“Trujillo has a great future, and it always will.” The town has always been, on paper at least, a very attractive, well-situated and strategic place. It sits in a large, deep bay; it has access to the fertile Aguán Valley and is a launching point on a natural land route leading to Olancho and Nicaragua.
It is also true that Trujillo has always been a bit out of the way, and other cities in Honduras have been stealing its spotlight. Tela was founded a year before Trujillo. Its status as the capital moved to Comayagua in 1821, soon after independence from Spain.

Trujillo is a time capsule, and that is perhaps why it is so attractive. The town has seen many booms and busts, and today it is quaint, handsome and not overbuilt — a rarity in Honduras. While nearby Tocoa and the Aguán Valley are booming, Trujillo is still a sleepy town where one can stroll safely at any time of day or night. There are no malls, no supermarkets and no Megapacas and the biggest grocery store is still located on the main square. The town’s children play in the streets, unbothered by worries. It is a place that time forgot. 

TRUJILLO AND ROATAN CONNECTION

Columbus was not spared the embarrassment.

PUNTA CASTILLA

Punta Castilla, or Punta Caxinas, just 21 kilometers north of Trujillo, is an extremely important place in the history of the Americas. It is the first place where Christopher Columbus set foot on the North American continent on Aug. 14, 1502. Sadly, neither Hondurans, nor Honduran authorities recognize that fact, let alone celebrate Punta Castilla’s historical importance.

There are interesting parallels with the Venezuelan communist government treatment of Columbus’ legacy in that country. The handsome bronze statue of Columbus that marked the spot where he landed for the first time in South America on August 5, 1498 is no more. Activists destroyed that Paria Peninsula statue in 2004 and all statues dedicated to Christopher Columbus in Venezuela were destroyed in 2009. Sadly Honduras is slowly following the Venezuelan revolutionary example of vandalism and self hatred.

NOT CELEBRATING

On May 18, 2025, Trujillo should have celebrated 500 years since its founding. Still, there was very little fanfare to mark the city’s half a millennium of existence. Making it this far is quite the feat, as the city—for example—is 40 years older than St. Augustine, Florida.

Before the anniversary, many promises were made by Tegucigalpa ministers, but none were kept. Trujillo’s mayor Hector Mendoza was encouraged to leave it up to the central government. Yet, when the date of the celebrations approached, nothing was finished.

Even Christopher Columbus was not spared embarrassment. His four-foot-tall concrete and diminutive statue, located one block from the main plaza, was neither repaired nor properly disposed of. The great navigator’s “midget” bust remained missing a head and a hand. No one bothered to invest a bit of money to even rudimentarily repair the statue ahead of the town’s anniversary.

Trujillo’s central park paving wasn’t finished, and the park’s gazebo wasn’t constructed. The entrance gate to the city wasn’t built, nor was a new dock on the shore. Xiomara Castro, president of the country, failed to show up— let alone send anyone of consequence to represent the Tegucigalpa authorities. The most important officials were from the local Red Cross and the army. Ironically, perhaps, the guest of honor was Moonup Sung, ambassador of South Korea.

There was a rumor that the King of Spain might show up.

While some might see incompetence in this, others see a hint of malice and even hatred. The lack of appreciation for 500 years of Catholic sacraments, civilization, written language, law and education is beyond perplexing. Sadly, Honduran authorities promote ideologically driven hatred of Christianity, Spain, European culture, and the halfhearted celebrations in Trujillo were yet another example of that phenomenon.

According to Jon Thompson, an English amateur historian and a 30-year resident of Trujillo, at one point there was a rumor that the king of Spain might show up for the occasion. While King Felipe VI had plenty of more enjoyable activities on his calendar, he wisely stayed away from a place where his presence would not be welcome.

500 YEARS EARLIER

On May 3, 1524, the feast day of the holy Cross, Tela became Honduras’ first city. Triunfo de la Cruz, as the settlement was originally called beat Trujillo by almost exactly one year.

In 1525, after declaring his loyalty to Hernán Cortés, Francisco de las Casas decided to return to Mexico but left his deputy, Juan López de Aguirre, to establish a settlement in Honduras. De Aguirre was not happy with Puerto Cortés and traveled east to Trujillo.

Ultimately de Aguirre left the task of founding its first capital, Trujillo, to his deputy, Juan de Medina. On May 18, 1525, the settlement of Trujillo—named after a town in the province of Cáceres, Spain—was founded. Medina became Trujillo’s first mayor.

A few years later, in 1532, Trujillo obtained the status of a town, and in 1539 its church was declared a cathedral by Pope Pius II. Bishop Cristóbal de Pedraza became Honduras’ first bishop.

ROOTLESS PIRATES

In the mid-1500s, Trujillo became a gold and silver depot for mines in Honduras’ interior. There was a security problem, as the lack of sufficient population made the port an easy target for pirates attempting to enrich themselves by raiding Spanish ships and settlements.

The threat of Dutch and English pirates incentivized the Spanish to construct Trujillo’s Santa Bárbara Fort. The pirate raids in the Caribbean were part of the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), a primarily religious conflict in Europe. The pirates often made it their life’s work to raid Catholic, be it Spanish or Portuguese, ports and destroy ships.

As part of the war against Spain, the Dutch West India Company instructed pirate Jan Janszoon to sack Trujillo and possibly intercept the Spanish silver fleet there. In July 1633, Janszoon attacked Trujillo and burned two-thirds of the houses covered by palms. The governor of Trujillo paid 20 pounds of silver as ransom for the pirates to leave.

Pirates based on Roatan raided Trujillo several times in fact, causing death, destruction, economic downturns and crisis. English pirate, William Jackson, sacked Trujillo in 1643. He arrived with 16 ships and 1,500 men and took the city without much of a fight.

In the 1600s, the nearby Bay Islands had no Spanish settlers whatsoever, and the Paya Indians living there were coerced into helping the pirates with provisions, careening their ships, and logistics. As a result, Spanish authorities made the decision to resettle the Paya Indians who lived in the Bay Islands to Trujillo and later to Río Dulce, Guatemala.

GARIFUNA AND WALKER

For Trujillo, the best part of 1700s were largely uneventful. That changed in 1797, when three ships departed the island of Saint Vincent carrying thousands of Garifuna as cargo. The Black Caribs had just lost a war with the British and were considered too rebellious to manage in the eastern Caribbean. Only half of the roughly 5,000 Garifuna survived the voyage across the Caribbean.

Trujillo found itself as a constant target of attacks.

The ships with the conquered Garifuna stopped in Jamaica and eventually arrived on Roatan to abandon the Black Caribs there. The Spanish quickly found out about the British actions, and as Roatan was not able to support such a number of new arrivals, the vast majority of the Garifuna were transported to Trujillo.

Trujillo became the epicenter for the dissemination of the Garifuna and their culture along the coasts of Central America. In the 1840s, Garifuna communities that allied themselves with Spanish loyalists, moved east and west of Trujillo. They eventually settled as far as Belize to the west and to the east in Pearl Lagoon, Nicaragua.

In 1821 Trujillo lost its status as the capital of Honduras. The capital of the newly formed republic was transferred to Comayagua, and eventually to Tegucigalpa. This date marked yet another period of decline for the town.

In 1860, Trujillo had a bout with another troublemaker, this time an American. As Great Britain was preparing to surrender the Bay Islands back to Honduras, a group of Roatanians invited buccaneer William Walker to come to the island and help them preserve their independence from Honduras.

Representing some anti-Honduran Bay Islanders, Roatan resident Uwins Elwyn traveled to New Orleans in March 1860 to look for Walker and invite him to come to the island. Elwyn essentially asked for his help in reversing the upcoming transfer of the archipelago from Great Britain to Honduras. As Walker was absent, Elwyn met with his deputy, Callender Fayssoux.

Elwyn proposed that Walker’s filibusters would travel to Roatan at their own expense, but once there, their expenses would be covered by the islanders. The subsequent plan was to help Walker with his invasion of Nicaragua

The proposal quickly materialized into concrete action. Walker sent some of his filibusters —essentially soldiers of fortune— to Roatan in June. He even stayed on the island from June 16 to 21, 1860. As the British caught wind of the possible damage his actions could cause to the U.S.-British agreement on returning the islands to Honduras, tensions rose.

As British authorities realized that the American was up to no good, Walker left Roatan for Cozumel. One way to look at it is that it was Roatanians who brought about Walker’s ultimate demise in Trujillo just a few months later.

On Aug. 5, 1860, Walker landed his ship with 91 filibusters near Trujillo and attempted to take the city. He failed and, after a chase, was eventually arrested by British navy officer Nowell Salomon.

The British surrendered Walker to Honduran authorities and he was tried by Honduran military court on charges of piracy and “filibusterism.” Walker, 36, was executed on September 12, 1860 by order of president José Santos Guardiola. William Walker, a prominent freemason, was buried in Trujillo’s Catholic cemetery.

BANANAS AND CABBAGES

When bananas became a booming industry in Central America in the 1890s, Trujillo also began to thrive. It became a refuge for American criminals fleeing justice in the North. Some were famous, others infamous.

In 1896, Trujillo hosted William Sydney Porter, known by his pen name O. Henry, when he fled justice in Texas, where he was charged with embezzlement. He was not the only American taking advantage of the lack of an extradition treaty between Honduras and the United States. His drinking companion in town was Al “Alphonso” Jennings, an Oklahoma lawyer turned train robber. They both hid in Trujillo, spending their time drinking and adventuring.

O. Henry began writing his book of short stories, “Cabbages and Kings,” while in Trujillo. His most well-known contribution to Honduras was coining the phrase “banana republic,” which is still used to describe the country and, in fact, many other countries around the world.

“It was upon this hint that the minister of war acted, executing a rare piece of drollery that so enlivened the tedium of executive session. In the constitution of this small, maritime banana republic was a forgotten section that provided for the maintenance of a navy,” O. Henry wrote in “Cabbages and Kings.”

From the 1890s onward, Trujillo was a banana town. The boom lasted about half of a century, but come to an abrupt stop. Banana operations were scaled down there in the 1930s, as United Fruit’s Castilla Division, which grew Gros Michel bananas, closed down operations due to Panama disease that decimated the region’s banana crops.

World War II came to Trujillo’s rescue when the U.S. built a small Navy base at nearby Punta Castilla. The Americans also established a seaplane base there. As the war subsided, Trujillo lingered on into the second half of the 20th century.

The 21st century for Trujillo was a roller coaster of emotions, expectations and, ultimately, disappointments. In 2001, the government approved the Honduran construction of the world’s largest vessel—a one-mile-long floating city for 90,000 residents. The 25-story-tall Freedom Ship was estimated to cost $8.5 billion. Its construction in the deep bay was expected to change Trujillo forever.

That project eventually fizzled out.
Around 2009, there were plans for Trujillo to become Honduras’ first charter city. President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Sosa, the country’s leader at the time and a native of Trujillo, strongly promoted the idea. However the concept of a charter city was not realized in Trujillo during the 2010s, but instead on Roatan with the implementation of Economic Development and Employment Zone (ZEDE) laws and the establishment of Próspera in the 2020s.

There were attempts to turn Trujillo into a minor cruise ship destination in the mid-2010s. The town was marketed as “Banana Coast” and promoted to cruise ships with a planned $50,000 seafront shopping center. The project ultimately faded.

In 1890s bananas became the boom industry.

Then there is the idea of building a housing community for retired Canadians looking for tranquility and warm weather. The project is called Alta Vista and is the brainchild of Randy Jorgensen, who made his fortune in the pornographic industry and promoting vice in Canada. Jorgensen has been in conflict, in and out of court, with the Garifuna, who claim that the land he acquired for his project was sold illegally.

The land owned by Canada’s so-called porn king was occupied by Garifuna activists, some armed with machetes and allegedly bused in from outside the area. The situation grows more complex from there. The Garifuna activists are affiliated with the Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña, or OFRANEH, and are believed to be supported by more powerful interests often overlooked. OFRANEH receives funding and training from organizations such as the Open Society Foundations. Larger global players also appear to be connected to developments in the small town of Trujillo.

“Trujillo has a great future, and it always will.” That potential is different from what many people think it is or would like it to be. It is a beautiful, quiet place soaked in history and contradictions. It is a place that time almost forgot. There are certainly more booms and busts ahead for the 500-year-old city by Trujillo Bay.

After it sunk in late 1958, Marjorie E. was one of Roatan’s biggest wrecks for decades, and a prominent landmark at the entrance of the Oak Ridge channel.

Oak Ridge Cay resident Miguel de la Cruz Pérez, now 100 years old, was a seaman on the ship the night it sank. He enlisted as a merchant seaman in 1956 and had worked for two years on Marjorie E. before her fateful voyage.

The ship was on her typical route between Galveston, Texas and Guayaquil, Ecuador where she had a contract to pick up bananas for shipment back to the US.

Captain George Cooper and several other crew members were from Roatan, so they planned to stop for a couple days in Oak Ridge. Victor Cooper, Daniel Stanley, Nieland Moore, Flowers, Landon Gaugh, Rex Gaugh, and Arnaldo Valladares were among the islanders in the crew. Captain Cooper was even bringing his wife and three children for a Christmas visit. Neither the boat owners nor the insurance company were informed about the ship’s stop on Roatan.

Majorie E was in dire straits.

Marjorie E. docked in Coxen Hole to clear immigration and paperwork with the port captain. After delays, the ship left Coxen Hole just as the sun was setting. She sailed full steam into the eastern wind and waved towards Oak Ridge.

There are still people who remember witnessing the accident from the shore. Mrs. Elana Cooper was seven years old when she watched the ship crash into the reef. “There was a heavy north eastern wind and rain,” said Mrs. Cooper. Several islander families were expecting to see their loved ones before Christmas, and excitement was in the air. “I remember seeing the light from the boat. Coming into harbor is very dangerous,” said Cooper. “Something appeared to go wrong and the ship hit the reef.”

As Marjorie E. made the turn to the Oak Ridge channel, the crew realized the rudder suffered a hydraulic failure. Majorie E was in dire straits. Capt. Cooper tried to steer the vessel using two of her propellers, but the maneuver was done in vain. The heavy eastern wind and current were pushing Marjorie E straight into the reef. “She’s going on shore! She’s going on shore!” Cooper remembers her mother and aunts screaming.

Captain Cooper ordered a secondary anchor to be lowered to Marjorie E.’s only rescue boat and hauled east into the waves. Her crew used a wrench to tighten the rope and tried to pull the ship off the reef. This task was Sisyphean as the ship was simply too heavy, and was being pushed hard by the wind and the waves.

Still, being practically empty, Marjorie E was light enough that she pushed right on top of the reef where sharp coral made a hole right in the engine room floor. As the water poured in, the generators seized and the ship went dark. Islander Rex Gaugh, Marjorie E’s first engineer, simply didn’t have any options.

Two rope ladders were lowered on the ship’s side and De La Cruz jumped overboard with his duffle bag full of clothes. He was waist deep in the water and could stand on the coral. None of the crew was hurt.

“They never paid a cent,” he said of the insurance company.

On that fateful night, Roatan gained both a large wreck and two new islanders: Mexican sailor Miguel de la Cruz and Candelario Ventura Palacios. Both would go on to meet their wives on the island.

Soon after Marjorie E’s sinking, rumors began to swirl that it was intentionally sunk by the boat’s owner in order to cash in on insurance money. The testimony of witnesses points towards an accident. De La Cruz recalls that the boat’s owners were very upset and that they never collected any insurance money. “They never paid a cent,” he said of the insurance company. The insurance company claimed that Roatan was an unscheduled stop, and therefore not covered by their policy.

The imposing ship didn’t block the Oak Ridge harbor entrance, but for decades it served as a large and auspicious marker for vessels passing through.

Islanders helped themselves to whatever they could find on the abandoned ship. “They drove her up and sold her for scrap,” remembers Mrs. Cooper, who has a couple white porcelain serving plates from the boat. Her uncle Harvey had a light from the ship that he turned into a lamp. Someone else ended up with the ship’s bell.

Truman Jones, an island seaman, assisted in retrieving Marjorie E.’s anchor in April 1967. It was cleaned up and used by The Hybur, the first metal boat owned by the Hyde family.

“We all grew up swimming and diving around her”

Time, salt, water, and wind has since eaten away at the ship’s metal carcass. Marjorie E. eventually broke into two pieces with only her bow remaining visible on the reef. Both Hurricane Francelia in 1969 and Hurricane Fifi in 1974 pounded the Marjorie E. into smaller pieces that then sunk into the coral and off the reef’s wall. “Every time we had a hurricane, it would break her up even more,” said Mrs. Cooper. “One of the hurricanes even moved her bow.” It took about 20 years for the ship to completely disappear below the water’s surface.

American expat Erick Anderson used to snorkel around the wreck in 1966. Back then, her stern had sunk below the surface and her bow remained above water, next to the reef wall. “We all grew up swimming and diving around her,” remembers Cooper. There was a “giant engine,” and the metal carcass that was known to house the biggest Moray eels.

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.