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Mini Caribbean in an azure sea
WELCOME BAHAMAS NASSAU - 2008
Mini Caribbean in an azure sea
More to enjoy than sun, sea and sand
With 700 islands and innumerable cays, The Bahamas is a mini-Caribbean in its own right. Each island adds something unique to the whole, which makes The Baamas what it is: Inagua with its flamingos and salt; Eleuthera with pineapples and surfing; Cat Island with obeah and story-telling; Long Island with its sheep farms; Acklins and Crooked Island with cascarilla trees.
Although the ubiquitous sun, sea and and are staple to each and every tropical island of the world, the combined islands of The Bahamas are set apart by a combination of culture, biology, geology and a certain je ne sais quois.
The collective cultural and historical experience of the Bahamin people-which include piracy, civil war blockade running, (ship) wrecking, slavery, emancipation, Junkanoo, rum-running-is theirs alone. But the way nature has utilized its forces in The Bahamas, too, makes a difference.
Most beautiful on earth
Spectacuar photographs taken by a Mercury astronaut in the early days of space travel emphasized the brilliant clarity of Bahama seas. The astronauts called them the "most beautiful" on earth, and in an era of polluted oceans and air, the pictures drew thousands o our shores.
Comprised of 90 per cent limestone, The Bahamas' land mass is 5,380 square miles, roughly the size of Great Britain. The islands are low and flat, with the highest elevation a mere 206 feet above sea level.
The Bahamas is thought to be th relic of an underwater mountain range. The islands and the Great Bahama Bank itself are the flattened peaks; the deep channels that were once vast valleys, now drop 10,000 feet to the ocean floor.
Although part of the Caribbean region, The Bahamas is no in the Caribbean Sea (that is south of Cuba), but in the western Atlantic. As most sailors know, it lies between latitudes 20° 50' N and 27° 25' N and longitudes 72° 37' W and 80° 32' W.
Its climate has earned it the appropriate sobriquet "isles of perptual June," voiced by President George Washington, with average winter temperatures of around 70° F.
Awesome extremes
But it's the ocean people recall years after their visit. Described as "gin clear," "multi-hued" and "the clearest and most beautiful inthe world," the marine vista provides tremendous extremes.
In New Providence, the sea on one side of the island breaks off into a considerable number of fathoms, making it dark blue or indigo. In shallow areas it is turquoise or aquamarine, becoming progessively clearer towards the shore, and over coral reefs it looks like a shade of egg plant. At the Tongue of the Ocean, on the eastern edge of Andros, the pale green of the 25-or-so-feet-deep Great Bahama Bank abruptly meets the blue-black of deep ocean.
Derived from the Spanish name for shallow waters-baja mar-The Bahamas rises from two broad banks forming an extension of the continental shelf off Florida. The surrounding sea is consequently shallow. The islands are, however, separated into groups by seeral deep water channels, the most pronounced of which, the Crooked Island passage, is heavily used by ships.
In the world scheme of shipping lanes, The Bahamas holds an enviable position. Nowhere is this more evident than in Grand Bahama, site of the duy-free industrial port of Freeport and home of one of the largest bunkering installations in the western hemisphere. The island is just off the Gulf Stream-the watery highway between North and South America-and the route to the Panama Canal. It is also diectly on the Northwest Providence Channel, one of the main routes to Europe.
Freeport would not exist as it does today but for the entrepreneurship and vision of American investor Wallace Groves. He devised the plan that eventually became a huge "free pot" and industrial centre in the midst of the scrub and swamp around Hawksbill Creek.
Groves started the Grand Bahama Port Authority (GBPA) with a huge grant of land from the Bahamian government. In return, he created a deep harbour and built houses, churhes, schools and roads.
Groves retired in the 1970s but his company continued. In 1995, the largest container company in the world, Hutchison Port Holdings Ltd, became an equal partner, and later, a subsidiary called Hutchison Lucaya Ltd, constructed a htel complex called Our Lucaya.
Today, the harbour is a major trans-shipment port and the complex is served by a state-of-the art airport.
Mysterious blue holes
The mysterious blue holes of The Bahamas, which often appear as circles of blue in emerald reen waters, have unusually strong currents that set them apart from similar formations around the globe.
Publications such as National Geographic have provided theories on the origin of the Bahama blues. The consensus is they were created during an Ice ge of the past million years or so, when water became trapped in glaciers and icecaps and caused sea level to lower by hundreds of feet. The holes probably started as dry-land caves or sinkholes on the platforms of land which became exposed. Heavy rains ae away the limestone, opening fissures and forming underground pockets. Flowing water followed the meandering crevices and enlarged them, turning the pockets into caverns. As the last glacial period ended, once again raising the level of the sea, the caven roofs collapsed and flooded, forming the blue holes we see today.
Intrepid divers say the eerily beautiful chasms hundreds of feet deep can be a little spooky and sometimes frightening, and their goal is to get in and out as quickly as possible. Some od-time Bahamians speak of the mythical lusca, a hideous octopus-like creature they claim inhabits the holes. Myth has it that "him of de hahnds" despises intruders and pulls boats into the abyss by wrapping its tentacles around them.
The submerged cavern of Grand Bahama's Lucayan National Park are one of the world's most extensive cave systems. About eight miles of the ancient caves have been explored, and in the 1960s, three skeletons of Lucayan Indians-believed to be pre-Columbian-were discovered there
Bahama exclusives
In this "world of difference," you'll see species you won't find anywhere else. The Bahama parrot (Amazona leucocephala bahamensis) has its last wild enclaves on Inagua and Abaco. Fossils more than 10,000 years old have been found in Nw Providence. The Bahama swallow (Tachycineta cyaneoviridis) lives and breeds in the northern Bahamas and nowhere else on earth. Around 120 of the islands' 1,370 plant species are endemic to The Bahamas.
Almost all Bahama reptiles-iguanas, freshwater terapins, boa constrictors-are endemic to a particular island or cay. At one time, the entire archipelago was densely populated by iguanas. Nowadays they are few and far between.
A cat-sized rodent once found in all but the extreme southern Bahama islands i the Bahamian hut́a (Geocapromys ingrahami), now largely restricted to the 1,000-acre East Plana Cay, between Crooked Island and Mayaguana.
Inagua has the largest colony of flamingos in the western hemisphere, numbering more than 60,000. This Bahamas natonal bird once faced extinction, but is now protected by law. Even airplanes are forbidden to fly less than 2,000 feet over the nesting grounds.
Exploring the unknown
Speaking of planes, The Bahamas has become a world-class playground for island-hopping ilots, especially owners of single-engine craft.
From Florida, the longest distance over water is around 55 nautical miles. Once reaching the western tip of Grand Bahama, pilots can island-hop the rest of the chain with no more than about 25 nautical mils between airports. Because a typical single-engine plane glides about two miles for every 1,000 feet of altitude, it need only climb to 8,500 feet, for example, to glide 17 miles-a calculation newly-licensed pilots wary of the sea are quick to memorize.
Ideal weather conditions are also part of the attraction. Says veteran pilot J Mac McClellan of Greenwich, CT, even if a plane is forced to ditch in the sea, your chances of survival are excellent in The Bahamas because the water is warm, and you are requred to have life vests and a raft on board.
Warm water, indeed. Bahamas sea surface temperatures are in the bathtub range, varying on average between 74° F in February and 83° F in August.
Absence of rivers
You may wonder why our peaceful inland waters re so transparent. Two reasons are the absence of rivers -which carry sediments into the ocean and darken the waters-and almost non-existence of plankton.
Although plankton is important for the survival of almost all marine life, less is better from an asthetic standpoint. The amount of plankton depends on nitrates, phosphates and other nutrient salts being disturbed and transported by currents. As there is little agitation of the waters around The Bahamas, the nutrients are too few to feed significant aounts.
This makes life easier for the coral reefs which thrive in warmer oceans and plenty of sunlight. Left undisturbed, reefs can reach massive proportions. The world's third largest barrier reef off Andros extends 120 miles. In all, there are 900 squae miles of reefs in The Bahamas.
The government has enforced a look-but-don't-touch policy to protect the reefs, as divers have been known to pluck a coral or two for souvenirs. The policy also protects the diver, since some corals are toxic and others ae razor-sharp and can inflict severe lacerations.
Shipwrecks and divers
Shipwrecks provide good breeding grounds for coral, and exploring them has become an increasingly popular pastime. Most of the ships sunk (often deliberately) in The Bahamas are stee-hulled vessels, some of which have endured the ravages of salt water for nearly a century. More than a half-dozen lie in Bahama waters, including the 120-foot Comberbach, resting in 100 feet of water near Stella Maris, Long Island, and the Tears of Allah off the west end of New Providence. Formerly a 90-foot inter-island cargo vessel, it was sunk in 45 feet of water for a James Bond movie.
There is also the popular 230-foot Theo's Wreck off Grand Bahama's Port Lucaya, where the Underwater Explorers Socity (UNEXSO) offers one of the few organized programmes in the world allowing scuba divers to swim with semi-wild dolphins in the open sea. On rare occasions, divers come across sunken treasure from Spanish galleons.
Wrecks and reefs are magnets for fish porting a myriad of colours and shapes, such as the sergeant major, jewel fish and blue chromis. For the serious angler, the legendary blue marlin is found in deep waters off Bimini, Cat Island, Walker's Cay and Grand Bahama.
Another spirited competitor s the bonefish, often called salt water's "fightingest" fish, pound for pound. Other local treasures are the grouper, the rarely seen hawksbill turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata), commercially the most valuable of turtles because of its distinctive shell, an the crawfish, a delicious clawless lobster.
No island worth its salt water-certainly not The Bahamas-is without its tuna, wahoo, amberjack, tail-walking sailfish, sting ray, octopus, barracuda, shark, migrating whale and more. The popular conch (Strombu gigas), one of the largest univalve shellfish in the world, is considered so vital to our fishing and tourism industries that its exportation is prohibited.
Salt and pepper
Speaking of industry, Inagua is an important provider of salt for manufacturing rocesses around the world. Each year the Morton Salt Company produces more than one million tons of the crystalline compound that is extracted from the sea, treated in Inagua's 30-acre salt pans and sold as 99.4 to 99.6 per cent pure, against mined salt'saverage of 97 to 98.5 per cent purity.
Pepper is another important Bahamian commodity. Carried back to Europe by Columbus, Bahamian bird and goat peppers are now enjoyed by many global gourmets. They're among the hottest peppers known to mankind.
The poular Italian aperitif Campari is made with Bahamian cascarilla, the dried, bitter, aromatic bark of Croton eleuteria, a 10- to 20-foot tree of the spurge family (Euphorbiaceae), found in the central and southern Bahamas. Islanders have been harvesting casarilla and shipping it to Italy via Nassau since the early eighteenth century.
A rich tapestry
The colourful history of The Bahamas is immortalized throughout the islands in enduring monuments you can visit.
These include the loyalist homes dating from he 1700s; Fort Montagu, built in 1741 and captured by American war hero John Paul Jones in 1776; Vendue House, an auction house for slaves during the 18th century and now headquarters for the Pompey Museum of Slavery and Emancipation; the salt, cotton andguava plantations that operated from the 1600s until final emancipation in 1838; the Parliament Square buildings representative of The Bahamas' former role as a British colony; the stately Government House, where the Duke of Windsor resided with the forme Wallis Simpson as Governor of The Bahamas during the Second World War.
Today, The Bahamas boasts the Caribbean region's number one tourism destination, Atlantis-Paradise Island, along with a host of other world-class resorts. All are here, and all are prt of the rich tapestry that makes The Bahamas a world of difference.
While the faster pace of the outside world is steadily making inroads into Bahamian society, especially in Nassau and Freeport, the people, especially those who live in peaceful Out Isand settlements, are known for their welcoming friendliness and charm.
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