History

Early History

Although Paleo-Indians may have populated the area previously, Taino Indians from Hispaniola and Cuba moved into the southern Bahamas around the 7th century AD and became the Lucayans.

European Colonisation

On 12 October 1492, Christopher Columbus made his first landfall in the Western Hemisphere on the island of San Salvador (also known as Watling's Island) in the south part of Bahamas. He encountered Arawak Indians and exchanged gifts with them. There were an estimated 40,000 Lucayans at the time of Columbus' arrival.

Spanish slave traders later captured native Lucayan Indians to work in gold mines in Hispaniola, and within 25 years, all Lucayans perished. Without a source of slaves, the Spanish did not colonise the islands, though they had claimed them.

In 1647, during the time of the English Civil War, a group of Puritan religious refugees from the royalist colony of Bermuda, known as the 'Eleutheran Adventurers', founded the first permanent European settlement in the Bahamas and gave Eleuthera Island its name.

Similar groups of settlers formed settlements in the Bahamas, but the isolated cays sheltered pirates and wreckers through the 17th century. Charles II granted land in the Bahamas to the Lords proprietors of Carolina, but the islands were left entirely to themselves. After Charles Town was destroyed by a joint French and Spanish fleet in 1703, the local pirates proclaimed an anarchic 'Privateers' Republic' with Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, as chief magistrate. Nassau was the main port preferred by the pirates during this time.

When the islands became a British Crown Colony in 1717, the first Royal Governor, a reformed pirate named Woodes Rogers, brought law and order to the Bahamas in 1718, when he expelled the buccaneers who had used the islands as bases. Instead, the pirates still working in these waters became privateers. Rogers is best known for his capture of pirates Calico Jack, Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

During the American War of Independence, the Bahamas fell to Spanish forces under General Galvez in 1782. After the American Revolution, the British government issued land grants to a group of British Loyalists, and the sparse population of the Bahamas tripled in a few years. The colonists intended to grow cotton, but the limy soil was unsuited to it, and the plantations soon failed.

Many of the current inhabitants are descended from the slaves brought to work on the Loyalist plantations. When the UK outlawed the slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy began intercepting ships and depositing freed slaves in the Bahamas. Plantation life was finished after the emancipation of remaining slaves in 1834.

The Bahamas in the 20th Century and Beyond

During World War II, the Allies centred their flight training and antisubmarine operations for the Caribbean in the Bahamas.

Since Havana closed to American tourists in 1961, the Bahamas has developed into a major tourist resort. At the same time the establishment of Freeport as a free trade zone (1955) developed an off-shore financial services centre with a reputation for a tolerant atmosphere.

The British made the islands internally self-governing in 1964 and, in 1973, Bahamians gained full independence whilst remaining a member of the Commonwealth of Nations.

Since the 1950s, the Bahamian economy has prospered based on the twin pillars of tourism and financial services. Today, the country enjoys the third highest per capita income in the western hemisphere, and the highest in the Caribbean excluding the dependent territories of Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. Despite this, the country still faces significant challenges in areas such as education, healthcare, correctional facilities and violent crime and illegal immigration. The urban renewal project has been launched in recent years to help impoverished urban areas in social decline in the main islands.