of dirty work.

)[24] In 1912, the State Department’s solicitor, J. Reuben Clark, wrote a memorandum entitled, The Right to Protect Citizens in Foreign Countries by Landing Forces.

Demands for an apology and indemnity were duly made on the local de facto authorities, but they were not answered.”[25] In the current version of the official US list of interventions, which originated in 1945 and was then called “Instances of Use of US Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-1945,” the unanswered company-loss reparation was dropped and only the unanswered Borland-insult remained as justification for the razing: “Naval forces bombarded and burned San Juan del Norte (Greytown) to avenge an insult to the American Minister to Nicaragua.” And it has continued to appear in this list’s subsequent iterations right up to the latest one at this writing, dated: June 7, 2023.”[26] When the Cyane returned from Greytown, it landed at Boston, where Hollins was ordered to leave the ship and travel to New York City, where “you have been arrested.”[27] A New York merchant named Calvin Durand, who had lost large amounts of goods in the bombardment and burning, sued Hollins personally for $14,000 (about $490,000 in 2024).

As the New York Journal of Commerce put it: “The case … involves a number of interesting questions, and especially the broad one of the constitutional power of the President to order the bombardment and destruction of a town in a foreign country without the authority of Congress, which body holds the war-making power.” (Reprinted in the Nashville Union and American.

Now, as it respects the interposition of the executive abroad, for the protection of the lives or property of the citizen, the duty must, of necessity, rest in the discretion of the president.

"[30]Justice Nelson went on to say that President Pierce intervened "for the protection of the [American] citizens at Greytown against an irresponsible and marauding community that had established itself there.”[30] In similar language, President Pierce, in his State of the Union referenced above, wrote of the Greytowners: "At first pretending to act as the subjects of the fictitious sovereign of the Mosquito Indians, they … assumed to adopt a distinct political organization [Greytown had declared itself an independent city state, acknowledged as legitimate by both the US and England[31]] … Not standing before the world in the attitude of an organized political society, … it was, in fact, a marauding establishment … [and] a piratical resort of outlaws.”[32] As historian Arthur Schlesinger said of Greytown (and, by extension, Durand v. Hollins) in his 1973 book, the Imperial Presidency, “both Pierce and even Nelson himself said with the utmost clarity that the action was undertaken, not against a sovereign state, but against a ‘piratical’ and ‘irresponsible’ group.

Nevertheless this … generally wretched episode was cited in later years by lawyers in desperate search of constitutional justification for presidential war against sovereign states.”[33](Schlesinger may have been echoing noted expert in international law and long-time state department official John Bassett Moore.