Colonel James Lawrie was one of the most significant mahogany and logwood cutters in Belize during the last quarter of the 18th century. Unlike most other British colonists in the Caribbean region at the time who were attempting to make their fortunes in sugar, those settlers living in the Belize territory on the Bay of Honduras employed their slaves in timber extraction as the commercial production of sugar in the Settlement was formally prohibited by treaty. The journal upon which this manuscript is based forms part of a private collection of Lawrie Papers held at the Scottish Record Office in Edinburgh. Covering five months of Transactions and Occurences in the Business of Mahogany and Logwood Cutting at Rowley s Bight in the Bay of Honduras in, the journal was likely written by Houston Maxwell, a clerk in the employ of Colonel Lawrie at one of his timber works called Sea Side. As far as we know, it is one of the only day to day accounts of the activities of timber slaves involved in the extraction of mahogany and logwood in Belize during a logging season that has survived, and as such, is a valuable insight into the nature of slavery in a colony that remained on the periphery of the sugar plantation economies of the British West Indies until well after emancipation in 1834. - from Amzon