ABSTRACT
The story of British Honduras seems almost too romantic for the pages of sober history. The long drawn-out, perilous, often well-nigh desperate, but finally triumphant struggle of a few English buccaneers to establish a foothold on the Spanish Main, and of their descendants to win recognition of their tiny holding as a Colony of the British Empire, makes as colourful a record of adventure as any work of fiction, yet it is a record of historic fact. The only method of preserving meat was to salt it so heavily that it became uneatable. It was the discovery of the ‘bucean’ method of curing flesh which gave the buccaneers their extended range of action and the physical sustenance necessary for their extraordinary feats of endurance. The colonization of the country began, indirectly, with the Earl of Warwick’s emigration scheme in 1629, the so-called Providence Company, a few years after the occupation of Barbados.
