The Origins of the Belize Settlement - a reconsideration

Abstract

The historiography of Belize holds, rather uncritically, that the settlement of Belize (formerly British Honduras) was founded in 1638 by a shipwrecked Scottish buccaneer named Peter Wallace and his crew when they shifted to logwood cutting. If true, this would mean that the Belize settlement pre-empted Jamaica as an English territorial holding in the West Indies and occurred only eight years after the English established a colony in Providence Island off the coast of Nicaragua in Central America. This article argues that this date is unsupported by historical evidence and that the conditions for the establishment of the settlement of British Honduras were not fully in place until or after the mid-1660s. This article builds on the revisionist arguments of Barbara Bulmer-Thomas and Victor Bulmer-Thomas in their 2012 book on the economic history of Belize that the “necessary conditions for the permanent occupation [of Belize were only] in place by the end of 1642” (Bulmer-Thomas & Bulmer Thomas, 2017. p. 35).