Articles

When you think of Roatan today, you usually imagine beaches, coral reefs, and the growth of tourism. But life on the island hasn’t always revolved around visitors. In fact, for much of its history, survival depended on traditions that may sound unusual to us now. One of those was the practice of child lending. You read that right, child lending. According to David K. Evans, a researcher from Wake Forest University who published the paper Recent Sociocultural Change in Roatan,

Roatan’s economy today is quite diverse, tourism and diving usually come to mind. But just a few decades ago, life on the island revolved around very different industries, coconuts, shrimp, and eventually overseas jobs. According to David K. Evans, coconut harvesting was once the main source of income across the Bay Islands. Families who owned land with coconut trees could count on steady harvests, selling their crops for export, often through contracts with Miami importers.

I came across an old book during a trip to Covington, Louisiana; a gem Lani Mcnab luckily owns. It is called "MacNab: The Last Laird" written by Roland Wild, published back in 1938. It’s a rare one, packed with stories about the origins of the MacNab clan. If you're unfamiliar, the MacNab family, now spelled McNab are one of the British families that made their way and still exists on the Bay Islands, more specifically of Scottish descent. The opening tale grabbed me instantl

My latest read is The Appeal's May 22nd, 1897's paper. The piece on the left-end opens with a look at how the Mosquito Coast used to be one of the most talked-about regions in Central America. For centuries, Spain and England fought over it, with newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic treating it like a place full of conflict, beauty, and political drama. They explain how the territory eventually fell out of fashion, even though the land itself never lost its appeal. I'll s

The Appeal's 1897 paper on the Bay Islands of Honduras has quite a few stories. The following is another story I had yet to share from thatvery same paper. I've taken the time to write it out as it is read in the paper you can gaze upon, that which I have shared with you a few days ago. Old English is quite naturally a beautiful version of the language and it would sound much less enjoyable if I were to modify it. It reads as follows: For many years they formed part of Spain’

If you grew up in the Bay Islands, you’ve probably noticed something funny about the way we write English. Our place names still carry the old British spellings: French Harbour, not French Harbor; oftentimes we use colour, favour, honour... all those words that hang on to the “u” the way our grandparents did. People sometimes ask why we write it that way when the United States doesn’t. The answer goes back a couple of hundred years, and it has more to do with identity and ref

Did you know England referred to the Bay Islands as the "Garden of the West Indies", the "Key of Spanish America" and "The New Gibraltar"? Carrying on with the stories found about the Colony of the Bay Islands in The Appeal's May 22nd edition of 1897, here is how those names came about. To this day, 1897, England claims some rights over the islands in connection with her very questionable rights in Belize, based upon nothing but an ancient treaty with Spain, which simply gave