A Brief History
Centuries before the arrival of Columbus, a peaceful Amerindian people who called themselves the Luccucairi had settled in the Bahamas. Originally from South America, they had traveled up through the Caribbean islands, surviving by cultivating modest crops and from what they caught from sea and shore. Nothing in the experience of these gentle people could have prepared them for the arrival of the Pinta, the Niña, and the Santa Maria at San Salvador on 12 October 1492. Columbus believed that he had reached the East Indies and mistakenly called these people Indians. We know them today as the Lucayans. Columbus claimed the island and others in the Bahamas for his royal Spanish patrons, but not finding the gold and other riches he was seeking, he stayed for only two weeks before sailing towards Cuba.
The Spaniards never bothered to settle in the Bahamas, but the number of shipwrecks attest that their galleons frequently passed through the archipelago en route to and from the Caribbean, Florida, Bermuda, and their home ports. On Eleuthera the explorers dug a fresh-water well — at a spot now known as “Spanish Wells” — which was used to replenish the supplies of water on their ships before they began the long journey back to Europe with their cargoes of South American gold. As for the Lucayans, within 25 years all of them, perhaps some 30,000 people, were removed from the Bahamas to work — and die — in Spanish gold mines and on farms and pearl fisheries on Hispaniola (Haiti), Cuba, and elsewhere in the Caribbean.
English sea captains also came to know the beautiful but deserted Bahamian islands during the 17th century. England’s first formal move was on 30 October 1629, when Charles I granted the Bahamas and a chunk of the American south to his Attorney General, Sir Robert Health. But nothing came of that, nor of a rival French move in 1633 when Cardinal Richelieu, the 17th-century French statesman, tried claiming the islands for France.
Colonization and Piracy
In 1648 a group of English Puritans from Bermuda, led by William Sayle, sailed to Bahamian waters and established the first permanent European settlement on the island they named Eleutheria (now Eleuthera) after the Greek word for freedom. The 70 colonists called themselves the Eleutherian Adventurers, but life was very difficult and the colony never flourished, though Sayle was long honored for the effort. In 1666 a smaller island (called Sayle’s island) with a fine harbor was settled by Bermudians and renamed New Providence. It was later to become known as Nassau, capital of the Bahamas.
In 1670 six Lords Proprietors of Carolina were granted the Bahama islands by Charles II, but for nearly 50 years their weak governors on New Providence either couldn’t or wouldn’t suppress the piracy raging through the archipelago. Then, in 1684, to avenge countless raids against their ships, the Spanish dispatched a powerful squadron from Cuba to attack Nassau. This sent the majority of the English settlers fleeing to Jamaica or Massachusetts, but didn’t have much effect on the pirates.
Most feared of the 1,000 or more swashbucklers operating from the New Providence lair was Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard. Today you can visit a tower east of Nassau named after him. Another two infamous pirates were women: Anne Bonney and Mary Read had exceptionally bloodthirsty reputations and are still celebrated in the Bahamas. The pirates raided anything on the sea, living totally lawless — and often not very lengthy — lives. Moreover, there was not always a clear distinction between pirates and privateers, the latter officially authorized by their governments to plunder enemy ships during time of war. Anarchy and confusion reigned throughout the area.
In 1718, shortly after the Bahamas became a crown colony, Captain Woodes Rogers, a renowned ex-privateer, was named the first royal governor. Arriving in Nassau with a powerful force and promising amnesty for surrender, he became a legend by cleaning out many of the pirates and establishing some order. This incident inspired the national motto Expulsis Piratis — Restituta Commercia (Pirates Expelled — Commerce Restored), which was retained until 1971.
A few years later Rogers quit the islands only to return for a second time in 1729 after a period of bankruptcy and debtor’s prison in England. Before he died in Nassau in 1732 he had summoned the Bahamas’ first official Assembly, composed of 16 elected members for New Providence and four each for Harbour Island and Eleuthera. At this time, in all the Bahamas there were only about 2,000 settlers.
New Providence knew some spells of prosperity in the mid-18th century as privateering resumed with England at war with Spain. The town of Nassau expanded, and improvements were made between 1760 and 1768 by another revered governor, William Shirley from Massachusetts.
The American Revolutionary War
When the 13 American colonies, enraged by the Stamp Tax, got into the war that eventually brought independence, the Bahamas somewhat reluctantly found itself on England’s side. But reluctance dissolved as profits from privateering once again flowed into Nassau. This time the plundered vessels were American, but not all the victories were won by the privateers. On 3 March 1776, a rebel squadron under Commodore Esek Hopkins arrived and occupied Nassau for two weeks, a bloodless undertaking that emptied the island’s forts of arms and other military supplies. A smaller and equally non-violent American operation against the town in January 1778 lasted less than three days.
As the colonies’ war effort picked up steam, both France and Spain weighed in against the British. In May 1782, New Providence surrendered to a large Spanish-American invasion fleet from Cuba and for the next year a Spanish governor ruled the Bahamas.
News traveled slowly in those days. The Treaty of Versailles in 1783 formally restored the Bahamas to the British, but actual liberation came through a famous escapade that would never have happened in the age of the telegraph. Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew Deveaux, a loyalist from South Carolina, sailed from Florida with six ships, picked up men and fishing boats at Harbour Island and Eleuthera, and “invaded” Nassau. Though vastly outnumbered and outgunned, Deveaux employed elaborate ruses with his little boats to convince the Spanish defenders that his force was overpowering. The humiliating Spanish surrender is proudly recalled in Bahamian history, even though it was all unnecessary: the peace treaty had been signed the previous week.
Deveaux was the first of some 7,000 loyalists who, with slaves and the promise of land grants, came to the Bahamas from the southern American colonies in the wake of the English defeat in the Revolutionary War. This influx profoundly affected the islands. A number of prominent Bahamians today are the descendants of loyalists or their slaves. As a reward for his efforts, Deveaux was given acreage on both New Providence and Cat Island. Other loyalists set up cotton plantations on various islands, and slaves soon became the majority of the population.
Emancipation and Decline
In the 1780s well over 100 cotton plantations were founded and flourished around the Bahamas. Prosperity from the land finally seemed a possibility. But by the end of the century cotton had fallen victim to a devastating plague of chenille bugs and exhaustion of the weak soil. Most of the planters left the islands and depression returned, only partly relieved by “wrecking,” the freelance business of salvaging cargo from the ships forever running aground in the dangerous Bahamian waters. (Some ships were deliberately misguided by lights on shore; Nassau harbor did not have a proper lighthouse until 1816).
Nassau became a free port in 1787, sparking a surge in trading activity. Loyalists built a number of the attractive colonial-style homes and public buildings still standing today, and during the War of 1812, privateers enjoyed another profitable spell against American vessels.
Slavery in the Bahamas was not as widespread or as vicious as on many sugar islands in the Caribbean. Some slaves were voluntarily freed or sold their liberty by loyalist owners. After 1804, no slaves were imported into the Bahamas. By 1822, the first registration counted 10,808 slaves on the 17 inhabited islands or island clusters. After Parliament in London abolished slavery in 1833, there was a transitional apprenticeship period of 5 years before all slaves in the colony became fully free on 1 August 1838. This included a few thousand slaves from ships captured by the Royal Navy. They were housed in specially founded settlements on New Providence and the Out Islands.
Civil War Blockade Running
Over the centuries, trouble on the nearby American continent has often meant good news for the Bahamas. When Lincoln ordered a blockade of the southern states in 1861 after the outbreak of the Civil War, the Bahamas quickly boomed. Nassau harbor was busy with ships unloading Confederate cotton and tobacco and taking aboard arms, medicine, and manufactured goods, mainly from Europe, to be run back through the northern blockade. As the war went on, speedy and camouflaged contraband vessels were built to slip past the ever-increasing Federal patrols. Profits from blockade running were incredible, and Nassau went wild. But the extravagant parties and carefree spending stopped abruptly with the North’s victory in 1865. Late the following year an immense hurricane sent a tidal wave over Hog Island (today Paradise Island), smashing Nassau’s flimsy buildings and ruining crops. Other islands were also devastated. As the Bahamas sank back into economic doldrums, citizens turned to agriculture, fishing, or salt raking. The spread of lighthouses and decent navigational charts had crippled the old standby, the wrecking trade.
For a time a new fiber called sisal seemed promising. But Bahamian soil was too poor and Mexico grew a better plant. Neville Chamberlain, future British Prime Minister, took over his family’s sisal operation on Andros in the 1890s. It failed, the natives said, because of that island’s evil elves called chickcharnies, who cast a spell on the family for disturbing the land. Hopes were raised, and also fizzled, over Bahamian citrus and pineapple. Sponging, another vitally important industry at the end of the 19th century, also had setbacks. A hurricane in 1839 drowned some 300 sponge fishermen in the ‘mud’ off Andros, and a devastating fungus some 40 years later killed almost all the sponges.
The 20th Century
Desperate for work, perhaps 20 percent of the Bahamian population left to take construction jobs in Florida between the turn of the century and World War I. During that war hundreds of Bahamians saw active service with British forces. The islands suffered food shortages and a serious bank failure, but nothing more threatening militarily than rumors of German submarines offshore.
Prohibition brought gloom to millions of Americans, but for the Bahamas it brought the biggest bonanza in history. At the end of 1919, Congress passed the Volstead Act outlawing the manufacture, sale, or transport of intoxicating beverages. The Bahamian islands (where the temperance crusade never had much chance) were perfectly placed to help thirsty Americans. For 14 years, until the controversial law was finally repealed, bootlegging changed Nassau, West End on Grand Bahama, and Bimini beyond recognition. With just as much gusto as they’d shown in the past for wrecking, privateering, and blockade running, Bahamians took to the seas with illegal liquor. Trying to outwit the US Coast Guard was risky but enormously profitable. Fortunes were made by respected Bahamian families turned liquor merchants, rum-running boat captains, notorious criminals, shady ladies, and the Bahamas government (which collected duty on temporarily imported drink).
Liquor money bought Nassau better houses, churches, lighting, water, roads, sewers, docks, and hotels. The city’s first gambling casino opened in 1920; the first daily air service from Miami began in 1929; the yacht set decided Nassau was fashionable, and many wealthy Americans as well as Prohibition millionaires built homes on the islands.
When the boom suddenly came to an end with the worldwide depression and the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, unemployment rose again, despite the first significant tourism the Bahamas had known.
In some respects, World War II put the Bahamas on the international map. The colony was chosen to have two of the sites Britain leased to the United States under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “destroyers for bases” deal in 1940. Allied forces operated submarine-hunting and air-sea rescue stations on the islands; Royal Air Force pilots and Royal Navy frogmen were trained here, and much trans-Atlantic air traffic passed through the Bahamas.
Then, to the astonishment of the local populace, the Duke of Windsor, having given up his throne for an American divorcée, was named governor of the little colony in 1940. He and the Duchess remained until 1945.
In 1943 the Duke intervened in the investigation of the murder of Canadian multimillionaire Sir Harry Oakes, a longtime benefactor of the Bahamas who gave his name to Nassau’s first airfield. The sensational case, never solved, made world headlines for the Bahamas and is still discussed today.
After the construction of the first wartime American air bases on New Providence was completed, thousands of Bahamians left to work on farms and in factories in the United States, a migration that continued well into the postwar era. But employment opportunities began to grow at home. From 1950, a promotion campaign under Sir Stafford Sands was hugely successful in attracting tourists to the Bahamas. Denied the sun, sand, and sin of Cuba by Fidel Castro’s takeover in 1959, hundreds of thousands of American vacationers set their sights on the Bahamas. The influx was spurred by gambling, airport and harbor improvement on the major islands, and the creation of the modern city of Freeport (which had been set in motion by the so-called Hawksbill Creek Agreement of 1955). Resort hotels began to appear and the advent of air-conditioning improved the often stifling humidity of summer.
Under a new constitution in 1964, the colony was given self-government with a ministerial-parliamentary system. In 1967 elections, the Progressive Liberal Party was victorious, its leader Lynden O. Pindling becoming premier. Following a constitutional conference in London, the Bahamas became fully independent on July 10, 1973, and is now a member of the United Nations and the British Commonwealth. In August 1992 the Progressive Liberal Party, still headed by Lynden O. Pindling, was toppled by the Free National Movement after 25 years in power. Today’s prime minister is Hubert Ingraham.
Since independence the Bahamas has kept British systems of judiciary and government yet has moved closer economically to its near neighbor, the US. The Bahamian Government has deliberately pursued tourism as the major industry of the Bahamian commonwealth and is happy to welcome many millions of visitors to its shores. The growth in cruise traffic has been particularly strong. The other islands, called the Family Islands by the government but generally referred to as the Out Islands by the tourist trade, have not shared this huge growth in numbers of visitors. Together they offer tourists almost any form of vacation experience, from the bustle of the busy city to the silence of the desert island.
In the 1990s the Bahamian Government began working on ways to expand the country’s economic base. While tourism remains a top priority — the opening of the vast Atlantis resort on Paradise Island leaves little doubt about that — a number of measures have also been taken to make the country’s laws and tax codes more attractive to offshore investors. As a result, money has been making its way into financial institutions on the Bahamas from around the world, and a large number of foreign banks have opened brand-new air-conditioned offices surrounded by carefully manicured gardens.
One of the major questions still facing the Bahamas is how to accommodate the increasing numbers of tourists while still preserving the special architectural and social heritage of the Out Islands, as well as of the major towns like Nassau. Will it be possible to enjoy the natural splendors of places like Inagua without upsetting the delicate balance of nature? At the moment, the thinking is that it’s perhaps best to leave these smaller, less developed islands in peace.
