Three Caribbean islands thrived after Columbus called them Tortugas
Columbus spotted the Caymans on 10 May 1503 and named them for turtles; later tongues swapped in caiman, the Arawak-Taíno crocodile word. Today the self-governing British Overseas Territory packs Grand Cayman, Cayman Brac, and Little Cayman into 264 square kilometres with Caribbean-leading living standards.
More than 90,000 residents make the Caymans the most populated British Overseas Territory. George Town on Grand Cayman is the capital of a Western Caribbean, Greater Antilles cluster south of Cuba and northeast of Honduras. No clear pre-European occupation has been found as of 2017. After Columbus, Drake paused in 1586; pirates, wreck survivors, and deserters from Cromwell's Jamaica campaign filtered in. Isaac Bodden, born on Grand Cayman around 1661, is the first recorded permanent inhabitant—grandson of a settler likely tied to the 1655 seizure of Jamaica.
England formalised control with Jamaica under the 1670 Treaty of Madrid; Spanish forces under privateer Manuel Ribeiro Pardal hit a Little Cayman turtle camp that year. Permanent English-speaking settlement firming in the 1730s brought royal land grants and enslaved Africans. The 1802 census counted 933 people on Grand Cayman, 545 of them enslaved; abolition in 1833 freed more than 950 people held by 116 families. From 1863 the islands were a Jamaica dependency; after Jamaican independence in 1962 they became a separate Crown colony.
On 8 February 1794 islanders rescued the crews of ten merchant ships, HMS Convert among them; the popular story that the king rewarded them with freedom from tax is untrue. Real fiscal design does charge no tax on income earned or stored, helping a 2023 GDP per capita near $97,750 and migrants from over 140 places. Cuban rock iguanas appear among regional wildlife notes, while turtles that once packed the beaches were hunted toward local near-extinction. Hurricane Ivan struck on 11 September 2004, the worst storm in 86 years, pushing an 8-foot surge across low-lying Grand Cayman.
Source: Cayman Islands
