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43 The Antonio Mathe was a “small but stanch brig.” Captained by C. H. Stephens and with an officer’s complement of two, she sailed a mail route between New York and Belize City. The Caribbean hurricane season made summer voyages unpredictable and potentially treacherous for such a modest vessel. Departing July 11, she made a particularly stormy run and arrived in British Honduras twenty-eight days later. The ship’s cabins were sparse even by the day’s standard, but the small crew “did all in their power” to make their passengers comfortable during the voyage.1 On board the Mathe were John Hodge, manager of the colony’s most powerful land corporation, and four guests of the company, “three colored men and one white,” who came to bear witness to the proposed colony at Hodge’s invitation.2 The BHC-financed tour was a gamble from the outset. They departed amidst the uncertainty of the contrabands dispute and had no knowledge of its resolution while they were at sea. The identities of the party’s members are only partially known, though they styled themselves “commissioners” and made varying impressions on Charles Leas, the U.S. consul, who greeted them upon arrival. One man was a Canadian, and the other three Americans. Two of the men were lawyers, accused by Leas of having succumbed to the “temptation of large personal advantages providing they will return to the states and bring with them a body of emigrants.” The other two, Leas noted, “are men of hand-fisted honesty, and will look at the whole question as its merits demand.”3 J. Willis Menard led the delegation as a representative of the Emigration Office and intended spokesman to the contrabands, should the prohibition be lifted. Traveling with him was another young man named Charles Babcock of Salem, Massachusetts, variously described as a “mulatto” with part Narraganset Indian heritage who “identifies himself with the colored people and their interests.”4 Menard and Babcock had met some years prior while working with Rev. Henry Highland Garnet’s African Civilization Chapter 5 This Most Desirable Country 44 Colonization after Emancipation Society. Like Menard, Babcock initially saw Liberia as the key to the African race’s future but had come to view the Caribbean as an equally suited and geographically closer point of migration.5 Little else is known about the other two “commissioners.” The Canadian, a black preacher who went by the name Mr. Keef, had been sent by an unnamed Baptist congregation as part of a two-member “deputation,” but the other man had taken sick shortly before their departure.6 The identity and purpose of the party’s Caucasian member is lost to history. On the day of their arrival Hodge introduced his delegation to Leas and also provided the consulate with a copy of a BHC pamphlet describing the proposed colony.7 The group spent several days in Belize City where Hodge hosted them at the BHC’s land office and presented them to several colonial government officials. The men were impressed to see an all-black Zouave unit guarding the town’s small defensive garrison, Fort George. Somewhat astonished, Babcock wrote of the abundance of commercial goods in the town’s market, including “all the Yankee Notions” that “can be had nearly as cheap” as in the United States. They inspected the legislative assembly building, visited several churches, and greeted the local inhabitants, finding them “quite hospitable” and willing to shelter the American party as the town lacked any regular hotels or boardinghouses.8 Hodge arranged for the group to be accompanied on a tour of the planting region by John Roles, described as “an old Louisiana cotton planter” and “thorough abolitionist” who sought wage laborers “of whatever shade of complection” [sic] for his farm. They traveled eighty miles north along the coast where they encountered J. H. Blake, Esq. a “gentleman of color” who operated a hundred-acre cotton plantation in the region. The party continued on to the BHC’s tract of land along the New River Lagoon, site of the proposed colony. The site was already being subdivided into farms and prepared for settlement. Back in Belize City, Hodge explained the company’s plans to Seymour and informed him that the New River site already contained five hundred acres of land sown with cotton. Babcock took notice of the northern region’s fertility, seeing “plenty of sugar cane, cotton, corn, and tobacco” in the early stages of...

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