The history of the Bahamas

The Bahamas is an archipelago of some seven hundred islands and cays stretching from near Florida towards Hispaniola. Its first people, the Lucayans, met Christopher Columbus on his first landfall in the Americas in 1492, and within three decades they had been enslaved and carried away by the Spanish, leaving the islands empty. English settlers from Bermuda arrived in the 1640s, Nassau became a notorious haven for pirates, and after the American Revolution Loyalist planters brought thousands of enslaved Africans, whose descendants make up most of the population today. A white merchant elite governed the colony until 1967, and the Bahamas became independent in 1973, with an economy built on tourism and offshore finance.

The islands were settled late compared with the rest of the Caribbean. Some time between about 500 and 800 CE, Taíno people from Cuba and Hispaniola began crossing in dugout canoes, probably reaching Great Inagua first, the island closest to both. Over the next eight centuries their descendants spread north island by island, through Long Island, the Exumas and Cat Island to Eleuthera, Andros, Abaco and Grand Bahama. They called themselves Lukku-Cairi, "people of the islands", from which come the Spanish Lucayos and the English word "cay". A tooth from a burial in Preacher's Cave on Eleuthera, dated to the eighth to tenth centuries, has yielded DNA closest to Arawak-speaking peoples of the Amazon and Orinoco basins, the deep homeland of the Taíno.

By 1492 there were perhaps 40,000 Lucayans, most densely settled in the central islands. They lived in villages of large round houses of poles and thatch, each sheltering an extended family, and traced descent through the mother's line. They grew cassava, maize, cotton and other crops on the thin soils, fished the shallow banks and gathered conch, and made a distinctive shell-tempered pottery known as Palmetto Ware. They were linked to the wider Taíno world by canoe trade with Cuba, and a piece of jadeite found on San Salvador appears to have come from as far as Guatemala. Scholars debate whether they should be called Taíno or a separate people, but their language and customs were closely related to those of the Greater Antilles, and they lived in small chiefdoms rather than the larger polities of Hispaniola.

On 12 October 1492 Christopher Columbus, sailing for Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, landed on an island the Lucayans called Guanahani and claimed it for Spain as San Salvador. The exact island is still disputed: many historians accept the island then called Watling's Island, renamed San Salvador in the 1920s, while a National Geographic study in 1986 argued for Samana Cay. Columbus described the people he met as gentle and generous, and seized several of them as guides before sailing on through the islands to Cuba.

The encounter, which opened the Age of Discovery in the Americas, was a catastrophe for the Lucayans. As forced labour and disease destroyed the Taíno of Hispaniola, King Ferdinand in 1509 authorised the import of Indians from nearby islands, and Spanish slavers swept through the Bahamas. Lucayans, skilled at diving, were sold as pearl divers to the island of Cubagua off Venezuela, where most died. By 1513 the southern islands were largely empty, and when a Spanish expedition went in 1520 to gather the last survivors it found only eleven people. The Lucayans as a people were destroyed within a generation of contact, a fate that historians describe as genocide, and the islands were left uninhabited for well over a century. Spain kept a nominal claim but made no settlement, since there was no gold and no one left to exploit.

In 1648 a group of religious Independents from overcrowded Bermuda, led by William Sayle and calling themselves the Eleutheran Adventurers, sailed to found a colony on an island they named Eleuthera, from the Greek for freedom. Their main ship was wrecked on the reef, and the colony struggled on poor soil, sustained by gifts from New England. Many settlers went back to Bermuda, but small communities survived on Harbour Island and Spanish Wells. In 1666 other Bermudians settled New Providence, which had a good harbour and became the centre of the colony. Its settlers lived from the sea, making salt, cutting hardwoods, hunting turtles and, most profitably, salvaging the many ships wrecked on the shallow banks along the routes between Europe and the Caribbean. A small number of enslaved and free Africans came with them from the start.

In 1670 Charles II granted the islands to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, who struggled to impose governors on the independent-minded settlers. The town of Charles Town on New Providence, rebuilt as Nassau in 1695 in honour of William III, was repeatedly attacked. The Spanish burned it in 1684 in retaliation for raids on their wrecks and shipping, and French and Spanish fleets sacked it again in 1703 and 1706 during the War of the Spanish Succession.

With no functioning government, privateers commissioned against France and Spain made Nassau their base, and when the war ended in 1714 many simply carried on as pirates. By the mid-1710s perhaps a thousand pirates were operating from the Bahamas, outnumbering the settled families, among them Benjamin Hornigold, Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, Charles Vane, Stede Bonnet and later John Rackham with Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Merchants from the American colonies came to buy their plunder.

The British government responded by taking over the colony from the Proprietors and appointing Woodes Rogers, a former privateer, as royal governor, with a pardon for pirates who surrendered. Rogers arrived in July 1718 with warships and found several hundred pirates ready to accept the pardon. Vane escaped, and Blackbeard had already left, but Rogers hanged eight pirates who returned to raiding, rebuilt Nassau's defences and fought off a Spanish attack in 1720. The colony later took a Latin motto celebrating the expulsion of the pirates and the restoration of commerce. An elected House of Assembly first met in 1729.

During the American Revolution an American naval force raided Nassau in 1776 to seize gunpowder, and Spain captured the islands in 1782. A Loyalist expedition under Andrew Deveaux retook Nassau in 1783, and that year's peace treaty confirmed the Bahamas as British, with Spain receiving Florida instead. Thousands of Loyalists fleeing the new United States then arrived, given land grants by the Crown, and brought enslaved Africans with them. The population roughly tripled within a few years, and enslaved people became the large majority.

The Loyalists set up cotton plantations on Abaco, Exuma, Long Island, Cat Island and other islands, modelled on those of the American South. Enslaved men and women cleared the land and worked the fields under harsh conditions, and planters bought more captives through the Atlantic slave trade. But the thin soils were soon exhausted and insect pests ruined the crops, and by the early nineteenth century the cotton boom was over. Many planters left, and on the poorer islands enslaved people increasingly worked their own plots and the sea. After Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy landed thousands of Africans freed from captured slave ships in the Bahamas, where they founded settlements such as Adelaide and Gambier on New Providence. Others reached the islands by escaping: in the early 1820s hundreds of enslaved people and Black Seminoles fled from Florida to Andros.

Slavery ended in the British Empire on 1 August 1834, followed by an apprenticeship that bound freed people to their former owners until 1838. Afterwards most freed Bahamians lived by subsistence farming, fishing and small-scale trade, often on land held in common. Because the Bahamas was a free soil, enslaved people on American ships that reached its waters were freed, most famously in 1841, when enslaved people aboard the Creole revolted and sailed the ship to Nassau, where the British authorities refused to return them.

Political power stayed with a small white merchant class in Nassau, later nicknamed the "Bay Street Boys", within a rigid hierarchy of race and colour. The colony prospered briefly during the American Civil War, when Nassau became the main base for blockade runners carrying arms to the Confederate States and cotton back for British mills. After 1865 the islands slipped into decades of poverty, relieved only by sponge fishing, pineapple growing and the first tourist hotels, and many Bahamians emigrated to Florida for work.

American Prohibition from 1920 brought another boom, as Nassau and Bimini became bases for rum-running to the United States, until repeal in 1933. In 1938 a disease destroyed the sponge beds. During the Second World War the Duke of Windsor, the former Edward VIII, served as governor from 1940 to 1945, and the islands hosted Royal Air Force training and ferry bases. In June 1942 Black labourers building an airfield rioted on Bay Street over being paid far less than American workers, an outbreak that is often seen as the start of modern Bahamian politics.

After the war, tourism and banking transformed the economy. Nassau's airport opened to international traffic, Freeport on Grand Bahama was founded as a free-trade zone in 1955, and when the Cuban revolution closed Havana to American visitors in the early 1960s, much of that tourism moved to the Bahamas. Low taxes and bank secrecy drew offshore finance.

The Progressive Liberal Party was founded in 1953 to challenge the Bay Street elite, which formed the United Bahamian Party in 1956. A general strike in 1958 and the extension of the vote to women, who voted for the first time in 1962, broadened politics. A new constitution in 1964 brought internal self-government under a premier, Roland Symonette. In the January 1967 election the two main parties won equal numbers of seats, and the PLP's Lynden Pindling formed a government with the support of a Labour member and an independent, becoming the first Black head of government. The day is now marked as Majority Rule Day. A further constitution in 1969 renamed the colony the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, and after a final conference in London, the country became independent on 10 July 1973, with Elizabeth II as queen.

Pindling governed until 1992. His years saw rapid growth in tourism and the founding of national institutions, but in the 1980s the islands became a major transit route for cocaine bound for the United States, and a commission of inquiry in 1984 examined allegations of official corruption linked to drug trafficking. In 1992 Hubert Ingraham's Free National Movement won power. Since then the PLP and FNM have alternated in office, under Perry Christie, Ingraham again and Hubert Minnis. Migration from Haiti, and the treatment of Haitian migrants and their children, has been a recurring political issue.

In September 2019 Hurricane Dorian struck Abaco and Grand Bahama at Category 5 strength, killing dozens of people and causing billions of dollars in damage. The PLP returned to power under Philip Davis in September 2021, winning 32 of 39 seats. Davis called an early election for 12 May 2026, held in a House enlarged to 41 seats, and the PLP won a large majority, the first time since 1997 that a Bahamian party had won two elections in a row. Tourism and financial services remain the foundations of the economy.