“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.

How Roatan Communicates With Itself

Roatan is growing in leaps and bounds. With dozens of commercial centers about to open for business, the signage business is booming as well. Signs and signage are becoming more elaborate in order to help us orientate ourselves and recognize places we are attempting to locate.
The oldest surviving sign on the island is an 1898 lifeboat marking the name of its mother ship ‘Snyg.’ It adorns a two-foot piece of wood at a home in Coxen Hole.
The first signs on the island were simple painted wood announcing a business to customers that already knew about it. Even today, some islanders still rely on word of mouth to the point that they don’t have a business name displayed next to their establishment.
The island went through an evolution of the sign design business over the last four decades. In the 1980s there were wooden signs with painted, stenciled acrylic letters. In the 1990s, super large signs came with 3D and fiberglass. In the 2000s PVC materials arrived on the island, and in the 2010s LED and photo-op artwork proliferated. In the last couple years, LED and 3D art is flourishing.
The sophistication and scale of signage on the island has grown rapidly. The signage has become much more three dimensional, elaborate, and colorful. The signs increased in scale and scope. There are now half a dozen “I love Roatan” 3D signs as tall as a person; photo-op signs with picture frames 12 feet tall; angel wings signs and a dozen oversize beach chair signs sponsored by different hotels.

Mr. Fausto’s Servicolor

Ávila begun by painting houses and assisting Pali Castillo, the one professional sign maker the island had at the time. Castillo would paint the names of fishing boats on their hulls and paint names on stores on wooden planks in Coxen Hole. Roatan’s biggest town was not exactly Times Square, and the sign business was in its infancy.

Ávila begun by painting houses and assisting Pali Castillo.

Castillo made signs for the Casa Warren in Coxen Hole, and different fishing boats around the island. In the 1980s and 90s, Roatan signs were simple and often large.

Ávila remembers creating a 20 x 12 foot sign in Los Fuertes announcing the Executive Inn hotel. “Now you can’t have signs bigger than three by four feet,” says Ávila, who is energetic and smiles when he speaks about his work.

As young man, Ávila learned his stencil technique when Romeo Silvestri, a French Harbour business man, convinced him to go on his own. Soon Ávila was making a sign for his wife’s beauty salon in Coxen Hole. It was 1991 and the island was just starting to grow.

In 1992 Ávila set up his Servicolor sign business and worked out a small wooden building on the side of the road by “el triángulo” in Coxen Hole. Ávila prefers working on marine plywood, painting, or airbrushing it with acrylic paints, then sealing the paint with polyurethane so it could last 10, 15 or even 20 years.

Over time, Ávila has worked on signs for some of the island’s biggest businesses: Anthony’s Key, Coco View, Las Palmas, and Port of Roatan. “I worked on this for two months,” says Ávila about a three by four foot welcome sign he built and painted at Anthony’s Key Resort. The sign shows in great detail each one of the resort’s bungalows and trees. He painted the original name of “Oso” transport ship back in the early 2000s.

Today, Ávila’s business is based out of a concrete home on the main street of Coxen Hole. He still creates signage for faithful clients like BICA and Anthony’s Key, and occasionally picks up new ones.

Sign Maker Gessell

Gessell Brousek stumbled into the sign making business by chance. While his father was building high end furniture for houses on Roatan, Brousek followed suit with a complementary business of his own: sign making. “I can draw and I can paint, I am artistic and I am creative – I can do signs,” recalls Brousek about his decision to go into the sign making business.

It all started with one developer in 1995. “John Edwards called and said: I need some signs” recalls Brousek. It was his first commission for signage, one he created for Lighthouse Meridian. West Bay was pretty much undeveloped back then, and there was only Foster’s, Tabyana, and Mayan Princess with beach front units built. Edwards was becoming the island’s biggest developer and needed a constant supply of signage for his projects, which included Mayan Princess, Parrot Tree, Century 21, and others.

Soon after his first commission, word travelled fast. Buccaneer wanted a sign, Gio’s wanted a sign. Word of mouth delivered a steady and growing stream of clients. Times were uncomplicated back then. Brousek did a sketch for the prospective client and got himself jobs. “[Developer] John [Edwards] was a constant customer for 20 years,” Brousek remembers.

Brousek works primarily in marine plywood, fiberglass, and in construction pine. “We have to work with something that withstands the weather and the sun,” he says. He works under the name of the company his father started: Maple Leaf. The Brousek family moved to the island from Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1993.

There is no plan. I just know how I want it to look.

Some of his signs survived well over a decade, like his Tabyana “stroll sign” for example. Others, like the Coco View sign, he renews every few years to give it more life and shine. The Iguana Grill was his first 3D sign, and Brousek also created the iconic Twisted Toucan sign for Roatan’s best know bar of the 1990s.

After the government imposed lockdowns of 2020, his business scaled down. “I simplified a lot after COVID,” says Brousek. “Most of the time I work by myself.” The Canadian sign maker works from a workshop that is adjacent to his home in First Bight.

His workshop is an open space covered from the sun, with no walls and surrounded by groves of banana trees. It is a space full of saws, fans, compressor, stools, and work tables. He is intuitive, and has developed the knowledge of his materials and tools over three decades. “I just create it. There is no plan. I just know how I want it to look and go along and make it work,” says Brousek, smiling.

The signage business keeps him busy and his 3D installations have become bigger and more elaborate. He builds photo op structures such as beach chairs, and has ventured into sculptures and industrial art. He is making a fish school installation for a West Bay hotel.

Roatan’s tourist attraction owners constantly think of ways to create some interesting sculptures and artworks. Brousek created several challenging sculptures for Little French Key: a statue of Neptune standing in the sea, a giant seahorse swing, and a mermaid seating on a seahorse.

Alex Making Signs

For many island businesses, the importance of signage cannot be overemphasized. “Your sign is your main identification,” says Alex Montiel. Montiel’s Multiservicios del Caribe sign company works with a variety of materials: PVC, acrylic, vinyl cuttings, fiberglass, fome board. He develops the idea, concept, and design, and then manufactures signs commissioned to him throughout the island. Some of Multiservicio’s clients include iconic hotels and large island businesses: Ibagari, Infinity Bay, Pristine Bay, Sun Corporation, and Roatan Municipality.

Montiel moved to the island in 1997. In 2000, he started his graphics design company Multiservicios del Caribe. Signage was initially a small part of his business, but it steadily grew.

Montiel tries to stay ahead of the many technological advances in the industry. He attended trade shows about signage multiple times, such as Tradeshow Signs of the Americas. “We were using LED lights before La Ceiba did,” says Montiel about Roatan being at the cutting edge of signage design in this part of Honduras.

Multiservicios was the first company to start making LED lit signs. The first LED sign was ACE Hardware in 2013. Multiservicios built the iconic “I heart Roatan” sign in front of Petrosun in Flowers Bay. “That sign started trending, says Montiel. “It was preceding signs like that in La Ceiba, Tela, Guanaja.”

One of his clients is Stephanie Woods, owner of The Cove restaurant in Palmetto Bay. “Alex has been the go-to sign maker for over a decade. [he is always] keeping up with new, longer lasting quality materials,” says Woods.

While they do graphic design and paper printing, sign making is the most creative and challenging aspect of the Multiservicios del Caribe undertakings. “We love the radical and crazy ideas people bring us. We love to be challenged,” says Monitel.

His shop does custom designs and 3D installations. According to Alex, choosing materials is sometimes the biggest challenge. Moniel says PVC is not the best choice for big signs. It is too heavy and not so rigid. PVC, however, is an affordable, long lasting material. “We can mimic any type of material – copper, rusted metal – with PVC,” says Alex. “You have to touch it to tell.” PVC can last up to 20 years, and while they look like wood, they can last longer. “All the signs you see in Disney, amusement park signs – they are PVC,” says Montiel. It can last decades if protected from elements… Rain, sun, wind.

We love the radical and crazy ideas people bring us.

Montiel uses automotive paints for a smoother, easier to maintain surface as well as for a more lasting effect. “Over 20 years we have been trying and testing all kinds of materials, and PVC is the one that lasts the longest,” says Alex. “We use ACM – Alubond, a compound that is a combination of PVC and aluminum. Alubond is a brand of aluminum composite that is non-combustible, non-toxic, and odorless. Neon LED is the latest signage material that Montiel began using.

The island has a natural beauty; bad, poorly made signage can take away from that splendor. Montiel is conscious of the visual pollution that is increasing on Roatan. “I am against billboards,” says Montiel. “I am 100 percent against visual pollution.”

There are several other craftsmen making signs on Roatan. Painter Dennis Luma also creates signage. Luma is based in West End, and is more of an artist that is happy to create signs when things are slow.

The idea for the Dolphin Program at AKR came to Julio Galindo, the resort’s owner, via an idea made by a couple of the guests in 1987. “We made a trip to a facility in Gulfport to look at their dolphins,” says Julio Galindo. Galindo began the program with two other partners, but by 1993 he bought them out. “Its [dolphin program] been good for business,” says Galindo.

The Honduran government permits needed to capture the wild dolphins was not easy to obtain. “It took a while to get permission to do this. The government wanted to know what we were up to,” says Eldon Bolton, Director of Roatan Institute for Marine Sciences. In 1989 Eldon was hired by AKR to locate, catch, and move the bottlenose dolphins to their Sandy Bay facility.

Eldon worked for Marine Animal Productions, a company that amongst other clients supplied the US Navy with bottlenose dolphins for their military program. In early 1980s until 1987 the Mississippi based company was providing dolphins for US clients.

At first it was not even known if the team would be successful at catching bottlenose dolphins. Bottlenose dolphins can be found on three Oceans in the world: Indian, Pacific and Atlantic. They are only absent from the Arctic Ocean. They are plentiful and feel right at home in warm waters off the Honduras’ Caribbean coast.

The key step in catching dolphins in Honduran waters was finding the right location to capture a group of bottlenose dolphins large enough to make it viable in a pen off Roatan. “It took some scouting. We took several boats and stayed several weeks at a time,” says Eldon about locating Honduran coast for the bottlenose dolphins.

The dolphin search focused in areas both east and west of the Trujillo peninsula. Once the team would spot the dolphin pod they would feed the dolphins and using a 1000 foot long net the capture team would encircle the dolphin pod.

The dolphin scouts determined the best location and the way to capture the aquatic mammals. “We would circle a group of animals and try to find a right group. Maybe half a dozen or fewer,” says Eldon. They would run a net forming a big circle or compass around the pod.

Their gear was designed to work in less than 20 feet of water.
The team consisted of 18 dolphin “trappers” that would start in as deep as 40 feet of water and stealthily move the net around the dolphin pod. They would keep the net intact and slowly wring in the whole thing on shore, shallow enough where the crew could stand up and safely manage the dolphins. The entire process would take half-a-day’s time.

Dolphin scouts determined the best location and the way to capture the aquatic mammals.

Each time the animals were then placed on specially designed slings, lifted out of the water, but kept moist and cool. The transfer of the animals between Trujillo to Roatan took four to five hours.

Three different trips were conducted from October 1989 to November 1990. In three capture operations five, three and eventually seven dolphins were caught in this manner. Fifteen bottle nose dolphins were brought in to AKR altogether.

The Dolphins are quite territorial, so it is possible that the three dolphin catches all came from two or even just one pod.

Originally AKR had constructed a dolphin enclosure facility near its museum building. The pen blew down three to four times before it was dismantled and in 2003, replaced by new pens.

In order to help with the beginning of the dolphin facility in the Bay Islands, Marine Animal Productions would send some of their trainers from Mississippi to Roatan do start working with and training the dolphins. “We hired local people right off the bat,” says Eldon. “They began teaching local trainers essentially.”

The AKR dolphin program started with four trainers and five dolphins. The original pen enclosure offered, adjacent bleacher seating and “classic dolphin performance with a commentary.”

All the dolphins from the first 1980s capture died from old age. In 2017, Paya, the last of the original dolphins, who lived up to the venerable dolphin age of 34 died. He was around five when he was caught in 1989.

Out of the 17 dolphins that live in AKR facility in 2023, two females were caught wild. Only two wild caught dolphins remain at the AKR. Gracie was caught in 1998 and Elita was caught in 2003.

The actual number of dolphins has been up and down over the years. In 1998, 2002 and 2003 the AKR went to Bay of Trujillo and Honduran coast to replenish their dolphin stocks. In March 2023 AKR had 17 dolphins: eight males and nine females, including a one year old dolphin. One or two dolphins are born in AKR each year.

While AKR’s dolphin facility is unique in Central America, there are around a dozen dolphin aquariums in Mexico, half a dozen in Cancún alone. AKR has maxed at 32 dolphins. “From the management standpoint that is a nightmare,” says Eldon.

As the dolphins began to reproduce more steadily AKR had more than enough dolphins and even provided other sea mammals facilities with their dolphins. In 2003 AKR provided animals to the Curaçao Sea Aquarium and Ocean World in Dominican Republic. In 2013 they provided dolphins to Nassau Bahamas. AKR helped in designing and sometime staffing those facilities, the influence of AKR on the dolphins is quite considerable.

AKR dolphin facilities are unique because the dolphins are allowed to spend time in the bay. So the animals are familiar with the space outside the pen in case of bad weather and break down. “We don’t have any problems with animals trying to escape,” says Eldon. “If we took the nets down they would not leave the lagoon.”

One male, two mothers and two calves were lost during Hurricane Mitch. The pen holding them disintegrated in the water storm surge and dolphins escaped. “They made their way out of the channel and we never saw them again. We looked all over,” says Eldon. Three of these were wild caught and remembered how to provide for themselves. They most likely made their way to the coast.

According to Eldon the dolphins don’t escape, they are content in the enclosed, but not escape tight facility in Sandy Bay. “I prefer to think that we give them everything that they need, good food and each other” says Teri Bolton, Assistant Director at Roatan Institute for Marine Sciences Honduras. “They have a pod and they are more important to each other than we ever will be.”

The dolphins not only have their physical needs met, they are entertained, stimulated and have enough social interactions to keep them happy. “They have that family structure so there is no need for them to want to leave,” says Teri.

The dolphins have a variety of tasks and activities throughout the day to keep them occupied and entertained. “It’s more complicated than it looks. We are dealing with living, breathing, soulful animals that are much more important to each other than we are to them,” says Teri Bolton.

Every September and October AKR has been offering dolphin therapies for kids with disabilities. Groups of 20 disabled children travel to Roatan every September and October to have twice-a-day interaction sessions with the bottlenose Dolphins at AKR. “I only wish we could do more of that,” says Julio Galindo, about the 25 year old program.

AKR dolphin facility also gets involved in rescue operations from time to time. During Hurricane Mitch, the Bay Islands and especially Guanaja were pounded by ferocious winds causing enormous damage to the reef, and forests of the islands. Many dolphins died, or barely survived. In Guanaja a dolphin washed into a swampy area, unable to swim back to open water. It managed to survive for several days and was spotted by islanders who alerted AKR. Eldon brought the animal to AKR and tried to nurse the bottlenose female back to health for a week, but she was too worn down and wounded to survive. “Its skin was peeling off. It was a bad, bad situation,” says Eldon. “That was the only time we had to put an animal down.”

They have several enclosure pens that are used for housing and training during the day. “We tend to move them around to prevent boredom,” says Eldon. The enclosures range from zero depth at shoreline to 20 feet deep. The biggest dolphin pen is ¾ acre. There are several isolation holding pens that could be used as maternity areas. “Occasionally males are isolated from a newborn baby calf to assure safety of that calf,” says Eldon. “The males can get aggressive, like a lion would.”

AKR dolphin trainers take out their dolphins from their pens on a regular basis. “At the end of the day we draw all the gates down and let our animals run,” says Eldon. “We are very unique in the way we manage our heard.” Only facilities in Curaçao and Bahamas take their bottlenose dolphins out on regular basis. All-in-all the AKR dolphins have one acre of enclosed area to swim in.

Feeding the dolphins and keeping them healthy with good, consistent feed is a key task. The dolphins receive four feedings a day. While a small 12 month dolphin eats as little as two pounds of fish a day, a grown dolphin eats over 30 pounds per day.

As main source of food for the AKR’s bottlenose dolphins is Capelin fish from Newfoundland, Iceland and Norway. The staffs sometime buy juvenile herring from France and occasionally Atlantic herring from North America and Norway. “The prices went sky high in the last five years. 30-40 percent increase in price,” says Eldon. “We are buying feed worldwide.”

Each dolphin is assigned a place on board of how many and what type of fish food it is given during each of four daily feeding sessions. For every five pounds of feed a vitamin tablet is placed in the gills of the fish fed to the dolphins.

Every couple weeks each dolphin’s length and girth is measured to monitor their weight. “The idea is not to over feed them and not to underfeed them,” says Kenly McCoy, one of 12 dolphin caretakers who have been with AKR since 1996.

The AKR dolphins supplement their diet by catching fish and other sea creatures that stray into their pens. They feed on unsuspecting snappers and blue tang. “I have seen them eat lobsters,” says McCoy.

About every three months AKR dolphins have a shipment of food arriving from the US. A specialty supplier in US out of Newport, Rhode Island ships two 20 foot freezer containers via Naviera Hybur. Then the fish, up to 40,000 pounds, is stored in freezers at the AKR’s dolphin facility.

As the AKR facility uses 400 Lbs of fish a day getting local feed for the dolphins has proved difficult. “We tried for years to work with our shrimp fleet because they have a lot of by catch. They have a lot of dead fish that they bring in when they are shrimping,” says Eldon. To make an optimum feed for the dolphins, the entire fish has to be frozen quickly to eliminate the possibility of the intestines beginning to rot.

Dolphins cannot eat gutted fish as that food has not enough nutrients for the sea mammal. According to Eldon, the Roatan shrimp boats are not geared for processing and freezing which creates a health risk for the dolphins that would consume these fish. “They get parasite loads from food they take in,” explains Eldon.

Anthony’s Key Resort facility uses 400 Lbs of fish a day.

AKR runs a variety of educational programs with the dolphins. There is a volunteer program, a six week internship program and a scientist programs at the Dolphin center. “Bottlenose dolphins are the ones we know the most about because we have been exposed to them for the longest time,” says Teri. “It is a very exciting time for research on the dolphins.”

The number and variety of careers associated with dolphin research and keep has multiplied over the last three decades. “You can be in animal care, you can be a lab technician, an educator, a research scientist,” says Terri. “It is a very exciting time because technology has caught up with the dolphins.”

Teri Bolton oversees researchers who come to study dolphin behavior at AKR. There is a strong and ongoing connection of AKR’s dolphin program with several academic institutions. Dolphin observation study has been conducted by Rees Magnasco’s group Lab out of Columbia University and Rockefeller University. Most reputable facilities are also promoting conservation, education, providing opportunities for scientists.

It is a very exciting time for research on the dolphins.

AKR’s dolphin program is host to several scientists and doctoral candidates. One of them is PhD candidate Melissa Voisinet who studies dolphin cognition and communication at Hunter College and Rockefeller University. Voisinet spent many weeks observing the AKR dolphins.

Public display of the dolphins and activities with them provide major economic sources for the upkeep of the dolphins. The bottlenose dolphin is exposed to guests for three to three-and-a-half hour a day.

The twice-a-day dolphin programs at AKR has allowed others to sell island boat tour packages that include a stop-by-the AKR dolphin pens. In high season as many as 17 tourist boats make their way to AKR’s Bailey’s Key. “The noise and fumes are bad for the dolphins,” says Teri. “They need good water, good food and clean air just like we do,” says Eldon.

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.

Five Die in Roatan’s Biggest Air Disaster to Date

The Roatan firemen pulled out the crash victims from the wreck, but only one, a passenger sitting with his back towards the front of the plane was still alive when rescued. Despite many attempts to save his life, the victim died at the Roatan public hospital.

While Roatan does have an emergency center at a public hospital in Coxen Hole, the island lacks a trauma center and specialists capable of stabilizing a patient with vast, or complex internal damage. “We have been fooling ourselves with thinking that we can handle an accident with multiple injured where we couldn’t deal with one,” said Dainie Etches, a Canadian warden on the island who has had assisted in dozens of incidents and mishaps that involved Canadians over the years. Etches says that the construction of the new public hospital in Dixon Cove is moving forward too slowly, and the new hospital is no guarantee that government will properly staff it and equip it. “There isn’t a single orthopedist on the island right now,” said Etches.

Piloting the plane was Patrick Forseth, a 32-year-old Canadian pilot and entrepreneur who lived in Trujillo. Forseth flew multiple times that day departing Trujillo, then flying to Roatan and to Guanaja.  A Canadian Broadcasting Corporation news news report quoted John Enman, a passenger who flew from Trujillo to Roatan that day, saying that Forseth told him during the flight  that “he had been delayed because of mechanical issues – a broken wire from the ignition to the battery, which a mechanic had fixed.”

Forseth picked up four American passengers who arrived from Houston and booked his plane for a flight to Guanaja. Those passengers were:Bradley Post, Robert Miller, Anthony Dubler and Frederick Tepel. The plane took off at 2:15 pm and flew a kilometer heading east.

Mary Russell, who was just a hundred meters from the crash site, reported hearing two backfires and a loud sound of the plane hitting the water. “It looked like there is a bit of smoke on takeoff. Take off looks hard and it [the plane] lifts slowly, then it looks like the engine stopped and almost at the same time the plane lost its lift on the left wing,” described the footage of the crash Patrice Bellemare, a Roatan Dive Shop owner. A video of crash was recorded by a security camera on a cruise ship in Mahogany Bay. Bellmare assisted with the removal of the plane from the crash site.

The incident is being investigated by Mario Carcamo, Chief of the Honduras Investigative Commission of Air Accidents and Incidents. It is not clear what caused the engine to quit, or what happened after that.

The proper technique after loss of engine power is to immediately tilt the airplane down in order to maintain speed and keep the airplane flying. “You are trained in a failure like this to go straight,” said Mike Boden, a 30-year Delta Airlines veteran pilotand Roatan resident. “Keep control is what you are doing.” Another person who was perplexed why an engine failure in these circumstances became such a fatal crash is Larry Forseth, Patrick’s father and veteran Air Canada pilot. “The situation was survivable” Larry Forseth had told the Canadian media. “It is clear that the plane had stalled out with the tail being broken like that,” said Boden. The plane’s chassis completely disintegrated suggesting a great vertical speed right before impact.

Several friends and family testified of that Patrick Forseth repeated training for loss of engine power in the past. “Patrick reacted quickly and got the plane away from a close-to-stall situation,” remembers Edil Mendez a 2018 emergency landing situation when the plane’s landing gear failed to open. “He was a friend, like a brother,” says Mendez who did several med-evac flights from Roatan with Patrick Forseth.

The reasons for engine failure and subsequent airplane flight are unclear. Not out of the question is passenger interference. In 2010 an accident investigation determined that a passenger interfered with the operating of the airplane during a flight near Vancouver Island when passenger interference caused the pilot to lose control of the aircraft, resulting in a crash and death of all four on board. FAA has no recommendations as far as placing passengers that are pilots next to the pilot. There are reports that two of the four passengers knew how to fly but were seated in the back of the plane. The pilot’s preference in small airplanes is to seat heavier passengers up front to better distribute the plane’s weight.

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.