Coxen Hole and the buccaneer John Coxon

If you arrive on Roatán by cruise ship, there's a good chance your first steps on the island are in Coxen Hole. Most visitors never ask where the name comes from. The usual answer is a buccaneer.

Who was John Coxon?

John Coxon sailed the Caribbean in the 1670s and 1680s, the era when English, French and Dutch sea-rovers raided Spanish shipping and towns, sometimes with government papers and sometimes without. According to the historian E. O. Winzerling, Coxon had once held a French commission and commanded the squadron that took Santa Marta, on the coast of today's Colombia, in June 1677, carrying the town's bishop and governor off to Jamaica for ransom.

His loyalties moved with the wind. In October 1682 the governor of Jamaica, Sir Thomas Lynch, sent him to the logwood camps on the Bay of Honduras to bring the woodcutters away. When some of the men plotted to seize the ships and go pirating, Coxon fought them off himself and brought three of the plotters back to Jamaica, where they were condemned. The next year he was back at it: Winzerling records him and Captain Bartholomew Sharpe seizing 500 chests of indigo from a warehouse in the Gulf of Amatique, and by November 1683 he had turned pirate again.

A home in Roatán

In January 1686 Coxon gave himself up for trial in Jamaica, got away, and surrendered again that September. Then, Winzerling writes, "for ten years thereafter he lived mainly at Coxon-Hole in Ruatan, from where in his sloop he traded with the Moskito Indians who at times accompanied him in his raids."

Winzerling places Coxon at "Coxon-Hole", and the town's name has long been linked to him. Today it's spelled Coxen Hole, as Richard Rose wrote it in 1904 under the photograph above, which shows the waterfront with Government House on the hill.

See it for yourself

Today Coxen Hole is Roatán's busiest town, full of shops, markets and island life. With a private driver you can stop here on your way across the island and picture the harbour as Coxon knew it.