Mrs. Catherine caught her first fish in 1961 — a 12-pound Black Snapper she hooked in the Barabareta channel. Now, at 97 years old, she remains the oldest fisherman of the Bay Islands and continues to fish with her grandson, Aaron.
World War II took a heavy toll of merchant vessels in the Caribbean. Elder & Fyffes, operating from Jamaica and Belize to England, lost 16 ships out of its fleet of 22.
Honduras provided vital fruit produce to US markets that became a target of German submarines. In the early months of World War II, Germany set about attacking allied merchant shipping in the Caribbean.
Despite ongoing political intrigues, during the outbreak of World War 1, I saw Roatán and the rest of Honduras in a relatively peaceful state, untroubled by events on the other side of the Atlantic.
Governments need enemies in order to rally the common people behind them and if the governments don’t have an enemy, one often has to be conjured up.
For over half a century Honduras was the biggest exporter of bananas to the United States, shipping over 12 million stems per year. The peak production decades for Roatan and The Bay Islands were the 1920s and 1930s, but it all started in 1876.