Islands of palms on one side and blue mountains on the other, and water as green as corroded copper, took the place of the white sand-banks of Yucatan, and on the third day out we had passed the Mexican state and steamed in towards the coast of British Honduras, and its chief seaport and capital, Belize.
British Honduras was formerly owned by Spain, as was all of Central America, and was, on account of its bays and islands, a picturesque refuge for English and other pirates. In the seventeenth century English logwood-cutters visited the place and obtained a footing, which has been extended since by concessions and by conquest, so that the place is now a British dependency. It forms a little slice of land between Yucatan and Guatemala, one hundred and seventy-four miles in its greatest length, and running sixty-eight miles inland.
Belize is a pretty village of six thousand people, living in low, broad-roofed bungalows, lying white and cool-looking in the border of waving cocoanut-trees and tall, graceful palms. It was not necessary to tell us that Belize would be the last civilized city we should see until we reached the capital of Spanish Honduras. A British colony is always civilized; it is always the same, no matter in what latitude it may be, and it is always distinctly British. Every one knows that an Englishman takes his atmosphere with him wherever he goes, but the truth of it never impressed me so much as it did at Belize. There were not more than two hundred English men and women in the place, and yet, in the two halves of two days that I was there I seemed to see everything characteristic of an Englishman in his native land. There were a few concessions made to the country and to the huge native population, who are British subjects themselves; but the colony, in spite of its surroundings, was just as individually English as is the shilling that the ship’s steward pulls out of his pocket with a handful of the queer coin that he has picked up at the ports of a half-dozen Spanish republics. They may be of all sizes and designs, and of varying degrees of a value, or the lack of it, which changes from day to day, but the English shilling, with the queen’s profile on one side and its simple “one shilling” on the other, is worth just as much at that moment and at that distance from home as it would be were you handing it to a hansom-cab driver in Piccadilly. And we were not at all surprised to find that the black native police wore the familiar blue-and-white-striped cuff of the London bobby, and the district-attorney a mortar-board cap and gown, and the colonial bishop gaiters and an apron.
GOVERNMENT HOUSE, BELIZE
It was quite in keeping, also, that the advertisements on the boardings should announce and give equal prominence to a “Sunday-school treat” and a boxing-match between men of H.M.S. Pelican, and that the officers of that man-of-war should be playing cricket with a local eleven under the full tropical sun, and that the chairs in the Council-room and Government House should be of heavy leather stamped V.R., with a crown above the initials. An American official in as hot a climate, being more adaptable, would have had bamboo chairs with large, open-work backs, or would have even supplied the council with rocking-chairs.
Lightfoot agreed to take us ashore at a quarter of a dollar apiece. He had a large open sail-boat, and everybody called him Lightfoot and seemed to know him intimately, so we called him Lightfoot too. He was very black, and light-hearted at least, and spoke English with the soft, hesitating gentleness that marks the speech of all these natives. It was Sunday on land, and Sunday in an English colony is observed exactly as it should be, and so the natives were in heavily starched white clothes, and were all apparently going somewhere to church in rigid rows of five or six. But there were some black soldiers of the West India Regiment in smart Zouave uniforms and turbans that furnished us with local color, and we pursued one of them for some time admiringly, until he become nervous and beat a retreat to the barracks.
SIR ALFRED MOLONEY
(Central Figure)
Somerset had a letter from his ambassador in Washington to Sir Alfred Moloney, K.C.M.G., the governor of British Honduras, and as we hoped it would get us all an invitation to dinner, we urged him to present it at once. Four days of the ship’s steward’s bountiful dinners, served at four o’clock in the afternoon, had made us anxious for a change both in the hour and the diet. The governor’s house at Belize is a very large building, fronting the bay, with one of the finest views from and most refreshing breezes on its veranda that a man could hope to find on a warm day, and there is a proud and haughty sentry at each corner of the grounds and at the main entrance. A fine view of blue waters beyond a green turf terrace covered with cannon and lawn-tennis courts, and four sentries marching up and down in the hot sun, ought to make any man, so it seems to me, content to sit on his porch in the shade and feel glad that he is a governor.