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Honduras Anglo-Spanish Rivalry
A major problem for Spanish rulers of Honduras was the
activity
of the English along the northern Caribbean coast. These
activities
began in the late sixteenth century and continued into the
nineteenth century. In the early years, Dutch as well as
English
corsairs (pirates) attacked the Caribbean coast, but as
time passed
the threat came almost exclusively from the English. In
1643 one
English expedition destroyed the town of Trujillo, the
major port
for Honduras, leaving it virtually abandoned for over a
century.
Destructive as they were, raiding expeditions were
lesser
problems than other threats. Beginning in the seventeenth
century,
English efforts to plant colonies along the Caribbean
coast and in
the Islas de la Bahía threatened to cut Honduras off from
the
Caribbean and raised the possibility of the loss of much
of its
territory. The English effort on the Honduran coast was
heavily
dependent on the support of groups known as the Sambo and
the
Miskito, racially mixed peoples of native American and
African
ancestry who were usually more than willing to attack
Spanish
settlements
(see Boundary Disputes
, ch. 2). British
settlers were
interested largely in trading, lumbering, and producing
pitch.
During the numerous eighteenth-century wars between
Britain and
Spain, however, the British crown found any activity that
challenged Spanish hegemony on the Caribbean coast of
Central
America to be desirable.
Major British settlements were established at Cabo
Gracias a
Dios and to the west at the mouth of the Río Sico, as well
as on
the Islas de la Bahía. By 1759 a Spanish agent estimated
the
population in the Río Sico area as 3,706.
Under the Bourbons, the revitalized Spanish government
made
several efforts to regain control over the Caribbean
coast. In 1752
a major fort was constructed at San Fernando de Omoa near
the
Guatemalan border. In 1780 the Spanish returned in force
to
Trujillo, which they began developing as a base for
expeditions
against British settlements to the east. During the 1780s,
the
Spanish regained control over the Islas de la Bahía and
drove the
majority of the British and their allies out of the area
around
Black River. A British expedition briefly recaptured Black
River,
but the terms of the Anglo-Spanish Convention of 1786 gave
definitive recognition to Spanish sovereignty over the
Caribbean
coast.
Data as of December 1993
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