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.

Every year, on his birthday, his family comes together from as far as the US to celebrate the special day. “By the help of the Lord I’ve lived this long. Every year the children have a birthday party for me with cake and ice cream,” Mr. Victor says with a subtle smile. “I can’t get to them, so they have to come to me.”

Since suffering a fall that fractured his hip five years ago, an injury on which the doctors were reluctant to treat with surgery because of the possible side effects of the anesthesia on a man of his age, and for which they instead recommended bed rest; Mr. Jones has been bedridden ever since.

Prior to the hip fracture, Mr. Victor was up and about and took care of himself. “He was able to support himself besides cooking,” said his daughter Verne Jones who has left her job in the US to help take care of her dad. “My sister Linda would spend the night,” she said. A house worker, who has been with the family for years, would do the cooking.

The eldest of four children born to Gustave and Lena Jones, and the only one still alive, Mr. Jones was an example his younger siblings. “I never gambled, smoked or drank alcohol, but I loved to hunt for rabbits and deer and loved to fish,” he remembers.

Mr. Victor does not speak much Spanish because while he was growing up “The teacher would come from the mainland, stay for a few months and leave never to return,” he said. Mr. Victor did receive English lessons however, and one of his teachers was Mabel Bennett of Flowers Bay.

Alert and sound of mind, Mr. Jones can recall incidents that happened when he was a child such as a story he related to his late daughter, Linda, five years ago. He told of a church bell that was donated to the Bethany Methodist Church in Jonesville Point and was later thrown into a pond during an altercation between locals at the school house where it had been stored for safekeeping after the church had been leveled by a hurricane. The bell was never recovered.

Some of Mr. Jones’s fondest memories, as a child, come from the time he spent on the family farm with his father who was a farmer and kept a few cows and hogs and grew enough provision of plantains, bananas and other fruits and vegetables to feed his family.

Some of his not so fond memories include the difficulties of traveling from one area of the island to another: “I remember when you wanted to get to French Harbor; you had to paddle or walk to get there.”

I never gambled, smoked or drank alcohol, but I loved to hunt for rabbits and deer.

Mr. Victor, who worked as a seaman, started his career at the age of 16 with the Standard Fruit Company and worked on a ship that belonged to Joe Gough of Oak Ridge. The ship ran from Belize to Tampa Florida, delivering bananas. As a seaman, Mr. Jones has traveled around the world twice and favors the country of Singapore amongst all the places he has visited.

Working as a seaman during World War II was scary, he recalls, “we had to sleep under the lifeboats, which was hard to do because of the discharge going of all hours of the night,” he said.

The end of the war was welcoming news for the seaman who would spend months on the sea before going home to spend a few months with his family. “We were coming out of Tampa when the War started and we were passing through the Panama Canal when it ended,” he said. “Passing through the canal we heard the celebration; guns going off and ships blowing their horns and when the pilot came aboard to take us through, he told us that the war was over”, he remembers.

Like for most islanders of his generation, country and western was Mr. Jones favorite kind of music to dance and listen to. “We used to kick-up our heels every now and then at the Miramar club in Pandy Town,” he says. “I loved all the country singers, but my favorite was Earnest Tubb.”

Mr. Victor was married to Ema Midence of West End for 62 years and they had five children, of which three are still alive. Mrs. Jones has been deceased for 24 years, but Mr. Jones still remembers the first time he saw the 17-year-old doing her chores. It was the day he fell in love.

He is the grandfather of 11 and great-grandfather of 15, still live in the home where he lived with his wife from 1942 until the day she died, and where they raised their children.

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.

Oranges and lemons were first introduced to Central America by the Spanish around 1550, then came coconuts in 1559 by way of the Cape Verde islands. The Paya name for coconuts is “koko ka” borrowed from the Spanish word “cocos”. Although plantains were indigenous to the New World, the much prized sweet version, the Gros Michel, or Big Mike, was first brought to the islands in 1835 from Martinique, where it was first propagated.

Both the United Fruit Company, and the Vacarro Brothers Fruit Company (renamed Standard Fruit in 1924), were founded in 1899 in Boston and New Orleans respectively .While United decided to start business in Tela and Trujillo on the mainland, the Vacarros chose Roatan, buying shipments of coconuts that also included mixed citrus fruits and bananas with between 100,000 and 200,000 coconuts being shipped per voyage. In September 1899, the Vaccaros sent their cousin, Salvador D’Antoni, on their first boat, a creaky, two mast sailing schooner called the Santo Oteri, to Roatan. Its namesake had been the first banana man in Honduras, before being bought out by United.

Islanders knew nothing about soil rotation and the need of large quantities of nitrogen

The fledgling banana industry reaped huge profits of up to 1000% for those involved. Despite being ravaged by a major hurricane in 1877, Roatan’s banana production was in full bloom when the visiting US Consul, Richard Burchard, wrote in 1884 that almost every hectare of cultivable soil on the island was planted with bananas. He noted that a four hectare parcel of land could be purchased for $250. The only equipment needed was a machete for clearing brush, weeding, and cutting the fruit, and a sharpened stick for planting the seeds. A small farm of 3,000 plants could expect a profit of $1,500 the first year and from $3,000 to $5,000 in successive years. This was big money at the time.

D’Antoni’s chief contact on the island was an Englishman called Bill Collins, who taught him the rudiments of banana selection and grading. The main collection and purchasing agents were Sam and Bessie Warren of Coxen Hole. Everything ran well for five years and for faster deliveries the Vacarros started chartering Norwegian flagged steamers. Unfortunately, the islanders knew nothing about soil rotation and the need of large quantities of nitrogen to fertilize the plants. The quality and size of the fruit started to decline, and in1904 Collins persuaded D’Antoni to shift the entire operation to the mainland.

It was first proposed to build the company headquarters at El Porvenir, but when the teetotal mayor of the town heard that it would be the hub for a railway, he vetoed the idea on account of the fact that it would bring alcohol and other vices to the town. Instead of El Porvenir becoming “La Bella Novia de Honduras,” (the beautiful bride of Honduras) the honor went to La Ceiba. Things progressed well, until 1910, when President Davilla imposed a 5 cent per stem tax on bananas and a 2 cent tax on imported railway equipment. This incensed the United Fruit Company who, in cahoots with former President Manuel Bonilla, devised a plot backed by $500,000 to overthrow Davilla. Over one hundred mercenaries assembled in New Orleans and sailed in the steamboat ‘The Hornet’ in December 1910 in order to topple the government. Their first target was Coxen Hole, Roatan. [To Be Continued…]

Pitt’s father, Thomas “Diamond” Pitt, had worked for the East India Company in Calcutta and had come into the possession of an extremely valuable 410 carat diamond, “The Regent”. It weighed close to four ounces and made Pitt a hefty sum of £135,000. In 1732, using his inheritance from the diamond, William, then age 37, founded a wood cutting settlement on the Miskito Coast. His fortunes further improved, when he rescued a beautiful Spanish noblewoman from a shipwreck. They married and her connections to influential businessmen and politicians in Tegucigalpa allowed Pitt to start a lucrative smuggling business. The colony thrived on smuggling and on the export of hardwoods, turtle shell, plant medicines, sugar and sarsaparilla.

A census taken in 1769 showed the town to have 200 settlers of white or mixed origin, 600 black slaves and around 3,000 Mosquito Indians. The town was twice the size of the other two towns of importance on the coast, Trujillo and Puerto Caballos, and boasted two shipyards and 12 lumber mills. That year alone over 800,000 board feet of mahogany, 10,000 pounds of turtle shell, and 200,000 pounds of sarsaparilla were exported to London and New York. All of this illegal commerce came to the attention of King Charles of Spain who ordered the trespassers to be expelled.

The colony thrived on smuggling and on the export of hardwoods

On April 13,1781, Galvez, accompanied by 800 soldiers from Roatan and 600 from Trujillo sailed for Black River. The area was mostly abandoned as the British and their Miskito allies had left to assist a young captain, Horatio Nelson, in his disastrous mission to invade Nicaragua. The meager force of 20 soldiers manning the defenses of Fort Dalling fled into the jungle.

Galvez knew that the British would return, and waited for them. Upon hearing of the loss of Black River, the Governor of Jamaica sent a 500 man relief force of Jamaican Rangers. They joined up with members of the Roatan and Black River Volunteer Militia, led by Captains Richard Hoare and James Ferral of Roatan, and their Miskito mercenaries. A force of 1,300 men arrived back in Black River to find the Spanish forces depleted with 400 men dead to tropical disease, snake bites, and alligators. The Spanish were soon defeated in a rout, losing 120 men to Miskito sniper archers. The last 23 officers and 715 men surrendered giving up ships, 33 cannons, and three Royal Standards. The men were shipped back to Omoa, under oath not to take up arms again against the British, and the town returned to normal commerce.

In 1786, Britain and Spain signed the Convention of London where Britain relinquished its control over the Miskito Coast in exchange for rights to settle Belize. 2,650 British settlers left Black River for Belize and Jamaica. The town was formally handed over to the Spanish by William Pitt’s grandson, William Pitt Lawrie.

The town of Black River boasted some fine houses and hence the Spaniards renamed it Palacios (Palaces) and 240 settlers arrived from the Canary Islands to re-colonize the town. The Spanish forbade any trading with the Miskitos, and this, combined with the new colonists total lack of knowledge of agriculture, caused the town to fail completely.

The final nail in the coffin came on the dawn hours of September 3, 1800, when the Miskito general Perquin Tempest silently paddled down the river by canoe accompanied by 200 warriors. The Miskitos killed every Spaniard they could find and only 80 survivors managed to flee to Trujillo, leaving the community abandoned for the next century.

The story begins in 1675, when a slave boat loaded with a human cargo of Ibo tribes people from the Bight of Benin crashed on rocks off Saint Vincent. Over 400 blacks made it ashore. There they were rescued and integrated into the existing Carib society. By 1710, it was estimated that some 5,000″Black Caribs” inhabited one side of the island. Several thousand “Red Caribs,” who had not intermixed lived on the other side. The blacks called themselves Garinuga meaning “proud and brave people,” and their beloved adopted island was known as Yurumein.

Things were to change drastically for the islanders when, in 1763, Saint Vincent was awarded by the French to the British in the Treaty of Paris. The Caribs and Garifuna moved to the north shores of the island where they were welcomed by French sugar cane planters, from whom the Garifuna adopted many French words. They also embraced Catholicism and the French counting system. The British settled on the south shore of the island, where they established their capital, Kingstown.

British were forced to sign a peace treaty with the Garifuna, the first treaty signed with a native population

An uneasy peace lasted for 11 years, until the British attempted a full scale invasion to control the entire island. It was repelled by a Garifuna army led by a charismatic and determined Chief, Joseph Satuye. The British were forced to sign a peace treaty with the Garifuna, the first treaty signed with a native population in the Americas. And like many other treaties that the British signed, it would soon be broken.

Tension between the Garifuna and British mounted until 1795, when the Garifuna grew tired of the petty bullying and ridiculous laws and taxes of the British. Satuye, now in his late 40s, led a rebellion to finally kick the British off the island. His campaign was supported by French military aid and was a total success. Garifuna and French forces soon occupied most of the island and were poised to take Kingstown.

Unbeknownst to the rebels, a huge British relief force under the command of General Abercrombie, arrived to squash the rebellion and attacked them at night on Dorsetshire Hill, overlooking Kingstown. Taken by complete surprise, the Garifuna were routed and Satuye was shot and killed.

Satuye’s reputation for fighting the British for 26 years remains impressive to this day. Satuye is the spiritual leader of all Garifuna around the world, their National Ballet Company in New York is named after him, and he is the only national hero on the island of Saint Vincent.

Despite Satuye’s death, it took the British another year to subdue and round up the remaining 5,000 Garifuna. The new governor of the island, Sir Thomas Young had lost his sugar cane estates in the fighting and had also amassed millions of pounds of gambling debts. To offset these losses, it was decided to remove the Garifuna from the island to make way for new plantations.

The Garifuna were initially kept in camps on the tiny island of Balliceaux, where over half of them died from the pitifully unsanitary conditions and lack of medicines. In January 1797,it was decided to ship them to the island of Roatan, where the British hoped they could be used as indentured agricultural workers.

The pirate became infuriated when he discovered that the two Spanish boats anchored in the bay, which he presumed to be loaded with valuable indigo, were in fact empty. The cruel Van Hoorn murdered the entire garrison of the fort, as well as most of the Trujillo’s population. He didn’t stop there and burned Trujillo to the ground.

After this latest outrage, the Spanish deemed the town indefensible against foreign attacks and abandoned it. The northeast coast of Honduras became virtually abandoned by the Spanish crown. The Spanish would not return to this part of Honduras for almost a hundred years.

Without troublesome Spanish interference, the British, Dutch, and French , solidified their settlements and trading posts on the Bay Islands and along the Miskito shore all the way to what is today Costa Rica. The British took advantage and established two fully equipped military forts. One was at Roatan’s Old Port Royal, improved by stones taken from fort in Trujillo. The other one was built at a prosperous sugar cane and mahogany logging town known as the Black River Settlement, 80 miles east of Trujillo.

The soldiers had little to do except to go hunting and fishing, as can be evinced from a menu from the 3rd Buff’s regimental dinner in Black River in 1770. On the menu were: calipash (a turtle delicacy), warree or wild pig steaks, broiled Indian rabbit, armadillo curry, barbaqued monkey; turtle soup, roasted antelope, giant mullet, smoked peccary, parrot, and stewed hicatee (a type of river turtle).

Soon the pirate’s idyllic lifestyle would come to an end. In 1779, with the American war of independence raging and all available British troops sent to fight in that campaign, the Spanish decided that the weakened British were worth attacking. They set out to expel the pirates from the Bay Islands and Miskito bases once and for all.

An army of 1600 men, including 200 battle hardened storm troopers assembled in Guatemala City under the command of the governor of Guatemala and Honduras, 57 year old Matias de Galvez. On December 17,1782 the expeditionary force began their long march to Trujillo.

British, Dutch, and French , solidified their settlements and trading posts on the Bay Islands

They reached Olanchito by February the following year and took the old Indian trail known as La Culebrina- the little snake, over the mountains. Reaching the Bay of Trujillo, they spent three days resting up in a place still known as Campamento, before attacking the town. Trujillo was empty as the small British army contingent there had prudently fled to Roatan upon hearing of the Spaniards approach.

The British sailed north and joined the small garrison of sixty soldiers under the command of Colonel Dalrymple at Old Port Royal. Here they awaited the Spanish attack.

It was not long in coming. The Spanish formally reoccupied Trujillo for the first time in 99 years. They secured the town’s defenses by manning the fort with 1,000 men. The remaining 600 men set sail for Roatan on March 15,1783 in three frigates: Santa Matilde, Antiope and Santa Cecilla.

Despite being outnumbered by eight men to one, Dalrymple initially vowed to fight to the death. However after a two day cannon bombardment that had reduced his fort to rubble and knocked out his only cannons, he was given the ultimatum of Deguello (no quarter) by Galvez and Dalrymple surrendered on March 18. The Spaniards spread out all over Roatan capturing runaway slaves, destroying farms, crops and torching any homes they found. In total some 500 dwellings were raised to the ground.

On March 21, 1783 the 81 surviving British soldiers and 135 settlers, were transported to Havana, Cuba as prisoners of war. Their boats, livestock, weapons, tools and furniture were shipped back to Trujillo as prizes of war. The 300 captured slaves were auctioned off in Havana.

The total cost of the invasion of Roatan was minimal. The Spanish had two men killed and four wounded, and the British suffered two dead and two wounded.

Galvez next turned his attention to “the tiny thorn in the foot of the Spanish empire,” the Black River settlement. That would prove to be a much harder nut to crack.

The Paya spoke a Macro Chibchen dialect, which was used throughout Central America and as far south as present day Colombia and Venezuela. Into the Paya language hundreds of Nahuatl words from Mexico brought there by Toltec Indians were incorporated.

Many Paya words are still in everyday use in Honduras. The word “champa,” for example, meaning house or hut; the word “Zipote” and “Chiwina,” both meaning young child. “Zacate” meaning grass. The Paya words for mosquito and sandfly are “Zancudo” and “Jejene.” Our word in English, hammock comes from the Nahuatl word “hamaca” as is their word for canoe “cayuga,” and hurricane is derived from “huracan.”

My favorite Paya word still in use today is “Macanazo,” meaning a good beating, which originates from the Toltec word for war club: “Macana.” Other Nahuatl words still in use, are “tomate,” “avocate” and “potato.”

The Paya lived in settlements of 100-500 people, led by a cacique or chief, assisted by a shaman for spiritual consultation. They tended to avoid living close to the ocean as their dwellings consisted of platforms built on poles, with a thatched roof or “manaca” and woven walls. The structures were too flimsy to withstand serious storms.

Paya words for mosquito and sandfly are ‘Zancudo’ and ‘Jejene’

They lived a completely self sufficient lifestyle, using food and materials from their natural habitat. Food was in abundance: beans and corn were cultivated as staples and they hunted wild pigs, “quequeo” a large rodent similar to a giant guinea pig (tepesquintle), deer, armadillos, manatees, coatamundis, raccoons or “mapache,” rabbits and wild turkeys. Fish, lobster, turtles and shrimp comprised other food sourced from the sea.

The Ceiba or Kapok tree was and still is sacred to the Paya. It provided a valuable oil for medicines and a workable, lightweight wood for their dug-out canoes. The tough, fluffy Ceiba tree fiber from the tree’s seed pods was used to stuff Paya pillows and mattresses. While it was very durable it was also unfortunately highly flammable.

The Paya also used the Kapok fiber to pad their tunics when hunting and fighting, making it an early form of Kevlar armor. Upon arrival, the Spanish quickly found their heavy metal armor unsuited for the climate and adopted kapok stuffed tunics to replace it.

Roatan and the Bay Islands were an important stopover point for traders bartering goods up and down the Caribbean coast from Mexico to Costa Rica. The Paya traded in gold, silver, ceramics, conch shells, exotic bird plumes and cocoa – a highly profitable plant whose seeds were used as currency. Until 1680s the Spanish paid their Paya workers in cocoa seeds.

The Paya were also involved in establishing trading routes of over 800 miles stretching to the Pacific Ocean. Apart from the threat of natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes and inter- tribal fighting the Paya lived a relatively peaceful and trouble free existence. They remained in tune with their environment. This all changed drastically with the arrival of the colonizing Spanish, who came to Honduras in 1524.