that in the Battle of the Black River recovered British settlements on the Miskito Coast from the Spanish, for which he received a royal commendation and the rank of colonel. While leading reconnoitring missions, Despard again worked intimately with the African-Indian Miskitos Olaudah Equiano, a former slave who had lived among them in the 1770s, recorded that "These Indians live under an almost perfect equality, and there are no rich or poor among them. They do not strive to accumulate, and the great unwearied exertion, found among our civilised societies, is unknown among them". "Without distinction of colour": Superintendent of the Bay of Honduras After the Peace of Paris which concluded the war in 1783 Despard was made Superintendent of the British logwood concessions in the Bay of Honduras (present-day Belize). As directed from London. Despard sought to accommodate British subjects, the "Shoremen", displaced in the evacuation agreed with the Spanish (Convention of London 1786) of the Miskito Coast. To the dismay of the established "Baymen" (slave-holding loggers), Despard did so without "any distinction of age, sex, character, respectability, property or colour". He distributed land by lottery in which, the Baymen noted in their petition to London, "the meanest mulatto or free negro has an equal chance". Despard also set aside lands for common use (a reversal of the enclosures to which his family had been party in Ireland) and sought to keep food prices down “for the poorer sort of people”. To the suggestion from the Home Secretary, Lord Sydney, that it was impolitic to put "affluent settlers and persons of a different description, particularly people of colour" on an "equal footing", Despard replied "the laws of England ... know no such distinction". (He had, on the same principle, overruled a local law excluding Jewish merchants from the Bay). Persuaded by the Baymen's entreaty that under "Despard's constitution" the "negroes in servitude, observing the now exalted status of their brethren of yesterday [the free, and now propertied, blacks among the Shoremen] would be induced to revolt, and the settlement must be ruined ", in 1790 Sydney's successor, Lord Grenville, recalled Despard to London. Despard supplied Grenville with a 500-page report in which he characterized the Baymen as an "arbitrary aristocracy". He buttressed his argument with the results of the magistracy election in which he had stood shortly before he left, winning a resounding majority on an unprecedented turnout. But