The area that we now know as Belize first appeared on the map, by right, after Britain and Spain signed the Treaty of Versailles in 1783, bringing to a formal end the set of conflicts which had erupted around the American War of Independence.
I find this early period in the region's history — roughly eighty years until the establishment of British Honduras in 1862 as a Crown Colony — particularly interesting for a number of reasons.
Firstly, because the current government of Belize very clearly does not want it to be quite so interesting. One of their primary foreign policy objectives has been to join the wider push to stiff the present day British public for reparations for slavery, an institution abolished by Britain, somewhat inconveniently timeline-wise, in 1833.
But the greater interest stems from the way the original, not-so-off-the-books community was formed out of a fusion of two very different territorial projects, neither of which were strictly 'colonial', at least not in the sense commonly understood, and around which there would be considerable disagreements — aaaarguments — and tensions from the get go, all of which were heavily informed by the recent traumas around consent up in North America.
Prior to Versailles there had been a tiny, basically autonomous community of so called Baymen operating a base camp around the mouth of the Belize River. At the most around 100 individuals of European descent and 300 or so African slaves.
There is evidence to suggest that many of these were former buccaneers who had been using the cayes as cover for attacks on Spanish shipping, but as demand for logwood and then mahogany boomed across the Atlantic they swerved into the straight and narrow (though albeit still extra-legal) logging lifestyle. By 1730 the Belize River operation was the main source of such wood for the British furniture market.
A small settlement of fishermen and smugglers had remained on St George's Caye. It would be hard to overestimate the importance of contraband in the local grey economy, for both major European powers in the area were attempting to maintain strict commercial monopolies accompanied by a system of duties, and during peacetime at least the locals, both Spanish and English-speaking, were partial to a bit of inter-community commerce.
Meanwhile, Britain's largest nearby colony on Jamaica had been pursuing a plan of encroachment around the Bay of Honduras, holding Roatán for a time and establishing a small settlement on the coast opposite the island, known as Black River (Rio Tinto).
The individuals involved in this activity came to be known as the Shoremen. Unlike the aforementioned Baymen they were a 'motley crew' — an ethnically-blended band of characters functioning at the very margins of the grand enterprise: freed slaves, zambos (a mix of indigenous and African peoples), former Irish indentured labourers, small scale farmers, traders, rum-brewers, shipbuilders and smugglers, plus some of the equally miscegenated settlers from further down in what had come to be known as Mosquitia (now Nicaragua).
Britain then tended then to refer to its overseas territories collectively as a Commonwealth as opposed to an Empire and these Shoremen were in a sense a bit too common for the Commonwealth.
The war which Versailles settled had seen them displaced from the northern shore of what is now Honduras, so Britain hoped to fling the Baymen and the Shoremen together into a single entity to be known henceforth as the Bay of Honduras settlement, perhaps even under a single administration linked to London indirectly via Jamaica.
Though as this was not a colony* it could not have a Governor, only a military superintendent whose primary role was to act as a go-between in maintaining the terms of the treaty. This did not grant sovereignty to either Spain or Britain.
The Baymen had possessed the basis of a set of rules to live by since 1765, the so-called Burnaby's Code, named after the British Admiral who helped regularise relations between these former buccaneers. It maintained more than a whiff of pirate democracy and along with establishing rules for meetings, the election of officials and stipulating punishments for theft, it also set up a swear box for penalising those guilty of public profanities. (A biggish box, one would presume.)
Although perhaps not consistently imposed as a system of government, it was cherished by the Baymen as part of their identity as a long-established community before all the newcomers turned up.
The Baymen wanted more than the Versailles document had given them, specifically the right to cut mahogany and not just the logwood, plus the right to fish and farm. They also wanted a swathe of territory to the south of the river for further settlement. The situation was to be finessed in 1786 by the Convention of London, via which the Baymen got some of the things they wanted, but ended up with a keen sense of betrayal by distant diplomats, because Spain had regained formal sovereignty in exchange for the mahogany rights and (effectively leased) territorial expansion. And whilst farming was also permitted, the Baymen would not be allowed to participate in the Caribbean plantation economy (tobacco, sugar etc.)
* Although it does seem that the British government contemplated establishing a colony of the penal variety in the Bay for the transportation of convicted criminals, but the Baymen had such a berrinche about this that it was eventually concluded that this sort of riffraff would have to dispatched down to Australia instead. Musket ball dodged.
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