Coons in Helene: The First Week

Saturday, May 14, 2011

The First Week

I met Vanessa at the airport on Roatan, and we rented a cabana on the beach at West End to spend a night away from the kids before we all got together. We ate at a nice creole restaurant, had a great night, and then loaded an extremely large amount of luggage (hint: don't bring extra luggage during semana santa) into the taxi for the 18 mile ride to French Harbour, the end of the road, literally, on the east end of Roatan. Vanessa's brother Samir picked us up in his small dory and we got a good saltwater bath motoring the remaining 5 miles or so into the wind to the island and village of Helene.

(Image not mine, I don't have a camera, guh.)

Once we were in Helene, I rested a couple of days, played with lil Divya and big Adderley (who has changed his name to Benten), I got to work cleaning up the land. The lot's view rather amazed me once I got it cleaned up. We are about half way through the cement portion, and are planning the house as we go. That's just a better way to do things around here. The sand, rocks and gravel are all being brought in by dory from the island of Morat nearby by motor dory:

We have also been having to get fresh water for bathing and such from the island of Morat, as the pump for the spring to the main water tank for the community has been broken. We haul the water a couple of hundred feet from a well said to have been dug by pirates hundreds of years ago. I have no reason to doubt that story, as the innermost part of the well is done in rock with no cement. There are two outer layers that have been put in since then.

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Basic Helene/Roatan Information

Information on the Paya Indians: Link Length 60 km (37 mi) Width 8 km (5 mi) Largest city Coxen Hole (pop. 5,100) Demographics Population 30,000 Ethnic groups Caracoles, Garifuna Roatán, located between the islands of Útila and Guanaja, is the largest of Honduras' Bay Islands. It is approximately37 miles long, and less than 5 miles across at its widest point. Located near the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, the largest barrier reef in the Caribbean Sea, second largest worldwide after Australia's Great Barrier Reef. The easternmost quarter of the island is separated by a convoluted channel through the mangroves that is 15 meters wide on the average. This section is called Helene, or Santa Elena in Spanish. Satellite islands at the eastern end are Morat, Barbaretta, and Pigeon Cay. The most populous town of the island is Coxen Hole, capital of Roatán municipality, located in the southwest. Other important towns include French Harbour, West End, and Oak Ridge, the capital of Jose Santos Guardiola municipality. The pre-Columbian indigenous peoples 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. Soon after the Spanish began raiding the islands for slave labor. More devastating for Native American communities was exposure to Eurasian infectious diseases to which they had no immunity, such as smallpox and measles. Diseases ran in epidemics, and no indigenous people survived. Throughout European colonial times, the Bay of Honduras attracted a diverse array of individual settlers, pirates, traders and military forces, engaged in various economic activities and playing out political struggles between the European powers, chiefly Britain and Spain. In contesting with the Spanish for colonization of the Caribbean, the English occupied the Bay Islands on and off between 1550 and 1700. During this time, buccaneers found the vacated, mostly unprotected islands a haven for safe harbor and transport. English, French and Dutch pirates established settlements on the islands. They frequently raided the cumbersome Spanish cargo vessels carrying gold and other treasures from the New World to Spain. In 1797, the British defeated the Black Carib, who had been supported by the French, in a battle for control of the Windward Caribbean island of St. Vincent. Weary of their resistance to British plans for sugar plantations, the British rounded up the St. Vincent Black Carib and deported them to Roatán. The majority of Black Carib migrated to Trujillo on mainland Honduras, but a portion remained to found the community of Punta Gorda on the northern coast of Roatán. The Black Carib, whose ancestry includes Arawak and African Maroons, remained in Punta Gorda, becoming the Bay Island's first permanent post-Columbian settlers. The majority permanent population of Roatán originated from the Cayman Islands near Jamaica. They arrived in the 1830s shortly after Britain's abolition of slavery in 1838. The changes in labor force disrupted the economic structure of Caymanian culture. Caymanians were largely a seafaring culture and were familiar with the area from turtle fishing and other activities. Former Caymanian slaveholders were among the first to settle in the seaside locations throughout primarily western Roatán. Former slaves also migrated from the Cayman Islands, in larger number than planters, during the late 1830s and 1840s. Altogether, the former Caymanians became the largest cultural group on the island. For a brief period in the 1850s, Britain declared the Bay Islands its colony. In the latter half of the 19th century, the island populations grew steadily and established new settlements all over Roatán and the other islands. Settlers came from all over the world and played a part in shaping the cultural face of the island. Islanders started a fruit trade industry which became profitable. By the 1870s it was purchased by American interests, most notably the New Orleans and Bay Islands Fruit Company. Later companies, the Standard Fruit and United Fruit Companies became the foundation for modern-day fruit companies, the industry which gave Honduras the sobriquet "banana republic". The region of the Bay Islands encompasses the three major islands of Roatan, Utila, and Guanaja, and the smaller islands or keys. These people are also called "Islanders," especially locally. Over time the form of English spoken by the islanders has changed. The language differs mostly in morphology but also in pronunciation and accent and, to a lesser extent, in syntax and vocabulary, from the English of the other British Caribbean colonies. They are similar enough to be mutually intelligible. Information from Wikipedia

Coons in Helene

Saturday, May 14, 2011

The First Week

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