Honduras History

Christopher Columbus discovered Honduras, not North America. That’s right. He set foot on the mainland of America near the present-day town of Trujillo in 1502, although the Mayan culture had flourished in western Honduras (around the Copan valley) for some 4000 years, reaching its zenith around 500-800 AD, when 15,000 people lived in that area. The newly-arrived Spaniards fought disease and the local Lenca Indians (led by their chief, Lempira, after whom Honduras’ modern-day currency is named) but finally prevailed in the mid-1500’s.

In the early 1600’s piracy flourished in the Caribbean and the long coastline of Honduras proved vulnerable. The Dutch and English buccaneers were attracted to the coast by stands of mahogany, and brought black settlers from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands to harvest the timber. They used the Bay Islands as a base from which they staged many raids on the gold-laden Spanish galleons traveling from the south. Every settlement the Spaniards created was sacked – repeatedly. The shallow reefs surrounding the islands provided shelter from the deep-draft Spanish ships and the pirates successfully resisted all efforts to evict them. Following an appeal by the Miskito Indians, a British protectorate was declared over the coastal region which lasted until 1859, when the area was returned to Honduras. The British, however, had established permanent settlements in the islands and today many of the Bay Islanders are fair-skinned descendants of these pirates. Legends of buried treasure abound.

Honduras was briefly a part of Mexico, and after that, the Central American Federation along with Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and El Salvador. It finally gained independence as a separate nation in 1838. Honduras led the world in the production of bananas for a time in the early 1900’s; in fact, the phrase “Banana Republic” was originally used in reference to Honduras.