Logwood: the dyewood that made Belize

What was logwood used for?

Logwood was a dye. Dyers chipped the dark red heartwood and boiled it, then fixed the colour in cloth with a mordant, a chemical such as iron or copper salts that makes dye stick to fibres. Different mordants gave lilac, purple, blue, grey or a deep black. Iron gave the black, and that is what made logwood so wanted: Europe’s woollen trade needed a great deal of dark cloth. Logwood was also used to make ink.

Written accounts sometimes list red among its colours, but logwood reds were weak and faded quickly. Its real value lay in blacks and purples.

England did not always welcome it. An Act of 1581 condemned logwood colours as deceitful, because they faded, and ordered any logwood found to be burnt. The ban lasted until 1662. After that, English dyers slowly came to accept it.

Where did logwood grow, and who cut it?

Logwood grows wild in the swampy lowlands along the Gulf of Campeche, the Yucatán peninsula and the coast of today’s Belize. Spanish ships first carried it to Europe, and English buccaneers, sea raiders who preyed on Spanish shipping, captured logwood cargoes. From the 1650s and 1660s many of them started cutting the wood themselves instead.

When treaties of 1667 and 1670 made raiding Spain harder, more former buccaneers turned to logwood. Their main camps were around Laguna de Términos, a large lagoon west of the town of Campeche, with Isla del Carmen, which the English called Triste or Trist, at its mouth. In 1673 an Englishman told the king’s council that about 300 British subjects were living there. A second cutting ground grew up along the Bay of Honduras, around the Belize River. The cutters became known as “Baymen”.

The cutters lived in small, rough camps near the swamps. Ships came from Jamaica, New England, New York, Barbados, Britain and the Netherlands to buy the wood, and carried it to Port Royal, Boston, London and Amsterdam.

What did William Dampier say about cutting logwood?

The fullest first-hand description comes from William Dampier, later famous as an explorer and writer. In 1675 he sailed from Jamaica to Campeche on a ship buying logwood. Drawn by the trade, in 1676 he went back and worked as an ordinary cutter at Laguna de Términos. By his own later reckoning he spent about three years in and around the Bay in all, before reaching England in 1678.

In 1699 he published his “Voyages to the Bay of Campeachy”, describing the work, the swamps, the animals and the cutters themselves. Historians who have studied his account see the camps as a kind of escape: there was no captain to obey, and the men organised their own days between cutting wood, hunting for food and heavy drinking. Dampier died in London in 1715, the year Silver & Sails begins.

Why did Spain call logwood cutting illegal?

Spain claimed all of the coast and saw the cutters as trespassers taking its wood. The English answered that they had been cutting there before 1670, when the Treaty of Madrid let England keep the lands it then held. Spain never accepted this, and the two governments were still arguing about it in the 1730s. A 1724 book on pirates put it bluntly, calling the wood “but little better than stole” from Spain.

In late 1716 a Spanish force under Alonso Felipe de Andrade sailed into Laguna de Términos. It seized about twenty merchant ships from England, Scotland, New England, New York, Barbados and the Netherlands while their crews were away up the creeks cutting wood. Andrade offered a pardon to anyone who gave up their weapons and warned that others would be treated as pirates. In December the captains were set free with Spanish passes, though English papers say their ships were kept, and Spain built a fort on Isla del Carmen. In July 1717 a band of English cutters attacked it. Campeche was closed to them.

Most of the trade moved to the Belize River. Spain attacked those camps too, in 1717, 1730, 1754 and 1779, but the cutters always came back.

Who else did the work?

The Baymen did not work alone for long. In 1724 a Spanish missionary reported that the English had recently been bringing enslaved Africans to the Belize camps from Jamaica and Bermuda. Logwood cutting was small-scale, so a settler usually held one or two people, but the work in the forest camps was hard and dangerous. Many enslaved people escaped to Spanish Yucatán. Slavery grew much larger after about 1770, when the settlers switched to cutting mahogany, and it lasted in Belize until 1838.

Further south along the coast of today’s Honduras and Nicaragua lived the Miskito. One large group of them, the Miskito Sambo, grew from Indigenous Miskitu joined by Africans who had survived shipwrecks or escaped slavery. In the 1680s Dampier described Miskito men as expert harpoon fishermen, much valued on English ships, friendly to the English and fierce enemies of Spain. Later in the century Britain’s alliance with the Miskito helped protect the woodcutters.

Did logwood cutters become pirates?

Some did. A visitor in 1720, Nathaniel Uring, described the Belize cutters as a rough, hard-drinking crowd, some of whom had been pirates. The men who attacked the Spanish fort in 1717 were described as pirates. According to the 1724 General History of the Pyrates, Edward Low was in charge of a logwood-cutting boat in the Bay of Honduras, in the early 1720s, when he quarrelled with his captain, fired at him, and sailed off with twelve men to become a pirate. It is often said that many cutters turned pirate when Spain drove them from Campeche, but no one counted, so it is safer to say that some did.

How did logwood lead to British Honduras and Belize?

All of this is later than the game, but it grew straight out of the logwood camps. In 1763 the Treaty of Paris let Britain cut logwood on the coast while Spain kept the land. Treaties in 1783 and 1786 fixed where cutting was allowed, and in 1786 Britain also agreed to leave the Miskito coast. In 1798 the settlers beat off a Spanish attack at the Battle of St George’s Caye. Mahogany replaced logwood as the main export after the 1770s. In 1871 the settlement became the crown colony of British Honduras, and as Belize it became independent on 21 September 1981.