Caribbean Tales - The Bahamas

Abaco
With an area of 650 sq. miles, this group of islands comprises 130 miles of landmass, 82 off-lying cays and 208 rocks in an emerald sea. Just under 200 miles east of Palm Beach, Florida, the off-shore cays lie east of Great Abaco Island. They provide a 100-mile-long protected cruising area unsurpassed perhaps in the western hemisphere. The Sea of Abaco is the 100 mile long protected body of water bordered by The Abacos' 85 miles of reef and 100 miles of cays on its Windward side and Great Abaco's mainland on its Leeward side.

Acklins/Crooked Island
These two islands are part of a group of four islands covering 100 miles, 240 miles southeast of Nassau. Fortune Island (Now known as Long Cay) flanks Crooked Island and Castle island, Aklins Island.

Andros
Andros is the largest of The Bahamas, known locally as "The Big Yard", with an area of 2,300 sq. miles, 20 miles west of Nassau. It is flat (except for the east coast) and marked by numerous inlets and inland lakes teeming with fish. The landscape includes extensive virgin pine, palm and mahogany forests, scrub and mangrove swamps with large colonies of seabirds. The western shore is a barren low bank called "The Mud;" the Barrier Reef of Andros lies just off the eastern shore along the Tongue of the Ocean, and is the world's third largest barrier reef which at over 140 miles long. The 12 foot water around the reef suddenly plunges 6000 feet into the Tongue of the Ocean.

Berry Islands
Just to the northeast of Andros, on the northeastern edge of the Great Bahama Bank, lie the Berry Islands. Lying in a long lacy line, this cluster of 30 islands and close to 100 cays covers an area of 12 sq. miles and sprawls over 40 miles of open sea along the edge of the mile-deep Tongue of the Ocean, 35 miles northwest Nassau.

The Biminis
Are a tiny group of islands, consisting of North Bimini: 7 miles x 700 ft at widest points, and South Bimini: 4 sq miles, separated by a shallow, narrow channel. Cat Cay and Gun Cay. They are located 50 miles east of Miami, Florida, where the waters of Florida's Gulfstream meets The Bahama Banks, the Bahamian island closest to the United States, and 120 miles northwest of Nassau.

Cat Island
Located over 300 miles from Miami, Cat Island should not be confused with its very very small nephew Cat Cay--which is part of the Biminis. Its 150 sq. miles is covered with rolling hills of dense green forests and uncounted miles of magnificent beaches, 48 x 4 miles at widest points.120 miles southeast of Nassau. Cat Island also happens to be the sixth largest island.

Eleuthera
The island is 110 miles long and only two miles wide along most of its length. 60 miles east of Nassau. Just offshore are Harbour Island and Spanish Wells. Site of the first successful European settlement in The Bahamas.

Exuma
Stretching for 130 sq. miles, there are 365 cays with pure sand beaches, isolated anchorages and landlocked harbours. Some islands are merely a pile of sand in the sea; others are high-cliffed and forested. Most of the cays are uninhabited, one has a hilltop castle, and another has friendly king-size iguanas that can be hand fed. Great Exuma­40 x 2 miles. Little Exuma­12 x 1 mile, (90 mile long chain). 35 miles southeast of Nassau.

Grand Bahama
The island has an area of 530 sq. miles. 96 X 17 miles at widest points. 55 miles east of Palm Beach. (Freeport/Lucaya was built only 40 years ago, so doesn't apply for our purposes).

Inagua
Inagua is an anagram for the herbivorous animal common to its shores: the iguana. Lying the farthest south in The Bahamas, it covers 645 sq. miles and comprises the islands of Great and Little Inagua. 40 x 20 miles at widest points. 321 miles southeast of Nassau; the southernmost tip of The Bahamas. The third largest island in The Bahamas.

Long Island
Lives up to its name, with a length of 60 miles and an area of 230 sq. miles, no more than 4 miles at its widest point. 160 miles southeast of Nassau. One of the most scenic hideaways in The Bahamas, it is divided by the Tropic of Cancer and bordered by two very different coasts, one with soft-white, broad beaches and the other rocky headlands that descend suddenly into the roiling sea.

Rum Cay
The island is 10 miles long and 5 miles wide, with rolling hills, golden beaches and necklace of coral reefs encircling its shores. Originally named Santa Maria de la Conception by Columbus, Rum Cay is supposed to have derived its present name from the wreck upon its shore of a West Indian rumrunner laden with the commodity. Port Nelson, a sheltered harbour on the south coast, is the only settlement. Also has Loyalist cotton plantations.

Mayaguana
The most easterly island of The Bahamas. The island has an area of 110 sq. miles. 24 X 6 miles at widest points. 350 miles south of Nassau. It retains its original Indian name.

Nassau/New Providence/Paradise Island
It is 80 sq. miles. 21 X 7 miles at widest points.185 miles southeast of Miami. This is the island most visitors erroneously call Nassau.

Ragged Island

The sickle-shaped Ragged Island Range stretches from the Jumento Cays at the southern tip of The Exumas curves east, then south down to Great Ragged Island, this two-by-five mile island bears a single settlement: Duncan Town. The total size of Ragged Island is 9.5 square miles, and the highest point of elevation is 116ft. Latitude position is 22.19 degrees north and 75.73 degrees west. The islands have an area of 15-square miles.

San Salvador
12 x 6 miles at widest points. 200 miles southeast of Nassau. 63-sq.-mile area.

History
The Bahamas were originally inhabited by a group of Arawak Indians known as Lucayan. Originally from the South American continent, some of the Arawak had been driven north into the Caribbean by the Carib Indians. Unlike their Carib neighbors, the Lucayan were generally peaceful. The Lucayans arrived near the turn of the 9th century. They lived primarily off the sea, fishing and harvesting shellfish, conch, lobster and mollusks. What little remains of their culture is limited to pottery shards, petroglyphs and words such as 'canoe,' 'cannibal,' 'hammock,' 'hurricane' and 'tobacco.' Christopher Columbus planted the Spanish flag on San Salvador (also called Watling Island) or possibly Samana Cay, both in the Bahamas, upon his first landfall in the Americas in 1492. Three years later, Spanish colonialists established the first settlement in the archipelago, serving as a terminus for Lucayan Indians enslaved by the Spaniards for shipment to Hispaniola. Within 25 years, the entire Lucayan population of 50,000 was gone, and the Spanish eventually abandoned the settlement.

In 1513 the Spaniard Juan Ponce de Leon sailed through the archipelago searching for the fabled Fountain of Youth. Instead he ran into the fast-moving Gulf Stream, which whisked him to Florida and his 'discovery' of North America. Soon Spanish galleons were passing by the reef-encrusted Bahamas laden with treasure, from the empires of Central and South America, bound for Spain. Many foundered, and the waters of the archipelago were littered with wrecks. Tales of treasure lured pirates, and they used the Bahamian islands as hideaways and bases. For the most part, the islands remained unsettled and unclaimed until over a century later, when King Charles I of England granted them to his attorney general.

In 1629 Charles I of England granted the islands to one of his ministers, but no attempt at settlement was made. The English Civil War infected the colonies with religious persecution, and the Puritans of Bermuda were forced to move on. In 1648 William Sayle led a group of English Puritans from Bermuda to, it is thought, Eleuthera Island. This settlement met with extreme adversity and did not prosper, but other Bermudan migrants continued to arrive. In 1648 some set sail to found a colony of tolerance, and so it was that the Company of Adventurers for the Plantation of the Islands of Eleuthera arrived at Abacos. Political rivalries forced a split, and the majority continued south to the island then known as Cigatoo (now Eleuthera), where the ship ran aground and sank. A few survivors set out by rowboat to enlist support and made it to Jamestown, Virginia, whose residents sent provisions to the marooned, who then founded the first independent republic in the New World. New Providence was settled in 1656. By 1670 the Bahamas were given to the Duke of Albemarle and five others as a proprietary colony. The proprietors were mostly uninterested in the islands, and few of the settlements prospered. Piracy became a way of life for many.

Also during the 17th century, the British Crown sponsored privateers to patrol the waters in and around The Bahamas, enhancing the careers of scores of pirates and making the main settlement of Charles Town buccaneer central. After the town was destroyed by a joint French and Spanish fleet in 1703, the pirates proclaimed a 'Privateer's Republic' without laws or government and Edward Teach - better known as Blackbeard - made himself their magistrate. This state of affairs lasted until 1714, when Britain signed the Treaty of Utrecht, which removed royal patronage and made the pirates outlaws. For the next century, pirates plundered ships of all nations and raided towns and plantations both in the Caribbean and the Carolinas. The crown's appointed governor (himself a former privateer) eventually triumphed over the pirates, proclaiming, in words that became the nation's motto: Expulsis Piratis - Restituta Commercia ('Pirates Expelled - Commerce Restored'). With the pirates went the islands' main source of income, and those who remained had to scrape by through turtle trapping, salt farming and, most importantly, wrecking.

The pirate community was large and well established. Because of it location relative to the British colonies in North America, it became a major concern for the Crown and a convenient location for smugglers and pirates of every nation. For this reason the British set up a Naval station to combat the pirates. The colony reverted to the Crown in 1717, and serious efforts were made to end the piracy. The first royal governor, Woodes Rogers, succeeded in controlling the pirates but mostly at his own expense. Little monetary and military support came from England. Consequently, the islands remained poor and susceptible to Spanish attack. Rogers was an exceptional pirate hunter. He offered pardons to pirates in an effort to get them to turn. While most weere skeptical, they sooned found him to be sincere and eventually 2,000 pirates accepted the pardons and made the Bahamas virtually pirate free. Rogers knew the habits of pirates and he was certain that many of the pardoned pirates would go back to their evil ways. But this concerned him little. Rogers recruited men from among those pardoned to hunt down those who returned to their old ways. The move was quite successful and eventually many of the brethren of the coast were "dancing the devil's jig" on the gallows.

Held for a few days by the U.S. Navy in 1776, and for almost a year by Spain in 1782-83, the islands reverted to England in 1783 and received a boost in population from loyalists and their slaves who fled the United States after the American Revolution. For a time, cotton plantations brought some prosperity to the islands, but when the soil gave out and slavery was abolished in 1834, the Bahamas' endemic poverty returned.

After America's Revolutionary War, English Loyalists began washing up in The Bahamas by the thousands, tripling the population in three years and introducing two things that would profoundly shape the island's future: cotton and slaves. They set up plantations modeled on those in the US, but the land was ill suited and most of the farms failed within a few years. When the Crown outlawed the slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy began intercepting ships and depositing freed slaves in The Bahamas. Many Loyalists left The Bahamas after emancipation, often bequeathing their lands to their former slaves, who, like the free blacks around them, turned to eking out a meager living from fishing and subsistence farming. Full equality and political rights, however, proved more elusive, for the post-slavery era was marked by the continued rule of an elite minority of whites over an under-represented black majority.

For most of the 19th century, the economy muddled along on subsistence agriculture, fishing, wrecking, smuggling and sponging.