Americans considered their bananas as a much more important commodity. In early 1942 Germany began targeting banana boats leaving Honduran and other Central American waters, in an attempt to undermine morale. The unarmed ships of the banana companies experienced serious losses.

In the United States, however, bananas were deemed to be of paramount necessity, not only for the general morale of the population, but also for the banana’s nutritional value to the nation’s diet.

Thus, banana exports from Honduras remained steady during the war. United Fruit’s catchphrase during the period became “Every banana a guest, every passenger a pest!” It was signaling that no space would be reserved for anything but the valued fruit.

Bananas were Deemed to be of Paramount Necessity

In February of 1942 United Fruit lost the SS San Gil. That loss was followed by the SS Esparta in March. Between April and July, is the period that the German U-boat captains called “The Happy Time,” 16 more United Fruit ships, averaging 4,000 tons each, were sunk. All in allover 150 Honduran crewmen lost their lives. During the war, over 80 banana boats from Central America would be sunk.

Standard Fruit had purchased four destroyers left over from WWI from the US Navy and converted them into merchant vessels designated to transport bananas. At the start of WWII, these were leased back to the Navy, and sent as cargo boats, to help break the siege of Corregidor in the Philippines but arrived too late.

In response to the alarming loss of merchant shipping, the U.S. Navy began to build anti-sub bases across the Caribbean. In November 1942 Puerto Castilla was chosen as the base for three Catalina long-range flying patrol boats. These amphibian planes would patrol the Bay Islands on a daily basis.

In its three years of existence, the base would pump over $400,000, in 2020 value, of much-needed money into the local economy. Unfortunately, the naval bombers chose for its bombing practice the mile-long island of San Vicente, lying off Santa Fe. That island was sacred to the Garifuna people.

By the end of the war the landscape of the island, now known as Cayo Blanco, had been completely destroyed.

The German operations in the Caribbean suffered a heavy blow when on Bastille Day, July 14, 1943; the Free French forces liberated the island of Martinique. The Axis submarines lost their base of operations. From then until the war’s end, only two more banana boats would be sunk.

The primary targets for German navy were oil and petroleum routes from Trinidad, Venezuela and the Dutch islands. Almost as important were the cargo vessels hauling bauxite from Jamaica and the Guyanas to be used in the manufacture of aluminum. Thus the battle of the Caribbean began. After the fall of France in 1940, Germany and Italy based most of their submarine fleet on the island of Martinique. Not wishing to provoke the United States into entering the war, the Axis left the American banana boats alone.

Using the Honduran ports of Puerto Castilla and La Ceiba as supply dumps, Nazi agents began bribing workers from United Fruit and Standard Fruit, into providing the Germans with bootleg diesel siphoned from tractors, field generators, and other equipment. Germans were keen on supplying their mariners with fruit, liquor, beer, water, and other contraband merchandise. These would be surreptitiously loaded onto barges which would rendezvous with the U-boats in between the mainland and the Bay Islands.

Germany and Italy based most
of their submarine fleet

on the island of Martinique.

This illicit commerce ended when US entered the war in December 1941, declaring war on Japan on December 11 Germany and Italy declared war on the US in response. Honduras followed suit and declared war on Germany and Italy on December 12. A blacklist of the 510 documented Germans living in Honduras had been compiled by US intelligence.

These “undesirable aliens” were arrested, and their businesses and properties confiscated. These Germans were taken from their Honduran families and deported to internment camps in Texas. The men were sent to a 22-acre compound called Camp Kennedy and the women and children relocated to another camp called Crystal City.

A total of around 4,500 Germans from all over South and Central America would pass through these camps during the war.
Though many would be repatriated to Germany in exchange for seriously wounded American military personnel, many Honduran Germans would remain until late 1946, after the war’s end, returning to find their homes and businesses in ruins and unable to claim any reparations. To say that the German population of Honduras was inconvenienced during World War II would be a major understatement.

However, as the war escalated, on the 1st of March 1917, America began taking the threat of underwater warfare seriously enough to purchase the Danish Virgin Islands for $25 million. This was to preempt a possible German purchase for the purpose of installing a naval base there.

The decision of British Honduras (Belize) to send 450 soldiers to fight in the war on the Allied side further increased tensions in the region. In response, a plan was conceived by the exiled Guatemalan General Isidoro Valdez and it proposed to Heinrich Von Eckhart, the senior German diplomat, the general spymaster serving in Mexico City.

The “Valdez Proposal,” as it came to be known, was to muster an army of 5,000 Germans in Mexico, provoke a coup d’état in Guatemala to oust its pro-American president, Manuel Estrada Cabrera. The plan included an invasion of Belize with an army of Honduran opposition liberals to establish a U-boat base. Once a pro-German government had been installed in Honduras as well as in its major ports, then tire Mosquito Coast could also be used for naval bases.

Upon learning of these plans, U.S. naval intelligence sent the esteemed Harvard-educated Mayanologist Sylvanus Morley to Belize on a United Fruit Company ship. He travelled on the pretext of conducting archaeological research in the area.

Working as a secret agent from his headquarters in the American legation compound in Tegucigalpa, he would spend the next 20 months putting together an espionage ring in Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras to spy on and compile blacklists of German-owned businesses and diplomats. Ironically, his agents in Honduras had to collect their monthly pay of $25 from the German-owned Banco de Honduras, the only bank in Tegucigalpa.

Honduras also closed all of Germany’s consulates.

Morley would also travel over 2,000 miles of Central American coastline, including the Bay Islands of Honduras, looking for clandestine U-boat sanctuaries.

During his time in Central America, Morley and his agents would send back over 10,000 pages of information and reports to naval intelligence. Morley would later be acknowledged as probably America’s most effective secret agent during the war. He would later excavate and largely catalog the objects in the great Mayan city of Chichén Itzá in the Yucatán, as well as make several exciting discoveries of other previously lost Mayan temples and pyramids. Morley has been put forward as a model for Steven Spielberg’s fictional movie hero Indiana Jones.

In May of 1917, reports that a Standard Fruit banana boat had been shelled and sunk by a German gunboat on the milk run between La Ceiba and New Orleans prompted Honduras’s pro-American president, Francisco Bertrand, to cut off diplomatic relations with Germany. Honduras also closed all of Germany’s consulates including those in Puerto Cortez, La Ceiba, and Trujillo, and expelled its German diplomats. Honduras was put under martial law, and people wishing to travel within the country’s borders had to do so using an internal passport.

Germany had indeed been using its consulates to coordinate espionage networks. Most of these German agents were corrupt and much more interested in lucrative smuggling activities with allied ships than in espionage or actual sabotage.

Honduras finally entered World War 1 on the side of the allies on July 18, 1918. It was the last nation in the world to declare war on Germany. The threat of U-boats to the banana companies was now over.

Roatan was the Favorite Base for the Brethren of the Coast

In 1683 Roatan hosted the largest meeting of pirates in history; they planned a series of attacks on Spanish towns and shipping routes. These pirates known as ‘Brethren of the Coast” raided Spanish cities and burned towns, captured and sold slaves and executed hostages, sewing terror from Florida to South America. These buccaneers defied laws and civility, no one was safe from their greed and cruelty.
While many people glorify them, today that loose coalition of pirates and privateers would be called terrorists with behavior surpassing that of the Islamic State. Some of these buccaneers carried ‘Letters of marque and reprisal’ that regulate their relationships with their European benefactors and themselves. The Brethren were almost always English Protestants, Dutch Lutherans and French Huguenots that saw their Catholic, Spanish and French counterparts as legitimate targets of ruthless treatment. Their actions were the extension of ruthless European religious wars in the New World. 

This was the largest and the last convocation of The Brethren of the Coast to be held on Roatan, and it was convened at the behest of Dutch sea rover Nicholas “Claas” Van Hoorn, who had persuaded two of the most flamboyant and successful pirates of the era to accompany him on the mission. They were Le Chevalier Michel de Grammont, a French nobleman who had fled France and turned to piracy after killing his sister’s lover in a duel over her honor.

The other leader of the group was Laurens Cornelis Boudewijn de Graaf, who harbored a deep hatred for the Spanish after being captured on a Dutch merchant vessel and forced to work as a galley slave and later to labor on their plantations for several years before escaping. De Graaf, known simply as “The Devil” to the Spanish, was so successful in his piratical activities in the Caribbean that they sent their special, fast, pirate-chasing fleet, called La Armada de Barlovento, or Windward Fleet, under the command of Andrés de Ochoa in pursuit of him.

Furthermore, Henry Morgan was now a reformed character assigned an as acting governor of Jamaica. Morgan had sent the 55-gun frigate the “Norwich,” with 240 men aboard, to hunt down de Graaf in order to appease the Spanish. Four years earlier, De Graaf had turned the tables on the Spanish and attacked the boats chasing him, capturing two of their vessels, the “Tigre” and the “Princesa,” the flagship of the Barlovento fleet, off Santo Domingo, along with 120,000 silver Peruvian pesos, which he shared equally with his crew.

De Graaf renamed the second boat “Francesca” and used her as his own flagship for years to come. To keep himself and his 200 crewmen entertained, the popular De Graaf employed an orchestra of musicians, replete with guitars, violins, and trumpets, who lived permanently aboard the ship.

In retaliation for this great insult and loss, the Spanish confiscated the first Dutch-flagged boat that sailed into Santo Domingo. This ship, which belonged to Nicholas Van Hoorn, contained a valuable shipment of 900 African slaves to be sold in Martinique. Van Hoorn was so aggrieved by its loss that he immediately sailed to the French-ruled western part of Hispaniola and demanded and received from the governor a letter of marquee and reprisal against Spanish property.

Armed with this valuable permit to attack the Spanish, Van Hoorn met up with Grammont at their base in Pétit-Goâve and sailed in his own triple-decker warship, the “St. Nicholas Day,” along with 300 men, to rendezvous with De Graaf on Roatan.

Van Hoorn’s ship, the largest operating in the Caribbean, had been paid for with part of a bullion shipment of two million gold livres which the Spanish had paid Van Hoorn to protect on its way from Hispaniola to Cádiz, and which he had stolen once the convoy left port.

By chance, they encountered John Coxen and his ship the “Dorado” off Jamaica. Coxen, who had temporarily retired from piracy (only for one year!), Was himself under Morgan’s orders to hunt down and capture another Dutch corsair, Yankey Willens, a former cohort of Morgan, for a reward of 200 English pounds. They explained to Coxen their plan to attack Vera Cruz and invited him to join the team, but he demurred, and they continued towards the Bay Islands.

Van Hoorn was so eager to retaliate against the Spanish that he diverted his boat to attack Trujillo on Honduras’s mainland. Trujillo proved easy to capture, as it had fewer than 200 men under arms to defend it.

There they found two large Spanish galleons, Nuestra Señora de la Concepción and Nuestra Señora de la Regla, awaiting a valuable shipment of indigo which was to arrive by mule train from the south. Unfortunately for the townsfolk and the soldiers guarding Trujillo, the boats sat idle and empty. This infuriated Van Hoorn, who already had a reputation for his arrogance and cruelty towards prisoners, and he ordered his army to kill the garrison of the fort and to murder the entire population of the town, after which he ordered Trujillo to be torched and burned to the ground. This act of insanity caused the Spanish viceroy in Guatemala to order Trujillo to be completely abandoned as indefensible; it would not be repossessed by Spain for another 97 years, leaving it a free port for smugglers.

Van Hoorn and Grammont then sailed with their two new prizes to French Harbour. Unbeknownst to either man, Laurens de Graaf and his colleague Michiel Andrieszoon also had plans to seize the two cargo ships and were waiting patiently on Guanaja, careening their boats, until the cargoes of indigo arrived at Trujillo, and were appalled and angered by Van Hoorn’s actions. The animosity between Van Hoorn and de Graaf would turn deadly within less than two months.

The animosity between Van Hoorn and de Graaf would turn deadly.

With England and Spain being in a state of peace for eleven years, the men gathering at French Harbour for the raid were almost exclusively Dutch and French, with only two English captains, George Spurre and Jacob Hall in attendance. The rest of the pirate captains were Michiel Andrieszoon, Jan “Yankey” Willens, Jacob Evertson, Francois Le Sage, Pierre De L’Orange, Nicolas Bregeult, Nicolas Bot, and Antoine Bernard. They spent over a month on the island, careening boats and hunting and fishing, their enforced stay caused by the news from their spies that Ochoa, with 1,200 marines and the Armada de Barlovento, was in Vera Cruz, preparing to sail to Cuba to look for de Graaf.

As soon as the coast was clear, the Brethren departed in five large boats and five smaller vessels. Late on the night of May 17th 1683, Van Graaf boldly sailed into Vera Cruz harbor in the two Spanish-flagged vessels from Trujillo, and, along with Yankey Willens, silently landed over 200 men.

Meanwhile, Grammont and Van Hoorn moored their boats down the coast, and with another 200 men marched overland into the rear of the town and took over a hundred horses from the garrison’s stables. They attacked the fort at dawn.

The Spanish were so surprised by the Dutch cavalry charge on their own horses that they quickly surrendered without a fight. The sea rovers quickly spread out through the town, herding most of the population into the large church, to be bartered for ransom. Captain Spurre found the town’s governor, Don Louis de Cordua, hiding under some straw in a stable, and would later successfully ransom him for 70,000 silver pesos.

After a week of looting the town, De Graaf learned that another heavily armed Spanish fleet was soon to arrive from Cartagena and hastily retreated to La Isla de Sacrificios two miles offshore, taking his Spanish hostages and over 1,500 black and mulatto slaves and freemen with them. The latter would be dispersed and sold throughout the Caribbean, a sad crime which the people of Vera Cruz never forgave De Graaf for.

While awaiting the ransom for their Spanish hostages to be sent from Mexico City, Van Hoorn became impatient; he ordered the decapitation of twelve of the hostages, intending to send their heads back to the mainland as a warning. When De Graaf stepped in to prevent the execution of the Spanish, a drunken Van Hoorn attacked him with his sword. A duel ensued and ended when De Graaf slashed Van Hoorn badly on the wrist, and then ordered him confined to his boat in chains.

After receiving their ransom, the sea rovers sailed to Isla de Mujeres, off present-day Cancún to split their booty. Laurens de Graaf, Jacob Evertson, Michiel Andrieszoon, Jan “Yankee” Willens, George Spurre, and Michel de Grammont shared the equivalent of $30,000 each, while their men each received 800 pieces of eight, worth perhaps $7,000 today. In addition, there were some 1,500 slaves to dispose of.

Grammont and Jacob Hall took 400 slaves north to sell in North Carolina; Hall would use his profits to retire in Virginia. De Graaf, Evertson, Andrieszoon, and Spurre sailed directly to Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) to auction off the remaining slaves; over the next four months Spurre would drink himself to death there.

Meanwhile, Andrés de Ochoa, the Spanish commander of Vera Cruz and Admiral of the Fleet of Barlovento (on the present-day Colombian coast), hell-bent on capturing “Laurencillo” de Graaf and the pirates who had raped his town and destroyed his citadel, embarked on a two-year mission to hunt them down. On August 4th, on his 450-ton flagship, the San José, accompanied by three pursuit galleons of 350 tons each, Ochoa had success off of Little Cayman, where they captured two ships involved in the raid, Pierre d’Orange’s Dauphinand Antoine Bernard’s Prophète Daniel, along with their crews and stolen plunder.

A week later, on the evening of August 11th, they chased down Yankee Willens, who was captaining La Señora de Regla, one of the cargo ships captured by Nikolaas Van Hoorn in Trujillo. Willens set fire to the ship, and then escaped on a smaller vessel in the smoke, dusk, and confusion, eventually making it back to Saint-Domingue, having left behind 90 slaves, who put out the fire and were rescued by Ochoa. The French captains and their crews were publicly executed by garrote on the waterfront, as were 14 Englishmen who had participated in the raid and were captured in a failed attack on Tampico in early 1684.

Along with Yankey Willens, silently landed over 200 men.

On August 22nd Ochoa returned to Vera Cruz; there he would stay for ten months while overseeing the rebuilding of the city.

In October 1683, the remaining Brethren of the Coast–minus de Grammont, who was attacking Spanish settlements in Florida–were offered the opportunity to attack Santiago de Cuba by the governor of Saint-Domingue. The one condition was that the raid would be accompanied by a detachment of French soldiers and that the overall command would be undertaken by the pompously titled Major Jean de Goff, Sieurde Beauregard.

A brutal martinet, de Goff displeased the Brethren so much that they mutinied before the venture got under sail, and instead turned their attention to another Spanish target, Cartagena, a heavily fortified citadel surrounded by 11 kilometers of walls and ramparts.

With over a thousand men, they moored outside Cartagena’s bay for three weeks while calculating how to infiltrate the city’s formidable defenses. Their presence became known to the Spanish governor, who on Christmas Eve dispatched a force of some 800 men on three ships: the 40-gun San Francisco, the 34-gun La Paz, and the 28-gun galliot Francesca.

However, the large Spanish ships were outmaneuvered by the dexterity of the Dutch captains. The San Francisco ran aground on a sandbar, and the other two boats were captured with all on board. Ninety Spanish soldiers were killed in the battle; on the Dutch side, only 20 men were lost. De Graaf refloated the San Francisco, renaming it the Neptune and making it his flagship; Andrieszo on was given the La Paz, renaming it the Rascal; and Willens was rewarded with de Graaf’s former flagship Princesa.

Three weeks later Willens would use this ship to capture a passing English sloop named the James, thus angering the governor of Jamaica so much that he doubled the price on Willens’s head from 200 to 400 pounds.

De Graaf ransomed the surviving soldiers back to Cartagena. Upon receiving the extortion money, he sent a messenger thanking the governor for his Christmas present. With his cohorts, he then sailed back to their main base at Petit-Goâve, where he would remain on his sugarcane plantation with his family for the next year while plotting his next raid.

In June 1685 de Graaf returned to Roatán to await the passing of the Spanish treasure fleet on its way to Guatemala and thence to Cuba. Thwarted when the fleet was delayed by bad weather, he reconvened a meeting of all the Brethren of the Coast on Cuba’s Isla de Pinos (now Isla de la Juventud).

From there he sailed with Michel de Grammont and the entire team who had accompanied him at Vera Cruz and Cartagena—minus Hall and Spurre, who had been replaced by the Frenchman Pierre Bot, who captained La Señora de Regla, and the English pirate Joseph Bannister, aboard his ship Golden Fleece—and a total force of 750 men and 30 boats to launch an attack on Campeche, Mexico. Campeche ranked alongside Havana, Cartagena, and Vera Cruz as one of Spain’s most valuable shipping ports.

He withdrew to Trujillo,now a virtual ghost town.

Forewarned of the attack, the governor of Campeche, the 50-year-old veteran soldier Felipe de Barreda, ordered the women and children to leave the town, taking with them most of its valuables, while he remained to organize Campeche’s defenses. The first assault group of pirates, arriving on July 6th, was repulsed by Barreda’s 200 defenders upon landing. However, the pirates regrouped, infiltrated the town at night, and emerged victorious from a pitched battle with the remaining Spanish militiamen as well as two other detachments of 200 soldiers sent from Mérida.

The pirates then stormed Merida, only to find it mostly devoid of treasure. Enraged, de Grammont sent 200 mounted French and Dutch cavalry riding stolen horses throughout the country in a radius of up to 50 miles from the town, burning farms and hacienda sand killing two thirds of the province’s population.

De Graaf then sent two ransom demands to Juan Bruno Téllez de Guzmán, governor of the Yucatán, insisting that he send 80,000 pesos and 400 head of cattle to prevent the town from being burned to the ground. Guzmán refused both notes, saying that the pirates could do what they wanted, but that Spain, being powerful and wealthy, would simply rebuild the town. This provoked de Grammont into hanging six of its leading citizens in the town square. He was about to execute six more, including Barreda, when de Graaf intervened. Finally, having spiked the fort’s cannons, the pirates sailed away on September 5 and scattered up and down the coast.

Meanwhile, on learning that de Graaf was holed up on Roatán, Andrés de Ochoa scoured every bay and inlet on the island in search of the nemesis he had been hunting for over two years. Unable to find any trace of him, he withdrew to Trujillo, now a virtual ghost town, to await de Graaf’s return. When a messenger boat arrived from Mérida to report that de Graaf was attacking Campeche, the gravely ill Ochoa set sail north on September 8th with five galleons.

Three days later, he espied three sails 53 kilometers north of present-day Cancún and gave chase, catching up with part of de Graaf’s heavily laden fleet at Cabo Catoche and eventually capturing Bot’s slow-moving galleon, with its crew of 130 Frenchmen, over 200 weapons, and 30 African slaves taken at Campeche, as well as a sloop, while another sloop was sunk.

The Spanish continued to tail De Graaf for four days until, at Alacrán Reef, having dumped much of his cargo overboard to lighten his ship, De Graaf turned and daringly engaged and outmaneuvered the Spanish warships Santo Cristo de Burgos and Concepción. Though the two pursuit vessels fired over 1,600 cannon shots at the Neptune, luck was on De Graaf’s side. After his rigging was crippled by Spanish chain shot and it looked as if he would be taken, a cannon blew up on Ochoa’s flagship, killing several men and severely damaging the superstructure, making further pursuit impossible.

De Graaf returned to Roatán to await the passing of the Spanish treasure.

Ochoa died the following morning from a combination of fever and battle fatigue, and the chase ended. The disappointed Spanish fleet turned north for Vera Cruz, giving De Graaf the chance to escape after jettisoning all his cannons. However, the unlucky Pierre Bot, his officers, and six Spaniards sailing under his flag were immediately executed.

The Englishman Joseph Bannister was as unlucky as Bot. On his way back to Jamaica, his boat was intercepted by HMS Ruby and he and his men were taken to Port Royal, accused of piracy against English vessels, and sentenced to be hanged. Bannister appealed the sentence, and while awaiting a retrial, made a daring nighttime escape with some of his men. They sailed the Golden Fleece to Sabana Bay, Santo Domingo, where he successfully outgunned the English naval frigates Falcon and Drake which had been sent to capture him.

Joseph Bannister then fled to Honduras’s Mosquito Coast, hiding out in an Indian village before being recaptured and returned to Jamaica. The governor of the island was so incensed by Bannister’s disregard for English law that he immediately had him hanged onboard the ship in the harbor without trial.

Michel de Grammont, aboard his flagship Hardi, teamed up with Nicolas Brigaut, making Roatán their base of operations for two months while preparing for an attack on St. Augustine, Florida. Leaving Roatán, the two Frenchmen split up at Matanzas inlet, the plan being that Brigaut would capture guides and interpreters to assist them with intelligence before the raid.

When Brigaut’s ship ran aground, it was attacked by a much larger Spanish force and his entire crew of 40 men was annihilated. Brigaut himself was captured and taken to St. Augustine, where he was hanged at the end of May at the age of 33. Michel de Grammont’s luck also finally ran out. In an attempt to rescue Brigaut, his ship Hardi capsized in a storm and he drowned along with all of his crew, aged 41. The other Frenchman of the Brethren, François Le Sage, would survive a further nine years before being killed while accompanying De Graaf in a successful raid on Jamaica in 1694.

Joseph Bannister was as unlucky as Bot.

Of De Graaf’s three remaining Dutch officers and leading captains, only Michiel Andrieszoon survived along with De Graaf to live into middle age. After the raid on Campeche, Andrieszoon retired from piracy to live out his life on Petit-Goâve. Yankee Willens partnered up with Jacob Evertson, his old comrade of many years, sailing the Princesa, the ship De Graaf had given him, around the Caribbean while being hunted by both the Spanish and English navies, before both men reportedly drowned in a storm in the Gulf of Honduras in 1688.

Laurens de Graaf was, after Henry Morgan, perhaps the greatest privateer of the Golden Age of Piracy, which would end at the beginning of the 18th century with the introduction of strong Dutch, French, English, and Spanish naval patrols and the elimination of such pirate bases as Roatán, Petit-Goâve, Tortuga, Port Royal, Providence, and Isla de Pinos. The Brethren of the Coast would never reunite; their time was over.

De Graaf, however, would continue to lead a charmed life into his 50s, continuing daring raids until the end of 1690s. In March 1693, when he was 39 years old, he married a beautiful woman known as Anne Dieu-le-Veut (Anne Who-God-Wants), one of the very few known female buccaneers (Mary Read, Ann Bonny, and Jacquotte Delahaye being the others).

Having fallen in love after she challenged him to a duel for some slight, they lived together for 12 years. He died either in Louisiana while attempting to start a new colony there or back on his plantation in Saint-Domingue. The date of his death is given as 1705, making him 50 or 51 years old at the time, slightly younger than Henry Morgan, who died in 1688 at age 53 after a heavy drinking bout in Jamaica.

During the 329 years of their presence in the Caribbean and Central America, only around 25,000 African slaves were imported here by the Spanish. This is a great contrast to the 12 million blacks shipped by the English, Dutch, French, and Portuguese for use in their colonies in the same region.

Therefore, the Spanish depended on local labor, and after mostly annihilating the indigenous populations of present-day Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Cuba. Then they turned their attention to Central America and are of today’s Honduras as a source for providing laborers.

They considered anyone not converted to Catholicism with disdain, and the economic value of a Paya, Lenca or Tolupan laborer was less than that of a pig or a horse. In the one hundred years between 1524 and 1624, it is estimated that the population of Honduras fell from around 500,000 indigenous people to less than 150,000, the majority of whom were shipped off to die in the mines of Peru and Bolivia.

However, workers were also needed in the Caribbean islands. The first Spanish raiding parties arrived in the Bay Islands from Cuba in 1516. Equipped with firepower, and huge, spike collared, Pyrenean hunting dogs, brought to pacify the natives. These were previously unseen by the natives.

However, the Paya did not always go to their fate docilely and in the Bay Islands, they were valuable allies to the pirates raiding the Spanish armada. After a Spanish raid on Guanaja in 1516, some 500 Payas were shipped to Cuba, whereupon landing, the Indians took advantage of the crew and soldiers guarding them. During a drunken celebration, the captive Paya overpowered and killed them. Incredibly, they managed to sail back to the Bay Islands using astral navigation. Their feat only provoked the Spanish into sending a much larger punitive force after them, and most were recaptured and disappeared into the vast plantations of Cuba.

This curse became known as “La Maldición de Trujillo.”

Life for the Paya would become much more miserable with the arrival of Hernán Cortés in Trujillo in 1526. Using his Nahuatl speaking mistress from the Yucatan, he summoned three of the head caiques of the region to a meeting in Trujillo. Here he proposed that they and their people, subject themselves to Spanish rule, abandon their idolatry, human sacrifices and convert to Christianity. They also were to pay tribute and taxes to King Charles.

The Paya chieftains were aware of the brutal treatment of their neighbors and friends on the Bay Islands and refused to deal with Cortés. Fearing reprisal, the chiefs of four of the largest towns surrounding Trujillo, Chapagua, Merderato, Potlo, and Thicahutl, took their families, members of their courts and their shamans, and fled to the mountains of Olancho.

Only the proud caique, Mazatl, Lord of Papayeca the Paya capital, remained to defy Cortés. In retaliation, and to prove his superiority over the perceived venality of the infidels, an enraged Cortés, captured Mazatl and his head priest named Pizacura, along with one hundred of the leading citizens of the town, who were branded with the letter “C” on their faces. The mark denoted them as Cortés’s private property.

On being brought to Trujillo, Chief Mazatl again refused to swear allegiance to Cortés and took offense when manhandled by a Spanish soldier, who he slapped on the face. He immediately had his hands nailed to a tree in the plaza.

Chief Mazatl was hanged later in the day, but before dying, he laid a curse on the Spanish, telling them that they would find no wealth, no joy or nor prosperity in the region on account of their inhumanity.

This curse became known as “La Maldicion de Trujillo,” a legendary curse that people all over the region believe in, so much, that when Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Sosa, who was born in Trujillo, became President of Honduras in 2010, he brought the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa to the town to exorcise and remove it.

Walker’s last adventure in Central America, as self-proclaimed President of Nicaragua, had ended in total fiasco. He also earned some respect among white Bay Islanders, and in April of 1860 a representative was sent from Roatan to New Orleans to invite Walker to help set up a new, independent Bay Islands republic, with himself as President.

Unbeknownst to the islanders, Walker, backed by his allies, including wealthy Southern plantation owners and the Masonic pro-slavery group The Knights of the Golden Circle, had been stockpiling weapons and ammunition and recruiting men in New Orleans since September of the previous year in order to launch a new campaign in Nicaragua. There he intended to reclaim the presidency,as well as control of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s transit company, which offered the quickest route from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast by way of stagecoach and river steamer, generating some $6 million in revenue per year.

With this money Walker planned to finance his campaign to conquer all five of the Central American countries and unify them into a huge cotton, rubber and fruit-producing region. Slavery was to be reintroduced and English was to be the official language. He had promised his motley band of soldiers of fortune that, once the expedition proved to be a success, each would receive 150 acres of land.

Starting in late April, Walker began sending his representatives to Roatan on fruit boats in order to await the handover date from Britain to Honduras, at which point he and his forces would strike. In June, he and 55 men left New Orleans on the chartered schooner “John C. Taylor,” while more men and most of his stock of weapons and ammunition were sent to Belize on the “Clifton” to await orders. Meanwhile, the arrival of dozens of American and German mercenaries on the island had not gone unnoticed by the British authorities. They beefed up the island’s defenses with 40 troops sent from Belize, while sending 15 ships from their West Indian naval fleet in Jamaica to patrol off Roatan.

Upon arriving at Coxen Hole, the notorious Walker was refused permission to disembark from the “Taylor.” On also learning that all his ammunition and weapons had been confiscated from the “Clifton” in Georgetown, he retired north to the island of Cozumel to await the handover of Roatan to Honduras. Five weeks later he and his men sailed back to Roatan, only to discover an even larger British military presence barring them from landing. To further frustrate him, Britain and Honduras had hastily extended the handover date for Roatan to April 22 of the following year.

Infuriated, Walker made the biggest blunder of his career: an all-out attack on the Honduran mainland at Trujillo. With a force of 91 men, including three new recruits from Roatan, Walker arrived in Trujillo on August 6 and quickly took the fort. Six of its Garifuna defenders died; five men on Walker’s side were seriously wounded, two of whom would later die.

Walker immediately declared the town a free port and confiscated $3,500 from the town’s customs and excise office. His men encamped in the fort, where they fixed its broken cannons and replaced their ammunition.

His next move was to contact former Honduran President José Trinidad Cabañas about forming a coalition government, with the idea of joining forces to re-invade Nicaragua. Cabañas, however, engaged in setting up Honduras’s fledgling education system, rejected Walker’s overtures. Meanwhile, British Commander Nowell Salmon arrived from Belize on the “Icarus” and informed Walker that the money confiscated from the customs house belonged to Britain in lieu of a debt; if Walker did not surrender the town, Salmon would order a naval bombardment of the fort.

When Walker refused, Salmon confiscated the “Taylor,” and on August 26 General Mariano Alvarez, marching from Tegucigalpa with 700 Honduran troops, arrived in Trujillo to confront Walker on land. Outgunned and outnumbered, Walker beat a fighting retreat some 80 miles to the east, losing 18 men in skirmishing and disease before reaching Black River, where he hoped to find another boat.Salmon set off in the “Icarus” in hot pursuit and soon reached Black River. While laid up resting on a farm along the banks of Río Sico, Walker reluctantly surrendered to the British marines after being promised protection and safe passage back to New Orleans by Salmon.

However, instead of sailing to Louisiana, Salmon broke his word as an officer and a gentleman and promptly delivered Walker and his men to the waiting authorities in Trujillo. Walker was charged with piracy and violating international neutrality laws; in his defense, he claimed he was only attempting to “protect the inalienable rights of the people of Roatan, and protect them from tyranny.” This defense failed,and he alone was sentenced to death.

He languished a further six days in the fort, while his remaining 75 men were deported on the British steamship “Gladiator.” The last throw of the dice to save Walker’s life came from the US consul, and a fellow freemason, in Trujillo who offered General Alvarez $10,000 to spare him. The offer was rejected, and on the morning of September 12, 1860, Walker faced a three-man firing squad behind the fort. The first volley of shots did not kill him, but the coup degrâce blew away his face beyond recognition. The consul paid 10 pesos for his coffin and he was buried in Trujillo’s old cemetery.

One of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the scientific world was the finding of the Crystal Skull of Doom. That skull became an inspiration for dozens of new age websites, books, magazine articles and even an Indiana Jones movie. The swindle was perpetrated by the Canadian born Anna Mitchell-Hedges, the adopted daughter of British big game fisherman, explorer, charlatan and tomb robber, Frederick Mitchell-Hedges. FM-H visited, and lived on his yacht, the “Amigo,” moored off the eastern end of Roatan on and off in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. That is where he and his wealthy mistress and sugar mama Lady Lilian Richmond Brown, looted hundreds of Paya Indian artifacts which they had found on Barbareta and Saint Helene, and later sold to the Museum of the Indiesand the British Museum.

Mike Hedges theorized that Roatan, along with the other Bay Islands, and the islands off Belize, formed the remnants of the lost continent of Atlantis. He fantasized that the island’s inhabitants had imparted their secret knowledge to the Paya and Maya Indians on the mainland of Central America.

Three years prior to visiting Roatan, Mitchell – Hedges and Richmond Brown, had shipped the “Amigo” from Liverpool to New York and voyaged down to British Honduras on a fishing trip. They arrived in Belize City on February 17, 1924, an important date to remember in our story. There they met the former Chief British Medical Officer of the colony, Dr. Thomas Gann, who was an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist. Dr. Gann offered to show them the site of the long-abandoned Mayan city of Lubaantun, located 55 miles northwest of Punta Gorda, Belize.

The site had previously been visited by Europeans in 1903 (an expedition led by Dr. Gann), and later, in 1915 by a group from the Peabody Museum, sponsored by Yale University, In spite of this, Mitchell – Hedges sent a report, along with photographs, to the Illustrated London News, claiming to have single-handedly discovered “the most important, and largest of all the Mayan lost cities.”

This didn’t discourage Mitchell who sponsored his own extensive studies of the site in 1926 and 1927.On returning to Roatan, Mitchell – Hedges would later claim on his syndicated radio show to have found a lost treasure, belonging to the notorious pirate, Ned Lowe. The supposed treasure was to be found on Cow and Calf Caye in Port Royal and was estimated to be worth six million dollars. This detail itself is hard to believe, as Lowe was a lower ranking pirate, who made a living attacking fishing boats and merchant’s vessels. Lowe was ill-equipped to attack larger, well defended Spanish treasure convoys. Furthermore, no mention of this “amazing find” was made in any of the adventure books later written by Mitchell – Hedges, leading me to believe that his claim was another outlandish lie.

No mention of the found treasure was made in any of his books, newspaper columns or radio shows of The Skull of Doom. That magnificent crystal skull weighing over 11 pounds, which his adopted daughter Anna claimed to have discovered in the rubble of an old tomb at Lubaantun on her 17th birthday, on January 1, 1924, over six weeks BEFORE her father arrived in Belize.

Supposed treasure was to be found on Cow and Calf Caye.

No mention of Anna even being present in Belize exists, and she is not mentioned in any of the writings about the expedition. Furthermore, she only revealed the existence of the skull in 1950’s, thirty years after allegedly finding it. It is also a well-documented fact that Mitchell – Hedges purchased the skull for 400 pounds, at Sotheby’s London office in 1943.

Despite his daughter’s claims that the skull was over 3,600 years old, electron microscope work by Margaret Sax in 2008, of the Department of Scientific Research at the British Museum, detected scratches on the skull made by modern, mechanical carving tools. Obviously, Mayans had no access to such tools.

The skull most certainly came from the collection of Eugene Boban, a French dealer who dealt in both real and fake Aztec and Mayan artifact. Boban lived in Mexico City between 1860 and 1880, and most likely crafted the skull, along with several others in the 1870s , in the German town of Idar-Oberstein, renown for its crystal carving German town of Idar- Oberstein. Despite its undenied beauty and unparalleled craftsmanship, the Skull of Doom, is just a very skillful fake.

The ships were manned by 140 men under the command of Admiral Christopher Columbus. It was Columbus’ fourth voyage to the Americas and he was accompanied by his 13-year-old son, Fernando. Columbus’ second in command was his younger brother, Bartholomew.

They had made the fastest to date crossing of the Atlantic from Spain to the Caribbean, having left Cadiz on May 7, and arriving in Martinique on June 15.

Having been refused entry to any port in Hispaniola, Columbus meandered along the coast of Jamaica before heading south into uncharted territory, taking three weeks to reach an island which was then known to the Indians as Caguamara. Columbus immediately claimed the Caguamara and the neighboring Roatan in the name of Spain and renamed it “La Isla de Pinos.”

Guanaja was named after predominant pine trees that would become an important source of pine tar. The Spanish used to caulk their boats with pine tat at such a rate that within 100 years the entire island would be deforested completely. The island would not be known as Guanaja until 1657.

At 51, Columbus was continuously looking for a new trading route to India and China. He incorrectly thought that he had entered the Straits of Molucca, off the coast of Indonesia without the use of latitude in his calculations. He was 16,000 miles off course but charted a new route for Central America.

Although he had gained much prestige, wealth and fame for his previous voyages of discovery to the New World, his star was on the wane after his despotic governorship of Hispaniola ended amidst charges of corruption, abuse of power, mass torture and murder. Stripped of his powers, he had been shipped in chains back to Cadiz, where he spent a year in jail. He was now a much-changed person, he had written a biblical themed book called “The book of prophesies,” and had taken up the name “Christbearer.” Columbus wandered the deck of his ship dressed in a priest’s cassock.

Maya had voyaged down from the Yucatan peninsula to trade with their Paya cousins

Upon his release from jail, his chief benefactress, Spain’s Queen Isabel, decided to give him one more chance to open a trading route to China. As a condition however, on this voyage he was not allowed to settle, colonize or do any trade with newly discovered lands. To assure that Columbus complied, he was accompanied by a royal administrator and overseer, who monitored all of his actions.

After spending two weeks on the island and learning from the local “caique”, or chief, that a large ocean did indeed exist on the other side of the nearby mainland. On the 35-mile voyage to what he named Honduras, he encountered a large canoe, larger than his own ships, manned by 35 Maya Indians.

The Maya had voyaged down from the Yucatan peninsula to trade with their Paya cousins. Among the items Columbus’ men found in the canoe, was were cacao beans — European’s first encounter with chocolate.

Today the most expensive chocolate in the world is made in Belgium, and is called Guanaja chocolate.

Columbus arrived in what is now known as the Bay of Trujillo on August 15, and on that date, the first ever Catholic mass on the American continent was held at “Punta Caxinas”, present day named “Puerto Castilla.” Columbus was stricken with syphilis and tropical fever and remained on his flagship for the duration of the time he spent in Honduras.

Having collected captives to use as guides and translators, the Spanish explorers departed the Trujillo bay on August 30. They sailed west down the coast to look for the elusive passage to the Pacific. In the end Columbus never found the passage to India and it took him two years to return to Spain. He died there at the age of 54.

He had intercepted the French ship on its way to Martinique from the notorious slaving port of Whydah, in present day Nigeria. It was loaded with 516 slaves, twenty pounds of gold dust, and 40 cannons which had to be unloaded before the hull could be properly cleaned. This was not the last visit that Blackbeard would make to Roatan waters.

Thatch was born to a respectable family in Bristol, England, a coastal city located not far from Liverpool, England’s main slaving port and its second largest city. He served in the Royal Navy with honors, and only turned to piracy during his mid-30’s when a temporary ceasefire between England and Spain left Thatch and hundreds of able seamen without jobs and itching for income.

With Jamaica and Isla de Tortuga both firmly under the control of the English and French and Roatan abandoned, Thatch and his band chose New Providence Island in the Bahamas as their base. The island was close to American and Spanish shipping lanes and housed a modest English settlement. Fortunately for Thatch the government turned a blind eye to their illicit comings and goings, because of the pirates outnumbered the local population by three to one.

Thatch joined the “The Flying Gang“, a group of outlaws whose members included: Josiah Burgess, Thomas Nichols, Charles Vane and Benjamin Hornigold. Along with them came Calico Jack Rackham so named on account of his preference for wearing women’s undergarments, which he found to be more comfortable attire in the tropics. Another man named Stede Bonnet, “the Gentleman Pirate”, was a wealthy plantation owner from Barbados. Stede turned to piracy as a business venture. Not one of these men would reach forty years of age, all were either hanged or went down with their ships. Vane was captured on a cay near Roatan. As a rule the Spanish treasure ships were too heavily defended to attack so The Flying Gang took to using fast, open sloops to intercept smaller trading ships and relieve them of their cargo to sell in America.

All were either hanged or went down with their ships.

Thatch’s first venture as a pirate was as first mate for Benjamin Hornigold on a successful excursion into the Gulf of Mexico, around the Yucatan peninsula and along the coast of Honduras in the summer of 1717. Their thirty-gun sloop, “Ranger”, intercepted Spanish flour merchants’ ships and Portuguese wine traders from Madeira. Later in the year, Thatch and Hornigold intercepted a boatload of Englishmen sailing to Roatan. Clad in black and wearing burning fuses twisted into his hair, Thatch looked truly ferocious surrounded by a cloud of smoke from the fuses. The English sailors were truly surprised when Thatch explained that he and his men had thrown their hats overboard during a drunken party the previous night, and that he had boarded their boats only to relieve them of their hats. Thatch was never known to have killed anyone until his final battle the following year. He simply preferred to look the part of the Devil incarnate and to intimidate his foes.

Later in 1717 Thatch and Hornigold parted ways and Thatch was given “The Revenge” as a reward for his work. As captain of “The Revenge” Blackbeard went on a rampage throughout the Caribbean that cemented his place in pirate lore and history.

His reputation made it impossible for Thatch to return to Providencial, so he sailed to Charleston, North Carolina. There he received a full pardon from the colony’s corrupt Governor, Charles Eden with whom he then conspired to rob ships leaving the port in order to sell the goods on the black market. Blackbeard was now considered to be such a menace on the Atlantic seaboard, that Governor Spotswood of Virginia, sent Lieutenant Robert Maynard with two sloops to hunt him down.

On November 22, 1718, Thatch was cornered in an inlet off the shore of North Carolina. With most of his men onshore and with his crew outnumbered by three to one, Thatch put up a desperate last stand after consuming some wine to fortify him. He was killed in hand-to-hand combat by Maynard on the deck. It was discovered that his body had five gunshot wounds as well as twenty cutlass slashes. As a deterrent to others he was decapitated, and his head hung on a pole at the mouth of the Hampton river. Blackbeard’s notorious, yet short lived, pirating career had come to an end.

Coxon had settled on Roatan taking over Henry Morgan’s position as head of the Bretheren of the Coast – a highly organized group of British, Dutch and French pirates. Coxon was planning an ambitious expedition across the Darien gap in present day Panama to raid Spanish seaports along the Pacific coast of South America. He had done that before and enjoyed great success.

The expedition was to last two years and Coxon and Dampier sailed to Port Morant, Jamaica to pick up supplies and rendezvous with several other top line captains who would accompany them. These captain included Bartholomew Sharp, Cornelius Essex, Peter Sawkins, John Watling, Peter Harris and Robert Allison.

They left Jamaica on January 17, 1680 and they almost immediately ran into gale force winds that scattered the fleet. Most of the ships managed to find their meeting point at Boca de Toros and proceeded to move on Portobello, and successfully sacked the town. Shortly thereafter, Coxon and Sharp intercepted a small Spanish eight-gun ship proceeding from Cartagena. Amongst the loot was a wine jar with 500 gold doubloons hidden inside, which Coxen decided to keep for himself. This caused great unrest amongst his crew.

Coxon lost further respect after taking the village of Santa Maria and killing 70 Spaniards. He decided that the risk of further provoking the Spanish combined with the rigors of crossing Panama by foot, were not worth his trouble and decided to abort the entire mission. The other captains fired Coxon from commandeering and placed Sawkins in charge of the expedition. Coxon returned to Jamaica and then to Roatan, using it as a base to attack Florida the following year.

The other pirates completed the forced march to Colombia and immediately stole three boats, including the 400 ton Santisima Trinidad, which was renamed the Trinity and proceeded to raid up and down the coast for a year. The Spanish sent out most of their Pacific based South American fleet to look for them.

Coxon had settled on Roatan taking over Henry Morgan’s position.

Sharp and Watling, with Dampier as navigator, decided to hole up in the Juan Fernando islands, 400 miles off the coast of Chile. On board the boats were several Misquito Indians, hired as crew, cooks, fighters and fishermen. The Misquitos had a great reputation as fishermen andit was said that two Indians could provide enough seafood for one hundred men.

While the Misquitos were foraging for food and water on the main island, three large Spanish ships appeared on the horizon. With trouble approaching, Watling decided to depart immediately. All the men made it back to the ships except one called Will. Will was reluctantly left behind, even though Watling moored his ship on the far side of the island to wait for Will until the Spanish presence demanded they leave.The expedition continued, with Watling being killed three months later on an attack on the town of Atica, Peru.

Although Coxon’s big raid had been a financial success, he was branded a coward and had lost three of his best captains to the Spanish: Sawkins, Harris and Watling were killed. Dampier also left the group, returned to the Caribbean, and three years later returned to Juan Fernando Island on a mission to complete the first circumnavigation of the globe. He also wanted to find Will, whom they eventually found cooking goats on the beach. Dampier commented that he had never seen anyone so pleased to see him.

By an incredible coincidence, 20 years later, another castaway, Alexander Selkirk, was part of another of Dampier’s adventures, acting as ship’s fitter on the Cinq Ports ship. Feeling that the ship was unseaworthy, he asked permission to be put off on Juan Fernando. Indeed Cinq Ports soon-after sank.

Selkirk, like Will, lived off feral goats and spiny lobsters for four years and four months before being rescued, again by the 58 year old William Dampier, this time acting as pilot for a Woodes Rogers expedition. The writer Daniel Defoe combined the stories of Will and Selkirk, to act as his models for Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday. This great story would never have been written had it not been for William Dampier.