The Blake/Andrade Dynasty
During the Caste War, the city of Valladolid in the Mexican state of Yucatan also fell to the Maya rebel forces. Jose and Juanita Andrade had been wealthy Spaniards who settled in Valladolid. They had manged to survive the massacre during the seizing of the city by the Maya insurgents. The Andrade and an entourage of 50 families migrated to British Honduras. At the Hondo River, they were attacked by the Icaiche Maya. Juanita and her three children, but not her husband, had survived the attacks and she and the other survivors sought refuge in the Corozal District.
In Corozal, Juanita met James Hume Blake, who over time became the principal landowner of Corozal District and was appointed District Commissioner and later Magistrate. His many business interests included growing sugar cane and processing it for export. Another of Blake’s businesses was exporting guns, ammunition and supplies to the Santa Cruz Maya during their rebellion against the Spaniard and Mestizo during the Caste War. His first wife having died, Blake married Juanita in the early 1850s and they subsequently had two daughters of their own. On 13th September 1869, James Hume Blake, acting as agent for his two stepdaughters, Romana and Maria Exaltacion Andrade, purchased the entire island at an auction for $625 (save for one parcel controlled by the Catholic Church).
By the mid-1880s, the Blake/Andrade family had settled on the island. Maria Exaltacion Andrade became the sole owner of Ambergris Caye upon Romana’s death. Through a complex series of marriages and remarriages, the Blake-Andrade family became intertwined with the family of Antonia Alamilla, another widowed refugee who had fled Valladolid with Juanita Andrade, and that of an English expatriate named George James Parham. When Maria Exaltacion Andrade de Mendez died at the age of 93, she left her estate in equal shares to James Howel Blake and Ann Elizabeth Parham, both grandchildren of Juanita and James Hume Blake and both married to children of Antonia Alamilla. Another daughter of Antonia Alamilla later married George James Parham after the deaths of his first two wives, the two Blake daughters.