Culture

Port Royal, when Roatan was a pirate harbor

Roatan really was a pirate harbor, and the records prove it without the legends. Port Royal from 1638 to the Battle of Roatan in 1782, which famous pirates were actually here, and the castaway who lived alone on the island.

A rainbow over the rocky coast at Paya Bay on Roatan's East End

By Roatan Lifestyle

Published October 17, 2026 · 12 min read

Last checked 19 October 2026.

Was Roatan really a pirate island?

Yes, and you do not need the legends to prove it. For about a decade in the 1640s English raiders held a fortified harbor on the south shore called Port Royal, and it took a Spanish fleet to get them out. That is documented. Most of the famous names attached to the island since are not, and we will tell you which is which.

Port Royal is still there, at the far eastern end of Roatan, a scatter of houses and the remains of a fort on a cay. Almost nobody visits. This is the story of why it mattered.

Why Port Royal?

Because it is a deep, sheltered harbor with fresh water and timber, on an island with no Spanish garrison, beside the coastal shipping that served Honduras and within reach of the routes the great fleets took. Cays across the harbor mouth make it easy to defend from the sea and hard to see into. For a raider who needed somewhere to water, repair and hide, it had everything.

The treasure fleets themselves ran from Portobelo and Veracruz to Havana, not through the Gulf of Honduras, but the ships that fed them from the Honduran ports did, and Roatan sat beside that traffic. Spanish slaving and disease had devastated the island's original people by the early seventeenth century, though some remained until 1650, and Spain never garrisoned the island. If you were designing a place to hide ships and careen hulls, you would design something like it.

Who actually settled it?

Englishmen with a license, followed by Englishmen without one.

In 1638 the Providence Company, an English venture with Puritan backers, granted a Virginia planter named William Claiborne the right to settle the island. By 1642 English raiders had occupied what is called Old Port Royal, a little east of the present settlement, and were using it as a base against Spanish shipping. Britannica dates the buccaneer settlement of the main islands to the same year.

They were not there long. Spain, with good reason, regarded Roatan as a nest of pirates and sent a fleet to clear it.

What happened in 1650?

A Spanish fleet came and the settlement fell.

In 1650 a Spanish expedition organized by Diego de Villalba y Toledo, the Governor of Cuba, arrived. The popular local version has the defenders at Port Royal beating off a first assault and the Spanish withdrawing for reinforcements before returning in strength; the scholarly summary published by Honduras's anthropology and history institute records the expedition, the fortified positions and the expulsion without the two-act drama. Either way the settlement fell. The Spanish then gathered up what remained of the island's indigenous population, people related to the mainland Paya who had been there alongside the English through the 1640s, and removed them to the mainland, after which, in the Honduran institute's careful phrase, the islands appear to have been left without inhabitants. There was no permanent settlement on the Bay Islands for nearly a century afterwards, though ships kept calling and castaways came and went.

On the date, the Roatan Tourism Bureau gives 1654 rather than 1650. We give you the year the historians use.

Which famous pirates were actually here?

Fewer than the souvenir shops would like, and it is worth going through them honestly.

John Coxon, sometimes spelled Coxen, was real: one of the better-known buccaneers of the 1670s and 1680s, who sacked Portobelo in 1680 and raided in the Gulf of Honduras for indigo and cocoa. Coxen Hole, the island's capital, is named after him by tradition. What nobody has produced, as far as we or the historians we have read can find, is a document putting him on Roatan. The town's name is the tradition, and the Gulf of Honduras raid is the documented fact nearest to it.

Henry Morgan is the name everyone wants. The Roatan Tourism Bureau, which has every incentive to say otherwise, concedes that direct documentary evidence of his presence here is scarce and that the link rests on local tradition. Morgan's documented career was Panama, Portobelo, Maracaibo and Jamaica. The cay in Port Royal harbor with the fort remains on it is called Fort Morgan Cay today, which tells you how strong the tradition is and nothing about where he sailed.

Blackbeard is, in the Tourism Bureau's own words, mostly legendary here. There is a Thatch's Point on the island and a story of him careening there around 1717. Whether fact or myth, as they put it.

The buried treasure is in the same category as Morgan. People have been digging for it for centuries and no find has ever been documented. If any of them found it, they kept remarkably quiet.

Roatan was a working harbor for ordinary raiders whose names are mostly lost, and the celebrities were attached later. That is the usual shape of pirate history everywhere.

Who was the man who lived alone on Roatan?

The best story in the island's history, and one of the few you can read in the words of the person it happened to.

Philip Ashton was a young fisherman from Marblehead, Massachusetts, captured by the pirate Edward Low off Nova Scotia in June 1722. Low was among the most brutal of his trade, and Ashton spent months aboard refusing to sign the pirates' articles. In March 1723, when Low's ships put in at Roatan, Ashton walked into the forest and did not come back. The island was uninhabited. He lived there alone with nothing, eating fruit because he had no way to kill anything, until another castaway passed through and left him a knife, a bottle of powder, tobacco tongs and a flint, after which he could take tortoises and crayfish and cook. He was alone for about sixteen months, by his own account, before a party of Baymen, the logwood cutters of the coast, joined him; the group moved for a time to Bonacca, now Guanaja; and he eventually got home by way of a British warship, the Diamond, and a Salem brigantine under a Captain Dove. In 1725 he published, with help from his minister, Ashton's Memorial in Boston, an account of the whole ordeal. Roatan appears in it as it was in 1723: empty, green and full of things that bite.

When did the British come back?

Twice, and they were thrown out both times.

In 1742, during the War of the Austrian Succession, the Governor of Jamaica set up a small outpost at Port Royal called Augusta, defended by Fort Frederick on a high point to the west and Fort George on a cay at the harbor mouth. A garrison under Major John Caulfield held it, and his letter of 2 August 1745 to Governor Trelawny in Jamaica complaining of Spanish harassment survives. Archaeologists who have worked the site describe Augusta as a mixed settlement of English and Miskitu people, the Miskitu being Britain's allies from the Mosquito Coast opposite. One residents' account puts the population at 800 to 1,000; we have not seen a return that confirms it. The outpost was abandoned in 1749 after the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle.

Plan of New Port Royal harbor, Roatan, 1742 — A plan of New Port Royal harbor in 1742, the year the British outpost was founded, as published in 1775. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

By the 1770s British settlers were established on Roatan again, and when war with Spain broke out in 1779, refugees from St George's Caye in Belize joined them. Earlier that year, before Spain entered the war, a brig called HMS Badger, under a young commander named Horatio Nelson, was ordered to protect shipping at Rattan, as the island was then spelled. Paya Magazine, reading the ship's records, reports a midshipman deserting at Rattan in March 1779. Whether Nelson himself walked ashore, the records do not say, and the local accounts that put him in the forts are guessing.

What happened at the Battle of Roatan in 1782?

Spain brought a fleet, and the settlement lasted four days.

Matías de Gálvez, the Spanish captain general in Guatemala, arrived at Trujillo on 8 March 1782 and sailed for Roatan on the 12th. The accounts of his force differ. The English-language account has three frigates, the Santa Matilde, Santa Cecilia and Antiope, smaller armed vessels and around 600 regular troops. The Spanish naval historian Fernández Duro, working from the Gaceta de Madrid reports of June and July 1782, gives two frigates, the privateer Concepción, four gunboats, sixteen transports and about a thousand landing troops. The fleet was off the island on the morning of 13 March. The British defenses were batteries called Fort Dalling and Fort Despard, and by the Spanish account a third, Fort George, covering the harbor mouth at what was by then called New Port Royal.

Spanish plan of the harbor at Port Royal, Roatan, 1782 — The Spanish plan of Port Royal harbor from March 1782, showing the positions in the attack. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Gálvez sent in a demand to surrender. The defenders asked for six hours to think about it, were given them, and then refused, saying, by the Spanish report, that they would stand to the death. Bad weather held the Spanish off for two days. On the morning of 16 March the Spanish guns opened fire, had silenced both forts by one in the afternoon, and landed troops while the frigates sailed into the harbor and bombarded the town. The British fired back from the hills until sunset, then capitulated, and terms were agreed the next day.

The Spanish took 81 soldiers and 135 civilians prisoner, along with 300 enslaved people, and shipped them all to Havana, where the enslaved were sold. Before leaving on 23 March, Gálvez's men destroyed the settlement and its crops and burned many of the ships in the harbor, which Spain said had been used for smuggling and privateering. Residents' accounts cite a Spanish report of five hundred structures destroyed. Spanish casualties were two dead and four wounded. On the defending side the only recorded wounded were two enslaved people. The British lost their settlement and the island. The British officer nominally in command, Edward Marcus Despard, may not even have been there; one historian places him in Jamaica.

Local history dates the last English departure to 1788, and when people next arrived to stay, in 1797, they were Garifuna deportees landed on the island on 12 April 1797.

What is at Port Royal today?

Not much, which is part of the appeal.

Port Royal is at the far eastern end of Roatan, past Oak Ridge and well off the route most visitors take. Residents who wrote about living above the harbor in 2019 describe a shoreline that is still jungle falling to clear water, with mangroves and small beaches, a handful of houses and around twenty people. A portion of the fort on Fort Morgan Cay, once called George's Cay, survives. People who walk the shore still turn up fragments of hand-blown green bottle glass and old brick, though most of what was there has been carried off over the years.

We have not yet written up how to get there and what you can reasonably expect to see, and we would rather send you nowhere than send you somewhere with bad directions. When we have done the trip properly, it will be here.

Common questions about pirates in Roatan

Were there pirates in Roatan?

Yes. English raiders held a fortified harbor at Port Royal on the south shore from about 1642 until Spain drove them out in 1650, and the island was used by buccaneers through the seventeenth century because it sat beside Spanish coastal shipping with fresh water and no garrison. That part is documented. The famous names attached to the island, Morgan and Blackbeard especially, rest on tradition rather than records.

Did Henry Morgan come to Roatan?

There is no documentary evidence that he did. Morgan's recorded career was Portobelo, Maracaibo, Panama and Jamaica. The Roatan Tourism Bureau acknowledges that his link to the island rests on strong local tradition rather than records, and the cay at Port Royal now called Fort Morgan Cay was named for him long after the fact. The buried treasure stories belong in the same category.

Why is Coxen Hole called Coxen Hole?

After John Coxon, a real buccaneer of the 1670s and 1680s who raided Spanish shipping and settlements, including in the Gulf of Honduras. The naming is a local tradition rather than a documented event, and no document we know of places Coxon on Roatan itself. But unlike most of the island's pirate stories, this one is attached to a man who demonstrably worked these waters.

What is Port Royal in Roatan?

A deep natural harbor at the far eastern end of the island, named like its more famous Jamaican counterpart. It was the site of an English raiders' settlement in the 1640s, a British outpost called Augusta in the 1740s, the Battle of Roatan in March 1782, and the landing of the Garifuna in 1797. Today it is a quiet settlement of a few houses, with the remains of a fort on Fort Morgan Cay.

Who was Philip Ashton?

A Massachusetts fisherman captured by the pirate Edward Low in 1722 who escaped into the forest when Low's ships put in at Roatan in March 1723. He lived alone on the then uninhabited island for about sixteen months before others joined him, and eventually got home by way of a British warship and a Salem brigantine. He published the story as Ashton's Memorial in 1725, which makes it one of the earliest first-hand descriptions of the island.

What happened at the Battle of Roatan?

On 16 March 1782 a Spanish force under Matías de Gálvez, with two or three frigates and between 600 and 1,000 troops depending on the account, bombarded and captured the British settlement at Port Royal after a four-day standoff. The Spanish took 81 soldiers, 135 civilians and 300 enslaved people prisoner to Havana, then destroyed the settlement before leaving on 23 March. Spain lost two men. The British settlement was never rebuilt; the next people put ashore here were Garifuna deportees in 1797.

Checked 19 October 2026. Written by Roatan Lifestyle, an independent guide to Roatan, written by people who live here. Where it is legend we have called it legend. If you have a record that turns one of our traditions into a fact, we want it.

Sources

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