Roatan: Spending the Night in Houston

Our connecting flight from Houston to Salt Lake was canceled, so we are spending the night in Houston. See everyone tomorrow.

Love,

Mom and Dad

About Roatan

Roatán, located between the islands of Útila and Guanaja, is the largest of Honduras' Bay Islands. The island was formerly known as Ruatan and Rattan. It is approximately 32 miles long, and less than 2 miles wide at its widest point.

Located near the largest barrier reef in the Caribbean Sea (second largest worldwide after Australia's Great Barrier Reef), it has become an important cruise ship and scuba diving destination in Honduras. Tourism is its most important economic sector, though fishing is also an important source of income for islanders.

The Pre-Columbian residents of the Bay Islands are believed to have been related to Paya, Maya, Lenca or Jicaque, which were the cultures present on the mainland. Christopher Columbus, on his fourth voyage (1502-1504) came to the islands as he visited the neighboring Bay Island of Guanaja. The Spanish soon after began using the Islands for purposes of slave raiding, and no original Native American communities survived.

Throughout European colonial times, the entire Bay of Honduras attracted a diverse array of individual settlers, pirates, traders and militarists, engaged in various economic activities and playing out political struggles between the European powers, chiefly Britain and Spain. Roatan and the other islands were used as frequent resting points for sea travelers, and on several occasions were the subject of military occupation. In 1723/1724 an approximately 20-year-old-man from New England, Philip Ashton, managed to survive as a castaway on the island for sixteen months until he was finally rescued(see Edward E. Leslie, "Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls", 1988, pp.100-120).

Britain, in its aggressive attempt to usurp the colonization of the Caribbean from the Spanish, occupied the Bay Islands on and off between 1550 and 1700. During this time, the buccaneers found the vacated, mostly unprotected islands a haven for safe harbor and transport. English, French and Dutch pirates established settlements on the islands and raided the cumbersome Spanish cargo vessels laden with gold and other treasures from the new world. The English buccaneer Henry Morgan established his base at Port Royal on Roatán in the mid-17th century; at that time as many as 5,000 pirates were living on that island.

In the 1850s for a brief period the Bay Islands were declared a colony by Britain, who within a decade ceded the territory formally back to Honduras.

Although Spanish is spoken in mainland Honduras, the main language on the island is English, because the first modern population originated from parts of the British Caribbean. In general, the history of the Bay Islands was driven by the various larger political, economic and cultural forces throughout the entire Caribbean and Central American region.

In 1998, the island suffered some damage from Hurricane Mitch, temporarily paralyzing most commercial activity. Many of the native islanders attribute this storm as having broken the previously undisturbed Aguila shipwreck into three pieces. –Wikipedia Encyclopedia

Roatan

Saturday, November 8, 2008

Spending the Night in Houston

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