The Awakening Coast: An Anthology of Moravian Writings from Mosquitia and Eastern Nicaragua, 1849-1899 by Karl Offen and Terry Rugeley (review)

For Central Americanist geographers and those familiar with the region, the Moravian Church is known as a key institution in the regional identity of eastern Honduras and the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. So much so that today, it is taken as a given and does not appear strange at all to them or even this region’s residents that what began as a small German-Czech Hussite social-religious experiment now defines religious life amid a broader region dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. Yet how it came to be this way, and more importantly how this was experienced and recorded by the Moravian missionaries themselves, has until now been confined to short excerpts amid larger tomes and elusive archival shelves. Thankfully, geographer, Mosquitia-expert, and CLAGista Karl Offen and Latin Americanist historian Terry Rugeley have brought to life the seminal moments of the Moravian Church in Mosquitia from 1849 to 1900 with their annotated anthology, The Awakening Coast. More importantly, the careful passage selection, annotation, and contextualization by the authors serve to create a wonderfully readable cultural-historical geography of the Nicaraguan Mosquitia.

Unlike the mid-19^th century Moravian missionaries who were dropped off unaware into unfamiliar villages amid the lagoons, pine savannas, and rainforests, the reader is introduced to the Nicaraguan Mosquitia with a thorough introduction chapter by Offen. In fact, this chapter is a considerable scholarly contribution in itself and provides the overarching narrative that the excerpted vignettes flesh out with their lived experiences and observations. As a whole, this keystone chapter contextualizes the time and geographic setting during which the featured writings took place. In it, Offen begins by situating the importance of the Moravian Church in the regional identity of the Nicaraguan Mosquitia while pointing to the “Great Awakening” of the 1880s there as the moment of synthesis between the two. The majority of the essay, though, is an excellent summary on the social, cultural, political, and economic changes that swept the region in the latter half of the 19^th Century through the experiences of its Moravian, Miskitu, Rama, Mayangna, and Creole residents. In this sense, Offen’s chapter and the book in total succeed in the same way Bernard Nietschmann’s and Charles Hale’s work show the effects of globalization on the Nicaraguan Mosquitia, the only difference being Offen and Rugeley’s focus on the second half of the 1800s from archival sources.

While the introductory chapter works as a stand-alone essay, it is also valuable as an annotated index for the selected writings by the Moravians. For readers interested in specific thematic aspects of the anthology, such as boom towns, disease, Miskitu cosmology, healing, or buried poisons, among many others, Offen provides useful parenthetical “tags” on these subjects by noting the chapter numbers of the selected writings that reference those themes. This small, but significant detail adds to the book’s lasting contribution as an anthology of difficult-to-access writings.

Most of the 31 entries written by the Moravian missionaries are very brief, usually 3-7 pages, but some more substantive chaptered entries could qualify as monographs, with one exceeding 50 pages. Some are accounts of actual events, such as the description of events related to the religious “awakening” of 1879 in Karata, but others are general histories of places (“Changes in Dakura”) or descriptions of economic activity or cultural practices (“Trade among the Miskito Indians”; Sorcery at Kukalaya”). While many of the entries have the overly religious, ethnocentric discourse expected from mid-19^th Century Protestant missionaries, this does not make them uninteresting or useless as vistas into the past. If the reader can tune out the dated language and religious qualifiers, the observations of some writers, especially those of Heinrich Ziock, at least read like...