The Mayangna population continued to decline after the British gave up their claim to the Mosquito Coast in 1860, due to the combined effects of disease, internecine warfare, and assimilationist pressures from both Miskitu and the new Nicaraguan state. From a possible pre-contact total of more than 30,000, by 1862 only around 5-6000 remained. The final blow for the Mayangna came at the beginning of the twentieth century with their conversion to Christianity, a task undertaken by missionaries from the Moravian Church, who arrived in the region from Germany in 1847 but only began to make a real impact on the native population after the departure of the British. During the so-called ‘Great Awakening’ of the 1880s much of the Miskitu population converted to the new faith en masse, and buoyed by this success the Moravians increasingly turned their attention to the Mayangna. Just as the Catholic missionaries of the colonial era had done throughout the Spanish Empire, this first involved persuading the Mayangna, who up to this point had lived in dispersed family groupings and had continued to observe a traditional and often semi-nomadic lifestyle based on hunting, fishing and a shifting agriculture, to come together and settle permanently in new, compact and accessible communities, centred around a church.