Captain Willis


low water. At the mouth of this river he landed with some
eighty buccaneers and immediately started to build some
houses, surrounding them with a sort of palisade or breast-
work, in short, a rude fortress. The adventurous followers
of Wallace gave his name to the river on whose banks they
established themselves and which name afterwards degener-
ated into Wallix and ultimately to Belice."
 Bridges in his "Annals of Jamaica, London, 1828," "says
that Willis, ex-governor of Tortuga, sought his retreat on
the shores and isles of Yucatan, where a multitude of his sub-
jects or friends quickly joined him, and this notorious buc-
caneer was the first Englishman who settled on the banks of
the river to which he gave his name in 1638."
 The founding of this site, where now stands Belize, must
have occurred approximately in September 1640. Willis was
the first to establish himself at this part of the mainland with
which the Puritans were already familiar, as Captain William
Parker before them. In the following year the Earl of War-
wick's colony at the two Stands came to an end by the Span-
ish re-taking of Old Providence, but Willis was not alone.
Samuel Colson and Bluefields were at the Stand, Glover at
his reef, while others of the Earl of Warwick's colonists were
established between the two Stands, cultivating mainly tobac-
co and silk-grass which were sold to visiting vessels from New
England. A section of Comock's Bight is still called Johnsie
Rongoe Bight, and in the Calendar of State Papers we see
that on May 22, 1685 John Rongoe, a Negro, made a declara-
tion for a clandestine shipment of tobacco to New England.
 The Indians called the lower reaches of the Belize River,
Texach. The central and upper reaches they called Mopan.
This division was due to the fact that the few Indians who
knew the Texach, gravitated towards Bacalar, and those
around the Mopan gravitated towards the now ruined sites
of the upper Usumacinta. There were also tribal differences.
When Willis came to this one of the "regions Caesar never
knew" the island on which the northern half of Belize now
stands was called "el islote del Texach," from the Maya word