“A Ridiculous Tenure Cut Short by the Sword”: The Seven Origin Myths of a Central American Colonial Nation

At the very heart of the Americas is a young republic too often ignored as neither Latin American nor Caribbean—although it is both—and dismissed as too peripheral to the hemisphere’s sweeping march from Discovery to Colony to Nation. And yet its unique journey from Indigenous splendor to modern nation-state is overflowing with illuminating contradictions—both recent and protracted, extraordinary and archetypal, inscribed by a teleological narrative that is deeply rooted yet wildly implausible. This is a land that was apparently abandoned by the Mayas who had lived there for millennia, discovered by a Scottish pirate fleeing Spanish tyranny, and settled by defiant English loggers; those settlers forged the earliest democracy in the hemisphere and a system of slavery so imbued with racial harmony that enslaved workers willingly and heroically defended the settlement from those tyrannical Spaniards; thus legitimized by conquest, the settlement evolved into the colony of British Honduras and thence the nation of Belize—named after that piratical founding father, Wallace. This paper—and the book-in-progress from which it is drawn—examines that narrative of genesis through the lens of historical evidence, exposing its seven origin myths, and arguing that it reveals Belize to be central—not marginal—to invented narratives of conquest and colonization in the Americas.