ABSTRACT
The Maya were still in Belize when Christopher Columbus traveled to the Gulf of Honduras during his fourth voyage in 1502. The 1670 Godolphin Treaty between Spain and England confirmed English possession of countries and islands in the Western Hemisphere that England already occupied”. Formerly British Honduras, Belize achieved independence as a parliamentary democracy from the United Kingdom in 1981. The British Colonial Survey Committee authorized a survey of the colony in 1925. In 1926, work began on a contoured map series of the colony and various town plans, general maps at 16 miles to the inch scale, and two geological maps that were produced by 1928. By the mid-1940s, 6,600 square miles had been topographically mapped, presumably all by planetable and alidade methods.
