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H © Stephen J. Pavlidis 2010 |
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PPING
A Brief History of Las Islas Santanilla,
The Swan Island
The Swan Islands were discovered by Christopher Columbus on St. Anne’s Day in 1502 and were therefore named Las Islas Santa Ana. The islands offered little in the way of colonization, but they did serve as a pirate haunt from the 16th-18th centuries. The islands are said to be named after a Captain Swan, the master of the Cygnet, a ship sent to the Caribbean by London merchants in 1680 on a commercial voyage. The Cygnet was attacked by pirates and Swan was forced to join them and it is believed that Captain Swan may have become one of the buccaneers that dominated these waters. Almost a century later, in 1775, the islands first appeared on a chart as the Swan Islands. Later still, in 1860, the notorious William Walker occupied the islands during one of his attempts to conquer South America. After Walker was executed Honduras claimed the islands but to no avail as the islands were put under United States sovereignty in 1863 by the Guano Islands Act. It would be over 100 years before Honduras would officially gain control of the Swan Islands.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Swan Island Trading Company (sometimes shown as the Swan Islands Commercial Company) took title of the Swan Islands from a Captain Alonzo Adams, the self-proclaimed “King of the Swan Islands”, who staked a claim to the islands claiming them as abandoned property. In the early part of the 1900s, the Swan Islands Trading Company leased part of Great Swan to the United Fruit Company who planted over 15,000 coconut palms on the island. The company pulled out after several years, but provided valuable hurricane weather data from 1928-1932. In 1938, the United States Weather Bureau established a weather station no the island that was only occupied during hurricane season. A few years later, in 1940, the weather station was manned full time.
In the late 1940s, the United States Agriculture Department used Great Swan as a quarantine station for Latin-American cattle bound for the states; the quarantine station was abandoned in 1949, only a few years after its inception. In 1946, an aircraft navigational beacon was installed on the island by the FAA and remained in use until 1971. In 1960, a 50,000-watt radio station, Radio Swan, was constructed on Great Swan Island. The station as intended to broadcast propaganda to Cuba shortly after Castro’s rise to power and was owned by a New York company called the Gibraltar Steamship Company, which did not own any steamships. In 1961, the station’s name was changed to Radio America and its headquarters moved to Miami, Florida. I’ve heard rumors that Great Swan was home to a transmitting station during the Bay of Pigs invasion (allegedly sending coded messages to operatives inside Cuba), and in later years, the islands was used as re-supply base for planes assisting the Contras in Central America. Of course these are just rumors…
While all this was going on, Honduras laid claim to the islands in 1920, but did not press the issue until the 1960s. Honduras claimed that when Columbus landed here in 1502 to pick up wood, this made the islands part of the Spanish colonial empire, and of course Honduras was the rightful heir to the islands. The United States countered claiming that in 1863, Secretary of State William Seward laid claim to the islands on the behalf of the United States of America just a few years after George White landed on the islands, claiming them for the United States in 1857. After much wrangling back and forth, on November 22, 1971, the United States and Honduras signed a treaty that put the islands under Honduran sovereignty as of September 1, 1972. The U.S. continued to operate a weather station on Great Swan until 1980 when was transferred to the government of Honduras.
There is talk about a huge development that is planned for the Swan Islands. Current plans call for the Swan Islands to become one of the world’s most beautiful and exciting destinations, a tax haven where people can retire or just vacation. There are to be no property or income taxes, but there is a planned 12% sales tax and 12% duty on items not for resale on the island. I’ve seen the architect’s drawings (Swan Island Development, LLC, in partnership with Fantasy International Resorts and Caribbean Investment Associates) of the completed project that shows a huge marina and cruise ship dock on the northern shore of Great Swan along with condos and a huge new airstrip. The planned capital city, to be called Cygnet will be home to 5,000 people (quite crowded for so small an island in my humble opinion) with four resorts, casinos, and numerous clubs, restaurants, grocery stores, banks, boutiques, and theaters. Cygnet is slated to be the world’s first city designed exclusively for electric vehicles, no automobiles will be allowed on the islands should this plan ever come into being.
We’ll just have to wait and see what the future will bring, the location of the Swan Islands in the center of the Northwestern Caribbean, which is quite prone to hurricanes, may be the biggest obstacle to this imposing project.