Roatan Author makes her Book Debut

Roatan’s population needs a way to anchor itself to the history of its Garifuna, English and Spanish settlers. The book “Piece of the Puzzle,” set to launch in July 2025, provides a pivotal perspective on who shaped the Bay Islands and how over the past two centuries.

The book’s author is Keila Rochelle Thompson Gough, a Jonesville-born islander. She embarked on a path to discover her own roots. That path led her down the rabbit hole of family stories, secrets and old photographs. “When I started doing research, it was not to write a book, but then all these stories started coming alive,” Gough said. “It was then I decided to write the book.”

The book-writing process was cathartic for Thompson. “It made me realize how much more confident I am and what my family represents,” says Keila. On the book’s pages, she writes about “lives rich with industry, perseverance, success and sometimes tragedy.” We learn about people who wove the fabric that became the Bay Islands. These stories had a profound effect on how the islands are shaped today. They were fundamental to the history of the Bay Islands but also shaped the character of the Bay Islanders who walk the streets of the island.

The author has relatives throughout the British Western Caribbean—Cayman Islands, Jamaica and Belize. For many of them, and many other islanders, “Piece of the Puzzle” tied the strands of their history together. The book has been a wealth of knowledge and a source of understanding about how they are related across time and archipelagos.

Thompson Gough wrote this book as a tribute to her ancestors, her contemporaries and the children who will now have a reference for knowing where they came from. It is the kind of book you can keep open for reference or dive into to read island stories.

Culture dies without someone recording its origins.

The book’s pages not only display the author’s love and passion for her native Roatan, but also represent a work of diligent research that will serve as an invaluable source for other researchers and lovers of Caribbean culture, especially Bay Islands culture.

She searched old island cemeteries, looking at tombstones. Especially the Oak Ridge Cemetery provided a wealth of knowledge. The faded tombstones revealed their secrets to a persistent researcher.

She visited neighbors and sometimes grumpy nonagenarians. She was given treasured family documents, letters and testaments. Often, the greatest wealth of information came from nearby—her great-grandmother Cora Wood.

Thompson described them and sometimes gives them life in print within the pages of her book. “I felt very privileged to be a descendant of such a determined, resolute, and historic ancestry,” writes Thompson, who began in 2008 but had to put the project aside for so many years.

She took on the role of genealogist, contacting and visiting archives in Belize, the Cayman Islands, Jamaica, and the Honduran national archives in Tegucigalpa. “There was no history book in our schools to teach us specifically about the history of the Bay Islands,” writes the author.

“The Piece of the Puzzle” is a well-written, large-format book that serves as a great resource for anyone interested in the history, culture and ethnography of Roatan, the Western Caribbean, or Honduras. The 530-page, large-format “Piece of the Puzzle” is illustrated with numerous photographs of island life and interspersed with historical information and island stories.

The book is a good source for a history lesson on Roatan and the Bay Islands. It creates a record of island families and heritage. The author traces the origins and history of Roatan’s families who arrived on the island in the 1840s: the Goughs, Coopers, Thompsons, Boddens, Abbotts, Woods and many others. It is a book one can get lost in. If you love history, if you are interested in Roatan, if you appreciate a good story, this is your milieu.

Keila has launched her book, “Piece of the Puzzle: The History of My Ancestors on the Bay Island,” at GiLeis Café in Roatan. The book was released on Amazon on July 1 and became available for sale throughout Roatan in August. It is available for purchase in Roatan, on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and as an e-book on Apple Books.

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.