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Isla Grande and The Bahamas
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Isla Grande and The Bahamas
A story of pirates, gunrunners and bootleggers
Welcome to The Bahamas! You may decide that this is a good day to just relax by the pool. You may look forward to a workout in the hotel’s fitness room, a spot of tennis, a round of golf, a relaxing massage in the spa. The kids can enjoy the special activities offered in day camps.
Tonight, you may be looking forward to a superb in-house meal followed by live entertainment, trying your luck in one of two casinos, dancing or walking on the beach under the stars. Your hosts offer a seemingly endless list of choices, including access to outside activities: big-game fishing, an excursion to a deserted island, scuba diving on a colourful reef, snorkelling, horseback riding, birdwatching, swimming with dolphins, visiting a zoo … it’s your choice. You’ll discover that your hotel is a wonderful place for a convention and a great place to celebrate a wedding.
As you enjoy the amenities, you may wonder how all this came to be–what twists and turns of fate created this holiday nation of 700 major islands and thousands of smaller cays spread out like so many emeralds upon a turquoise sea.
You may be surprised to learn that the history of these seemingly peaceful islands is anything but. What is now one of the world’s premier tourism destinations and a sophisticated financial and investment centre was once the haunt of pirates, shipwreckers, blockade runners and bootleggers.
If you have a moment to spare, let this Welcome Bahamas give you a short-short version of the sometimes violent, surprising and not always creditable history of The Bahamas.
At one time a long time ago, you could have hiked from Bimini to Long Island–a distance of about 375 miles over the ocean–without getting your feet wet.
Back then–that’s 18 million years ago–scientists believe the Bahama islands were joined in a featureless land mass called Isla Grande.
To find out how Isla Grande, and thus The Bahamas, got here, straddling the Tropic of Cancer, you have to go back even further in time–back to the age of dinosaurs, more than 200 million years ago.
This was the Mesozoic era, when tectonic plates began drifting away from Pangaea, the gigantic land mass that scientists believe once contained all of today’s continents.
As North America began ripping away from what is now northern Africa, it dragged with it a splinter called the Bahama Platform. According to geologist Paul J Hearty, who wrote an article about this for the Bahamas Handbook in 1994, the platform “rotated 25 degrees northeast, then stopped near its present position between Florida and Cuba.” And the rest, as they say, is limestone.
That is, successive layers of limestone, precipitated from the sea and early reefs, accumulated on top of the platform–so much so (Hearty estimates there is six miles of compressed limestone underfoot in The Bahamas) that the platform began sinking under the weight. According to the scientists, the reefs are continually building up enough limestone to keep the archipelago’s nose above water.
Long before the arrival of the first humans, the islands supported a thriving ecosystem. They were heavily forested, according to the first European explorers. Recent underwater archaeology in Abaco has found that the fauna included long-extinct crocodiles and tortoises dating back 3,000 and 2,500 years respectively.
The first Bahamians
Fast forward many more years to the period when humans began arriving in The Bahamas. The first were the Lucayans, a branch of the Arawak Taino Indians who, among several other tribes, travelled by canoe from the river basins of northern South America and spread throughout the Caribbean.
No one knows the precise date of their arrival, but digs in Eleuthera have narrowed the possibilities. The Lucayans, it seems, discovered The Bahamas at least 700 years before Christopher Columbus did on October 12, 1492.
While it is popularly believed that the Lucayans were a peaceable people, it’s known that the wives of a deceased hereditary leader, a cacique, were killed and buried along with him. And there’s more recent evidence that the Lucayans may have practised ritual human sacrifice.
Columbus noted in his journal that the natives were a tall and handsome people “naked as the day they were born” and that the men had scars from wounds suffered in battles with invading Caribs. Unfortunately, the self-proclaimed Admiral of the Ocean Sea also noted that the natives could be easily subdued and would make fine slaves.
A reminder of the Age of Discovery is a statue of Columbus on the steps leading up to Government House, a pink mansion that is home to the Bahamas’ Governor General.
Spanish conquistadors raided the islands, took the Lucayans away in chains and forced them to work in the gold mines of Cuba and Hispaniola.
It’s believed there were between 30,000 and 50,000 Lucayans in The Bahamas when Columbus arrived. Within a generation, they were annihilated–victims of the terrible conditions of slavery and European diseases.
Eleutherian Adventurers
With the Lucayans gone, The depopulated Bahamas lay undisturbed until the mid-1600s, although there are stories, but scant evidence, that the Spanish and French made half-hearted attempts to colonize. There’s a herd of feral horses in Abaco that are thought to be of Spanish ancestry.
The first real settlement was led by an Englishman, William Sayles, a two-time governor of Bermuda. Sayles persuaded about 70 religious dissenters in Bermuda to establish an idealistic colony of equals on an island he called Eleutheria, the Greek word for freedom. It’s now called Eleuthera.
Bad luck dogged the settlers from the beginning. The ship bringing them to the new land in 1647 foundered on the Devil’s Backbone, a particularly dangerous reef. They lost their entire cargo of supplies. Somehow they scratched a meagre living from whatever wild food
was available.
The colony was never a success, and after a few years only a few settlers remained in The Bahamas. They included families whose names are still prominent: Adderley, Albury, Bethell, Davis and Sands, among others.
Move ahead another 50 years and King Charles II appoints eight English noblemen, known as the Lords Proprietors of the Carolinas, to rule over The Bahamas.
The Proprietors had little interest in the islands. The poorly defended capital, Charles Town–now Nassau–was destroyed by a joint French and Spanish fleet in 1703.
Shortly after this, The Bahamas was discovered by British pirates. They came at first to careen, clean and repair their ships. But they quickly realized that The Bahamas was a fine place to lay in wait for Spanish and French merchant ships plying to and from the New World.
What the Lords Proprietors may have ruled, the pirates quickly overruled. Led by Edward Teach, better known as the notorious Blackbeard, they proclaimed a “Privateers Republic.” Corrupt local officials acquiesced to everything the pirates demanded.
An article in the 1998 Bahamas Handbook revealed that Nassau under pirate rule was a “shanty town rife with illness, taverns, brothels and shacks built of driftwood.” The squalor and unsanitary conditions, said one observer, enabled a person to smell the island at sea, long before he saw it.
The 3,000 or so pirates who based themselves in Nassau included Blackbeard, Henry Jennings, Henry Morgan, Charles Vane–said to have been the most bloodthirsty of them all–the gentlemanly Stede Bonnet, Capt Benjamin Hornigold and the womanizer “Calico Jack” Rackam.
Rackam, by most accounts, was a feckless pirate and is best remembered for two members of his crew: Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Anne and Mary were the only female pirates in the Caribbean. They dressed as men and fought alongside their shipmates with pistols, knives and swords.
Anne arrived in Nassau with her husband, James Bonny, but quickly took up with an infatuated Rackam, who showered her with gifts. Mary joined his crew when Rackam captured a Dutch merchant ship on which she was serving.
In 1720 a British Navy sloop found Rackam’s ship anchored off the coast of Jamaica. Most of the crew were dead drunk. Only Anne and Mary offered resistance. When the women realized the fight was lost, they turned on their shipmates, screaming at them to sober up and “fight like men.” Rackam and his entire crew were hanged, except for Anne, then only 20, and Mary, 36. They successfully “pled their bellies.” That is, their sentences were commuted by reason of pregnancy.
Respectability arrives
The age of piracy began drawing to a close in 1718 with the arrival of Captain Woodes Rogers, a privateer himself, who had accepted a commission from King George I to take over as The Bahamas’ first Royal Governor. He also carried with him a warrant to rid the colony of pirates.
Rogers was a legendary figure long before he arrived in Nassau. On a small island off the west coast of South America, Rogers found a bedraggled figure clad in goat skins. He was Alexander Selkirk, a sailor who had been cast away on the island four years earlier for quarreling with his captain. Selkirk was the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s classic tale, Robinson Crusoe.
In Nassau, Rogers offered the pirates a King’s pardon if only they would reform. And if they didn’t, he promised to hang them. On one memorable day, he sent eight cutthroats to the gibbet, located on what is now the charming little beach in front of the British Colonial Hilton hotel.
The British Crown declared The Bahamas a colony in 1717, and Rogers gave The Bahamas its first motto: Expulsis Piratis Restituta Commercia, which remained in force until The Bahamas became an independent nation in 1973. At that time a new motto was devised: “Forward, Onward, Upward, Together.”
During the first of his two stints as Royal Governor, from 1718 to 1721, Rogers cleaned up Nassau, reformed the corrupt local government and rebuilt the island’s defences, often using his own money.
In 1729 he arrived in The Bahamas for the second time with instructions to convene an assembly. An election was held, and 26 members were elected–meaning that The Bahamas has had a representative government for more than 280 years.
Rogers died in 1732 and was buried somewhere in Nassau. The location of his grave is unknown, but there’s a swashbuckling statue of him at the entrance to the British Colonial Hilton, and the harbourside street where giant cruise ships tie up is called Woodes Rogers Walk.
Peace and conquest
The Bahamas enjoyed 50 years of peace after Rogers, but the American War of Independence (1775-83) brought conquest when the fledgling US Navy captured Nassau and held it for a couple of weeks in 1776. Then Spain overran Nassau in 1782 and held it for a year, until the islands were restored to Great Britain under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles in 1783.
While all this was happening a British Empire Loyalist, Col Andrew Deveaux of South Carolina, put together an invading force and retook The Bahamas from the Spaniards. Whether he knew about the treaty is not clear, but his bravery was rewarded by grants of prime Bahamian land from the Crown.
The American revolution provided the first of several booms and busts that blessed and plagued the Bahamian economy for generations.
After the War of Independence, those still loyal to the British monarch fled from the United States into Canada and the Caribbean colonies, especially into The Bahamas. Upwards of 6,000 new settlers and their slaves arrived en masse and quickly spread to the major islands, hoping to recreate the plantation style of life they had enjoyed in the United States.
The cotton plantations failed after a few years, due to poor soil, unsuitable farming techniques and a plague of insects so that, by 1838, when full emancipation arrived, many of the settlers simply left their plantations in the hands of their former slaves. Ruins of great houses and slave dwellings from the plantation era can be seen throughout the islands today.
More booms and busts
The next boom was shipwrecking. During the age of sail, charts of The Bahamas were rudimentary and lighthouses were few. Hundreds of merchant ships fetched up on the islands’ treacherous reefs, from which they were salvaged by local residents.
“Wracking,” as it was called, was a legitimate trade, licensed by the authorities in Nassau. It was hugely lucrative, and stories abound of Bahamians who deliberately lured ships onto the reefs, and ships’ masters who participated in the scam. Better charts and the proliferation of lighthouses in the late 1800s ended the wracking business.
Another wave of prosperity arrived with the American Civil War between 1861 and 1865. The Bahamas was ideally located to transfer supplies to the embattled South. Fast ships were used to run the blockade established by the North’s navy, risking everything to ferry metals, medicine, clothing and guns to the South. In exchange, the blockade runners brought back bales of cotton for trans-shipment to England. This turned Nassau into a boom town, but it withered back to poverty when the war ended. Locals went back to scratching out a subsistence living, fishing and growing fruits and vegetables.
Bahamians had to wait 75 years for the next boom, which was also sparked by events in the United States. When the US adopted Prohibition in 1920, The Bahamas welcomed a flood of bootleggers. Nassau, Bimini and Grand Bahama became wealthy again–wealthy, that is, until Prohibition was repealed in 1933.
But by this time, quite a few thirsty Americans had discovered that the nearby Bahamas was a great place to visit, not just for a legal cocktail but for a memorable holiday in the sun.
The war and tourism
When World War II broke out in 1939, England’s Royal Air Force Transport Command and the US Air Transport Command found that The Bahamas was an ideal transfer point.
Nassau served as a Royal Air Force training base and as the western bastion of an air bridge over which aircraft were flown to combat zones in Africa, Europe and the Far East.
By this time, King Edward VIII of England had found true love in the person of American divorcée Wallis Simpson. Only months into his reign he abdicated in 1936 to marry Simpson. He was subsequently made Duke of Windsor and sent to The Bahamas as Royal Governor and commander-in-chief. The Duke relinquished this position after the war and spent the rest of his life in retirement. The Duke and Duchess are buried in England.
Milestones
By 1950, Nassau, if not the whole of The Bahamas, was established as a year-round tourism resort, thanks largely to the efforts of Sir Stafford Sands, the energetic chairman of the Bahamas Development Board, who became known as the father of Bahamian tourism. In 1960, Sands wrote that the promotional work of the Board, caused “a golden shower of dollars” to rain on “this once money-arid area, nursing our economic plantings to the budding stage.”
In 1955, an American millionaire, Wallace Groves of Virgina, signed the Hawksbill Agreement with the colonial government of the day. This agreement, which ceded government-like powers to the Grand Bahama Port Authority, established the city of Freeport, a deep harbour and the world’s largest private airport.
An important milestone occurred in 1956 when Etienne Dupuch, later Sir Etienne, introduced an anti-discrimination resolution in the House of Assembly. Almost overnight, his action changed the social structure of The Bahamas, and hotels declared they would serve anyone who was “properly dressed and well behaved.”
But it was not until 1967 that descendants of Bahamian slaves took over the government of The Bahamas, electing Lynden Pindling, later Sir Lynden, and his Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) to lead the country. Sir Lynden was Prime Minister until 1992, when the PLP was defeated by the Free National Movement, led by the current Prime Minister, Hubert Ingraham.
On July 10, 1973, The Bahamas ceased being a British colony and became a sovereign nation, joining the United Nations as its 138th member.
The Bahamas enjoyed many flashes of prosperity over the years and suffered prolonged periods of poverty and depression. The booms and busts followed one another with regularity.
Today, The Bahamas has become the premier tourist destination in the Caribbean area, with many world-class hotels and a growing number of smaller, charming resorts dotted around the islands.
Freeport, Grand Bahama, is now a busy deep-water container port, and Nassau is now a renowned business and financial centre, home to many of the world’s top banks.
With new economic opportunities, including aquaculture and alternative energy projects on the horizon, Bahamians believe their economy is on a solid economic footing that will last.
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