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 The Treasures of Roatan Island, Hondurasby guest author, Daryl FriesenI am happy to share this exciting narrative of Honduran treasure hunting by Daryl Friesen. He's a great writer and an adventurous guy, and it was great to hear the story of his adventure on Rhoatan Island. I also appreciate his willingness to share this with all of you. If treasure hunting sounds like a great adventure vacation to you, Daryl has a web site with tips and information. I've included this and other related links following this feature. Rob and I stepped off the plane at the airport in Coxon Hole on to the shores of Roatan Island, one of the bay islands in the Gulf of Honduras. We were assaulted by taxi drivers all wanting to take us to the west end, a place which we were told in broken Spanish is the place where all gringos are supposed to go. The West End is a popular tourist district where scuba divers stay from all over the world. Roatan Island is famous these days for its amazing scuba diving, but I wasn't here for a tropical diving trip. I was here to explore Roatan's forgotten history which to me is far more interesting than the diving, even though the reefs which surround Roatan are some of the most beautiful in the entire world. Some of the first people to ever walk the shores of Roatan - next to the Payas, more on them later - were the pirates of the Spanish main. Roatan Island has seen some pretty historical figures in it's day. The most notorious being Sir Henry Morgan, who was said to have stopped on Roatan sometime in the late 1600s with his ships loaded with untold amounts of wealth. My first destination on Roatan was Oakridge at the far end of the Island, a town worth a visit just to marvel at it's design. Oakridge is a very ancient town built on stilts all around the bay and you have to take water taxis to get anywhere. The locals there are nothing but friendly. I mentioned Henry Morgan to our taxi driver as he was taking us across the bay to our hotel, the Reef House, and he wouldn't stop talking about how he believed all of Henry Morgan's treasure was still to be found on the island. I believe this story to be true because of just how much treasure has already been found on the Island. One of the first people to ever find buried treasure on Roatan was an archaeologist named Mitchell Hedges, who did a lot of exploring around the Bay Islands back in the 1920s and 30s. Mitchell Hedges lived on Roatan for seven years and he learned the island very well. He was one of the first people to ever explore the pirate ruins of Old Port Royal. Here can be seen to this day the ruins of a pirate fortress which was used by Henry Morgan along with many other notorious pirates who roamed the shores of the Island. It is a fact that near these ruins Mitchell Hedges discovered four chests filled to the brim with gold bullion, which were reaped from the Spanish by the pirates of Roatan. As the story goes, Mitchell Hedges' friend, known as Doctor Ball, was walking around one of the nearby keys near old Port Royal with a compass in hand. Suddenly the compass started going mad, with the needle spinning around in all different directions. He signalled for Mitchell Hedges who at the time was out in his boat the Amigo just offshore. He told him about the compass's behaviour and the two of them decided that the only thing that would make the compass behave in such a way was a large amount of metal buried under the surface of the key. The two men wasted no time and started digging like mad; within minutes the two explorers had unearthed two large wooden chests loaded to the brim with golden doubloons.
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