Belize and the Baymen’s logwood camps

Was there a town of Belize in 1715?

Not yet. The game’s port of Belize stands for a scatter of camps where English woodcutters worked along the Belize River and the rivers and creeks to the north of it, on the coast of the Bay of Honduras. This is today the country of Belize, on the Caribbean side of Central America, just south of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula.

The cutters lived in rough shelters near the swamps where logwood grew, and ships anchored off the coast to load the wood. Belize City grew up later at the mouth of the river. Later in the 1700s the settlers made their main home on St George’s Caye, a small island off the coast.

Nobody is sure where the name Belize comes from. A popular story links it to a buccaneer called Peter Wallace, but historians treat that as legend.

Who were the Baymen?

The Baymen were English (and later British) woodcutters who took their name from the Bays of Campeche and Honduras where they worked. Many began as buccaneers, sea raiders who attacked Spanish ships and towns from bases such as Port Royal in Jamaica. In the 1650s and 1660s some stopped capturing Spanish cargoes of logwood and started cutting the wood themselves. When treaties in 1667 and 1670 made raiding Spain harder, more of them turned to the axe.

Logwood was a dyewood. Its dark heartwood gave the black, purple and blue dyes that Europe’s woollen industry needed, and in 1715 Britain imported nearly 6,000 tons of it. For more than a century it was the main reason English people lived on this coast.

The Baymen had no governor. They settled their own affairs at public meetings and, in time, elected their own magistrates. Nathaniel Uring, a merchant captain who spent some months among them in 1720, described them as “a rude drunken Crew, some of which have been Pirates”.

Why did the logwood cutters move to Belize?

Until 1716 the busiest logwood camps were far to the north-west, around the lagoon of Laguna de Términos near Campeche. In late 1716 a Spanish force sailed in, seized the ships loading wood there and built a fort. An English attack on the fort in July 1717 failed, and Campeche was closed to them.

Most of the trade moved south-east to the Bay of Honduras, and the Belize River camps became much more important. Merchant ships, many from Jamaica and New England, kept coming to buy the wood. In 1731–32 Jamaica’s council and assembly complained to London that Spaniards had driven the cutters from both bays and seized their ships.

Did Belize logwood cutters become pirates?

Some did. Uring said that some of the cutters he met had been pirates. According to the 1724 General History of the Pyrates, a book that mixes fact with exaggeration, Edward Low was in charge of a boat cutting logwood in the Bay of Honduras. His crew went armed because of the Spaniards, and the book admits the wood was more or less stolen. Around the end of 1721 Low quarrelled with his captain, fired a musket at him, killed another man, and sailed away with about a dozen others to become a pirate.

Still, most Baymen lived by cutting and selling wood, and no one ever counted how many turned pirate.

How did Spain try to drive the Baymen out?

Spain claimed the whole coast and saw the cutters as trespassers stealing its trees. Its officers raided the camps whenever they could. The historian Nigel Bolland lists Spanish expulsions in 1717, 1730, 1754 and 1779. Another recent study adds an attack from Petén, in today’s Guatemala, in 1718, and expulsions in 1722 and 1726, so the exact list is still debated.

To watch the English, Antonio de Figueroa y Silva, governor of Yucatán, resettled the abandoned Spanish town of Bacalar with colonists from the Canary Islands in the late 1720s and built the fort of San Felipe there. In 1732 he launched a campaign against the cutters on the southern rivers, and some of them moved further down the coast to Honduras.

Yet Spain never settled the Belize River itself, and each time the cutters came back.

Who were the enslaved Africans in the logwood camps?

The Baymen did not work alone for long. The earliest record comes from a Spanish missionary in 1724, who reported that the English had recently been bringing enslaved Africans to the camps from Jamaica and Bermuda. Historians think most had first been carried from Africa and sold in Jamaica’s slave markets.

Cutting logwood was small-scale work, and a settler usually held only one or two people. But the forest camps were hard and dangerous places to live, and enslaved people soon outnumbered the white settlers. Later in the 1700s, when mahogany cutting needed bigger work gangs, most of the people in the settlement were enslaved.

Many resisted. Throughout the 1700s enslaved people escaped across the frontier to Spanish Yucatán, and there were several revolts later in the century. The records of the early camps rarely give their names. Slavery in Belize ended only in 1838.

What had happened to the Maya?

The Maya had lived here for thousands of years. By 1715 their world had been badly broken. Spanish conquerors and missionaries pushed in from Yucatán and Guatemala from the 1500s, and diseases such as smallpox and yellow fever killed great numbers of people.

The Maya of Tipu, in western Belize, governed themselves free of Spanish rule from 1638 to 1695. After Spain conquered the Itzá Maya in 1697, its soldiers moved Tipu’s people by force to near Lake Petén Itzá in 1707. Further south, Chol-speaking Maya had already been removed to the Guatemalan highlands, leaving much of the south almost empty for a century. Written records of contact between the Maya and the Baymen in the game’s years are thin.

How did the logwood camps become Belize?

All of this is later than the game. In 1763 the Treaty of Paris let British subjects cut and ship logwood, while Spain kept its claim to the land. Later treaties in 1783 and 1786 marked out where they could cut and allowed mahogany, which replaced logwood as the main export. In 1798 the settlers beat off Spain’s last attack at the Battle of St George’s Caye. The settlement became British Honduras, took the name Belize in 1973 and became independent on 21 September 1981.