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When the filibusters arrived in Nicaragua in mid-1855 and rapidly began to establish themselves as its dominant voice in the USA, the country had already reaped headlines in the US media for a number of years. The majority of these accounts was produced in the form of travel narratives. Most travel accounts of the 1840s and 1850s—from the bestsellers by John Lloyd Stephens and Ephraim George Squier to lesser-known examples like Karl von Scherzer and Moritz Wagner—often took a rather formulaic approach toward their subjects. The expectations inherent in the travel writing genre often predetermined what the writers included in their reports.

From its inception, the Nicaraguan postwar official organ Gaceta Oficial published articles demonizing Walker and his filibusters. In an article of August 4, 1857 they are seen to come over the country like a disease: “as a consequence of the war [of the 1850s] the cholera arrived and massacred our people, and as another consequence Walker arrived who was even worse than this horrible disease.” Just a few weeks later, when the Nicaraguans became aware of Walker’s attempt to set sail to Central America again to regain power, the Gaceta described Walker as the one “who has recently attempted to take away our independence and liberty; the same one who everywhere is known as the assassin, the arsonist and the most hardened criminal, he is the one who figures as the principal leader in the new enterprise to subdue Central America.” This tactic, which should deflect criticism from the Democrats for their early connection with the filibusters, was also supported by their new allies the Conservatives.

In the 1904 novel Cabbages and Kings by O. Henry, Clancy—one of the colorful characters of the fictitious Central American republic of Anchuria—reminiscences about the time he tried his hand at “filibustering.” On a New Orleans dock Clancy accidentally stumbles over boxes of guns being loaded onto a ship bound for Guatemala, and imagines that they might form part of a filibustering plot. Enthusiastically, he offers his services as a fellow freedom fighter to the person in charge. As it turns out, the weapons are destined for the supervision of railway workers, who have to labor in slave-like conditions to construct a transisthmian railway. For some time Clancy is stuck in the hellish construction work but eventually manages to escape and exact revenge on his tormentor. The remembrance of this adventure, which he started so lightheartedly, is brought back to Clancy when observing the nice weather on a typical Anchurian evening.

In his hugely successful and widely read travel narrative Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan from 1841, John Lloyd Stephens describes how his arrival in Granada, Nicaragua, was greeted with enthusiasm, and how he was congratulated on his recent “escape from prison” in San Salvador. In fact, this was a rather minor affair; on his way to the ruins of Copan, in what is today Honduras, Stephens and his accompanying artist Frederick Catherwood were prevented from leaving their lodgings in the village of Copan for one night when a young Honduran officer questioned the validity of their passports. Stephens then wrote a message to the passport issuer, their benefactor General Cascara, and shortly afterward the whole issue was resolved.

Every tourist who visits the Honduran town of Trujillo on the Caribbean coast will notice (and probably visit) the impressive Fort Santa Barbara 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.”

The present study aims at critically examining the transnational representations of the filibuster expedition to Nicaragua in the years 1855–1857 as well as this incident’s historical context and the repercussions these representations have enjoyed. Putting the filibuster publication El Nicaraguense into the spotlight also provided a possibility to transcend national paradigms in the analysis of this unique episode. But what has this analysis yielded? How did a transnational approach to this historical event change, amplify or contest our knowledge on antebellum America, transnational newspaper publications, hemispheric exchange processes in the Americas or the historical impact of nineteenth-century sources on contemporary historiography? As the title of this section already indicates, final answers are hard to nail down, but the study can hopefully present important advancements by researching the questions mentioned above.