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sausages baked in batter: both the latter dishes once a feature of popular eating-houses all over England, but now usually disregarded.
    One constantly stumbles upon relics of provincial Britain preserved in the embalming fluid of the Honduran way of life, and often what has been taken over from the mother country is strikingly unsuitable in itsnew surroundings. The minor industries, for instance, such as boat-building , are carried on in enormous wooden sheds, the roofs of which are supported by the most complicated system of interlacing beams and girders I have ever seen. One thinks immediately of hurricanes, but on second thoughts it is clear that all this reinforcement would be valueless against the lateral thrust of a high wind. It turns out that such buildings were copied from originals put up by Scottish immigrants, and were designed to withstand the snow-loads imposed by the severest northern storms.
    Many of the Scotsmen themselves lie buried in the city’s cemeteries, both of which are located in the middle of wide roads, just where in Latin America the living would have taken their nightly promenade in formal gardens. Many of the dead, the inscriptions tell us, were sea-captains. They came here to die of fever, or were sometimes murdered, and in this case the inscription supplies the exact time of the tragedy, but no more than this and an affirmation of the victim’s hope of immortality. The tombstones serve conveniently for the drying of the washing of the neighbours on both sides of the road. It is not a bad place at all to lie, for those who were confident of the body’s resurrection – by the white houses, and the lemon-striped telegraph poles, with the constant bustle and chatter of bright-eyed crows in the trees above, and the eternal British-Sunday-afternoon strumming of a piano in a chapel just down the road.
    Death took these captains by surprise. It was never old age or a wasting sickness, but always the mosquito or the dagger that struck them down. No Britisher ever wanted to lay his bones anywhere but in the graveyard of his own parish church in the home country. In this lies the key to all the unsoundable differences between the Spanish and the British colonies. The Spaniard took Spain with him. The Briton was always an exile, living a provisional and makeshift existence, even creating for himself a symbol of impermanence in his ramshackle wooden house.
     
    One of the first things that strike the newcomer to Belize who has seen anything of life in the West Indies is the mysterious absence of anythingthat might come under the heading of Having a Good Time. There are no calypsos, no ash-can orchestras, no jungle drums, no half-frantic voodoo devotees gyrating round some picturesque mountebank. The Hondurans sacrifice no cocks to the old African gods, and feuds are settled by interminable lawsuit or swift machete blows, but in either case without recourse to the black magic of the obeahman. This in some ways is a pity, because by virtue of the fact that timber extraction, the main occupation, ceases with the wet season, people are left with several months to fill in, and with not the faintest idea of what to do with themselves, apart from chapel-going, playing dominoes, and suffering the afflictions of love. This highly un-African existence, with its complete ineptitude for self-entertainment, is probably the result of certain historical factors. The colony was founded by an English buccaneer called Wallace – Belize is a corruption of his name – who turned from piracy to the more dependable profits of logwood extraction. The slave-owning Wallace and his successors were very few in number. They were exposed to frequent attacks by the warlike Indians of southern Yucatan, and to the constant threat of action by the Spanish, who never recognised the legality of their settlement. The interlopers could only hope to defend themselves, and to keep their foothold, by arming their slaves, who would