Almost uniquely amongst the major regions of the modern world, the Caribbean is set up as a patchwork of often remarkably distinct cultures and histories — an abundance of mini-civilisations, if you like — which nevertheless insist on being addressed in some respects as a coherent whole.
And in as much that Belize is determined to be taken for a properly Caribbean nation, it is thus an almost ideal sample of some of the issues that this state of affairs to presents to 'truth seeking historians'.
I ask Google for the history of Dandriga, for example, formerly known as Stann Creek...and I am served with a plethora of pages insisting that it was founded by the Garifuna people.
The arrival of the Garifuna is 1797 is celebrated every November 19 in these parts, typically with a re-enactment involving one or more small boats, though the majority were in fact rather unceremoniously dumped on Belize's southern coast by fairly substantial Royal Navy vessels.
And when that happened, Stann Creek had already been founded some time before...by white English Puritans.
They too had been victims of a general dumping that was going on around the Bay at the end of the eighteenth century.
One hundred years previously a group of strict Protestant traders and farmers had established a colony on an island just off the coast of what is now Nicaragua, naming it — as the credulous are inclined — Providence (Providencia today).
The Spanish evicted them in 1689 and they were forced to look elsewhere for the imposition of their Godly programme. Some of them found their way to the lands around the Belize River where a tiny group of buccaneers turned loggers were already set up, the so-called Baymen. (My current understanding is that the village of Placencia on the long sandy peninsula south of Stann Creek was also laid down as a Bible basher settlement to begin with.)
In 1783 via the 'Paris Peace', the British struck a deal with the Spanish which involved them giving up most of their miniature would-be colonies along the Caribbean coast of Central America (from Honduras to Nicaragua), while at the same time achieving some recognition of the lucrative wood extraction operation going on behind the cayes.
Spain retained notional sovereignty — until 1862 — but the Baymen would in theory be permitted a semblance of their own civil administration along with the right to manage a tract of land down to the Sarstoon River, effectively under lease. (A border which remains a source of considerable controversy today.)
What the Baymen had not really bargained for is that the Brits would then attempt to use the opportunity to dump an entire new community right on top of them.
These were mainly refugees from the aforementioned lost Miskito coastal territories (known as Shoremen), plus a whole load of other miscellaneous, also multi-ethnic colonists from locations like Jamaica, deemed surplus to requirements by the authorities.
This stage-managed exodus reminds me somewhat of Golgafrincham Ark B in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, a vessel conceived as a way of permanently offloading the 'useless' component of that civilisation, such as hairdressers, telephone sanitisers and marketing girls (tasked with constantly re-inventing the wheel).
In the case of the new British-administered Bay of Honduras settlement, the Shoremen were soon joined by rum dealers, Irish labourers, army deserters, Quakers, shipwrights, indigenous or semi-indigenous people, freed slaves from the island sugar plantations, and a whole host of other would-be Caribbean entrepreneurs and chancers.
The colonial ministers in London also considered setting up a penal colony, but the shrill complaints of the Baymen and the eventual availability of Australia finally dissuaded them.
The new situation quickly became what we tend to refer to as 'combustible'. A crucial incident would develop from July 1787, which takes us to the heart of historical matters currently being relentlessly politicised in Belize.
The first British military superintendent was Colonel Edward Marcus Despard, a friend of Nelson and later a notorious 'revolutionary' executed in London in 1803 for supposed treason. (He was an Irishman of French descent, so that probably didn't help.)
Despard decided that the way forward would be an equitable distribution of land without "any distinction of age, sex, character, respectability, property or colour", ultimately based on a lottery rather than the first come first served process that the Baymen themselves had in mind (particularly now that they were outnumbered five to one by the motley crew of newcomers).
The project began with an area Despard duly named Convention Town, to be established as a collection of lots, 100ft x 50ft.
In the first phase of the lottery, Lot 69 was drawn by a chap called Joshua Jones, a recently arrived free black man, and Despard escorted him to his plot which, it turned out, had a little hut on it that had earlier on been constructed by one of the Baymen's own magistrates, Aaron Young.
Jones was given permission to demolish said hut and this led to the so-called 'Battle of Convention Town', kicking off first with some diplomatic manipulations by the Baymen, who attempted to circumvent Despard with a direct appeal to Lord Sydney at the colonial office in London, arguing that ‘in the whole of the West India Islands, negroes and mulattoes are considered in a very inferior light’.
Sydney was inclined to agree, but as British law at the time was un-prejudiced with regards to skin colour, only actively discriminating against Jews and Catholics, the Baymen had to take things a notch further, and so they abducted Joshua Jones.
Colonel Despard approached the courthouse where Jones was being held — accompanied by a crowd of Shoremen later reported as a 'rabble' — and demanded the release of Lot 69's new owner.
The Baymen surrounding the building refused, claiming that it went beyond the superintendent’s authority to ‘accommodate a set of men of colour calling themselves the people of the Mosquito Shore’.
But Despard just pushed his way through the courthouse door and finding Jones sitting inside touched him on the shoulder and proclaimed, ‘I declare this man free in the King’s name.’
For the time being this brought a temporary end to the wider confrontation, but Despard was soon replaced. The Baymen were steadily warming to the idea that you could have all the benefits of British rule without most of the obligations. (Sounds somehow familiar...)
Yet one awkward little fact that tends to slip through the cracks of contemporary Belizean historical consciousness is that Joshua Jones was himself the owner of 17 slaves.
The modern creole inhabitants of this small nation are keen to position themselves as the descendants of oppressed peoples, not of oppressors, but at the time of the Treaty of Versailles the Belize River logging operation was quite small and made use of around 300 slaves, so it's a bit of a stretch to imagine that every dark-skinned person in Belize today descends from this microscale group of highly oppressed people.
And when PM Johnny Briceño tells the government of Sir Keir Starmer that the citizens of the UK collectively owe the people of Belize a considerable debt in the form of reparations, he's definitely hoping that historical imaginations are not stretched to include the dark skinned people who owned other dark-skinned people as chattel property in the Bay of Honduras Settlement, or indeed to consider the undeniable fact that the whole place was still the sovereign territory of Spain until several decades after Britain had abolished the institution of slavery.
But this is 'Caribbean' history as it is now typically constructed, collectively: Briceño wants a share of the smoothed out macro-perspective, where all the tricky and occasionally embarrassing complexities have grown rather faint to the gaze.
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