Miskito Repellant

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, ​t​ypically with a re-enactment involving one or more small boats​, though the majority were ​in fact rather unceremoniously dumped on ​B​elize'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 ​G​odly ​p​rogramme. 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 min​iature 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 plantation​s, 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’.

​B​ut 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.

Stupor Mundi

 

Sudden and very shocking.

He supervised me one on one for a single week in 1987 during the temporary absence of my regular supervisor that term.

Earlier, during my senior year at SPS, where he had himself been a pupil two decades previously, he had been something of a legend, his precocious levels of scholarship spoken of with awe.

He was then possibly most famous for his work on Frederick II Hohenstaufen (1194-1250), HRE and King of Sicily, one of those medieval figures that even people with minimal interest in the Middle Ages ought to know a bit about, I had long surmised.

So I chose to write about said unconventional German monarch that week, though unfortunately Professor Abulafia and I were not to see eye to eye once my essay was complete.

I believe this was largely down to the fact that he saw me as a rather irritating intrusion from the northern wastelands — not a Caius man — and perhaps, if I am to be honest, because he'd spotted my own lack of hellbent scholarship, let alone genius. 

And also because I found the whole experience rather unsettling.

He was something of a Stupor Mundi himself. His rooms were possibly the most apparently disordered personal space I have ever visited, a labyrith of piled papers, journals and hardback books. Though I have no doubt he correctly recalled the precise location of every single line of text contained therein.

And I think if you'd told me then that he was still only 38 I would have been gobsmacked.

Just this morning I was pondering whether there were any serious public intellectuals in Britain who might be inclined to weigh in on the Beckham row, and it then occurred to me that there aren't that many left. Definitely a dying breed.

Following his 2017 retirement as Professor Emeritus of Mediterranean History, Abulafia had certainly been cropping up with increasing frequency in the UK's right-of-centre media, often as a champion of free speech, but also occasionally leaning into pro-Brexit and anti-Woke narratives.

He believed that the Elgin Marbles should be returned to Greece, but wrote in the Spectator last November that the Rosetta Stone 'does not belong in Egypt'.

His lasting legacy will be his tomes on the human histories of what Ishmael refers to as the 'watery part of the world', most notably The Great Sea, his grand account of the importance of the Mediterranean within human history.

Dumped

 The delightfully named Belizean village of Dump...

It kind of marks the spot where we Brits were supposed to carry the Southern Highway onwards, straight, past Blue Creek and into Guatemala, where it would have joined up with the CA-13 in Petén after it clips the bottom left corner of Belize.

Instead, as you can see, it makes a hard left and heads to the coast at Punta Gorda.

Just to the west of Dump there is a Qʼeqchiʼ Mayan community in a township called San Antonio who possess a colourful cosmological myth relating to the origins of the larger celestial bodies in the sky, in the form of a soap opera.

The Sun and the Moon were just starting to enjoy their first home together as a married couple when the Sun invited his bachelor older brother to come and stay and generally play third wheel. (Albatross, we used to say at Cambridge, or 'Albert Ross'.)

But the Sun had to go out to hunt leaving wife and brother behind, and eventually 'er indoors ended up in bed with 'im indoors.

The Sun figured out what was going on and hatched a cunning plan, collecting bile from the bladders of various birds, such as a turkey and then a chicken* he had bumped into, and used these noxious liquids to prepare a particularly vile tamal for his housemates.

As their eyes watered and throats burned after this dinner, and all the water indoors was used up in an attempt to assuage the discomfort, the Sun gave a big speech covering how he felt about the whole situation.

He sent the Moon out to fetch some more water, but feeling sick and miffed about the very awkward scene, she sat down beside the river and began to cry.

Soon after she was joined on the bank by a vulture who told her about his boss, who lived in the sky in a huge gaff made of guano and she quickly decided she'd rather be up there with him than go back to face her husband and his brother.

Meanwhile, the latter was sobbing relentlessly and the Sun decided that it was time for him to go.

So he tricked him into jumping on a plank which, after three tries, broke and sent him tumbling into a deep ravine. (The people of San Antonio now identify this adulterer as Venus, and in their version of the tale this 'superstar' eventually scrambled out of this hole and found a place in the firmament.)

The Sun’s next ruse was to get himself carried up to the vultures' lair by pulling the skin of a dead deer over his body and waiting for the carrion alert to sound amongst the birds.

Once up there he was denied a room in the guano mansion, but found a nearby hut where he started to play musical instruments and fiddle with a pile of red maize kernels, which induced a severe toothache in the Moon's new feathered lover.

Over the course of several days the pain steadily worsened and the Sun, having drawn an audience with his tunes, claimed to be an accomplished healer — yet the vulture lord still refused him permission to enter his abode. He finally relented, but the face to face cure would send him into a slumber and the Sun was able to retrieve the Moon.

Just how keen she was to go back to her old conjugal existence varies across versions, but in the San Antonio take she's already quite bored with the carcass removal lifestyle and the pair duly commandeer a pair of vultures in order to first return to their home, before later taking up their more familiar roles above Central America.

* Chickens are often mentioned in the context of the so-called Columbian Exchange, yet there is evidence to suggest that they had already taken up station in the trees of the Americas, most likely owing their introduction to Polynesians perhaps a century or so before the Admiral showed up.

Peering beneath the hysteria...

The very persona of Trump generates a cloud of hysteria. Yet it is also true that he seems to understand this on some level and feed it, whether this can be described as strategic or not is debatable. 

One is obliged to try to tune out of this hysteria, even if like paranoia, it is sometimes justified. 

One also needs to tune out of all the yabbering ‘historians’ and other experts who are trying to impose precedents as templates to the present moment. Whatever use these could have as gateways to understanding is always limited. America has such as short-sighted view on history that it systematically re-treads the same old hackneyed material, over and over. 

I might cite examples from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (or even earlier) which could even be more relevant — or insight-pregnant — right now, but it would still be irresponsible. Historical narratives can function like dogmas, a semi-transparent cutaneous layer over reality. 

Trump has said and perhaps also done many outrageous things on the way towards finding an end to the war in Ukraine, yet behind all the unsettling noise, concrete positive steps continue to be made and the major European powers are accepting a heavy future load, which may have been the underlying goal all along from a US perspective. 

I always saw Venezuela as Little Marco’s pet project. And we need no reminding that early 50s Guatemala was also the pet project of a sitting Secretary of State. The way Vance is so far distancing himself from the seizure of Maduro does seem to reinforce this impression. 

Yet even if recent events go against the core MAGA belief system, there should be no doubt about the lures which have proved difficult to resist here: Caracas sits at the centre of a nexus of major US policy itches — narcos, migration, almost insanely blatant corruption driven by a criminal mafia which co-opts the organs of state (as here in Guatemala), support for Islamism, and a wormhole through which both Russians, Chinese and even Iranians have been able to blithely pursue strategic inroads right under Uncle Sam’s nose. 

And for Marco it has been holding up late stage ‘Castro’. Remove the imports and other assistance from Venezuela while Putin simultaneously self-destructs and Cuba would thereafter depend largely on goodwill gestures from Mexico and Canada, neither of whom are major participants in the new ‘Great Game’ nor represent a significant extra-hemispherical threat to anything like the same extent. 

Ramsés

Part of this new game, as being played by both the US and China is to make Putin think he is himself a key player, while slowly undermining him. 

The seizure of those Russian-flagged tankers today was a step in this. Before making their move on Taiwan, China is much more likely to snatch a swathe of territory in the east that it disputes with Russia. If and when it does, Russia will exit rather like one of those unfortunate third-placed reality show contestants. (No doubt with a good deal of sour grapes that could turn into very toxic grapes indeed.)

The ‘international law’ system was born out of hope and resignation in the last century. It was always going to require nations to start acting like Japanese citizens, reflexively sticking to rules with only a minimal need for policing. And when that policing did take place it was occurring at the end of a Cold War where the world appeared unipolar (a fully-aligned NATO or the US) and the cop could be seen as in some ways benign, but even before the neocon over-reaches of the 'War on Terror’, the first big customers for the Hague were brought there by a bombing campaign over Serbia which had the effect of turning Putin against the West. 

Right now the ‘other’ powers and mini-blocks around the three playing the top level game need to adapt to the evolving new situation fairly rapidly. NATO can still have some influence, because Trump wants benefits more than he wants costs and to some extent so does Xi. Only Putin still has this logic utterly back to front. 

In simple terms the big picture world may have just four ways to go forward right now:  1) the late twentieth century platitudes of the ‘international law’ order, perhaps precisely just the same old platitudes, but some would strive for a world so multipolar and inherently peaceful and harmonious that everyone just buries all their weapons along with their greed and resentment 2) open, unabashed direct conflict between the blocks, probably leading to apocalypse  3) ‘globalise the intifada’, overthrow everything, destroy all wealth, imprison and kill everyone who disagrees,  and go back to some sort of totalist medievalism across the globe (possibly seguing back into option three in the end) or 4) find a way to live within a world that has three or perhaps 2.5 great powers acting selfishly and sometimes amorally, clashing either through proxies or at a regionalised level, yet never walking away from the table where a deal of some sort awaits.

These are never going to be absolute forks in the road. Though option two in its most exclusive form tends to become one in the end. There’s some wriggle room for both head and heart, thought and action. 

Other courses continue to be possible at every other level other than the top level, given the current social, political and financial constitution of humanity. 

Maduro’s error, far more than his predecessor, was that he flaunted his position as a provocation in this situation where option four has been developing. He was, as they say, taking the piss. 

Belize Backstory — Part One

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 existed a tiny, essentially 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 eastern Nicaragua).

Britain tended then to refer to its overseas territories collectively as a Commonwealth as opposed to an Empire and these Shoremen were, one might say, 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 to be 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 guidelines 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 might presume.)

Although perhaps not consistently imposed as a system of government, Burnaby's Code was cherished by the Baymen as part of their identity as a long-established, independent encampment, 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, for Spain had regained formal sovereignty in exchange for the mahogany rights and the (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, coffee etc.)

c1775

* 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 threw such a tantrum about this that it was eventually concluded that this sort of riffraff would have to dispatched down to Australia instead. Musket ball dodged.

Sirât (2025)

 

I wouldn't recommend this movie any more than I would advise anyone to consume some strange herb, knowing that while many might not find any of the flavour, others may end up having a very bad trip.

My alternative title for the film would indeed be Bad Trip. (V suggests The Wrong Trip).

Oliver Laxe's chosen title refers to an apparently Islamic concept — a bridge leading at once to paradise and perdition — yet this seems a bit crowbarred on to me.

It won the Jury prize at Cannes, yet Peter Bradshaw described it in the Guardian as a 'path to nowhere', ending frustratingly in a 'wildness of un-meaning.'

Yet the thing is that it does begin as a journey to somewhere, which only around the midpoint abruptly segues into this un-meaningful trip to nowhere, and some people are undoubtedly going to connect with that, even as they discover it to be existentially rather jarring.

Having invited us to invest our curiosity in various narrative hooks (a missing person, a fun fiesta somewhere over the next hill, and a rapidly declining North African and possibly wider geopolitical backdrop) we reach a point where any resolution has suddenly turned inconceivable.

And this is either going to seem like one big cosmic 'meh', or it will do something to you like it did to me, which is send me to sleep thinking about many things I have not thought about in a very long time.

It does seem like a masterful piece of film-making, expended on what also seems to be some very un-masterful storytelling.

How deliberate and useful this latter aspect of it is will be a highly subjective take-out I suspect. The characters are sketchy and no effort has been made to fill them out better via dialogue. They are mostly interesting as a collective.

Even before the film's sudden mid-life switch presents itself as a possible metaphor for the journey that we all make, Laxe has made it obvious that all of these individuals have already chosen to swerve away from the main road before we first see them coming together in the desert.

There's something orientalist about all this, at least in precisely the same way that the stories of Paul Bowles are orientalist and I don't mind it there at all, but I think I would mind it if a European director used the landscape around here in a similar way to make a perhaps trite point about first worlders adrift in a hostile, near-allegorical landscape.

It has actually been attempted and the only time I enjoyed it was Gareth Edwards's calling card, Monsters — which, like this, also had a fabulous score. And this particular region has been used before, tritely, in Babel.)

Nelson and the Kingdom of Mosquitia

This map (on which Guatemala appears decidedly Chilean) is the one that that lay on the table of Lord George Germain, 1st Viscount Sackville, Secretary of State of the Colonies in London, 1775-82. 

He led a group of British policy-makers, by and large men who had never been to the Caribbean, who collectively had their ambitions sucked into Central America to a large extent by the map's exaggerated, enticing presentation of two water features: The Bay of Honduras and Lake Nicaragua. 

(Appropriate perhaps, given the manner in which the whole Columbian Exchange might be said to have been kicked off by a man incapable of reading a map properly.) 

Spain had been soundly defeated by Britain in the Seven Years War (ending 1763), but seeing that the victors had since lost many of their colonies on the North American mainland, the Spanish decided, opportunistically, that the time had come for yet another war, and duly declared it on June 16, 1779. 

Belize rightly celebrates the Battle of St George's Caye, probably the most decisive moment in the settlement's history, which would take place a couple of decades later in September 1798, but this earlier conflict began with a surprise Spanish dawn attack on the same coral atol by a smaller Spanish fleet sailing out of the Bay of Chetumal. On September 15 that year they sacked the little township on the caye and carried off 101 European-origin and 40 African-origin inhabitants into captivity on Cuba. 

The Brits were especially miffed at this as they had been preparing their own surprise attack on the Central American coast and did soon after stage a raid on the Spanish castillo at Omoa — now Honduras — where they forced a contingent twice as large as their own to surrender and made the unexpected discovery there of a large pile of gold. 

Horatio Nelson had been on the Royal Navy ship which was assigned to lead this little adventure, but was transferred off it and given his own first command at the last minute.

It was the inland lake further south that had George Demain and co really enthralled however.  

The fleet Oliver Cromwell had sent to the Caribbean in 1655, which ended up taking Jamaica, had originally proposed to find a way through to the Pacific and in effect, sever Spain's American empire in two and the idea persisted in London. 

This apparent weak link in the whole extended structure was defended at the entrance to Lake Nicaragua by a humungous Spanish fort — el Castillo de la Inmaculada Concepción — which had four foot thick walls, a moat and a drawbridge. 

Thomas Jeffreys's atlas of the region made said lake look pretty much like a 'Panama Canal' just waiting to happen, but as we can now more easily discern, matters on the ground were just a little bit less straightforward than they then appeared on paper...

The coastline of Central America from modern Belize down to Costa Rica was swampy, 'unwholesome' and largely unsuitable for the then prevalent Spanish economic model. But it very much suited another economic model, which involved a kind of symbiotic arrangement between the Spanish colonies and an offshoot of the British ones known as the 'shoremen', who in turn worked closely with the essentially autonomous Miskito community in the area.  

The nub of this arrangement was the trafficking of contraband. 

Both Spain and Britain forced their colonies to trade directly with the motherland, so that any sideways transfers between neighbours were considered illegal: an open invitation for smugglers and the formation of a kind of informal 'duty free zone' — a bit like the one which has been established more officially along the northern border of Belize today. 

These zones of tierra de nadie were contested during wartime, but at times of treaty or truce they also performed some functions which all otherwise competing entities in the region found useful. 

The shoremen were a mix of buccaneers who were starting to explore more legitimate trades, such as logging and smaller-scale plantation, and former indentured white labourers from the islands who had been displaced by African slaves as the sugar boom got going. 

The Miskito meanwhile, were a blend of indigenes who had arrived from the turn of the millennium via canoe from along where Pete Hegseth is currently blowing up faster-moving boats, with more recently shipwrecked African slaves and mostly-white buccaneers, their name either a reference to the 'mixto' nature of their ethnic make-up or the muskets that they acquired in exchange for the 'Indian' women who became buccaneer brides. 

Back in 1680 the first Miskito King, Jeremy I, had been crowned and handed a treaty in the name of his fellow monarch in London which guaranteed him and his successors a continuing supply of fine uniforms, other fancy clothes and oodles of rum. 

Miskito Kings were not in fact the actual tribal leaders, but instead a sort of ceremonial figurehead for dealings with representatives of the wider British colonial project in the Caribbean. There were other native dignitaries in the 'court' of Mosquitia, bearing titles such as General Tempest and Duke of York (!)

An expedition intent on opening up the Pacific set off from Jamaica at the start of 1780, under the command of hastily-promoted John Polson. This time Nelson was very much present, as the 21-year-old Captain of the frigate HMS Hinchinbrooke. 

The flotilla attempted first to rendezvous with 'our man in Mosquitia', James Lawrie, who had the important-sounding title of Superintendent-General and was in effect the only paid British official of any significance on the mainland. 

From his underpopulated and pestilent patch Lawrie had long been selling the untapped potential of the Mosquito Coast to his distant superiors: ‘The beef I have killed there would not disgrace Leadenhall market.' 

He had also greatly exaggerated the size of the armed force he could gather locally to assist Polson — 'one thousand soldiers' turned out to a motley crew (literally a unit of mixed racial heritage) consisting of a handful of shoremen and their slaves, plus little more than a hundred Miskito warriors. 

Polson's expedition finally settled at Greytown at the mouth of the San Juan river, close to today's border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. It was late March with its imminent threat of precocious downpours. Nelson, sceptical about the whole enterprise, requested to join the up-river raid on 'Inmaculada'. 

Lawrie had quite naturally underplayed the extent of the upcoming San Juan river trip and overplayed its navigability. The assorted Brits, Jamaicans and shoremen had little choice but to allow permit the Miskito in their canoes to exercise de facto operational control. 

Yet upon reaching the island of San Bartolomé, five miles down river from the main fort, it was Nelson who led an attack by boat (possibly his first taste of combat) which resulted in the speedy surrender of the Spanish garrison. However, two of the sixteen escaped, thus costing the expedition any remaining element of surprise, and matters were soon worsened by further dithering by Polson who was now expecting five hundred fresh troops sent by Lawrie and preferred to wait. 

Meanwhile, Inmaculada's comandante Juan de Ayssa had indeed seen the smoke rising above the forest and sent messengers to Granada requesting reinforcements. He had also been able to bolster his water supplies and bring all the nearby settlers in behind the fort's massive bastions. 

These had only ever been assaulted once before — in 1762 — just prior to the end of the previous war, when buccaneers and Miskito warriors had managed to pick off Inmaculada's CO, but his daughter Rafaela Herrera soon gained her revenge by taking out the buccaneer leader with the cannon she had taken charge of herself. 

Nelson and other officers now favoured another frontal assault, but Polson opted for something more akin to delay along with some positive activity. He ordered his men to ascend a nearby hill which overlooked the fort, thinking he might then bombard it a bit from there, but the jungle around the base of this hill was near impenetrable and the whole party panicked after they spooked a jaguar. So then they turned to the other, flatter, bank of the San Juan where they found an abandoned Spanish outpost from which they could prepare to fire at Inmaculada from a concealed position. 

Nelson had established himself as the best artillery marksman and fired the first shot of the battle on April 13. A three day bombardment ensued, with Nelson managing to take down the Spanish flagpole with one well-aimed ball. But this was not really getting the attackers anywhere as they had a limited supply of ammo. They had started out with two hundred cannon balls, but many had already been lost as a result of capsizing on the inbound river journey. 

The Miskito went out at night and picked up any that had fallen outside the walls for re-use, but any that ended up inside the fort, stayed there. 

After a week reinforcements arrived for Polson, but so too did the wet weather and associated sickness. Nelson soon had the chills and was vomiting convulsively. The siege and stalemate looked to be about to turn very deadly for those on the outside, so finally on April 28 Polson gave the order to launch the all out frontal attack. 

Lined up in front of Inmaculada's walls with his whole force and their scaling ladders Polson first sent a Spanish-speaking officer with a white flag up to the gates, just to check if the people holed up inside wanted to surrender. And much to Polson's surprise, they did. They were down to their last few gallons of drinking water. 

Polson installed himself behind Ayssa’s desk and wrote to Governor Dalling in Jamaica: ‘I have the honour to inform your excellency that this castle surrendered to His Majesty’s arms yesterday at 5 o’clock pm,' who in turn informed his own boss Germain of the capture of ‘the inland Gibraltar of Spanish America’. 

Even as these letters were on their way, the new owners of Inmaculada were becoming aware, like Napoleon in Moscow, that the destination of this campaign was not quite the prize they had hoped it would be. 

The Miskito contingent in particular had come along in the hope of a share of fabled Spanish loot, and discovering that there was none to be had here, quickly vanished off into the forest. 

This was also the moment that Nelson departed the theatre, ferried back to Greytown in a state that my mother would have described as 'at death's door'. He signed away his command of the Hinchinbrooke and was taken back to Jamaica where a freed slave called Cuba Cornwallis nursed him back to health using warm blankets and strange herbs. 

The British regulars who remained knew the game was up, but launched a few forward sorties to the edge of the lake to show willing, at least until they were utterly ravaged by further bouts of disease, around ten dying every day. The majority made it back to the mouth of the river known to the Spanish as the Rio Morte, leaving a small contingent at Inmaculada. 

The governor of Jamaica was still hoping to have another push, but a big boatload of troops arriving in Kingston from Britain turned out to be already largely laid low by fevers and dysentery. 

On November 8 the officer left in charge at the fort was ordered to demolish it. This was in progress and only partially achieved when a Spanish force of two hundred men under Capitán Tomás de Juliá approached, and so the last Brits had no choice but to evacuate. 

The San Juan raid is often cited as an example of some combination of bad luck and bad planning. This operation might be said to have sought its own ill fortune, starting with the use of the fanciful map, and then setting off only a short while before 'sickly season' on the isthmus. 

Of the roughly 2000 men who took part, 380 survived. This included Nelson, just. 

Sugar Rush

England drawing Ghana in Group L prompts me to tell a little tale from history...one of those of the 'Hollywood wouldn't touch it with a barge pole' variety.

Tekyi was a Ghanaian chieftain of the Coromantee people who relocated to Jamaica in the second half of the eighteenth century in circumstances that he was clearly none too pleased about. In 1760 he initiated what the locals described as Tacky's Revolt.

This island in the Caribbean was a perhaps unlikely seed of the modern world. It had been one of the most impoverished parts of the Spanish empire and then a redoubt of defiant Jewish pirates, who had assisted Oliver Cromwell in his plan to take it for England's Commonwealth. It might have remained a near-forgotten backwater but for the phenomenon that kick-started global capitalism: a humungous sugar craving.

Slavery had existed in the majority of human civilisations prior to Tekyi's arrival on Jamaica, but already back on Blighty the seeds of the institution's final demise were germinating. The first steps were taken in 1758 when the Quakers prohibited their membership from any involvement in this 'iniquitous practice'.

Yet if anything this was also a period when enslavement was expanding and intensifying. Not in essence because the enslavers had suddenly become more intensely evil and racist than any before them, but because they were responding to the lure of an economic opportunity the likes of which nobody had ever before experienced. They were proto-capitalists.

Capitalism will always prefer machines to human beings, but when no machines are available, it will tend to use human beings as if they were machines. This was basically the situation that the proto-capitalist planters of Jamaica found themselves in. Europe's sweet tooth was calling and they needed a human machine of heat and malaria-resistant, archetypally unfree and rights-deprived labourers.

But the demand was of course only one side of this new economic and dietary imperative. The planters soon realised that the price they got for their sugar was highly sensitive to the supply, and so they deliberately under-exploited their local opportunity in order to suppress the quantity of product available for export.

This meant that large parts of Jamaica remained under-cultivated. And this in turn helped preserve a rather strange phenomenon known as the Maroons (from the Spanish word Cimarrón, meaning wild or untamed.)

The Maroons were a community of thousands of former Africans descended from former Spanish slaves living 'wild' in the island's hilly hinterlands, residing in caves and sinkholes, from which they persistently launched guerrilla raids on the sugar rush.

The sneaky supply side dabbling of the planters meant that the Maroons in the deep interior significantly outnumbered the actual slaves on Jamaica and the conflict became very intense and brutal, placing a burden on the British Army that was only alleviated when a treaty was signed in 1738.

Crucially, as part of this deal, the Maroons agreed to cooperate on some levels with the plantation economy, returning escaped slaves to their masters.

Cue Tekyi/Tacky and his 1760 revolt. Having freed himself and recruited hundreds of others, he stormed the coastal township of Port Maria where many muskets were acquired. There followed a rampage through the plantations where more and more slaves were freed and more and more proto-capitalists were summarily taken off the market.

This little army included Coromantee obeahmen from Africa's Gold Coast who mixed up a powder which could, they asserted, protect the wearer from gunshots.

Things were perhaps looking a bit touch and go for the modern world, but then Tekyi and his team turned inland and sought refuge in the mountains. And that's where the Maroons got them.

In August Tekyi himself died in a running shoot out with a Maroon called Davy and when the rest of his followers were located later on in a cave, they had all committed suicide.