The Bahamas' history: an emptied archipelago and who came after

Who lived on the islands before Columbus

The first people to settle the archipelago crossed in dugout canoes from Hispaniola or Cuba at some point between 500 and 800 AD. Their route is argued over. William Keegan holds that the likeliest landfall was Great Inagua, which lies 90 kilometres from Hispaniola and 80 from Cuba and has yielded large quantities of pottery made on those islands; Julian Granberry and Gary Vescelius argue for two separate migrations, one from Hispaniola to the Turks and Caicos and one from Cuba to Great Inagua. The people are known as the Lucayans, and whether they should be classed as Taíno is itself disputed: Granberry and Vescelius place them within a wider Taíno population, while L. Antonio Curet does not.

Over some 800 years, from about 700 to about 1500, the Lucayans spread north through the chain. Their villages were densest in the south-central islands, where they had lived longest, and thinner in the drier far south, where Great Inagua receives less than 800 millimetres of rain a year. Known settlement sites are confined to the nineteen largest islands and to cays less than a kilometre from them.

They lived from the shallow banks. More than 80% of the meat in the Lucayan diet came from reef and seagrass fish, and most of the rest from shellfish. Stone had to be imported from Cuba or Haiti, so conch shell, plentiful on every bank, was worked into hoes, gouges, fishhooks and beads, and the largest shells were blown as trumpets to call people together. They grew cotton and tobacco, and one of Columbus's sailors received 12 kilograms of cotton in a single trade on the island the Lucayans called Guanahani.

The islands still carry a Lucayan name. Bahama was the Lucayan name for Grand Bahama, first attested on the Turin Map of about 1523, and English writers were using it for the whole archipelago by 1670. Tourist guides often derive it from the Spanish baja mar, shallow sea. Wolfgang Ahrens of York University calls that a folk etymology; Britannica records that some historians still hold it.

Where Columbus landed is still argued

On 12 October 1492 Christopher Columbus reached an island in the Bahamas, claimed it for Castile and renamed it San Salvador. Which island it was has never been settled. Samuel Eliot Morison identified it as Watling's Island, which was later officially renamed San Salvador; in 1986 Joseph Judge of National Geographic calculated from the ship's log that the landfall was Samana Cay, further south-east; Britannica records that others have argued for Cat Island. Columbus spent a few days among the islands and sailed on to Cuba and Hispaniola.

The Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 placed the archipelago in the Spanish sphere, and Spain made no attempt to settle it. What Spain wanted was labour. Lucayans taken to Hispaniola first sold for about four gold pesos each; once the buyers learned how well they dived for conch, the price rose to between 100 and 150 pesos and many were shipped to the pearl beds of Cubagua. The count of people removed is given as about 40,000 between 1492 and 1508 by Britannica and as up to 40,000 by 1513 in Keegan's account, while another estimate puts the whole population at contact nearer 30,000. Smallpox killed many of those taken.

When the Spanish went back in 1520 to collect the Lucayans who remained, they found eleven. The islands then stood uninhabited for about 130 years. Spain kept a formal claim until the Peace of Paris in 1783, when the Bahamas were confirmed as British and East Florida passed to Spain.

Why Puritans from Bermuda settled Eleuthera

England's claim began on paper. In 1629 Charles I granted his attorney general, Robert Heath, a patent that took in the Bahamas, and Heath did nothing with it. The settlement came from Bermuda instead, out of the religious quarrels that the English Civil War carried across the Atlantic. In July 1647 the Company of Eleutherian Adventurers was formed in London, and William Sayle, twice governor of Bermuda, led about 70 settlers, most of them Puritans and religious Independents, south in 1648.

They landed on the island they called Eleutheria, from the Greek for freedom, and their ship, the William, ran onto the reef north of what is now Spanish Wells with the loss of its provisions. The Articles and Orders of 1647 that Sayle drew up for the colony opened with the king's name and then described the settlers as members of a republic, with no further mention of the Crown. Sayle sailed to Virginia for help; when more exiles arrived in 1649 short of supplies, Puritans in New England raised £800 for them, and the colonists sent back a cargo of Braziletto wood to be sold for Harvard.

Poor soil, quarrels among the settlers and Spanish raids broke the venture. Many, Sayle among them, went back to Bermuda in the 1650s, and by 1670 about 20 families remained, at Harbour Island and at Spanish Wells. The first Africans in the Bahamas came with this group, freed people from Bermuda looking for a new start.

How Nassau became a base for pirates

A second party of Bermudians settled New Providence in about 1666, and the island had almost 500 people by 1670. They lived from the sea: salvaging wrecks, raking salt, taking turtle, fish, conch and ambergris. The islands lay close to the sailing routes between Europe and the Caribbean, so wrecks were frequent, and wrecking paid better than anything else available. In 1670 Charles II granted the islands to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, who appointed governors the settlers largely ignored. Their town, Charles Town, was renamed Nassau after William III came to the throne.

The wreckers fought the Spanish over salvage, and the Spanish answered by burning the settlements on New Providence and Eleuthera in 1684. French and Spanish fleets sacked Nassau again in 1703 and 1706, and the proprietors gave up governing. For about eleven years Nassau was run by privateers, and when the War of the Spanish Succession ended in 1714 many of them carried on as pirates. One estimate puts at least 1,000 pirates in the Bahamas in 1713, against about 200 settler families. At least 20 pirate captains used the islands as a home port, Edward Teach, Benjamin Hornigold and Henry Jennings among them.

The Crown took direct control in 1717, when the proprietors surrendered civil and military government to the king and the king commissioned Woodes Rogers as the first royal governor, with a pardon for any pirate who gave himself up. Rogers arrived in July 1718. Britannica puts the number who surrendered at about 1,000 and records eight of the unrepentant hanged; the Wikipedia account describes a population of about 200 settlers and 500 to 700 pirates seeking pardons. The colony adopted the motto Expulsis piratis restituta commercia, pirates expelled, commerce restored. In 1729 Rogers summoned a representative assembly, and the colony has had one ever since.

What the Loyalists brought after the American war

The American Revolutionary War reached Nassau twice. American forces took the town in 1776 and left after a short occupation, and in May 1782 the colony surrendered to Spain. It was restored to Britain by the preliminary articles of the Peace of Paris in January 1783, and in April of that year the Loyalist officer Andrew Deveaux recaptured Nassau before news of the treaty arrived.

What followed changed the population more than any war. The Crown granted land to American Loyalists, and some 7,300 came with the people they held in slavery, among them about 2,000 from New York and, from East Florida, at least 1,033 people of European descent and 2,214 of African descent. The sparse population tripled within a few years. The Loyalists planted cotton, which yielded well for a few seasons before insects and exhausted soil ended it. The proprietors surrendered their remaining rights to the Crown in 1787 for £12,000.

The first official census, in 1722, had counted 74% of the population as European and 26% as African. After the Loyalist arrival the proportions reversed and stayed reversed: people of African descent were the majority from then on, and the 2010 census recorded 90.6% of residents as Black.

How slavery ended in the Bahamas

Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, and the Royal Navy landed thousands of Africans taken from slave ships in the Bahamas as free people. In the 1820s hundreds of enslaved people and Black Seminoles escaped from Florida, 300 of them in a single flight in 1823 carried by Bahamians in 27 sloops, and most settled in north-west Andros, where their descendants at Red Bays still keep Seminole basket-making and grave-marking traditions.

Slavery inside the colony lasted longer. In 1830 an enslaved man named Pompey led a revolt on an Exuma estate against a sudden transfer of workers to Cat Island. The Abolition Act took effect on 1 August 1834, and full emancipation followed in 1838.

The islands also freed people who were never meant to stay. In 1818 the Home Office ruled that any enslaved person brought into the Bahamas from outside the British West Indies would be freed, and customs officers applied it to American ships wrecked or driven in. The Comet lost off Abaco in December 1830 carried 165 enslaved people and the Encomium in February 1834 carried 48, and all were freed over American protest. In 1841 enslaved people on the brig Creole revolted and took it into Nassau; of the 135 aboard, the 128 who chose to stay were freed. In all, 447 people held by American owners were freed this way from 1830 to 1842, and Britain paid an indemnity for the first two cases in 1855.

Freedom did not bring money. In the Out Islands little cash circulated and many communities were paid in kind under the truck system, while others worked the land of former owners on shares. Blockade-running in the American Civil War and liquor-running during Prohibition in the 1920s brought wealth that did not last, attempts to grow pineapples, citrus, sisal and tobacco for export all failed, and sponge fishing collapsed in 1938.

Who ran the colony from Bay Street

The assembly of 1729 and the legislative council created in 1841 remained in the hands of the white minority, whose leading members were known by the 1950s as the Bay Street Boys. A property qualification kept many Black men off the rolls, and women could not vote at all. The Tribune's account of the period lists churches Black Bahamians could not enter, banks and restaurants that refused them and schools reserved for the privileged class.

The first open challenge came in June 1942, when labourers building an airfield for the wartime governor, the Duke of Windsor, rioted over wages that paid foreign workers far more than local ones. The Progressive Liberal Party was founded in 1953, its first organisers William Cartwright, Cyril Stevenson and Henry Taylor, and Bay Street answered with the United Bahamian Party in 1956. Six PLP members were elected that year. A general strike in 1958 closed the colony for 19 days, and a women's suffrage movement won the vote, first used in the general election of 26 November 1962.

That election exposed the boundaries. The PLP won the most votes and the fewest seats, because New Providence, with most of the people, had the fewest constituencies. A new constitution brought internal self-government on 7 January 1964 under a UBP premier, Roland Symonette. On 27 April 1965, remembered as Black Tuesday, the PLP leader Lynden Pindling threw the Speaker's mace out of a window of the House of Assembly, and Milo Butler threw the sand clock after it.

How majority rule led to independence

The UBP called an early election, and the result was a tie at 18 seats each. Alvin Braynen, a white member for Harbour Island, accepted the Speakership from Pindling, and Randol Fawkes, the one Labour member elected, joined the PLP. On 10 January 1967 Pindling became premier, the colony's first Black premier. The Tribune, writing in 2017, called the day the most transformative event in the country's history.

The title became prime minister in 1968, and a further constitution that year widened local control. The opposition regrouped as the Free National Movement, formed in 1971 according to the Wikipedia account and in 1972 according to Britannica. Britain granted independence by an Order in Council dated 20 June 1973, which came into force on 10 July 1973, when the Prince of Wales handed Pindling the documents. Milo Butler was appointed the first governor-general. The Bahamas joined the IMF and the World Bank on 22 August 1973 and the United Nations on 18 September 1973.

The economy that independence inherited had been built after the war. Nassau's wartime airfield became its international airport in 1957, and tourism grew faster after Havana closed to American visitors in 1961. On 4 August 1955 the colonial government signed the Hawksbill Creek Agreement with Wallace Groves, which gave his Grand Bahama Port Authority some 50,000 acres of Grand Bahama, a free trade zone and the power to license businesses, in return for a deep-water harbour, an airport and schools. The Grand Bahama Museum records the tax exemptions running to 1985 and later extended to 2054. Freeport grew from that contract.

What the independent state has lived through

The PLP governed from majority rule until 1992, when the FNM under Hubert Ingraham won the election, and power has changed hands between the two parties several times since. The College of the Bahamas opened in 1974 and was chartered as the University of the Bahamas on 10 November 2016. The Royal Bahamas Defence Force was established on 31 March 1980.

The heaviest blow since independence came from the weather. From 1 to 3 September 2019 Hurricane Dorian struck Grand Bahama and Abaco at Category 5. An assessment by the Inter-American Development Bank and ECLAC counted 67 confirmed deaths and 282 people missing as of 18 October 2019, and put the cost at $3.4 billion, more than a quarter of GDP, with Abaco bearing 87% of the losses. Other tallies of the damage run higher, to at least $7 billion. The first case of COVID-19 was recorded on 15 March 2020, and the recovery from both became the ground on which the 2021 general election was fought.