The colonial extraction settlement on the Caribbean coast of Central America that became modern Belize. Conjured out of a single tree, it began as a cluster of English logcutters, some with buccaneering pasts, felling logwood for textile dye, then shifted to mahogany cut by enslaved Africans deep in the forest. Claimed by Spain but never made a dense settler colony, formalized by Britain only in 1862, and contested by Guatemala to this day, it left behind an English-speaking, plural society wedged into Spanish-speaking Central America.
Look at a map of Central America and one country breaks the pattern. Its neighbors are Spanish-speaking republics; here the official language is English, though everyday Belize is deeply multilingual. Its neighbors were shaped chiefly by Spanish colonial rule; Belize grew instead from a British timber settlement on land Spain claimed. The reason is a tree. In the seventeenth century, English sailors discovered that a scrubby coastal hardwood called logwood yielded a dye that Europe's cloth makers would pay a fortune for. Some of those sailors were pirates who had run out of ships to rob. They came ashore, took up axes, and started cutting. A country grew up around the stumps.