FOREST COLONY smallest attempt to occupy or colonize the place, demanded their withdrawal on the astonishing grounds that the Pope had allotted to Spain all lands lying west of longitude 60°W. They harried the settlers without ceasing and with varying fortune until, on September 10th, 1798, the guns of H.M. Sloop of War Merlin and the gun-flats improvised by the Baymen of Belize beat off-—or scared off—a formidable armada launched against them by the Captain-general of Yucatan (who rejoiced in the fine old Spanish name of O’Niel), and settled the business, until it was revived in recent years by the Republic of Guatemala.* LOGWOOD declined in price, but long before this happened the settlers of Honduras had found other valuable products in the forest. First of these to be exploited was mahogany. Swie tenia Mahogani and Swietenia Macro phylla, of that great timber-yielding family the Meliacae, had the good fortune to catch the fancy of the well-to-do public. The Honduras mahogany is a splendid-looking tree, heavily buttressed. It attains a girth of fourteen or fifteen feet above the buttresses and a clear timber height from the top of the buttresses to the first branch of fifty feet or more. Tn tropical mixed forests of the kind in which mahogany grows, nothing of the nature of a pure stand of one species is ever discovered. Mahogany is slightly gregarious and where one tree is found there are usually others O J O J o O . . J within a relatively short distance. But the winged seeds, somewhat similar to large sycamore seeds, are evidently effective in securing dispersion, and trees are widely scattered throughout the forest. Two hundred mahogany trees to a square mile—less than one to three acres—is good mahogany forest. Mahogany is a light wood and the obvious way to get it out of the forest is by floating it down a river. Unfortunately, all forest near the rivers has been logged since early days. Until comparatively recently the tree was ruthlessly over-cut, and where too high a proportion of the secd-bearers has been felled, mahogany has failed to regenerate, so that it must now be sought many miles from the natural routes of extraction. In the old days, trees were felled only within a few hundred feet of the rivers and hauled bodily to the waterside by slaves. Later, cattle were called upon to do the hauling, dragging wooden sledges running over sticks placed at intervals across the path. This technique is still occasionally followed for hauls up to a mile when the first rains have provided lubrication, and is known as “ sliding.’” “ Sliding Camp ” is a name that appears frequently on the map of British Honduras. THE next development was the introduction of wheeled trucks. These could be employed only in the dry season and so the operations began to conform to the pattern in use today. A five-mile haul is about the limit for cattle which are usually worked at night for the sake of coolness. A thousand logs was a good season’s work whth cattle, and even now “Thousandth Log” day is celebrated in the logging camps with a holiday on which the management is expected to provide rum freely, though the target of the operation, using tractors, may be three, five or seven thousand logs. For nowadays the crawler-track tractor hauls the logs in every big operation and it is only in the smaller ones that cattle are still occasionally used. Apart from everything else, the cattle food has been over-cut and is no longer plentiful; so much labour is required to cut and bring it in that the cost of cattle haulage has greatly increased. The elite of the modern logging camp are the tractor drivers and the best of them handle their machines with a skill and nerve that 1 find admirable. A payable tractor haul may extend to sixteen miles or so, and we now can say that almost all dry and reasonably level parts of the Colony can be logged, for little of it lies at a greater distance than that * How the Braye Baymen Saved Belize was told in the EMPIRE YOUTH ANNUAL, 1943.