ABSTRACT
With the signing by England and Spain of the Treaty of 1667, outlawing all buccaneering, those who cared about England’s glory or had an eye to her future in the West Indies must have realized the enormously increased importance of the British log-wood settlements. Sir Thomas Modyford, Governor of Jamaica, enterprising, far-sighted, Elizabethan-minded as ever, pleaded hard with the Home Government to devote a little more attention to this embryo empire in the new world—‘these new sucking colonies’, as he called them. Five years after Arlington’s declaration of policy, conditions in Campeachy had so far deteriorated that the Board of Trade was urging all British logwood-cutters, not only in Yucatan but throughout the Spanish Main, including presumably those in Belize and the Gulf of Honduras, to evacuate the settlements as quickly as possible and ‘apply themselves to the planting upon the islands of Jamaica’.
