On September 13, 1849, Yucatecan forces at Chac Creek, near the port city of Bacalar (in present-day Quintana Roo), stopped and searched a vessel named Four Sisters, owned by the Belizean merchant, Austin W. Cox. Inside they uncovered kegs containing 73 arrobas (25-pound kegs) of gunpowder and 16 arrobas of lead. Manned by three black men, the vessel also carried a Maya on whom the search party found incriminating evidence, in the form of a letter from Cox to Maya rebel leader Jacinto Pat. The letter made it clear that the gunpowder was meant for the Maya insurgents who were fighting against Mexican authorities in the Yucatán's raging Caste War. Historians of the Caste War period have consistently recognized that the Belizean authorities ignored the munitions trade that flourished between Mexico and Belize during the conflict.Footnote 1 Largely unexplored has been the critical role that merchants and munitions traders played in shaping the British government's attitude, and consequently its policies, toward Maya groups during this volatile period.
One of the longest and bloodiest peasant rebellions in Latin American history, the Caste War (1847–1901) is a subject of much scholarly debate. Scholars have posited various factors—social, political, and economic—to account for the conflagration.Footnote 2 A few scholars have looked beyond Yucatán to point out the centrality of Belize in the unfolding of the rebellion, and thereby the involvement of the British settlement there.Footnote 3 In this regard, they focus on the arms trade between the Yucatán and Belize, in particular its effect on prolonging the war.Footnote 4 In fact, a common belief for a time, albeit an erroneous one, was that the British involvement was inspired by its imperialist and expansionist designs on Central America—that Britain had provoked the war to “acquire more of Yucatán to add to their colony, now Belize.”Footnote 5
However, later scholarship challenged this view.Footnote 6 Scholars such as Paul Sullivan argued that the British had no grand design, but that individual entrepreneurs and traders in Belize did exercise a great deal of influence on British policies.Footnote 7 In explaining Anglo-Maya relations in Belize, the prevalent view is that British policies were motivated by either expediency or the fear of Maya “savages”: the British settlement did not have the power to defend itself against the rebels.Footnote 8 Countering the assumption that British policymakers acted out of fear or expediency, this article adds to the historiographical conversation by positing that individual merchants played a crucial role in fostering a sympathetic attitude toward the Maya rebels on the part of the British government in Belize during the initial years of Mexico's Caste War. An examination of the preoccupations of the Belizean government, mainly through the person of Superintendent St. John Fancourt, reveals how dynamics of frontiers and borderlands gave rise to interethnic solidarity. A consideration of this period in Belizean history through the lens of frontiers and borderlands opens up new ways of understanding the contours of race relations in border and peripheral areas.
The body of literature on frontiers and borderlands was developed by scholars of the US Southwest and later applied to the Atlantic World. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner posited that the frontier, rather than being marginal to US history, was actually the “process” that resulted in democratization and Americanization.Footnote 9 Following Turner, scholars such as David Weber proposed that the frontier had transformative properties that would change culture:
It is the power of frontiers to transform cultures that gives them special interest. . . . It does appear to be universally true, however, that at those edges where cultures come in contact, friction and cross-fertilization transform local peoples and institutions, giving rise to transfrontier regions with distinctive cultures, politics, economic arrangements, and social networks that set them apart from their respective metropoli.Footnote 10
Another of Turner's protégés, Herbert Bolton, emphasized the importance of the extended cohabitation between native populations and European interlopers at the boundaries of colonial rule. While Turner had emphasized the frontier as a process whereby Europeans pushed farther and farther into wilderness and as they did so transforming into “Americans,” Bolton showed that the West was not monolithic. Rather, the Spanish frontier of North America—what Bolton called the “borderlands”—was a zone of rivalry between the Old World powers Spain and England.Footnote 11
Taking their clue from these early thinkers, Adelman and Aron have defined frontiers as “a meeting place of peoples in which geographic and cultural borders were not clearly defined,” reserving the term “borderland” to mean “the contested boundaries between colonial domains.”Footnote 12 Following on the work of such scholars as Weber and Bolton, Latin Americanists have noted that frontiers and borderlands often remain outside the cultural bounds of nation-states and that from these regions emerge distinctive figures such as the gaucho in Argentina and norms such as the acceptance of violence and civilian militarism.Footnote 13
Northern Belize and southeastern Yucatán were frontier areas in which the Maya brushed against the British, but they were also borderlands of regions wherein imperial powers—the British, the Spanish and, later, the United States—vied for influence. It is this dual nature that helps us understand the region's history of cross-racial alliances. The frontier created its own culture, one that was at a basic level predicated on a simple give-and-take between the merchants and tradesmen who provided arms and ammunition and Maya who gave them access to timber and foodstuffs. Chronicling the history of Payo Obispo (present-day Chetumal), Luz del Carmen Vallarta Vélez found a culture and identity that was particular to the frontier. The payosbispenses (residents of Payo Obispo) were Yucatecan refugees who returned to Mexico to found the city of Chetumal. In their return, they brought a mixed culture: families that had creole and African members, spoke Creole, Maya, and Spanish, and even enjoyed a mixed cuisine. As Vélez points out, this frontier identity can be seen even today in the towns of Corozal and Orange Walk in northern Belize, where stores with names such as Chico's Tortilla Factory symbolize the convergence of diverse cultures.Footnote 14
That merchants and petty tradesmen could carry out their trading activities with Maya insurgents was due in part to the fact that this frontier region was also a borderland. Old imperial rivalries, and new ones, played out in the Yucatán-Belize borderlands. From the very beginning of British settlement in the region, Spain and Great Britain vied for control over Belize, and this competition did not diminish with the independence of Latin American states and the formation of nation-states such as Mexico. Rather, as this article points out, British officials continued to regard the Mexican state very much as they had the old colony of New Spain. Added to this mix was the newer rivalry between Britain and the United States. One of the arguments in this article is that British policymakers were more concerned with these imperial threats to their power than with the Maya threat. Borderland dynamics thus ensured that Belizean merchants had much more room to maneuver than would otherwise have been the case.
In this article I posit that the Yucatan-Belize border area functioned as both frontier and borderland, and that this peculiarity serves to explain the nature of British policies toward Maya groups during the Caste War. Scholars focusing on Belize before the nineteenth century have recognized that frontier dynamics gave rise to racial crossings.Footnote 15 In his study of slave flight in eighteenth-century Belize and Yucatán, Restall concluded that “even the narrower focal point of Belize reveals a frontier world that tied, rather than divided, people of different categories.”Footnote 16 In addition, scholars of the Mosquito Shore in the colonial period have explored the response of native peoples at the borderlands of imperial powers.Footnote 17 By putting into conversation scholarship on Belizean and Caste War history with the scholarship on frontiers and borderlands, I am taking threads from both strands of thought. Far from being peripheral, the borderlands between Belize and Mexico became zones of imperial rivalry and negotiation, fostering alliances between the British and the Maya in the first years of the violent Caste War.
Historical Background of the Border Regions
The interlinked developments in race, politics, and economy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries in Belize provide the backdrop for understanding how the Mexico-Belize border area developed as both a frontier marked by interethnic encounters and a borderland where imperial rivalries played out. The British settlement in the Bay of Honduras began with the arrival of a motley group of pirates who preyed on Spanish galleons and vessels transporting logwood to Europe for use in making dyes. Given the high demand in textile industries, logwood became a lucrative commodity. After the 1677 Treaty of Madrid suppressed piracy, these men decided to settle in the Bay of Honduras, in what is now the region of Belize. These first settlers or “Baymen” felled and hauled the trees themselves; indeed, it is not until 1724 that slavery became clearly entwined with logwood extraction.Footnote 18
From the very beginning, the region was a source of tension between Spain and Britain, with the Spanish asserting their sovereignty over the Bay of Honduras and conceding the right of the English to cut logwood only in 1763, by which time the logwood trade had already declined in profitability.Footnote 19 The growth of the English luxury furniture industry in the late eighteenth century led to the replacement of logwood by mahogany, which became the main export commodity for the settlement. By 1789, more than six million feet of mahogany was being exported annually from the Bay of Honduras.Footnote 20 Extraction of mahogany required more workers than logwood, and we see a concurrent increase in the number of slaves in the settlement, mostly imported from other British Caribbean colonies such as Jamaica.
In 1786, the Treaty of London extended the area of British timber extraction from the Hondo River in the north to the Sibun in the south. In return, the British were to evacuate from their other settlements in the area, such as the Mosquito Coast. This agreement led to a social transformation of the Bay of Honduras settlement, with 537 white and free “coloured,” along with 1,677 slaves, entering the colony.Footnote 21 All but a few of these newcomers became assimilated into the settlement at the lowest rungs; by the late 1700s, the British settlement had a social structure dominated by a small, wealthy white elite ruling over a majority black population and a middling population of free-colored, free black, and poor whites.Footnote 22
This social structure, together with the demands of the mahogany trade, shaped Belize's internal development and external relations. At first, a minority of wealthy white inhabitants drawn mainly from the established settlers dominated the mahogany business. This minority was also the main voice of government and constituted the Public Meeting that elected magistrates who oversaw the settlement's administration. From 1784, the appointment of a representative of the British crown, the Superintendent, introduced ambiguity in the locus of executive authority; the superintendent often proved to be the main check on the power of the Public Meeting and its elected magistrates.Footnote 23 Over the first half of the nineteenth century, however, the importance of the Public Meeting declined, partly due to the Baymen's failure to run the colony effectively in the absence of a strong executive.Footnote 24 The 1830s was a period of restructuring, with the abolition of slavery in 1833. It was followed by the apprenticeship period in 1838, at which time the African slaves who had been the main support of the settler elite were liberated. What followed was a decade of tension between the superintendent and the Public Meeting, with the latter losing its legislative powers in 1843 and finally abolishing itself in the early 1850s.Footnote 25
Since the Public Meeting had embodied in its actions the views of the established white settler elite, its decline has been seen as a reflection of that group's decline. One arena in which this change became apparent is in that of the mahogany business. At the time the Public Meeting was losing its efficacy, the mahogany trade was reaching its apogee. The railway boom in Europe in the 1840s created a high demand for mahogany for building carriages. Exports from Belize peaked, with more than 13 million feet of mahogany exported in 1846 alone.Footnote 26 There was another telling change: unlike the period in which the established settler elite and its economy had dominated the mahogany trade, the business in timber now required capital from abroad. Companies based in London, in particular, became the principal drivers of this boom. As early as 1801, London merchants had begun to show interest in Belize as a market; there, it was necessary to import all essentials of life due to local restrictions on cultivation and manufacture.Footnote 27 At first, the old settlers entered into ties with London merchant houses in order to export timber, but they were unable to keep up with them: “Ultimately, the Baymen and slave owners were no match for the London merchant and banking houses, who could lay out cash even in hard times.”Footnote 28 The inhabitants of the settlement who survived as moneyed merchants were those who could establish strong ties with the London firms. An example of the emerging partnership companies was that formed by Hyde and Hodge; it constituted a merger of interests: the local landowning Hyde family and a London merchant, John Hodge.Footnote 29 Indeed, by the 1860s these large partnership firms would buy out the old cutters and become the driving force of the mahogany industry in Belize.
As merchant firms in Belize responded to Europe's demand for mahogany in the 1840s, they also pushed further into the borderlands between Mexico and Belize. The Hondo River had always served as a boundary between the two, although the status of Belize as a crown colony would not be solidified until the 1860s. The southeastern part of Yucatán, north of the Hondo River, had always been a refuge area for Maya fleeing Spanish colonial rule. It is thus not surprising that the Caste War had its epicenter in this region. Importantly for merchants in Belize, the forested lands inhabited by the Maya were sources of timber. By 1847 the entire length of the Hondo River was dotted with logging camps along its south bank.Footnote 30 Prior to the outbreak of the Caste War, merchants in Belize were already crossing the Hondo for timber on the northern side and establishing logging contracts with landowners in the Bacalar area.Footnote 31
The Caste War erupted in the peninsula in late 1847. Although scholars are now moving away from characterizing it as a race war between the Maya and the Hispanics,Footnote 32 the truth is that the rebels, comprised mostly of Yucatec Maya, challenged the power of Mexican government in an unprecedented manner.Footnote 33 During the initial turbulent years of the war, 1847 to 1850, Yucatec Maya took control of timber-rich southeast Yucatán, leading even well-established London firms to consider entering into business deals with them.
The War Begins: Merchants and British Perception of the Maya
A consideration of the actions and concerns addressed by the Belizean government during the initial years of the Caste War (in the person, mainly, of Superintendent St. John Fancourt) show the importance of Belizean merchants and traders in promoting cross-racial alliances. Here, Maya insurgents are portrayed in a positive light even, in extreme cases, fighting alongside the merchants against Mexican forces. The preoccupations of the Belizean government during the outbreak of the Caste War reveal how the dual nature of Belize-Yucatán border area as both a frontier and a borderland engendered cross-racial action.
From the very start of the Caste War, the Belizeans' reaction to the insurgency was principally centered on protecting their business interests. News of the outbreak of hostilities in Yucatán reached the settlement in December 1847.Footnote 34 In a letter to Major Mends, commanding officer of the Garrison on Land Forces, then- superintendent St. John Fancourt requested a detachment of troops be sent immediately to the south bank of the Hondo to protect the mahogany camps.Footnote 35 Writing that he had received a petition from “several gentlemen, some of them of high respectability,” Fancourt voiced the fear of Belizean merchants: “What appears to be apprehended by these Gentlemen, and, I fear, with some reason, is that the Indian population of Yucatán, who have been engaged for some time past in the most lawless acts, may cross the river and interfere with the operations of the British merchants within our limits.”Footnote 36 A month after Fancourt's request for troops, however, it soon became apparent that the measly number of soldiers that could be mustered was no match for the insurgents if they should indeed choose to cross the Hondo, as so many of the merchants feared they would. In April 1848, news burst into Belize of rebels capturing the port city of Bacalar.
Since the eighteenth century, Bacalar had functioned as the vital link between Belize and Yucatán. Indeed, in the early nineteenth century Bacalar was the only settlement that the Spanish tried to establish in the forested southeast of the Yucatán peninsula, an area home to independent Maya groups including many who had rejected Spanish colonial rule. Indeed as González writes, “Prior to the outbreak of the indigenous uprising, a multitude of boats, small canoes and cayucos [a type of indigenous canoe] sailed from Bacalar to the coast of Belize, carrying food and timber, a movement which certainly gave indication of a highly dynamic commercial activity.”Footnote 37 The Maya were an intrinsic part of these trade relations. Adept at farming and confident of their superior knowledge of the timber-rich forests of southeastern Yucatán, Maya—especially those in the Tekax, Peto and Sotuta districts—had important commercial relations with the British settlers of the Bay of Honduras.Footnote 38 For the British, the Maya supply line was essential.
As a result of treaties with Spain, in particular the Convention of London of 1786, the British had gained logging rights in the Bay of Honduras but not the right to establish agricultural plantations.Footnote 39 It was thus that the settlement of Belize had to import even basic foodstuffs to survive. Bacalar became a major player in the associated trade, with Maya visiting it to ply the Belizean merchants not only with timber but also corn and poultry. This was moreover a two-way street. From the eighteenth century onward, a contraband route linked Belize to Yucatán through Bacalar up to Valladolid and British luxury goods, including cotton, found their way into Mexico. Describing the prosperity of Bacalar on the eve of the Caste War, González writes:
In 1846, a year before the outbreak, in Bacalar there were 43 houses with rooftops, among them three of two stories, all of solid and beautiful construction. Apart from rich and well-stocked stores, there was a church, maritime customs office and a timber export business. It was comprised of a population of 6,078 inhabitants dedicated to various activities, such as cutting wood [and] sowing corn, sugarcane, rice and tobacco. At Bacalar one could find three haciendas and 27 ranches in which were produced each year 4,000 arrobas of sugar, 400 of tobacco and 300 of rice. In addition, there were small indigenous settlements distributed around the outskirts of Bacalar which together cultivated some fourteen thousand five hundred mecates of corn.Footnote 40
A great portion of this produce found its way into Belize. Given its strategic position and commercial importance, it is not surprising that Bacalar became an important arena of contestation as soon as the first salvos of the Caste War were fired.
In April 1848, Fancourt wrote to the governor of Jamaica, Charles Grey, with news of the capture of Bacalar by Maya insurgents. “Bacalar,” he wrote, “would appear to have been attacked by five or six thousand men. It defended itself for three days with the loss of, I believe, four or five men only so that the resistance could not have been very obstinate.”Footnote 41 Already, Belize was beginning to feel the effects of the attack: a thousand Yucatecan Hispanics had crossed into Belize in the aftermath of the fall of Bacalar to take refuge there. Fancourt himself acknowledged the vulnerability of the settlement. Writing about the detachment of troops he had stationed at the Hondo, Fancourt informed the Jamaican governor of the city's situation: “I have now withdrawn them [i.e. the troops] because they would be useless for the purposes of protection against the formidable numbers collected in the opposite bank. Indeed, the only point I can pretend to protect in case of the Indians crossing the river is Belize [city] itself, and I fear it would be difficult even to do that as it ought to be done against four or five thousand men.Footnote 42
Merchants, who had been at the northern borderlands during the outbreak, brought more vivid portraits of the destruction wrought by the insurgents in Yucatán. In many ways, these merchants were the eyes and ears of the British government in the borderlands. As a British settlement that had not yet been recognized as a crown colony, Belize lacked a standing army to defend its borders; Belizeans had to depend on the goodwill of the British crown representatives in Jamaica for protection. As a result, with the exception of certain occasions when troops could be mustered to patrol the borders, these areas remained largely outside the purview of the government. In this situation, merchants whose mahogany camps lined the south bank of the Hondo acted as both traders and messengers.
In 1848, one merchant, A. W. Cox who at the time was the managing partner of the Hyde and Hodge Company, became particularly important as an informant to Fancourt. A letter from Fancourt to the governor of Jamaica on May 9, 1848, is especially revealing of Cox's role in shaping the attitude of the British government toward the Maya insurgents. From that letter: “A message was brought to me from the Indian Chiefs by Mr. Cox expressive of their desire to be allowed to bring their corn and poultry here as the Spanish did formerly and to cultivate friendly relations with us in every aspect. They never had, they say, the least intention of attacking us, on the contrary that they are anxious to place the whole country under our government.”
The information sent by Cox consistently portrayed Hispanics as the perpetrators of the violence. Describing the condition of Bacalar, Cox reported, “Many houses have been burnt and destroyed and. . . the streets and borders of the lake are strewed with dead bodies, principally Indians killed by the Spaniards.”Footnote 43 Similarly, describing what he called “untoward incident,” Cox wrote Fancourt that “a boat filled with Spaniards appears to have met a boat manned by Indians on the River Hondo which divides Yucatan from British Honduras. The Spaniards fired on the Indians and two of them were killed.”Footnote 44 Fancourt's writings to the governor highlight the intermediary role that Cox played in transmitting messages back and forth between Fancourt and the Maya chiefs. Cox's description of the rebels effectively portrays them as reasonable and moderate in their actions, and Fancourt's own writing reveals an underlying tone of respect for the rebel chiefs: “They [Maya rebels] number it is said twenty thousand strong and about half of them are armed with muskets and a sort of hatchet which they bear. Their leaders are intelligent and resolute. . . . The inhabitants [of Bacalar] were treated with kindness and allowed either to remain or to depart as they thought proper.”Footnote 45
Merchants such as Cox were Fancourt's main informants, and the latter's attitude toward the Maya chiefs owes much to the efforts of men like Cox to portray the rebels in a positive light. In this, of course, merchants like Cox were also helping to counteract the propaganda campaigns of the Mexican government, which consistently portrayed the rebels as bloodthirsty savages. In December 1847, the governor of Yucatán wrote to the superintendent from Mérida, with the “object to inform your Excellency that the aborigines or original natives of this peninsula have conceived that depraved design to exterminate without any exception whatsoever all the inhabitants not of their own race, taking possession of their towns and establishing dominion therein.”Footnote 46 The letter described the rebels as “barbarians” who were pillaging and killing indiscriminately.Footnote 47
Of course, by portraying the rebels as enemies of “all inhabitants not of their own race” the government in Mérida was hoping to obtain an alliance with the British along racial lines to protect the region's whites against the ‘savages.’ What the government in Mérida had not taken into account, however, was the vested interest of merchants who were trading with the Maya for timber and other resources in the borderlands to maintain a tone of alliance with the rebels. Countering the claim that the rebels were indiscriminately attacking all whites, Cox again wrote to Fancourt:
All property [in Bacalar] belonging to the English, they [the rebels] will give up on application, and it also appears that they have carefully avoided doing any injury to such property. . . . The Principal Magisterial authority now in Bacalar is a man of the name of Vega who has been in the habit of trading with Belize for many years. He is of Indian origin but speaks English and Spanish and is much attached to the British connection.Footnote 48
Fancourt's reaction was in keeping with his government's overwhelming desire to protect its business interests. In fact, it was at the outset fear of British property being damaged by the rebels that had led Fancourt to explore alliance with the Hispanics. In a letter to the governor of Jamaica, Fancourt explained:
The intelligence, which. . . up to that time and indeed for some time afterwards reached me represented the movement amongst the Indians as a predatory warfare, and not as having its origin in political discontent. Viewing the matter in this light and taking into consideration the large amount of property belonging to English merchants in the immediate neighborhood of Bacalar, I did not hesitate to assist the Spanish inhabitants of Yucatan generally in procuring arms at Belize. On the actual approach of the Indians towards Bacalar, one hundred stands of arms were furnished by the settlement to the commandant of the town under my sanction.Footnote 49
However, news about rebel activities in Bacalar assuaged Fancourt's fears of an attack at the hands of Maya insurgents: “From what I have learnt of the conduct of the Indians in Bacalar, they have exercised great moderation. Those who have arrived here were permitted to depart without injury or insult with their furniture and movables and even their livestock. I am disposed therefore to believe that the movement of the Indians generally has been purely a political movement.”Footnote 50 Fancourt's new perception can be attributed to the efforts of Cox, who acted as a crucial intermediary between the insurgents and the superintendent. However, it would be a mistake to see the actions of Cox as that of a disinterested third person. Rather, Cox, a former member of the British merchant service, had a great deal of vested interest in Bacalar, having bought up at nominal prices the property of Yucatecans who had fled to Belize.Footnote 51 It is arguable that his business interests played a great role in determining the way in which Cox represented the situation in Bacalar to Fancourt.
Surprisingly, Fancourt was more worried about the threat from United States than from Maya rebels. According to Brian Hamnett, the years 1846–48 formed the climax of a process that “involved the readjustment of the balance of power on the North American continent in favour of the United States and to the disadvantage of Mexico.”Footnote 52 Those years saw a war between Mexico and the United States that would end with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which confirmed Mexico's loss of Texas, New Mexico, and Upper California.Footnote 53 The United States' aggressive policies with regard to Mexico did not end with the treaty, however. By 1853 the entire far north of Mexico was in the hands of the United States, which was seeking still further territorial concessions in Lower California, Sonora, and Chihuahua. In fact, as Hamnett notes, “The decade after Guadalupe Hidalgo was a period of intense pressure by the US government and private interests for concessions from Mexico.”Footnote 54
The war had its repercussions in Yucatán, where elites from Campeche under Domingo Barret revolted against the Yucatecan government in a bid to separate from Mexico and proclaim neutrality.Footnote 55 The Barret government, which gained gubernatorial powers in January 1847, tried to gain US support for Yucatecan sovereignty, along with trade concession at ports such as Ciudad del Carmen.Footnote 56 Politicians in both Yucatán and the United States, including US president James Polk, even toyed with the idea of Yucatan's annexation by the United States, “although Secretary of State James Buchanan predicted correctly that Congress would never approve the idea.”Footnote 57
Fancourt worried about “the peculiar position of Yucatán in relation to the frontier of British Honduras.”Footnote 58 Fancourt seemed to think that there was no need to station troops at the frontier to protect the settlement from the Maya threat. He was satisfied that “the Indians have no hostile feeling towards the British,” and had in fact approved the return of naval forces to Port Royal in Jamaica. However, he was apprehensive enough about the threat from United States to detain a regiment to protect against that threat in another letter to the governor of Jamaica (June 7, 1848). Concerned about “the probability that the government of the United States on the invitation of certain parties in Merida have already occupied a portion of that province, thereby departing from their previously expressed determination to abstain from occupying Yucatan so long as it should remain neutral in the Mexican contest,” Fancourt wrote, “I have thought it prudent to detain the 1st West India regiment which has arrived under the command of Major O' Connor.”Footnote 59
After the nascent United States threw off the yoke of British colonial rule in 1776, an important commercial rivalry emerged between the two countries. The early nineteenth century saw this rivalry leading to outright hostilities in the War of 1812. Even after peace had been declared, the imperial ambitions of both nations continued to mar their relationship. Fancourt's letter to the governor of Jamaica in May 1848 reveals this undercurrent of distrust and tension. He confided to the governor: “Various occurrences have [led] me latterly to entertain the suspicion that the Government of United States has been secretly persevering a line of hostility to the British interests in this quarter of the world.” For Fancourt, the situation seemed dire: he believed that the government in Belize, which lacked strong legislative and executive powers, would not be able to counter the US threat. “If the troops of the government of United States were to take possession of Merida, I have little doubt that Bacalar would soon be overrun by American merchants and, this step accomplished, the proportion of American merchants resorting here would ere long I think convert the settlement into an American possession.” Given the strategic nature of Bacalar as a trading post that connected Belize to Mexico, and given the volume of goods exported through that port, it is not surprising that Fancourt sensed this threat to the British settlement. Further, he wrote: “It cannot be concealed that there are persons here belonging to the chief mercantile houses who to say the least of it are indifferent to British connection and who would were the smallest mercantile advantage at issue be ready to form part of the American Republic. Their political principles are thoroughly anti-monarchical.”Footnote 60
By July 1848, Fancourt had received news leading him to reevaluate his position regarding the Maya threat in the north. He was disconcerted by news of infighting among the Maya rebel chiefs, worrying that the rebel leaders would not be able to maintain their authority over the insurgents. In particular, the news that the Maya had put to death the officer in command at Bacalar, Juan Pablo Cocom, whom Fancourt believed would have been “favorable to a good understanding between the inhabitants of that place and of Belize,” unnerved the superintendent.Footnote 61 For the first time, a clearly worried Fancourt wrote to Governor Grey: “I am compelled. . . to request that no diminution of the military force in Honduras take place until I see some better guarantee for tranquility.”Footnote 62 Believing that he needed more accurate information on the situation in the borderlands and that circumstances necessitated more direct involvement of the British, Fancourt wrote to Charles Grey, governor of Jamaica: “I propose to move the Public Meeting which will assemble on the 18th instant to enable me to appoint a commercial agent in Bacalar.”Footnote 63
Although he viewed the Maya as intelligent and resolute people, Fancourt, like other British officers in the nineteenth century, was convinced of British superiority. The imperial hubris—that the British would be able to ensure peace in the area through their superior powers of reasoning—comes through clearly in Fancourt's writing. He hoped that placing a commercial agent in Bacalar would not only help him obtain “authentic intelligence” but would also act “as a means of advising the Indians with a view of leading them to peaceful and industrial occupations.”Footnote 64 Refusing to accede to the request of Maya rebels for gunpowder, Fancourt wrote, “I must decline to send you powder or to offer you any assistance whatever in disturbing the tranquility of Yucatán.”Footnote 65
While Fancourt looked on anxiously at the situation in the northern borderlands, mercantile interests in Belize were not sitting idle. In August 1848, the Honduras Observer published a letter from a “London merchant” to the Secretary of the State “entreating his lordship to adopt immediate measures, not only to afford effectual aid for the repulsion of any attack of the Indians now, but to form such a military force at Belize (without drawing the laborers from their work at a distance) as will defend her Majesty's possessions in Honduras.”Footnote 66 It was clear that whereas Fancourt was more preoccupied with the outcome of US imperial designs on Mexico, the mercantile community was still focusing its attention on the Maya threat to the north.
Like Fancourt, however, the British government wanted to avoid outright conflict with Maya rebels. The governor of Jamaica acted as the mouthpiece of the British crown in the Caribbean, and the latter's letters to Fancourt reveal the views of the metropolis on the war to the north. In May 1848, Governor Grey wrote to Fancourt: “I am encouraged to hope however, both by your own view of the matter and by all I can learn here, that you may avoid a quarrel with the Indians and have no need of fighting at all.”Footnote 67 Britain was involved in other costly wars at the time, including the South African conflicts known as the Xhosa or Kaffir Wars. Grey informed Fancourt that the British government was opposed to diverting any forces or funds to “distant objects or purposes of secondary importance” and that he did not want to be involved in the Caste War that was spreading through Yucatán. For men like Grey, the Mexican government did not represent any significant departure from the erstwhile Spanish empire. Thus, he found no reason to change the longstanding policies the British had held toward Mexico under the Spanish: “Our position in British Honduras was always that of friends to the Indians before the power of old Spain was broken down, and I do not see why it should not continue to be the same now or why these relations with the Indians may not even be improved to such an extent as to give us some influence over them which may be used for the interests of humanity.”Footnote 68
One result of the Caste War was the influx of Yucatecan Hispanic refugees into the British settlement. Most of them had been among the richer inhabitants of Bacalar who had fled with their lives and properties. One of the persistent apprehensions of the British government was that these Yucatecans would try to wreak vengeance by attacking the Maya rebels and thus bring the unwilling British settlers into a war not of their own making. The British stance with regard to the Caste War was to be hospitable to the Yucatecan refugees, but not to get involved in quarrels between these refugees and the Maya rebels. Grey, therefore, asked Fancourt to issue a proclamation stating that intention. Grey felt confident that with such a proclamation the “Indian chiefs,” whom he believed were “intelligent,” would keep within their boundaries and pose no threat to the British settlement. Fancourt wrote: “We are at peace with the Indians and wish to be so. . . although if they invade our frontiers with hostile designs we must necessarily defend our people and repel aggressions; we should greatly regret such a necessity and that as long as they will keep beyond our limits the Indians have nothing to fear from us and if our people pass beyond your limits and attack them they will be discountenanced and punished by our government.Footnote 69
The British government's fear of being drawn into the war seemed to become a distinct possibility in June 1848 when two Hispanic refugees residing in the Belizean border town of Ramonal were abducted by about 30 Maya and taken across the river to the Mexican side.Footnote 70 Outraged at the audacity of the Maya who had come into British territory and kidnapped men living under the protection of the British flag, Fancourt requested the coroner of Belize, Dr. Thomas Rhys, to seek help from authorities in Bacalar to locate the missing men and to “search out and punish the offending parties.”Footnote 71 Ironically, Thomas Rhys's expedition into Bacalar seemed to cement British belief in the honorable conduct of the Maya rebels.
Thomas Rhys was a surgeon who had been appointed coroner of the settlement of Belize in April 1848.Footnote 72 He arrived in Bacalar in July to meet with the Maya commandant, intending to resolve the kidnapping case. Rhys found the commandant “[in] tears, bitterly complaining of the conduct of his men in daring to go into the British limits, and commit so atrocious an act as that of forcibly carrying away two individuals while living under the protection of that flag.” The commandant informed Rhys that he had forbidden his men to take even a blade of grass from the English side. The sergeant of the raiding party was given 200 hundred lashes. When one of the officers confessed that he had shot one of the Hispanics kidnapped on orders of the sergeant, all men in the party were given two dozen lashes and the sergeant was shot in front of the stunned Rhys. In his report to Fancourt, Rhys wrote: “I have described thus minutely this painful proceeding as I consider that your Excellency should be made acquainted how rapidly these people punish those who offend the English or those who live under the protection of their flag. I sincerely hope it will prove conducive to promoting the happiness of the Spaniards who have migrated into this settlement for protection.”Footnote 73
Although reports of men such as Cox and Rhys portrayed the Maya in a positive light, pressure from Mexico made it paramount for Belize to maintain a stance of strict neutrality. As early as September 1848, the Mexican government had begun to cast aspersions on British activities in the Yucatán. The paranoia created by the Caste War was so great that even the flimsiest evidence became grounds for charging the British with illegally smuggling ammunition and gunpowder to the rebels. It was on the basis of a declaration by a villager of the town of Motul, for instance, that Mariano Otero, minister of interior and foreign relations, complained to Percy Doyle, the British consul in Mexico, that the British were helping the rebels.
Even though Otero himself admitted that the declaration was “vague,” he insisted that, “the matter is of so grave and delicate a nature that humanity and civilization require the most prompt and efficacious measures should be taken to prevent the fomentation of the iniquitous war which the barbarians are waging in the state of Yucatán.”Footnote 74 By March 1849, bad news reached Doyle: not only were British traders plying Maya rebels with arms and ammunition, but they had also opened shops in Bacalar for that purpose.Footnote 75 Harking back to Article 14 of the Treaty of 1786 between Spain and Britain, which prohibited the British from furnishing arms to indigenous people on the frontiers of Spanish possessions, Mexico demanded that the British cease their dealings with the Maya in arms and ammunition. The British government, for its part, maintained that it had always exercised neutrality in its dealing with the Maya.Footnote 76
While the official British position was one of neutrality, circumstances could force certain British residents to take sides. This comes through clearly in the case of Thomas Rhys. During his trip to Bacalar and in his interaction with the commandant, Rhys had found the Maya chiefs to be friendly to British interests. In December 1848, Rhys received intelligence that “Spaniards from all parts of the coast are murdering the Indians.”Footnote 77 Most disturbing was the news that his own son, Edward Rhys, was also being pursued by the Hispanic forces. Thomas Rhys sought Fancourt's protection for his son: “He has only been trading, not making war.”Footnote 78 Clearly distraught, Rhys declared: “I will immediately start for the above river and should Edward Rhys become their victim I shall sacrifice every Spaniard I meet.”Footnote 79
Thomas Rhys's letter portrayed the Hispanics, not the Maya, as the perpetrators of senseless violence. It is probable that Edward Rhys, like so many other Belizean merchants at the time, had been trading in arms and ammunition in the borderlands. Fancourt's hands were tied, however, because of the British government's commitment to neutrality. In reply to Thomas Rhys's request for the protection of his son, Fancourt responded that “any interference on his part under existing circumstances would be premature.”Footnote 80 Writing to Rhys, Fancourt's private secretary warned: “I am to acquaint you that his Excellency cannot be responsible for the consequences which may result from your entering a foreign province, which has been for many months as you are aware, unable to offer protection to its own inhabitants.”Footnote 81
Although Fancourt was reluctant to provide aid to Thomas Rhys to rescue his son from the Mexican side, he was sufficiently perturbed by events to make a personal trip to the northern borderlands to assess the situation there. In January 1849, accompanied by Major O' Connor, Fancourt proceeded to the Hondo River. On January 3, the party arrived at Haylock's Bank, four miles from the mouth of the Hondo, where they encountered Edward Rhys together with some Englishmen and Yucatecans. Fancourt's letter to the governor of Jamaica on January 11 reveals the extent of Edward Rhys' involvement with the Maya: the merchant had not only traded in arms but he had wielded them too.Footnote 82
By December 1848 the Caste War seemed to be running in favor of the Yucatecan government. Important areas occupied by the rebels such as Peto, Tihosuco, and Valladolid fell to government forces, and by the end of 1848 the Mexican government had been able to reclaim most of its pre-war positions in the frontier area.Footnote 83 Buoyed by these victories, some of the Yucatecan Hispanic refugees in Belize attempted to cross to the Mexican side in a bid to retake Bacalar.Footnote 84 Maya at Chac Creek stopped a group of these refugees. From Fancourt's letter to the Governor of Jamaica we learn that “these persons [the Yucatecan refugees] were defeated by the Indians, and there is every reason to suppose that Mr. Edward Rhys and other foreign auxiliaries directed the movement of the Indians. It was also reported to me that eight dead bodies had been found at Cayo Obispo, one of which to all appearance had been roasted to death.”Footnote 85
Whether Rhys was involved in the massacre at Cayo Obispo (present-day Chetumal), which lay about 10 miles east of Chac, is not known. Regardless, Rhys's case shows that the Belizean merchant could, if necessary, provide much more than lip service to the cause of the Maya rebels during the Caste War. Fancourt's letter to the governor betrays his inner disquiet at these developments. On the one hand, Fancourt was dismayed by the apparently reckless behavior of the Belizean merchants. He admitted: “The fact is unfortunately too well established that succor of every description is and has been afforded to both parties by certain traders in Belize, who indifferent as to the political or social quarrels at present distracting the neighboring province, have resolved to make a profit out of existing dissensions.”Footnote 86 On the other hand, Fancourt felt a degree of kinship with the British residents of Belize and placed some of the blame for this situation on the Hispanics. He thus wrote to Governor Grey: “I should here mention to your Excellency that the Englishmen with whom I conversed at Haylock's Bank complained very bitterly of the treatment they had received within the Yucatan boundary at the hand of certain of the invading Spaniards.”Footnote 87
Back in February 1848, when the rebels had first taken Bacalar, Yucatecan Hispanics had crossed into Belize and sought refuge from the war. Fancourt at the time had welcomed them to Punto Consejo, four miles from Cayo Obispo, and had offered them the protection of the British flag.Footnote 88 Now, almost a year later, the same refugees had tried crossing back into Mexico and attacked Englishmen and Maya who had tried to stop their progress. Embittered, Fancourt made his way to Punto Consejo upon returning to Belize after his encounter with Edward Rhys. There he met with the principal residents and warned them: “I should consider it my duty to deliver any one of them up to the Indian authorities who enjoying the British protection should hereafter abuse the privilege for the purpose of issuing forth as occasion might offer to return with their hands imbued in blood.”Footnote 89 This time Fancourt decided to station two policemen at Punto Consejo—not in response to any Maya threat but rather to ensure that the Yucatecan refugees could be kept out of mischief. At the same time, the skirmish at Haylock's Bank between Englishmen and Yucatecan refugees had clearly troubled Fancourt, leaving him wondering whether the British settlement would be drawn unwittingly into the Caste War. He thus wrote to Grey that although he did not want to occasion any additional expense to the crown, he could not “think it prudent that the military force in Honduras should be reduced at a moment when it is impossible to determine with any degree of accuracy the turn which from day to day affairs may take.”Footnote 90
Fancourt also worried about the course the Caste War was taking in Yucatán. With the Mexican government forces victorious in many of the frontier towns, there was a real possibility that the Maya rebels would lose the war. The result for Belize, Fancourt predicted, would be dire: “Should these [the Yucatecan forces] however be ultimately successful,” he mused, “I am of opinion that the great mass of the pure Indian race will cross the Hondo and settle in British Honduras.”Footnote 91 Despite all his protestations of goodwill toward the Maya, such a possibility clearly unnerved Fancourt.
Fancourt's fear that the settlement would be drawn into the war raging in Yucatán was, of course, not ill founded. On January 22, 1849, news came from Punta Consejo that the lieutenant colonel of the Yucatecan government, Vito Pacheco, had issued a call to arms to his countrymen residing on the English side to join in him in his campaign against Maya insurgents.Footnote 92 J. H. Faber, the British magistrate of Punta Consejo, wrote to Fancourt that, “the Spaniards are determined upon taking Bacalar at any sacrifice, at the end of this month or beginning of the next.” Faber's letter provides a glimpse into Bacalar as the town readied for war: “The Indians have been burning some houses [?] on the other coast yesterday, and it is said that they are aware of the intended attack, and prepare to meet it, their numbers increasing daily in Bacalar. . . . I have not to complain about the people here; they quietly perform their weekly task.”Footnote 93
The town would eventually fall to the Yucatecan forces, on May 2, 1849, but not before Belizean traders briefly entered the war on the side of the Maya rebels. On April 20, some 800 soldiers under the Yucatecan government's Colonel José Dolores Cetina made their way up the Hondo River toward Bacalar. Some Belizeans fired off their guns from the British side to warn the Maya about the approaching soldiers. These Belizeans included Henry Oswald, a Swiss by birth, who along with two other men would be later brought to trial for “breach of peace.”Footnote 94 At Chac Creek, a black Belizean, George Fantesie, and his French partner Silvestre Lanabit, who were well known as powder brokers, led rebels at Chac Creek in a rough fight with the Yucatecan forces.Footnote 95 Although the Yucatecan forces ultimately emerged victorious, the involvement of Belizeans, especially those involved in the gunpowder trade with the rebels, served to underline the alliances that had been formed at the local level between Belizeans and Maya insurgents.
Although the British government continued to maintain its official stance of neutrality in the Caste War, evidence was pointing more and more toward involvement of Belizeans on the side of the Maya rebels. From very early on, authorities in Mexico had questioned Fancourt's loyalties. In May 1848, he had received a message from the Maya insurgents through the mediation of Cox, stating “that they should be allowed to trade with the inhabitants of the English territory of Honduras as the Spaniards always have.”Footnote 96 In response, Fancourt had promised them the protection of the laws of his government. He wrote to the chief magistrate at Bacalar: “In proof, I may tell you that having learnt yesterday that two Indians had been killed by firearms within our limits, notice was given to the competent authorities that they might meet on the spot and proceed to the necessary investigations.”Footnote 97 However, these letters further aroused Mexican suspicion, and in June 1848, the government of Yucatán made a complaint against Fancourt, alleging that he had been helping Maya at Bacalar through Cox, protecting the Maya rebels, and furnishing them with arms and ammunition.Footnote 98
Things would come to a head a year later. In September 1849, the governor of Yucatán, Miguel Barbachano, wrote to Fancourt implicating Cox in the illegal munitions trade to the insurgents. The people of Belize, he alleged, were continuing to introduce arms and ammunition through Chichanhá. As proof, Barbachano declared, “two schooners named Daclas (Dart) and Drin (Dream) belonging to Mr. Cox have sailed from the port of Belize under the pretext of loading with salt and turtle but with the object of communicating with the insurgents for the purpose of supplying them with munitions of war brought from New Orleans.”Footnote 99
In October 1849, the Mexican government reported that the rebel leader Jacinto Pat had bought munitions worth $4,945 from Austin Cox. The Mexican government believed that if not for Belizean help, the insurgency would have long been quelled.Footnote 100 Not only were the English helping the insurgents, the Mexican government argued, but “their [the Maya] projects are facilitated by means of various bad Yucatecos or desertors, who refusing to serve their country, have gone there to settle at the points of Consejo, Corozal, New River, Douglas, Ramonal and others.”Footnote 101 More grist for the Mexican government's imagination was on its way. On October, 31, 1849, the Four Sisters, a boat manned by three black Belizeans, was apprehended at Chac carrying gunpowder, lead, and other merchandise consigned to Jacinto Pat from Austin Cox.Footnote 102
The apprehension of the Four Sisters was a turning point. Now, the Mexican government had incontrovertible evidence to prove that the British were involved in smuggling arms and ammunition to the Maya, and British officials could no longer ignore the activities of British merchants. Percy Doyle acknowledged “[that] these acts have been brought before a tribunal by the commandant of the town of Bacalar and will be judged by the strict military law and that the acts of which these people are accused and the sentence pronounced may be communicated to her majesty's superintendent in Belize.”Footnote 103 The matter was especially embarrassing to the British government, given that Fancourt had been accepted as a mediator between the rebels and the Mexican government and that negotiations were under way for a peaceful resolution to hostilities.Footnote 104 Despite Cox's apparently close ties to Fancourt, the latter was vocal in his disapproval of the merchant's actions.Footnote 105 At the same time, Fancourt pointed to the limitations on his ability to control the smuggling of arms and ammunition into Mexico. Writing to Percy Doyle, Fancourt averred, “Unless the Mexican government are strong enough to guard the two or three principal points of the River Hondo, it is impossible for any vigilance which I can exercise unless I were to subject the trade of the settlement to the most vexatious restrictions, to do more than I have already done.Footnote 106
Fancourt clearly found the actions of the Mexican government irksome, in particular its increasing tendency to stop and search British vessels.Footnote 107 Moreover, it appeared that some of the Yucatecan Hispanic refugees settled in Belize were also involved in the powder trade. In particular, the priest Juan Trujillo appears to have been a seasoned dealer in contraband.Footnote 108 The complex rivalries among the merchants of contraband can be seen in the fact that the capture of the Four Sisters was made possible through the efforts of Juan Trujillo.Footnote 109 Because of the large number of Yucatecans in the British settlement, Fancourt introduced tickets of residence, to be purchased by each refugee, that would allow them to carry on business in Mexico on the same footing as British subjects.Footnote 110 Fancourt refused, however, to give a ticket of residence to Juan Trujillo on the grounds that he was engaged in the powder trade.Footnote 111 While the Mexican government continued to be suspicious of Fancourt, the superintendent would fulfill a critical role in future negotiations between Mexican authorities and Maya rebels.
Frontiers and Borderlands as Game-Changers
Despite important developments, including the abolition of slavery and emancipation in the early nineteenth century, Belizean society continued to be stratified along racial and class lines. Former slaves continued to occupy the bottom of the social ladder. Due to laws that effectively disallowed ex-slaves from owning land, they remained subservient to the “mahogany lords.”Footnote 112 As Bolland writes, “The wealthy cutters of Belize reduced the options of ex-slaves with a system of labor laws designed to keep the laborers under very firm control.”Footnote 113 Like other Caribbean nations in the mid nineteenth century, Belize at the onset of the Caste War was a society that saw non-whites as mainly sources of labor. For the British government in London, small settlements like Belize did not figure as a priority until circumstances later forced the metropolis to assimilate Belize as a crown colony in the 1860s.
Meanwhile, interest in the Maya population was beginning to take hold in Britain, but only in academic circles. In September 1851 the British Museum made a request to the government in Belize for specimens of local Maya ruins.Footnote 114 But other than these academic overtures, there was little in the way of metropolitan interest in the Maya as a social group. How then to explain the cross-racial alliances that epitomized relations in the borderland during the Caste War? Not only did British merchants become involved in smuggling arms to the Maya, but black Belizeans and white Belizeans of Swiss and French origin also fought side by side with the Maya. For their part, Maya, while rejecting the Mexican yoke, were eager to be governed by the British, communicating to Fancourt that if they failed to defeat the Mexicans, they would wish to be ruled by the “Governor of Belize.”Footnote 115 Writing about the role played by the black man, George Fantesie, and the Frenchman Silvester Lanabit in aiding the insurgent Maya, Fancourt wrote: “In any other state of society than that of British Honduras these parties must have been prosecuted before the legal tribunal.”Footnote 116 That instead, merchants, traders and brokers from all ethnic backgrounds engaged in alliances with Maya rebels, flouting Belize's official position of neutrality in the Caste War, can be attributed to the nature of Yucatán-Belize boundary area as a frontier and a borderland.
Conclusion
In nineteenth century Belize, traders and merchants of different social classes and ethnic groups came together on the frontier to create a culture uniquely their own. It is thus that George Fantesie, writing about his encounter with Hispanics, could proudly assert: “I told them I was not a nigger. I was a black man and that they were to be reminded on what territory they were.”Footnote 117 The Belizean frontier was a leveler. It was a place where men like George Fantesie could peddle ammunition to the Maya rebels alongside great merchant firms like Vaughan and Christie.Footnote 118 As all sections of merchant society strove to cash in on the Caste War, some of them formed genuine alliances with the Maya rebels. Some like Edward Rhys, George Fantesie, and Silvestre Lanabit even joined hands with the rebels in battle. Others, like Austin Cox, portrayed the human side of the Maya who had been demonized by the Mexican government. Whether or not these actions came from selfless motives, it is clear that the frontier engendered racial crossings.
That the motley crew of merchants and tradesmen could make alliances with Maya insurgents was also due to this frontier region being a borderland. Imperial rivalries with Spain (later Mexico) and the United States meant that the British government saw the Maya as comparatively less of a threat. Despite Mexico's best efforts to form an alliance with the British on racial lines against the Maya, British imperial agendas triumphed. In fact, it was their general disapproval of Spanish ways that made the British more sympathetic to the Maya cause. The actions of British officials such as Governor Grey and Superintendent Fancourt show that they remained more preoccupied with their imperial rivals and did not see the Maya as much of a threat, except for fearing that they would migrate into Belize. It is thus that at the northern frontier of Belize, merchants did business with “savage” Maya and even fought alongside them against Mexican forces.
