Cutters & Haulers: The Production of Mahogany
Throughout the 1700s, all mahogany that arrived in British North America was either a rare “West Indian” species native to the Caribbean islands (short leaf, Swietenia mahagoni Jacquin) or a more plentiful “Honduran” species (big leaf, Swietenia macrophylla King). The native range of the former was limited to the North Central Caribbean, including the tip of Florida, Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas, Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and the smaller surrounding islands of the Northern Antilles. The native range of the Honduran species, by contrast, was vast—encompassing parts of Central and South America from Southern Mexico to the Amazon. Since this was mostly Spanish territory, English and Anglo-American woodcutters were limited to trees that grew in the Bay of Honduras, an English enclave on the Spanish-claimed coast of Central America, and the Mosquito Shore (now Nicaragua and Honduras).
Typically, these massive trees—averaging 80–100 feet tall and 4–12 feet in diameter—grew widely dispersed within vast expanses of rainforest. Since extracting the massive trees was extremely difficult and dangerous, English and Anglo-American woodcutters relied primarily on the labor of enslaved Africans.
Accelerated by the upsurge in consumer demand, the mahogany industry rapidly expanded. In the Caribbean, however, it proved short-lived. For several decades, for example, Jamaican mahogany was the world’s standard. Since sugar remained more lucrative, however, landowners prioritized clear cutting forests to plant cane, quickly depleting the island’s mahogany trees in the process. With growing demand for mahogany, deforestation spread steadily through the West Indies and Central America during the 18th century and contributed to the alienation of Indigenous peoples from their native lands.
Although restricted by competing Spanish territorial claims, the Bay of Honduras thus emerged as the world’s leading mahogany producer. Jonathan Card’s experience exemplifies the demanding process of mahogany logging in the Bay of Honduras. When he arrived, the region was still largely a wild frontier. Belize City, the main settlement, was inhabited by a rowdy population of free white settlers, enslaved Africans, and Indigenous people from the surrounding areas. At the time, any free person with sufficient capital could start a mahogany works by securing an unclaimed stretch of rainforest and acquiring an enslaved logging crew.
After settling in the Bay of Honduras, Jonathan Card established a small farm as his primary residence near Belize City and married Dorothy Taylor, a free woman of color, and had two children. After prospecting for mahogany trees around Spanish Creek, a remote area upriver from Belize City, Jonathan staked his claim merely by “felling a tree, building a hut, and hanging a grindstone.” He immediately began purchasing enslaved people who enabled him to lay claim to a mahogany works and start logging. Jonathan’s enslaved labor force consisted of 10–12 men, along with their wives and children. While the men comprised his logging crew, the women and children worked on his farm or his house as domestic servants.
Among them was Maria Perez, a woman of mixed Spanish and Mayan ancestry, who was captured and sold into bondage in 1762 after an English attack on her Yucatan village. While living and working in the Card household, she developed a relationship with Jonathan’s business partner Francis Hickey. As long as he lived, she and her children had some protection against the worst brutalities of slavery. After Jonathan and his business partner died, however, the Card children tried to sell Maria Perez’s children. She desperately sued for freedom on the grounds that as a Spanish subject, she had been wrongfully enslaved. After a close call, the Perez family were spared from horrors of the slave trade and secured their liberty.
During the dry season, Jonathan and his woodcutting crew ventured deep into the rainforest in search of the elusive mahogany trees. For several months, they camped out there, spending long days felling massive trees with two-man saws, loading them into ox carts, and hauling them alongside the closest river. There the men stacked the logs in large piles to await the rainy season. Then as the rivers swelled with water, the woodcutters would float huge rafts of logs downriver to the ships anchored in the bay.
During the men’s long absence, their families remained behind in Belize City, not only to work in the house or on the farm, but also as hostages to deter resistance. At the end of each cutting season, the men were reunited with their families in time to celebrate the Christmas holiday—one of the few days enslaved people were not required to work. Some enslaved woodcutters did manage to escape, by either absconding into the forest or seeking refuge with the nearby Spanish (who promised freedom to the enslaved running away from English colonies).
By Herman Moll (Engraver and Cartographer)
Date: 1763
Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library
Artists: Daniel Lerpiniere (1745–1785) and George Robertson (1748?–1788)
Engraver: John Boydell (1719–1804)
Date: 1778
Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library
Depicts a man of color hauling a log out of the forest, and another man and two women of color in the background near an ox cart.
Artist: Thomas Bowen (died 1790)
Date: ca. 1774.
Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
One of the Spanish places where runaway enslaved from the Bay gained freedom.
By Chaloner and Fleming (Liverpool: Rockcliff and Son, 1850).
Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society
By Chaloner and Fleming (Liverpool: Rockcliff and Son, 1850).
Image courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society