Capture of Cayo Cocina
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Revolutionary War:
West Indies
- 1st Nassau
- Barbados
- Dominica
- 1st St. Lucia
- 2nd St. Lucia
- Saint Vincent
- 1st Grenada
- 2nd Grenada
- Río Hondo
- Cayo Cocina
- San Fernando
- 12 December 1779
- 1st Martinique
- Guadeloupe
- 2nd Martinique
- Fort San Juan
- Dutch West Indies
- 1st Demerara & Essequibo
- Sint Eustatius
- Fort Royal
- Tobago
- 15 January 1782
- Brimstone Hill
- Frigate Bay
- 2nd Demerara & Essequibo
- Montserrat
- Roatán
- The Saintes
- Mona Passage
- Black River
- 2nd Nassau
- 18 October 1782
- 6 December 1782
- 2 January 1783
- 15 February 1783
- 17 February 1783
- Turks and Caicos
- 3rd Nassau
The Capture of Cayo Cocina (also known as Saint George's Caye) was the result of a Spanish military operation on the 15 September 1779 against a British settlement on Saint George's Caye, just off the coast of present-day Belize, during the Anglo-Spanish War. The settlement was at the time the major British population center in the area, until Spanish forces from the Captaincy General of Guatemala attacked it.
The Spaniards removed the entire population (140 Baymen along with 250 of their slaves), forced them to march overland from Bacalar to Mérida, and then transported them by sea to Havana.[1] Settlers who had been working on the mainland eventually made their way to other nearby British settlements at Roatán or Black River. In 1782 the Spaniards released the prisoners and sent them to Jamaica.[1] The entire Belizean territory was abandoned until 1784, after British logging rights were confirmed in the 1783 Treaty of Paris.[2][3]
References
- Bolland, O. Nigel. Colonialism and Resistance in Belize
- Restall, Matthew. The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan