The Garífuna trace their history back to the island of St Vincent , in the eastern Caribbean, when two Spanish ships, carrying slaves from Nigeria to their colonies in America, were wrecked off the coast in 1635. The survivors took refuge on the island, which was already inhabited by Caribs , themselves recent arrivals from South America, who had subdued the original natives, the Kalipuna , from whom it is likely the Garífuna derived their own name. At first there was conflict between the Native Americans and the Africans, but the Caribs had been weakened by wars and disease and eventually the predominant race was black with some indigenous blood, becoming known by the English as the Black Caribs .

For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries St Vincent was nominally under British control, though in practice it belonged to the Caribs, who successfully fended off British attempts to gain full control of the island until 1796. The British colonial authorities, however, could not allow a free black society to survive amongst slave-owning European settlers, so the Carib population was hunted down and transported to Roatán , off the coast of Honduras, where the British abandoned them. The Spanish Commandante of Trujillo, on the Honduran mainland, took the 1700 surviving Black Caribs to Trujillo, where they became in demand as free labourers, fishermen and soldiers. Their intimate knowledge of the rivers and coast also made them expert smugglers, evading the Spanish laws that forbade trade with the British in Belize.

In the early nineteenth century small numbers of Garífuna moved up the coast to Belize, establishing themselves in the area before the first European settlers arrived in Stann Creek in 1823. The largest single migration to Belize took place in 1832 when thousands fled from Honduras (then part of the Central American Republic) after they supported the wrong side in a failed revolution to overthrow the Republican government. It is this arrival which is today celebrated as Garífuna Settlement Day , though it seems likely that many arrived both before and after. An excellent Garífuna Web site - www.garifuna-world.com - lists cultural events and current developments in the entire Garífuna community.