doreys are to be seen all along the coast from Yucatan to Nicaragua, and although not such bold deep-sea sailors as the Creole negroes, they handle their canoes and doreys most skilfully and are well acquainted with every reef, island, and inlet on the coast. It is most curious to note how distinct they have kept from the Creole negroes, no Carib woman ever being known (unless a change has quite recently been made) to cohabit with a negro of another race. It has always seemed to me that the exclusiveness of the Caribs and their excellence as coasting sailors may be due to their having originally been brought to the coast of Africa as prisoners of war from the banks of some of the great lakes in the far interior, and to their thus having no kinship with the tribes from whom the slaves were usually captured, rather than to their supposed mixture with the Carib Indians of the Island of St. Vincent.
Belize as a British Colony has rather a curious history. The mouth of the Belize River was originally a haunt of buccaneers, and the very name itself is said to be a corruption of Wallace or Wallis, one of the most formidable of those pirates. Later on, as buccaneering was abandoned, a settlement was formed there by wood-cutters, and the little colony literally fought its way into recognition. Although the Spaniards were loth to give up their claim to sovereignty in any part of the New World, the Colony of British Honduras became an established fact, and its boundaries have since been recognized by treaty with Guatemala and Mexico. The Spaniards had never effectively occupied the eastern side of the peninsula of Yucatan, and although from time to time they established stations at Bacalar and even further south, the Indians of those parts always regained their independence, and beyond the British border they have kept it up to the present day. The Yucatec newspapers never the of writing about the "Guerra de Castas," the war of races, and inveighing against the iniquity of the English colonists who trade with the Indians, and are alleged to supply them with munitions of war. In reality these barbarous Santa Cruz Indians have been as great a nuisance to the British as to the Yucatecans, and both countries have suffered severely from their bloodthirsty raids. I cannot help thinking that in recent years it has not been the fighting strength of the Indians which has prevented the Mexicans from conquering them once for all, and putting an end to the raids and to the desultory warfare which—although there are really long intervals of rest—is supposed never to cease. There may be truth in the suggestion that the Mexican authorities found the war of races a convenient excuse for keeping Federal troops in Yucatan, with one eye turned to the frontier and the other on the Yucatecans themselves; for Yucatan has not always been a very loyal member of the Mexican federation. However, that
