Who Were The First Settlers in Belize?

April 4, 2023
by Larry Waight +

While the Paleo Indians were the first people to call the country we now know as Belize to be their home, there have been several other cultures including the ancient Maya who sought to settle and colonize the land. This article intends to look at this history of settlement by foreign powers in order to give the audience a more concise understanding of what those investments led up to.

First Came the Spanish

After only a few decades since Christopher Columbus’ disastrous travels in search of a shortcut to Asian spices, Spain began sending people to the territory now known as Belize. Despite being the first Europeans to set foot on Belize, Spain failed to establish any governmental presence nor erect any sort of towns or villages; this is because Spain’s main interest in the region was to chart its uncharted land, spread the influence of Catholicism to the new world, treat the land as a source of trade and raw resources and finally, to subjugate the Maya people.

The Entradas

Entrada means “entry” in Spanish and this was the name given to the initial waves of Spanish explorers and priests who set sail for Belize. Come 1525, Hernan Cortes crossed the Maya Mountains, as well as the Sarstoon, while seeking a route to Honduras, then a Spanish settlement. Six years later, Alfonso Davila sojourned across the New and Belize Rivers but had middling success in interacting with the Maya.

Plans to subjugate Belize’s Maya began by Hernan Cortes in 1519; this was a failure, as was the subsequent attempt at conquest co-led by Alonso and Melchior Pacheco in 1543 and the one by Francisco de Montejo y Álvarez in 1530. It was the foreign diseases of these Europeans, rather than their swords and muskets, that resulted in most of the Maya population, around 80%, being wiped out.

Northern Belize was treated as an encomienda for various Spaniards, meaning that the Spanish Crown had granted them the right to demand tribute and enslave the indigenous peoples therein. The Maya put up a strong resistance that eventually culminated in a major rebellion within Tipu. Juan Garzón’s military expedition in 1567 was deemed only a partial success, with Tipu remaining a Maya town for over a century afterward.

Spanish Houses of Worship in Belize

The Spanish were devout Catholics and deemed it their calling to convert everyone to Catholicism. Priests were part of Columbus’ second American voyage and were among the most influential powers of New Spain. Several Catholic churches were erected in Belize’s Maya villages, including Tipu and Lamanai. While Spain sought to govern Belize’s Maya, this was mostly a failure despite evidence indicating that a fair number of Maya had converted to Christianity.

The British Empire Gets Involved

The first major evidence of British involvement in Belize happened when José Delgado, a Spanish priest, was captured by the pirate Bartholomew Sharp at Manatee Lagoon. While this incident occurred in 1677, there is plausible evidence that the British had maintained the first true settlements within Belize as far back as 1642, a mere four years after their initial experiences with the land. These initial British settlers, colloquially known by the term “Baymen,” may have come from neighboring Caribbean territories like Roatan or Providence Island, which were close to Honduras and Nicaragua, respectively.

1670 would see Britain signing Spain’s Treaty of Madrid, which indicated a cessation to piracy. Seeing as this would have left many of these “local” British men out of a job, they taught themselves how to work with wood and worked in the initial lumber industry of Belize. Former pirates began to take out logwood from Honduras and the northern Yucatan Peninsula and the first exports of logwood from Belize’s shores happened in 1680.

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While piracy, the act of raiding and pillaging at sea, was now illegal, these British settlers had begun to raid Maya villages in search of slave labor for the logging camps. This contributed to the relocation of many Maya within the southern portion of Belize into neighboring Guatemala, partly standing policy with the Spanish government after realizing it had another European power playing around in lands it wished to have sole control over. Come 1697, most of the residents of Tipu were relocated to Lake Flores within Peten, Guatemala, with Tipu becoming completely abandoned a decade later. Despite British and Spanish efforts, the Maya never completely vanished from Belize.

St. George’s Caye

September 10th, 1798, was when a climactic battle ensued between the Baymen and the Spanish at St. George’s Caye. Despite considerable odds, the Baymen routed the Spanish for the final time, ending over two centuries of fighting over Belize and cementing Britain as Belize’s controlling nation until September 21, 1981.