A Short History of the Bahamas
The Bahama islands were inhabited by the Arawak and Lucayan Indians for many centuries. Christopher Columbus was the first European to see the islands, making his first landfall in the “New World” in 1492 when he landed on the island of San Salvador.
Later, the Spanish shipped the native Lucayans to Hispaniola and enslaved them there, after which the Bahama islands were mostly deserted from 1513 until 1648, as nearly all native Bahamians had been forcibly removed for enslavement or had died of diseases which Europeans had brought with them from Europe.
In 1649,English colonists from Bermuda, known as the Eleutheran Adventurers, settled on the island of Eleuthera.
The Bahamas became a British crown colonyin 1718, when the British clamped down on piracy. Famous pirates such as Blackbeard had scowled the waters .After the American Revolutionary War, the Crown resettled thousands of American Loyalists to the Bahamas; they took enslaved people with them and established plantations on land grants.
Enslaved Africans and their descendants constituted the majority of the population from this period on. The slave trade was abolished by the British in 1807. Although slavery in the Bahamas was not abolished until 1834, the Bahamas became a haven for freed African slaves, from outside the British West Indies, in 1818. Africans liberated from illegal slave ships were resettled on the islands by the Royal Navy, while some North American slaves and Seminoles escaped to the Bahamas from Florida. Bahamians were even known to recognise the freedom of enslaved people carried by the ships of other nations which reached the Bahamas. Today Black Bahamians make up 90% of the population of approximately 400,000.
The country became an independent Commonwealth realm separate from the United Kingdom in 1973.. It maintains Charles III as its monarch; the appointed representative of the Crown is the governor-general of the Bahamas. Its economy is based on tourism and offshore finance.
Destination: Bahamas
