Crosscurrents to the mainland.

• Author: Sletto, Bjorn
• Position: Bay Islands, Honduras

FOR CENTURIES THE VICTIMS OF FOREIGN POWER STRUGGLES, THE BAY ISLANDS ARE NOW STRENGTHENING THEIR TIES TO THE HONDURAN ECONOMY AND WAY OF LIFE

DAY BREAKS GENTLY IN OAK RIDGE, Roatan Island, Honduras. The sun slowly rises from the ocean in the east, a red plume caressing the sleeping lagoon before splashing gold across canoes and piers and the cluster of colorful clapboard homes. In the hushed silence of the early morning, the creak of a door drifts across the lagoon--then, the sound of rattling oars, and the cough of an outboard motor. Moments later, a peeling, blue and white dugout canoe--called a cayucu--slices noisily through the golden lagoon. In its wake, tiny waves batter the wooden stilts beneath the houses, nudging a discarded plastic detergent bottle and a piece of driftwood before finally losing its momentum beneath the keel of a resting cayucu.

Soon, half a dozen cayucus ferrying passengers to the downtown district cause a moment's traffic jam in the narrow strait between the Pany Ville section of Oak Ridge and downtown. Muffled fragments of conversations in lilting, Caribbean English waft through half-shuttered windows and across dainty picket fences. Women dress children for school, splash wash-water into the lagoon and hang clothes on lines tied between the windows and the boat sheds. On tiny porches, older men settle gingerly into ramshackle rocking chairs to watch life parading by on the town's main street--the Caribbean Sea.

In Oak Ridge and the other communities of the Bay Islands, life still revolves around the sea. Located in a 125-kilometer arc 60 kilometers off the east coast of Honduras, the islands became a hideout for Anglo pirates early in the colonial period. Since then, the reef-studded ocean surrounding Utila, Roatan and Guanaja has provided safety and isolation for individualists and opportunists of all kinds. Populated largely by people of British, African, and--islanders fondly claim--pirate descent, the islands were left alone until quite recently. That they have formed a slightly mulish department of the Republic of Honduras for more than a century has done little to dissuade the islanders from their British ways.

The history of the Bay Islands encapsulates three centuries of power struggle between England and Spain in the Americas. The islands were originally claimed by the Spanish when Christopher Columbus on his fourth voyage in 1502 spotted the hilly, verdant Guanaja--the easternmost island--and named it Isla de Los Pinos (Pine Island). Paya Indians lived on the islands at the time, but soon after the arrival of the Spanish they were decimated in labor camps in Mexico and the West Indies.

During the next century, the Spanish used the islands as something of a breadbasket, provisioning their ships with fruits, vegetables and meat for the return voyage to Spain. But because of their broken topography, mangrove swamps and reef-studded waters, no permanent Spanish settlement was established. Instead, pirates used the islands as a launching pad for raids against Spanish galleons. Bay Islands folklore is rich in stories of buried pirate loot; the near-deserted Port Royal on Roatan is said to have been the base for the infamous pirate, Henry Morgan.

The first peaceful settlers were Puritan farmers, arriving in 1638 from the state of Maryland in the United States. They grew cassava as a staple and tobacco and indigo for export, and cut logwood trees for their homes and ships. After four years, they were routed by the Spanish while civil war raged in England. British pirates, however, hung on until into the early eighteenth century, in later years turning from looting to logging in...