Baymen

Settlement

The first Baymen showed up around what’s now Belize City in the 1630s. They were English pirates and buccaneers trying to dodge Spanish rule in Mexico and Central America, and they figured out they could make a living by chopping down logwood and selling it back to England. A lot of these early settlers set up camp on what is today the Northside of Belize City, running things through public meetings. For the logging work, they used enslaved Africans, who, even if they were sometimes left alone in the logging camps, still relied on their owners for food and supplies. London then told Colonel Edward Despard, the new Superintendent of the British logwood concessions in the Bay of Honduras, to take in these evacuees, called Shoremen. The Baymen were not happy when Despard did this without caring about age, sex, character, respectability, property, or colour. He handed out land by lottery, and the Baymen complained to London that even the meanest mulatto or free negro had an equal shot. Despard also set aside land for everyone to use and tried to keep food prices low for the poorer folks. When Home Secretary Lord Sydney said it was a bad idea to put wealthy settlers and people of a different description, especially people of colour, on the same level, Despard shot back that the laws of England don’t recognize such distinctions. He called the Baymen an arbitrary aristocracy, backing this up with the magistracy election results where he won big with a record turnout. The Baymen argued to London that under Despard’s constitution, the enslaved negroes, seeing their now-propertied free brethren, would rise up and ruin the settlement.