Pre-Columbian Mayan Societies and the Conquest

Many Maya were still in Belize when the Europeans came in the 16th and 17th centuries. Archaeological and ethnohistorical research confirms that several groups of Mayan peoples lived in the area now known as Belize in the 16th century. The political geography of that period does not coincide with present-day boundaries, so several Mayan provinces lay across the frontiers of modern Belize, Mexico, and Guatemala.

Christopher Columbus traveled to the Gulf of Honduras during his fourth voyage in 1502. Spain soon sent expeditions to Guatemala and Honduras, and the conquest of Yucatán began in 1527.

Though the Maya offered stiff resistance to Spanish “pacification”, diseases contracted from the Spanish devastated the indigenous population and weakened its ability to resist conquest. In the 17th century, Spanish missionaries established churches in Mayan settlements with the intention of converting and controlling these people.

Piracy along the coast increased during this period. In 1642, and again in 1648, pirates sacked Salamanca de Bacalar, the seat of Spanish government in southern Yucatán. The abandonment of Bacalar ended Spanish control over the Mayan provinces of Chetumal and Dzuluinicob.

Between 1638 and 1695, the Maya living in the area of Tipu enjoyed autonomy from Spanish rule. But in 1696, Spanish soldiers used Tipu as a base from which they pacified the area and supported missionary activities.

In 1697 the Spanish conquered the Itzá, and in 1707, the Spanish forcibly resettled the inhabitants of Tipu to the area near Lago Petén Itzá. The political center of the Mayan province of Dzuluinicob ceased to exist at the time that British colonists were becoming increasingly interested in settling the area.

Colonial Rivalry Between Spain and Britain

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Spain tried to maintain a monopoly on trade and colonization in its New World colonies, but northern European powers were increasingly attracted to the region by the potential for trade and settlement. These powers resorted to smuggling, piracy, and war in their efforts to challenge and then destroy Spain’s monopoly.

In the 17th century, the Dutch, English, and French encroached on Spain’s New World possessions. Early in the 17th century, in southeastern Mexico and on the Yucatán Peninsula, English buccaneers began cutting logwood (Haematoxylum campechianum), which was used in the production of a textile dye.

According to legend, one of these buccaneers, Peter Wallace, called “Ballis” by the Spanish, settled near and gave his name to the Belize River as early as 1638. English buccaneers began using the coastline as a base from which to attack Spanish ships.

Buccaneers stopped plundering Spanish logwood ships and started cutting their own wood in the 1650s and 1660s. Logwood extraction then became the main reason for the English settlement for more than a century.

A 1667 treaty, in which the European powers agreed to suppress piracy, encouraged the shift from buccaneering to cutting logwood and led to more permanent settlement. Conflict continued between Britain and Spain over the right of the British to cut logwood and to settle in the region. In 1717 Spain expelled British logwood cutters from the Bay of Campeche west of the Yucatán.

During the 18th century, the Spanish attacked the British settlers repeatedly. The Spanish never settled in the region, however, and the British always returned to expand their trade and settlement. The 1763 Treaty of Paris conceded to Britain the right to cut logwood but asserted Spanish sovereignty over the territory.

When war broke out again in 1779, the British settlement was abandoned until the Treaty of Versailles in 1783 allowed the British to again cut logwood in the area. By that time, however, the logwood trade had declined and Honduras Mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) had become the chief export.

Beginnings of Self-government and the Plantocracy

The British were reluctant to set up any formal government for the settlement for fear of provoking the Spanish. On their own initiative, settlers had begun electing magistrates to establish common law as early as 1738. In 1765 these regulations were codified and expanded into Burnaby’s Code.

When the settlers began returning to the area in 1784, Colonel Edward Marcus Despard was named superintendent to oversee the Settlement of Belize in the Bay of Honduras. The 1786 Convention of London allowed the British settlers to cut and export timber but not to build fortifications, establish any form of government, or develop plantation agriculture. Spain retained sovereignty over the area.

The last Spanish attack on the British settlement, the Battle of St. George’s Caye, occurred two years after the outbreak of war in 1796. The British drove off the Spanish, thwarting Spain’s last attempt to control the territory or dislodge other settlers.

Despite treaties banning local government and plantation agriculture, both activities flourished. In the late 18th century, an oligarchy of relatively wealthy settlers controlled the political economy of the British settlement. These settlers claimed about four-fifths of the available land; owned about half of all slaves; controlled imports, exports, and the wholesale and retail trades; and determined taxation.

A group of magistrates, whom they elected from among themselves, had executive as well as judicial functions. The landowners resisted any challenge to their growing political power.

Slavery in the Settlement, 1794-1838

The earliest reference to African slaves in the British settlement appeared in a 1724 Spanish missionary’s account, which stated that the British recently had been importing them from Jamaica, Bermuda, and other Central American British Colonies. A century later, the total slave population numbered about 2,300.

Most slaves were born in Africa, and many slaves at first maintained African ethnic identifications and cultural practices. Gradually, however, slaves assimilated and a new, synthetic Kriol culture was formed.

Slavery in the settlement was associated with the extraction of timber, because treaties forbade the production of plantation crops. Settlers needed only one or two slaves to cut logwood, but as the trade shifted to mahogany in the last quarter of the 18th century, the settlers needed more money, land, and slaves for larger-scale operations. Other slaves worked as domestic helpers, sailors, blacksmiths, nurses, and bakers.

The slaves’ experience, though different from that on plantations in other colonies in the region, was nevertheless oppressive. They were frequently the objects of “extreme inhumanity,” as a report published in 1820 stated. In the 18th century, many slaves escaped to Yucatán, and in the early 19th century a steady flow of runaways went to Guatemala and down the coast to Honduras.

One way the settler minority maintained its control was by dividing the slaves from the growing population of free Kriol people who were given limited privileges. Though some Kriols were legally free, their economic activities and voting rights were restricted. Privileges, however, led many free blacks to stress their loyalty and acculturation to British ways.

The act to abolish slavery throughout the British colonies, passed in 1833, was intended to avoid drastic social changes by effecting emancipation over a five-year transition period, by implementing a system of “apprenticeship” calculated to extend masters’ control over the former slaves, and by compensating former slave owners for their loss of property.

After 1838, the masters of the settlement continued to control the country for over a century by denying access to land and by limiting freedmen’s economic freedom.

Emigration of the Garifuna

At the same time that the settlement was grappling with the ramifications of the end of slavery, a new ethnic group — the Garifuna — appeared. In the early 19th century, the Garifuna, descendants of Carib peoples of the Lesser Antilles and of Africans who had escaped from slavery, arrived in the settlement.

The Garifuna had resisted British and French colonialism in the Lesser Antilles until they were defeated by the British in 1796. After putting down a violent Garifuna rebellion on Saint Vincent, the British moved between 1,700 and 5,000 of the Garifuna across the Caribbean to the Bay Islands (present-day Islas de la Bahía) off the north coast of Honduras.

From there they migrated to the Caribbean coasts of Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and the southern part of present-day Belize. By 1802 about 150 Garifuna had settled in the Stann Creek (present-day Dangriga) area and were engaged in fishing and farming.

Other Garifuna later came to the British settlement of Belize after finding themselves on the wrong side in a civil war in Honduras in 1832. Many Garifuna men soon found wage work alongside slaves as mahogany cutters.

In 1841 Dangriga, the Garifuna’s largest settlement, was a flourishing village. The American traveler John Stephens described the Garifuna village of Punta Gorda as having 500 inhabitants and producing a wide variety of fruits and vegetables.

The British treated Garifuna as squatters. In 1857 the British told the Garifuna that they must obtain leases from the crown or risk losing their lands, dwellings, and other buildings. The 1872 Crown Lands Ordinance established reservations for the Garifuna as well as the Maya. The British prevented both groups from owning land and treated them as a source of valuable labor.

Constitutional Developments, 1850-62

In the 1850s, the power struggle between the superintendent and the planters coincided with events in international diplomacy to produce major constitutional changes. In the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850, Britain and the United States agreed to promote the construction of a canal across Central America and to refrain from colonizing any part of Central America.

The British government interpreted the colonization clause as applying only to any future occupation. But the United States government claimed that Britain was obliged to evacuate the area, particularly after 1853, when President Franklin Pierce’s expansionist administration stressed the Monroe Doctrine.

Britain yielded on the Bay Islands and the Mosquito Coast in eastern Nicaragua. But in 1854, Britain produced a formal constitution establishing a legislative for its possession of the settlement in present-day Belize.

The Legislative Assembly of 1854 was to have eighteen elected members, each of whom was to have at least £400 sterling worth of property. The assembly was also to have three official members appointed by the superintendent. The fact that voters had to have property yielding an income of £7 a year or a salary of a £100 a year reinforced the restrictive nature of this legislature. The superintendent could defer or dissolve the assembly at any time, originate legislation, and give or withhold consent to bills.

This situation suggested that the legislature was more a chamber of debate than a place where decisions were made. The Colonial Office in London became, therefore, the real political-administrative power in the settlement. This shift in power was reinforced when in 1862, the Settlement of Belize in the Bay of Honduras was declared a British colony called British Honduras, and the crown’s representative was elevated to a lieutenant governor, subordinate to the governor of Jamaica.

Under the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850 between the U.S. and Britain, neither country was to undertake any control, colonization or occupation of any part of Central America, but it was unclear if it applied to Belize. In 1853, a new American government attempted to have Britain leave Belize.

In 1856, the Dallas-Clarendon Treaty between the two governments recognized Belize territory as British. The Sarstoon River was recognized as the southern border with Guatemala.

The Anglo-Guatemalan Treaty of 1859 was signed, setting the present-day western boundary and temporarily settling the question of Guatemala’s claim on the territory. Only the northern border with Mexico was undefined.