Colonialism in the Mosquito Coast

By moving his family down to a place as remote as the Mosquito Coast of Honduras Allie Fox is trying to escape the shallow, materialistic culture of contemporary America. Instead, he unwittingly becomes the embodiment of the most significant archetype of the Westerner abroad: the colonist. His goal of establishing an anti-American paradise in the heart of the South American jungle is ironically a very American one. His journey mirrors that of the first pilgrims, who cleared away their own unspoiled territory to re-forge civilization from the ground up.

Even Allie’s profession suits him perfectly for the role of the colonist. As an inventor, he is the ideal representative of industrialism. The “fat boy” he takes with him into the jungle signifies something as destructive to that environment as it’s real-life counterpart; even in theory, the ice-making machine fundamentally undermines his goal of escaping American society. Its inherent function is to modify nature to make it better suited to human use, which is incompatible with his intention to revert back to a more primitive state of living. Conveniences like the icemaker are only the first step in producing the culture of excess and gluttony that Allie was so desperate to leave behind.

The conflict between Allie’s vision of himself as a revolutionary and his reality as a colonist reach a climax with the arrival of the three armed men. While trying to defend his pseudo-pristine utopia, the entire operation backfires. Not only is his community destroyed, he has inadvertently poisoned the river, an ultimate symbol of the destructive consequences of industrialization. Instead of raising his own family in the simplistic lifestyle he so idealized, he only reenacts on a small scale the relationship between Western colonists and the pre-civilized lands they come to inevitably alter.