Culture

Four hundred years of visitors, from privateers to cruise ships

Roatan was Spanish, English, empty, Caymanian and British before it was Honduran. The dates, the Garifuna landing of 1797, and why the island speaks English.

Three Garifuna drummers playing on a seafront deck in Punta Gorda, Roatan

By Roatan Lifestyle

Published August 26, 2026 · 13 min read

Last checked 21 October 2026.

Why does Roatan feel different from the rest of Honduras?

Because for most of its recorded history it was claimed, settled or run from somewhere else. The island was fought over by Spain and England for two hundred years, emptied of its first people, repopulated from the Cayman Islands, run as a British colony, and only handed to Honduras in 1861. The English you hear on the street is not a tourism accent. It is what people here have spoken for nearly two centuries.

What are the key dates in Roatan's history?

When	What happened	Source
Before 1502	Islands inhabited by people thought to be related to the mainland Pech (Paya), or by other accounts the Maya, Lenca or Tolupan	Figueroa and Portillo (IHAH)
1502	Columbus reaches Guanaja on his fourth voyage. Not Roatan	Britannica
1500s to 1650	Spanish slave raiding and introduced disease devastate the original population; the last are removed to the mainland in 1650	Figueroa and Portillo (IHAH)
1638	The English Providence Company attempts a settlement on Roatan	British Empire
1642	English buccaneers settle the main islands	Britannica
1650	Spanish forces destroy the English settlement. No permanent settlement on the islands for nearly a century, though ships keep calling	British Empire
1742 to 1782	The British set up a garrisoned outpost at Port Royal in 1742 and hold it on and off until a Spanish expedition takes it in March 1782 and destroys the settlement, which is not rebuilt	British Empire
1797	The British deport the Garifuna from St Vincent and land them here	British Empire, Roatan Tourism Bureau
1830s onward	Settlers arrive from the Cayman Islands after the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act; by the late 1850s a large share of the islanders were Cayman-born	Squier (1858); Davidson (1974)
1852	Britain declares the Bay Islands a colony, governed from Jamaica	Britannica, British Empire
28 November 1859	Under US pressure, Britain agrees to give the islands up in the Wyke-Cruz Treaty, signed at Comayagua	Figueroa and Portillo (IHAH), Cáceres Lara
1860 to 1861	Treaty ratified April 1860; cession announced in the Belize Government Gazette 14 July 1860; Honduras takes over the administration on 1 June 1861	British Empire, Waddell
1872	The Bay Islands become a department of Honduras	Holm et al. (1983)
1964	The first recorded flight lands on Roatan, a small Cessna 206	Honduras.com
5 September 1989	The Ocean Spirit, the first large cruise ship to call regularly, anchors off Coxen Hole	Paya Magazine
1990s	Honduras's state port company, the Empresa Nacional Portuaria (ENP), builds a cruise dock at Coxen Hole	Paya Magazine
1995	The island's international airport terminal opens, later named for President Juan Manuel Gálvez	Honduras.com
2008 to 2009	Royal Caribbean takes over the Coxen Hole port and opens its Town Center there	Cruise Industry News
December 2009	Carnival opens the Mahogany Bay cruise center at Dixon Cove	Cruise Industry News
2018	Mexico's ITM Group buys a majority stake in the Port of Roatan from Royal Caribbean	Paya Magazine
May 2026	Carnival unveils its Mahogany Bay cruise center under a new name, Isla Tropicale, with an expanded pool area	Carnival

Did Columbus discover Roatan?

No. Columbus reached the Bay Islands on his fourth voyage, in July 1502, but the island he put men ashore on was Guanaja, not Roatan, and both islands already had people living on them. He never set foot on Roatan. The claim that he discovered it is worth correcting because it is on half the souvenir maps.

There were people here already, as there had been for a long time. The sources are careful about who they were: the archaeologist Christopher Goodwin's work on Roatan points to close ties with the north-east mainland, most likely the ancestors of today's Pech, also called Paya, alongside patterns of the island's own; the Maya, Lenca and Tolupan all turn up in other accounts with less behind them. The archaeology is thin and the early written accounts are Spanish, some of them, Cortés's included, condemning the slave raids they describe.

What happened to the original islanders?

They were taken, and they died. Spanish ships began carrying the islanders off into slavery soon after contact; Cortés, reporting in 1526, blamed the raiding for emptying some of the islands already. Introduced disease did the rest, as it did everywhere in the Americas, though nobody counted it here.

A remnant survived alongside the English settlers of the 1640s, until the Spanish removed them to the mainland in 1650, after which, in the Honduran historical institute's careful phrase, the islands appear to have been left without inhabitants. That is the fact that explains everything that follows. Roatan was not a place where newcomers joined an existing society. It was a place that got repopulated, more than once, by people Europe moved here or who moved themselves.

Was Roatan really a pirate island?

Yes. For most of the seventeenth century Roatan was a working base for English, French and Dutch raiders, and Port Royal on the south shore was the harbor they used.

The English Providence Company attempted a settlement in 1638. English buccaneers were established on the main islands by 1642, and English, French and Dutch crews used the deep anchorages, particularly Port Royal on the south shore, as a refuge on and off into the 1720s. The attraction was simple geography: the islands sat beside the Spanish coastal shipping, had water and timber, and had no Spanish garrison.

Clement Cruttwell's 1799 map of the West Indies — The West Indies on Clement Cruttwell's map of 1799, the world of shipping lanes and rival empires Roatan sat at the edge of. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The English settlement ended in 1650, when Spanish forces destroyed it. There was no permanent settlement on the islands for nearly a hundred years, though ships kept calling and a marooned New England sailor, Philip Ashton, survived largely alone on Roatan for over a year from 1723. The British set up a garrisoned outpost at Port Royal in 1742 and held it on and off until a Spanish expedition destroyed it in 1782. The islands changed hands repeatedly for two centuries, and the people living on them were rarely consulted. The full story, including which famous pirates were actually here, is in Port Royal, when Roatan was a pirate harbor.

How did the Garifuna come to Roatan?

They were deported here, in 1797, after losing a war.

The Garifuna, descended from Africans, by tradition shipwreck survivors and escapees from plantations, who intermarried with the Carib of St Vincent, fought the British in what are now called the Carib Wars. When they lost, the British rounded up most of them, though some evaded capture and a Garifuna community remains on St Vincent, and held the deportees on the small island of Balliceaux, where a great many died of disease and starvation. The survivors were shipped to Roatan and put ashore at Port Royal.

Joseph Chatoyer, Garifuna chief on St Vincent, in an engraving of 1801 — Joseph Chatoyer, the Garifuna chief who led the fight against the British on St Vincent, in an engraving published in 1801. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

They landed on 12 April 1797, the date still commemorated here. The numbers are where the sources part company, and the gap is most of the story. The Garifuna scholar E. Roy Cayetano puts 4,338 people held on Balliceaux and 2,248 embarked for Roatan on 11 March 1797; other accounts put the number first removed from St Vincent at around 5,000. The Roatan Tourism Bureau says roughly 2,080 landed here. Most of the difference is deaths on Balliceaux, though some captives were sent back to St Vincent rather than onward, so the gap is not a measured death toll.

Most moved on to Trujillo on the mainland. Those who stayed founded Punta Gorda on the north shore, which local tradition counts as the island's oldest continuously settled community and which is still Garifuna today.

Why does Roatan speak English?

This is the question visitors ask most, and the answer is the 1830s.

Britain abolished slavery across most of its empire with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. In the Cayman Islands, a tiny society built on turtling and the sea whose fleet already ranged this far, that pulled the economy apart, and Caymanians began moving to the Bay Islands, which were close, nearly empty and claimed by nobody in a position to stop them. The most common account says former slaveholders came first and took the seaside land in western Roatan, and that through the late 1830s and 1840s formerly enslaved Caymanians followed in larger numbers; other accounts put the order differently. By the late 1850s, a large share of the people on the Bay Islands had been born in Cayman.

That migration is why the island's older communities are English-speaking, and why their culture has more in common with the English-speaking Caribbean than with Spanish-speaking Honduras. Today's large Spanish-speaking population is more recent, built by mainlanders moving to the island for work, mostly since the 1990s, and Spanish is now the language you will hear most, but the English-speaking communities are the older of the island's modern settlements. The full story, including the kidnapped commandant, is in The Caymanians who made Roatan English.

Coxen Hole, Roatan, in the early twentieth century — Coxen Hole in the early twentieth century, when English was still the working language of most of the island. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

When did Roatan become part of Honduras?

Later than most people assume, and the handover took two years.

Britain declared the Bay Islands a colony in 1852, administered by the Governor of Jamaica. That annoyed the United States, which held that it breached the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850, and under American pressure Britain agreed to give the islands up. That agreement is the Wyke-Cruz Treaty, signed at Comayagua on 28 November 1859 and ratified the following April.

Agreeing and doing were separate things. The cession was announced in the Belize Government Gazette on 14 July 1860, but Honduran officials did not take over the administration until 1 June 1861. During the delay, in 1860, a few of the British colonists went as far as asking the American filibuster William Walker to help them set up an independent English-speaking government instead; the scheme found few takers on the island. Walker was captured by the Royal Navy, handed to the Hondurans and shot.

You will see 1859, 1860 and 1861 all given as the date Roatan became Honduran. All three are defensible, because they describe different stages of the same transfer.

How did Roatan become a diving island?

Through fishing, then tourism, in that order.

For most of the twentieth century the islands lived on the sea commercially rather than recreationally: fishing, boat building, and crewing merchant ships, which is why so many island families have a grandfather who spent his working life away at sea. Diving came later and became the foundation of the tourist trade. Getting here became easier over the same years: the first recorded flight landed on the island in 1964, and the international airport terminal opened in 1995.

Anthony's Key Resort in Sandy Bay, family-run since 1968 by its own account, is among the oldest dive resorts on the island. We have not found a firmly dated account of exactly when recreational diving started here, so we are not going to give you a year. Our guide to Roatan's reef and wildlife covers the diving today.

When did the cruise ships arrive?

Recently, in the scheme of the above, and they changed the west of the island quickly.

The first large cruise ship to call regularly, the Ocean Spirit, anchored off Coxen Hole on 5 September 1989, and in the 1990s Honduras's state port company, the Empresa Nacional Portuaria (ENP), built a cruise dock there. Royal Caribbean took over that port in 2008 and opened its Town Center in early 2009.

Today there are two cruise ports. The Port of Roatan at Coxen Hole is operated by Mexico's ITM Group, which bought a majority stake from Royal Caribbean in 2018, and takes several lines. The cruise center at Dixon Cove is run by Carnival, which opened it as Mahogany Bay in December 2009 and rebranded it Isla Tropicale in 2026, unveiling the new name and an expanded pool area in May.

Whether that has been good for the island is the argument people here actually have, rather than one we are going to settle in a history article. What is not in dispute is that on a multi-ship day West End and West Bay are visibly different places, which is the most recent chapter in a very long run of outsiders arriving by sea and changing what was here.

Common questions about the history of Roatan

Was Roatan a British colony?

Yes. Britain declared the Bay Islands a colony in 1852, governed from Jamaica, after decades of informal English and British presence going back to the 1600s. It lasted under a decade. Under pressure from the United States, Britain agreed to cede the islands in the Wyke-Cruz Treaty of 28 November 1859, ratified in April 1860, and Honduras took over the administration on 1 June 1861.

Why do people in Roatan speak English?

Because of a migration from the Cayman Islands beginning in the 1830s, after Britain's Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 upended the Caymanian economy. Caymanians settled the nearly empty Bay Islands, bringing English with them, and the island was then formally British from 1852 to 1861. Most of today's Spanish speakers descend from mainland Hondurans who moved over for work, largely since the 1990s, and Spanish is now the language heard most.

Were there really pirates in Roatan?

Yes. English buccaneers were settled on the islands by 1642, and English, French and Dutch crews used the anchorages, particularly Port Royal on the south shore, as a base beside the Spanish shipping routes. The islands were thinly peopled and had no Spanish garrison, which was the appeal. Spanish forces destroyed the English settlement in 1650 and there was no permanent settlement again for nearly a century.

Who lived in Roatan before Columbus?

People believed to be related to mainland groups, most likely the ancestors of the Pech according to the archaeology, though the Maya, Lenca and Tolupan are also proposed; the record is thin and most early written accounts come from the Spanish. Columbus himself reached Guanaja rather than Roatan, on his fourth voyage in 1502. Spanish slave raiding and introduced disease devastated that population, and the Spanish removed those who remained in 1650.

When did the Garifuna arrive in Roatan?

On 12 April 1797, deported by the British after the Carib Wars on St Vincent, and the arrival is still commemorated on that date. The Garifuna scholar E. Roy Cayetano counts 4,338 held on Balliceaux and 2,248 embarked for Roatan, while the Roatan Tourism Bureau puts around 2,080 landing here; most of the difference is deaths on Balliceaux. Most moved on to Trujillo; those who stayed founded Punta Gorda.

Is Roatan part of Honduras?

Yes. Roatan is the largest of the Bay Islands, which form one of the eighteen departments of Honduras, and Honduran law, currency and immigration rules apply in full. The island has been Honduran since the British cession completed between 1859 and 1861. The cultural distinctness people notice is real but it is history, not a different jurisdiction.

Checked 21 October 2026. Written by Roatan Lifestyle, an independent guide to Roatan, written by people who live here.

Sources

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