Columbus’s first New World beach became a pirate-tamed realm
The Bahamas, a Lucayan Archipelago commonwealth, counts some 700 islands and more than 2,500 cays north of Cuba and Hispaniola. Lucayan Taíno lived here for centuries before Columbus’s 1492 San Salvador landfall—his first New World shore. Britain made it a crown colony in 1718 to crush piracy; independence as a Commonwealth realm came in 1973 under Lynden Pindling.
Taíno migrants from Hispaniola and Cuba settled the empty southern islands between AD 500 and 800 and became the Lucayans, numbering perhaps 30,000 when Columbus arrived. Scholars still argue whether he first stepped ashore on today's San Salvador or on Samana Cay, as a 1986 National Geographic study proposed. Spain enslaved the Lucayans and shipped them to Hispaniola, where smallpox alone killed half, and the islands stood largely empty from 1513 until the mid-1600s.
Puritans from Bermuda led by William Sayle arrived in 1648 seeking religious freedom and named their island Eleuthera, Greek for free; many, Sayle included, soon gave up and went back. Charles II handed the islands to the Carolina proprietors in 1670, and Nassau, then Charles Town, suffered Spanish raids. Blackbeard and other pirates made it a haven until the crown took over in 1718 and Governor Woodes Rogers stamped them out. American marines seized Nassau for a single day in 1776.
About 7,300 Loyalists and the people they enslaved came after the American Revolution, and Africans soon formed the majority. Slavery ended in 1834, but from 1818 enslaved people brought from outside the British West Indies were freed on arrival. In 1841 rebels aboard the brig Creole steered to Nassau, where 128 of them stayed free, in what has been called the most successful slave revolt in US history. African Seminoles fleeing Florida in the 1820s founded Red Bays on Andros.
The name probably comes from the Lucayan word Bahama for Grand Bahama; the popular derivation from Spanish baja mar is considered folk etymology. Only the Bahamas and The Gambia carry the definite article in their official short names. Tourism and offshore finance drive an economy whose defence force patrols some 470,000 square kilometres of ocean.
Source: The Bahamas
