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certainly have taken the first opportunity of pistolling their masters in the back, had their servitude been unduly oppressive. In those days the English in Jamaica produced a formidable breed of mastiff which they trained not only to track down but to devour black runaways , and such dogs were in great demand in the neighbouring French and Dutch colonies. One supposes that the atrocious treatment meted out to the blacks whose masters felt themselves secure from outside attack had the effect of drawing them together in their compounds, conserving all that was African in their lives, and uniting them in their hate for all that was white. Meanwhile the negroes of Belize, with their musketry drill, their smallholdings and their Sunday holidays, would have been encouraged to turn their backs on their African past and to struggle ever onwards and upwards towards the resplendent human ideal of the suburban Englishman.
    The test of this democracy malgré-soi came on September 10th, 1798, when a Spanish flotilla commanded by Field-Marshal Arthur O’Neil, Captain-General of Yucatan, appeared off Belize. The field-marshal was carrying orders to liquidate the settlement once and for all, and the baymen, as the English settlers called themselves, being forewarned, mustered their meagre forces for the defence. Reading of the remarkable disparity in the opposing forces one realises that here was the making of one of those occasions that are the very lifeblood of romantic history. The captain-general’s fleet consisted of thirty-one vessels carrying 2000 troops and 500 seamen. The defenders numbered one naval sloop, five small trading or fishing vessels, hastily converted for warlike purposes, plus seven rafts, each mounting one gun and manned by slaves – a total defensive force of 350 men. The resultant passage of arms has provoked a fair measure of armchair blood-thirst, flag-waving, and orotund speechifying on the annual public holiday which has commemorated it. In 1923 a Mr Rodney A. Pitts wrote a prize-winning poem called ‘The Baymen’, an ode in thirty-one verses, which, set to music, has become a kind of local national anthem. A sample stanza plunges us into an horrific scene of carnage:
    Ah, Baymen, Spaniards, on that day
    Engaging in that fierce mêlée –
    Ah, never such a sight before,
    They are all dyed in human gore –
    Exhausted, wounded, some are dead,
    They’re sunken to their gory bed.
    The cold facts of the case, supplied by contemporary records, paint a less murderous picture of the encounter. There were no casualties whatever on the British side, in an engagement which lasted two and a half hours, and the few bodies interred later by the Spanish on one of the cays were as likely to have been those of fever victims as of grapeshot casualties. One thinks of the dolorous quavering of generations of schoolchildren through such passages as:

    All died that this land which by blood they acquired
    Might give you that freedom their brave hearts inspired.
    As usual, history turns out to be a fable agreed upon.
     
    Modern times have brought with them a slackening in the idyllic master-and-faithful-serving-man relationship of the past. A People’s United Party has emerged, whose aim is total independence for British Honduras, and which, by way of a kind of psychological preparation for this end, urges the substitution of baseball for cricket, and the abolition of tea-drinking. The party’s creator and leader is a Mr Richardson, a weathy creole – as citizens of non-white origin are officially described. Mr Richardson’s antipathy for Britannia and all her works supposedly originates in a grievance over some matter of social recognition – a familiar colonial complaint, and one that has cost Britain more territory than all her other imperial shortcomings put together. When recently the Government of Guatemala renewed its claim to Belize, the outside world speculated on the possibility of the PUP operating as a fifth