issued to the governor of Honduras, Alonso Ortiz de Elgueta, who sent pilot Andrés Martín to scout the coast from Trujillo as far as the mouth of the San Juan River. Martín founded the settlement of Elgueta on the shore of Caratasca Lagoon (in Honduran Taguzgalpa), which was soon moved inland, to vanish from history. Around the same time, conquistador Juan Dávila launched several self-funded expeditions into the interior of Tologalpa, without success. In 1641 or 1652, a shipwrecked slave ship gave rise to the Miskito Sambu, when surviving Africans intermixed with the indigenous coastal groups. The Miskito Sambu developed strong ties to English colonists that settled in Jamaica from 1655 onwards, and with groups of English colonists that had settled along the Mosquito Coast. They became the dominant coastal group, allying or subjugating other groups in the region. When the Kingdom of Guatemala declared itself independent of Spain in 1821, most of Mosquitia was still outside of Spanish control. Legacy of the conquest Within a century of the conquest, the Nicarao were effectively eliminated by a combination of the slave trade, disease, and warfare. It is estimated that as many as half a million slaves were exported from Nicaragua before 1550, although some of these had originally come from other parts of Central America. Although Gil González Dávila had initially recovered a significant amount of gold, Spanish hopes of extracting great quantities of gold from the province proved ephemeral. Even when sources of gold were found, the collapse of native population levels meant that the Spanish were unable to work the mines. In 1533, the Spanish noted that although gold had been found in Santa María de la Buena Esperanza, about 25 leagues from León, a measles epidemic had killed so many natives that there were none left to extract the ore. By the end of the 16th century, Nicaragua contained a relatively modest 500 Spanish colonists. Historical sources Gil González Dávila wrote a number of letters in 1524 describing his discovery of Nicaragua, including a letter to 16th-century chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés containing his most complete account of his actions there. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés dedicated the entire 16-chapter Book IV of the Third Part of his Historia general de las Indias (General History of the Indies) to Nicaragua, which was published in Seville in 1535. He had himself lived in Nicaragua for