A Transnational Perspective on the Nicaraguan Filibuster Episode

Abstract

Every tourist who visits the Honduran town of Trujillo on the Caribbean coast will notice (and probably visit) the impressive Fort Santa Bárbara which dominates the bay. Right outside its main entrance the visitor might come across a curious commemorative stone in the pasture surrounding the fort, which simply reads “William Walker, 1860.” While some visitors might associate Trujillo with the American author William Sidney Porter—better known under his nom de plume O. Henry—(who had lived there in the 1890s and drew on this experience in several of his “banana republic” short stories), most will be at a loss to place the anglophone name of “William Walker”—as will be most Hondurans, by the way. Meandering off to the old cemetery, though, the visitor will again come across the name, this time as the inscription to the best-attended grave in the graveyard and the only fenced-off gravestone, which reads “William Walker, fusilado, 12 Septiembre 1860.”