Bonaire's history: an island the Dutch state ran twice

Who lived on Bonaire before the Spanish came

The oldest trace of people on the island is at Lagun, on the east coast, where archaeologists date occupation to about 3400 years before present, roughly 1450 BC. These were Archaic hunter-gatherers and fishers who moved in family groups of about a hundred; Curaçao, the neighbouring island, appears to have been settled about a thousand years earlier and to have emptied for a time in the same period.

The people Europeans met were the Caquetío, Arawak speakers who crossed from the mainland of present-day Venezuela. Sources disagree on when: the Wikipedia article on Bonaire gives both about AD 500 and about AD 1000, and the Otrabanda Records history of the islands' music puts the arrival around AD 600. Their remains have been found northeast of Kralendijk and near Lac Bay, and their rock paintings and petroglyphs survive in caves at Spelonk, Onima, Ceru Pungi and Ceru Crita-Cabai.

The island's name is usually traced to a Caquetío word, Bonay, meaning low country. A second theory reads it as Spanish buen aire, good air. The early Spanish called all three islands las Islas de los Gigantes, the islands of the giants, apparently because the Caquetío struck them as tall.

Why Spain emptied Bonaire and stocked it

Alonso de Ojeda reached Curaçao in 1499 with Amerigo Vespucci and Juan de la Cosa, and the neighbouring island he also visited was almost certainly Bonaire. De la Cosa's world map of 1500 marks it as Isla do Palo Brasil, island of brazilwood. Bonaire's own public holiday on 6 September commemorates that arrival.

Spain found no metal worth mining on Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao and in 1513 listed them as islas inútiles, useless islands. In 1515 it shipped the Caquetío to the copper mines of Santo Domingo on Hispaniola, somewhere between 500 and 2,000 people by the Wikipedia estimate. Juan Martínez de Ampiés, appointed commander of the islands in 1526, brought some of them back and landed cows, donkeys, goats, horses, pigs and sheep. Bonaire became a ranch worked by the remaining Caquetío, where cattle were raised for their hides.

The Spanish settlers lived inland at Rincon, tucked between hills away from the water, because pirates raided the coasts. That choice is why Rincon still sits away from the shore. The descendants of the donkeys, goats and pigs landed in the 16th century still roam the island.

Why the West India Company wanted Bonaire

The Dutch West India Company was founded in 1602, and from 1623 its ships called at Bonaire for meat, water and wood. The Dutch also left Spanish and Portuguese prisoners there, who founded Antriol, a name contracted from Spanish al interior. After losing Sint Maarten to Spain in 1633, the Dutch attacked the three islands, and Bonaire fell in March 1636. STINAPA's history of the Slagbaai plantation gives the company's reasons: Bonaire's salt pans, and its use as a meat supplier for the company's naval base on Curaçao. Fort Oranje went up over the harbour in 1639.

Curaçao became the company's slave market for the region and Bonaire its plantation. Britannica describes Bonaire as having supplied enslaved people to Curaçao's plantations; the Wikipedia account has the traffic running the other way in the 1710s, when famine and unrest on Curaçao led the Dutch to move a large number of enslaved people to Bonaire. Both agree that the island's work was salt, dyewood, maize and livestock, done by a small number of enslaved Africans alongside Caquetío and convicts.

When the company was wound up in 1791, Slagbaai passed to the Dutch government and went on producing goat meat, salt, chalk and wood with enslaved labour. Britain held the island from 1800 to 1803 and again from 1807 to 1816. White traders who came in that period built the settlement of Playa beside Fort Oranje in 1810, and the colonial administration renamed it Kralendijk, from the Dutch for coral dike, in 1830. Simón Bolívar stopped at Bonaire in 1816 while seeking safety during the Venezuelan War of Independence.

Who worked the salt pans and on whose account

From 1816 until 1868 Bonaire was a government plantation, and its main business was solar salt from the shallow pans along the flat southern coast. Most of the enslaved people on the island were owned by the Dutch government itself. In 1825 there were about 300 government-owned slaves. The pans were named after the colours of the Dutch flag and its pennant, the Rode, Blauwe, Witte and Oranje Pan, and in 1837 four obelisks in the same colours were put up so that ships could find the right pan to load from.

The work was to break the dried salt crust with pickaxes and carry it to the beach in bags and baskets in full sun. Reports from 1854 record salt wounds and scurvy among the workers, and the glare off the pans caused what was called salt blindness. Until 1850 the people who worked the southern pans lived at Rincon, the settlement of enslaved and free people of colour in the middle of the island, and Bonaire.com's account of the huts puts the walk to the pans at about seven hours each way. Those who stayed at the pans during the harvest slept in the open or in shelters they built themselves. In 1850 rows of small huts went up beside the White and Orange Pans, built of klipsteen, cut coral limestone, each about 1.5 by 2 metres and too low for an adult to stand. Some of the workers were moved at the same time to Tera Cora, then called Mundo Nobo, the new world, about halfway between Rincon and the pans and now a district of Kralendijk behind the airport. Sunday was the one free day, and many walked back to Rincon to see their families. The huts have been protected monuments since 2012.

Abolition in 1863 freed 758 people on Bonaire, 607 of them government property, according to the archaeologists Ruud Stelten and Konrad Antczak as cited by the historian Anne van Mourik. The Wikipedia article dates the Emancipation Regulation for the government slaves to 30 September 1862. Many of the freed men and women kept working the pans for wages, in van Mourik's account sometimes under coercion. She also notes that the plaques now beside the huts describe the period in terms that leave out who owned whom.

What changed when the government sold the island

After abolition, in STINAPA's account, running the island became too costly for the government. On 1 September 1868 the government of the Colony of Curaçao auctioned the island in parcels, and further lots were sold in 1870: five for forestry and livestock and nine for salt. The buyers were mostly Curaçao merchants who had no plan to live on their land.

What the plantations produced was modest. Aloe was cut after the rains and was last exported in 1973; goats went to Curaçao until 1970; divi-divi pods were sold for tanning leather in Europe, and Bonaire's were valued enough that a certificate of origin was introduced to stop traders passing off South American pods as Bonairean. After 1920, when the Herrera brothers bought the northern half of Slagbaai and called it America, more than 3,000 goats might be shipped from Playa Funchi in a good year. The aloe cutters were almost all women from Rincon who camped in the fields during the week.

Freed families also began farming small plots of their own, and the sorghum harvest, maishi chiki, is what the Simadan festival celebrates. A hurricane in 1954 wrecked the Slagbaai salt pans, and they were abandoned.

How the war and an airfield opened the island

When Germany invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940, the colonial authorities interned German and Austrian citizens and Dutch people suspected of German sympathies in a camp on Bonaire, just south of Fort Oranje. It held 461 people without trial between 1940 and 1947, many of them refugees from Nazi Germany. Britain and the United States treated Bonaire as a protectorate during the occupation, and in 1944 Princess Juliana and Eleanor Roosevelt visited the troops stationed there.

The war also killed Bonaireans at sea. German U-boats attacked the tankers that served the refineries on Aruba and Curaçao, and 34 Bonaireans died on those ships. A monument in Kralendijk records them.

The United States Army built the airfield that is now Flamingo International Airport; work began in December 1943 and it opened in 1945. After the war the empty internment barracks became the island's first hotel, Zeebad. A report in 1956 suggested tourism could become Bonaire's main income, the Bonaire Beach Hotel followed in 1962, Trans World Radio began broadcasting from the island in 1964 and the salt works reopened in 1966 under the Antilles International Salt Company. STINAPA was founded in 1962, and Washington park in the north, bought by the government from the estate of its last owner, Julio Caesar "Boy" Herrera, on condition that it stay undeveloped, opened on 9 May 1969 as the first nature sanctuary in the Netherlands Antilles, and the Bonaire Petroleum Corporation oil terminal opened in 1975.

How Bonaire joined the Netherlands and then objected

Bonaire became part of the Netherlands Antilles in 1954, with an island council, an executive council and a lieutenant governor for local matters. Its flag was approved on 11 December 1981 after a design process open to the public.

The Antilles came apart in stages. Aruba left in 1986. A commission reported in 2004 that the federation should be dissolved, and in the referendums of the period Bonaire and Saba voted for closer ties with the Netherlands while Sint Eustatius voted to keep the Antilles. The governments agreed in 2006, and at midnight local time on 10 October 2010 Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba became public bodies of the Netherlands itself, outside any province. The islands switched from the Antillean guilder to the US dollar on 1 January 2011.

Bonaire's own vote on the new status kept slipping. A referendum set for 26 March 2010 was cancelled in February after a United Nations delegation objected to a clause that limited voting to Dutch nationals who had arrived before 2007. When it was finally held on 17 December 2010, 84% voted in favour, but turnout was 35% against the 51% required, and the result was declared invalid.

The group Nos Ke Boneiru Bèk, We Want Bonaire Back, collected more than 3,500 signatures in 2013 for a new vote. On 18 December 2015 voters were asked whether they agreed with the direct link to the Netherlands: 5,040 said no and 2,649 said yes, on a turnout of 61.59%. The yes campaign had argued that most people were better off than before; the no campaign objected to secular rules introduced from The Hague, to same-sex marriage and euthanasia, and to what it called a lack of respect for Bonairean culture. The vote was not binding and the status did not change. Anne van Mourik reports that discontent on the island since has centred less on independence than on poverty and inequality, which brought people onto the streets in May 2022.