MacGregor's next known location is at the court of King George Frederic Augustus of the Mosquito Coast, at Cape Gracias a Dios on the Gulf of Honduras in April 1820. The Mosquito people, descendants of shipwrecked African slaves and indigenous people, shared the historic British antipathy towards Spain, and the British authorities in the region had crowned their most powerful chieftains as "kings" since the 17th century. These were kings in little more than name, with no effective control over the country they ostensibly led; Britain crowned and protected them simply so they could declare the area to be under Mosquito sovereignty and thereby obstruct Spanish claims. There had been a modest British settlement on the coast around the Black River (now the Río Sico), but this had been evacuated following the Anglo-Spanish Convention of 1786. By the 1820s the most visible sign of prior colonisation was a small graveyard overgrown by the jungle.