View of the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

column in support of the Guatemalan irredentists. The answer to this, I was told, is best expressed by the local proverb, ‘Wen cakroche [cockroach] mek dance ’e no invite fowl.’
    The party’s official organ, the Belize Billboard , is a journalistic collector’s item, combining the raciness of a scurrilous broadsheet with the charm of a last-century shipping gazette. It is particularly strong on crime-reporting, pokes out its tongue at the British whenever it can, and carefully commemorates the anniversaries of such setbacks in the nation’s story as the sinking of the Ark Royal . It is regarded with sincere affection by the white members of the colony, many of whom keep scrapbooks bulging with choice examples of its Alice-in-Wonderland prose – full of such words as ‘doxy’ and ‘paramour’. The trade winds blow right through the advertisement section of the Billboard , with its bald details of goods ‘newly arrived’, as if they had been listed in order of unloading on to the quayside: clay pipes, lamp chimneys, apricot bats (?), Exma preparations for the bay sore and ground itch, beating spoons,cinnamon sticks, bridal satin, colonial blue-mottled soap and – in the month of March – Christmas cards. Dropped like a dash of curry into this assortment from the hold of a ghost ship are the announcements of the Hindu gentleman with an accommodation address in Bombay who promises with the aid of his white pills to add six inches to your height, ‘If not over eighty’.
     
    In whatever direction the political destiny of Belize may lie, its economic future is dubious. In the past it has depended upon its forests; but ruinous over-exploitation in the half of the total land area of the colony which is privately owned has depleted this source of income and seriously mortgaged the future. The logical remedy would seem to lie in the switching over of the colony’s economy to an agricultural basis. But it seems that the rhythm of seasonal, semi-nomadic work in the forest, sustained for centuries, has created what a government handbook politely describes as ‘an ingrained restlessness’. In other words the Hondurans tend to become bored with a job that looks like being too steady.
    The eventual solution to this problem probably lies in the tourist industry, with a glamourised and air-conditioned Belize emerging as another Caribbean playground of the industrial north – and anyone who has seen what has happened to the north coast of Jamaica in the last year or two will know what to expect. All the ingredients for a colonial Cinderella story are present. Being just beyond the reach of the Cuban and Mexican fishing fleets, the Bay of Honduras is probably richer in fish – including all the spectacular and inedible ones pursued by sportsmen – than any other accessible area in the northern hemisphere. The average aficionado will lose all the tackle he can afford in a week’s tussle with the enormous tarpon to be found in the river running through Belize town itself. The forests, too, abound with strange and beautiful animals, with tapir, jaguars and pygmy deer, which await extermination by the smoothly organised hunting parties of the future. The Fort George, with its deep freeze, and its swimming pool in course of construction, marks the closing of an era. I was given to understand that even this year a touristorganisation calling itself The Conquistadors’ Caravan was dickering with the possibility of including Belize in one of its ‘Pioneer Conquistadors’ itineraries, and was dissuaded only by the news that there was no nightclub , no air-conditioning anywhere, no Mayan ruins within comfortable reach, absolutely no beach, and that jaguars’ tracks are seen most mornings on the golf course. May other travel agents read these words and be equally dismayed.
    In the meanwhile, for the collector of geographical curiosities, there is still time, although probably not much time, to taste the pleasures of a