ABSTRACT
The hurricane and tidal wave of 1931 are described in the Official Report as ‘the most awful calamity in the Colony’s history’, and, coming on top of the trade depression of the previous years, it seemed to many that at last the end had come. The Colony’s trade returns jumped meaninglessly up and down like a seismographic needle in an earthquake. Hundreds of her best woodmen sailed for the forests of Scotland, hundreds more were engaged at rates beyond the dreams of avarice for work on the Panama Canal, hundreds enlisted in the Forces. Belize became unrecognizable, a city of strangers, rumours, spy-mania, nervous tension. German submarines nosed about the cays. Nature herself seemed to have gone crazy: droughts, floods, the whiplash of several hurricanes, and an unprecedented plague of locusts added to the general dislocation.
