Post by Swept Away on Aug 6, 2011 7:28:46 GMT -5
History of Harbour Island & The Bahamas
------------------------------------- Early Indigenous History -----------------------------
The Bahamian island of Guanahani, traditionally identified as San Salvador, was Christopher Columbus' first landfall in the New World. He landed at Rum’s Bay on October 12, 1492. His historic arrival changed the course of world history, opening the Americas to the era of exploration and conquest. After observing the shallow sea around the islands, he said "baja mar" (low water or sea), and effectively named the area The Bahamas, or The Islands of the Shallow Sea. The islands are really mountain plateaus that emerged from the Atlantic hundreds of thousands of years ago. As they grew, they hosted countless generations of coral, which today comprise the islands' limestone base.
The original inhabitants of the islands were likely from nearby Cuba, living on islands in the Bahamas as early as the fourth century AD. Lucayans, an Arawak Indian tribe, driven northward by other indigenous Caribbean people, eventually made their way up to the coral-laden islands of The Bahamas in the 10th century. The "Lukku-cairi" or island people, as they called themselves, established villages on Grand Bahama Island and New Providence Island as well as other Out or “Family” islands taking advantage of their craft and agricultural skills to build a civilization. . Neither group of people left a written history, but what they did leave - drawings, pottery, tools and bones - gave insight into their daily lives. Archaeologists have discovered numerous relics on the Abacos and Andros.
The Lucayans described by Columbus as a peace-loving people, beautiful and generous of heart, numbered about 40,000 when Columbus arrived. Though Columbus claimed the islands for Spain, the lack of gold here led the Spaniards to focus on settlements elsewhere in the Caribbean. Like so many other native tribes, a combination of slavery, disease, religious persecution and violence soon obliterated the Lucayan civilization. By 1520 the Spanish began to mine silver and establish sugar plantations on Hispaniola and Cuba, causing labor shortages. About 20,000 Lucayans were transported and forced into backbreaking, menial labor. Within a short 25 years, the entire population of these natives had been extinguished.
-------------------------------------- Puritan History ---------------------------------------
European exploration and colonialism were significant factors in the early history of The Bahamas. The island chain lay largely uninhabited for the next 100 years, then in the early 17th Century, the British attempting to undermine the Spanish foothold in the Caribbean, established settlements in Eleuthera, Grand Bahama, and Nassau. The Bahamas was granted a constitution making them part of the Carolinas in 1629 by Charles I of England a grand gesture that would weave together two of the next major influences on Bahamas' development – England and the American South.
In 1648, a Bermudan and English group escaping religious persecution, led by Captain William Sayle, traveled to the Islands of the Bahamas. They landed briefly in Nassau's harbor during their search for a place to establish a Puritan colony. They then sailed south to today's Eleuthera Island, coming ashore near Governor’s Harbour at Cupid's Cay.
Disputes arose among the group, and Sayle and his faction of 70 headed off toward the northern part of the island by boat. Their boat floundered on the treacherous reefs of the Devil's Backbone and their supplies were lost. Many of them nearly starved, but they made do, living and worshipping in a cavern that is now known as Preacher’s Cave. The early years in this new home were characterized by fighting and hunger. The Eleutheran Adventurers (from the Greek word "Eleutheria," or "freedom") as these settlers came to be known, may not have survived if their captain had not traveled to Massachusetts to procure supplies for the struggling settlement from the Puritans. Later out of gratitude they sent a gift of braziletto wood to help the folks at Harvard University; which was at that time the most valuable gift they had ever received.
Although the Spanish still had troops in The Bahamas the Eleutherans soon had established a second settlement at Harbour Island. Eleuthera the hilly, verdant isle became the “birthplace of The Bahamas,” eventually one of the most developed of the Out Islands, and a prosperous agricultural economy that still thrives today. As time progressed many, if not most, of the original adventurers drifted away, but a committed group remained.
-------------------------------------- Pirate History ----------------------------------------
With its complex geography of lethal reefs and difficult navigational conditions, The Bahamas provided the perfect playground for pirates in the 17th and 18th century. The Golden Age of Piracy it was called and some of the most famous and feared pirates hunted it’s waters including Edward Teach(Blackbeard), Benjamin Hornigold, Major Stede Bonnet, (Calico) Jack Rackham, Mary Reed and Anne Bonny. Nassau (first established as Charles Town in 1666 and christened Nassau in 1695) was burned by retaliating Spanish forces several times during this period of piracy.
Their chief occupation was using the islands' natural cover to launch surprise attacks on fat Spanish galleons bringing spoils back to Europe. The pirates used small, shallow draft sloops to negotiate the reefs and encircle their bulkier foes to broadside them to pieces. Though the settlers of the islands were very poor at this time, the rampant privateering created trade throughout the Bahamas. Taverns and merchants began to cater to the buccaneers and their prized booty.
The party ended in 1717 with the surrender of rights to the British Crown that made Eleuthera part of the crown colony of the Bahamas. In 1718 England sent Governor Woodes Rogers to Nassau, armed with three warships. Blackbeard Privateer's Republic in Nassau was over. Rogers promptly hung eight pirates, and coined the famous motto Expulsis Piratis – Resituta Commercia (Pirates Expelled – Commerce Restored). The British would later kill Blackbeard in a battle off the coast of Virginia. Not long after, in 1720, Woodes Rogers also fought and defeated the infamous pirates Calico Jack, Anne Bonny, and Mary Read.
The good news was the coming of representative democracy 12 years later when Harbour Island sent four representatives to the first parliament in Nassau. The Sugar Mill monument at the foot of Government Dock commemorates that breakthrough.
This complicated history of theft and adventure would continue for many years to come in the shallow maze of waters around The Bahamas. Tales and legends survive and a fairy tale notion of buried treasure remains a real possibility on the hundreds of islands that make up The Bahamas.
A government-sanctioned form of piracy was practiced during Britain's war with Spain and the American Revolution, and brought periods of prosperity to the islands. Spain entered the fray on the side of the Americans and briefly retook The Bahamas in May 1782. A year later, under the Treaty of Versailles, Britain had little choice but to exchange Florida for the Bahamas in 1783, approx eight thousand displaced American Loyalists with few other options were given land grants for them to settle throughout the islands.
----------------------------------- Dunmore History ---------------------------------------
One of the first to be established was on Harbour Island which was a sleepy fishing village in 1787 when Gov. John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore of Virginia fled from the American Revolution to be appointed the first Governor of the Bahamas. He was asked to set out a settlement for the American refugees and founded Dunmore Town. The Governor immediately started a building boom, evidence of which can be seen throughout the island despite numerous hurricanes. The protection of the natural harbour between the island and mainland Eleuthera was auspicious for a rapid and lengthy growth process, becoming the capital of the Bahamas
Harbour Island features 18th century New England style buildings and cottages restored in a Bahamian Brigadoon setting along a three-mile pink sand beach. The Harbour Island settlement of Dunmore Town was once the Bahamian capital and larger and more important than Nassau.
Many of the Loyalists that fled here brought with them their Creole workers and freed black slaves from their plantations in the Carolinas. But the cotton plantations they recreated were soon to fail due to the poor soil, its erosion and insect infestations. So not being commercially viable, many estate owners moved elsewhere and left their land to be divided up between those workers that had followed them, as subsistence farming was going to be their only foreseeable future. To become the rightful owner of these lands they took the surname of the donating owner, meaning the larger the estate the larger the number of descendants with the same surname like Albury, Bethel, Carey, Higgs, Johnson, Pinder, Roberts, Rolle, Sands, Sweeting & Thompson.
----------------------------------Up Thru Independence to today -------------------------
In 1807 when England's Parliament banned the slave trade, many slave ships were intercepted by the Royal Navy and the captured West Africans were set free here. Nassau's Over-the-Hill district was first established as a settlement for liberated West Africans. By the time Parliament declared general Emancipation in 1834, about three-quarters of the Bahamian population was descended from West Africa.
Soon, the economy and survival of the Bahamas became completely dependent upon activities in North America. When nations were at war, the cays and small islands would be transformed into supply bases, bringing commerce to the impoverished nation.
The Out Islands saw their economy strengthen once again when the American Civil War broke out from 1861-1865. Confederate blockade-runners would tuck away their ships in the nooks and crannies along the coasts of the Abacos and Andros to evade the Union navy. During the American Civil War, privateering had something of resurgence. England and Nassau defied the North's blockade and continued to trade with Southern states. In the famous Civil War novel Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler is a well-known man about town in Nassau. Bahamian merchants, already benefiting from increased commerce, would additionally profit by letting the smugglers use their facilities as supply bases. The end of the war brought a deep recession to the Bahamas and wrecking returned as one of the primary industries.
When the United States enacted Prohibition in 1919, the Bahamas would again become the port-of-call for the nefarious. Bahamian Rum became the export of choice to the mainland, where liquors were now illegal. Bootleggers set up camp among the Biminis, only 50 miles from Miami, as well as smaller operations throughout the islands. Inns and taverns sprung up to gain patronage from the criminal element. This proved quite profitable for the economy of The Bahamas until the1930’s when the America went into a deep depression and the Bahamas returned to a life of subsistence agriculture and fishing.
.
Prosperity did not return until World War II, when the Bahamas served as an air and sea way-station in the Atlantic. In the 1940s, King Edward VIII gave up his throne to marry "the woman I love" and settled in Nassau. The new couple, known as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, began a new era of peaceful glamour here, attracting an ever increasing number of visitors and developers to The Bahamas. In 1941 Bahamas Air began weekly flights. In 1949, the first year records were kept, 32,018 visitors arrived in the Bahamas.
The population of America soon possessed enough extra income to afford vacations. This would mark the beginning of the first stable industry in the Bahamas—tourism. Resorts, restaurants, and shops sprung up to welcome the influx of visitors in the 1950s and 1960s. Though much of the development took place in Nassau and Freeport, the Out Islands also got their share of the bounty. They quickly gained a reputation for excellent sport fishing and natural splendor. In 1961, when American tourists could no longer travel to Cuba because of the Cuban missile crisis, The Bahamas forged ahead to become one of the world's most popular tourist destinations.
In 1953, young politician Lynden Pindling, who had grown up in Nassau's West African Over-the-Hill district, formed the Progressive Liberal Party. He would become its first Prime minister. Great Britain granted the islands self-government in 1964 and changed their status from colony to Commonwealth in 1969. In 1973, the Commonwealth of The Bahamas became independent within the Commonwealth of Nations, but retained Queen Elizabeth II as constitutional head of state.
In the late 70's and early 80's, The Bahamas became a route through which cocaine traveled from Columbia to Florida, largely through the use of high speed 'Cigarette Boats’. This drug scourge affected politics, the economy, and the people of the Bahamas, but has largely disappeared due to the combined efforts of the authorities of the Bahamas and the United States.
The Bahamas is a renowned tax haven with no corporate, income, capital gains, or estate tax. By 1990, total arrivals to the Bahamas set an all-time record of 3.628 million!
From its rich history of Piracy, slavery, adventure, treasure, smuggling, and independence The Bahamas has created a world class tourist destination with 250 years of stable Parliamentary democracy. Harbour Island with its famous 3 mile pink colored sand beach, created by the ancient reddish hue of ground-up shells and coral, remains a hidden gem ready to be explored. The permanent population of Eleuthera and Harbour Island is approximately 10,500 (Bahamas 1990 census) Eighty-five percent of which is of African descent.
------------------------------------- Early Indigenous History -----------------------------
The Bahamian island of Guanahani, traditionally identified as San Salvador, was Christopher Columbus' first landfall in the New World. He landed at Rum’s Bay on October 12, 1492. His historic arrival changed the course of world history, opening the Americas to the era of exploration and conquest. After observing the shallow sea around the islands, he said "baja mar" (low water or sea), and effectively named the area The Bahamas, or The Islands of the Shallow Sea. The islands are really mountain plateaus that emerged from the Atlantic hundreds of thousands of years ago. As they grew, they hosted countless generations of coral, which today comprise the islands' limestone base.
The original inhabitants of the islands were likely from nearby Cuba, living on islands in the Bahamas as early as the fourth century AD. Lucayans, an Arawak Indian tribe, driven northward by other indigenous Caribbean people, eventually made their way up to the coral-laden islands of The Bahamas in the 10th century. The "Lukku-cairi" or island people, as they called themselves, established villages on Grand Bahama Island and New Providence Island as well as other Out or “Family” islands taking advantage of their craft and agricultural skills to build a civilization. . Neither group of people left a written history, but what they did leave - drawings, pottery, tools and bones - gave insight into their daily lives. Archaeologists have discovered numerous relics on the Abacos and Andros.
The Lucayans described by Columbus as a peace-loving people, beautiful and generous of heart, numbered about 40,000 when Columbus arrived. Though Columbus claimed the islands for Spain, the lack of gold here led the Spaniards to focus on settlements elsewhere in the Caribbean. Like so many other native tribes, a combination of slavery, disease, religious persecution and violence soon obliterated the Lucayan civilization. By 1520 the Spanish began to mine silver and establish sugar plantations on Hispaniola and Cuba, causing labor shortages. About 20,000 Lucayans were transported and forced into backbreaking, menial labor. Within a short 25 years, the entire population of these natives had been extinguished.
-------------------------------------- Puritan History ---------------------------------------
European exploration and colonialism were significant factors in the early history of The Bahamas. The island chain lay largely uninhabited for the next 100 years, then in the early 17th Century, the British attempting to undermine the Spanish foothold in the Caribbean, established settlements in Eleuthera, Grand Bahama, and Nassau. The Bahamas was granted a constitution making them part of the Carolinas in 1629 by Charles I of England a grand gesture that would weave together two of the next major influences on Bahamas' development – England and the American South.
In 1648, a Bermudan and English group escaping religious persecution, led by Captain William Sayle, traveled to the Islands of the Bahamas. They landed briefly in Nassau's harbor during their search for a place to establish a Puritan colony. They then sailed south to today's Eleuthera Island, coming ashore near Governor’s Harbour at Cupid's Cay.
Disputes arose among the group, and Sayle and his faction of 70 headed off toward the northern part of the island by boat. Their boat floundered on the treacherous reefs of the Devil's Backbone and their supplies were lost. Many of them nearly starved, but they made do, living and worshipping in a cavern that is now known as Preacher’s Cave. The early years in this new home were characterized by fighting and hunger. The Eleutheran Adventurers (from the Greek word "Eleutheria," or "freedom") as these settlers came to be known, may not have survived if their captain had not traveled to Massachusetts to procure supplies for the struggling settlement from the Puritans. Later out of gratitude they sent a gift of braziletto wood to help the folks at Harvard University; which was at that time the most valuable gift they had ever received.
Although the Spanish still had troops in The Bahamas the Eleutherans soon had established a second settlement at Harbour Island. Eleuthera the hilly, verdant isle became the “birthplace of The Bahamas,” eventually one of the most developed of the Out Islands, and a prosperous agricultural economy that still thrives today. As time progressed many, if not most, of the original adventurers drifted away, but a committed group remained.
-------------------------------------- Pirate History ----------------------------------------
With its complex geography of lethal reefs and difficult navigational conditions, The Bahamas provided the perfect playground for pirates in the 17th and 18th century. The Golden Age of Piracy it was called and some of the most famous and feared pirates hunted it’s waters including Edward Teach(Blackbeard), Benjamin Hornigold, Major Stede Bonnet, (Calico) Jack Rackham, Mary Reed and Anne Bonny. Nassau (first established as Charles Town in 1666 and christened Nassau in 1695) was burned by retaliating Spanish forces several times during this period of piracy.
Their chief occupation was using the islands' natural cover to launch surprise attacks on fat Spanish galleons bringing spoils back to Europe. The pirates used small, shallow draft sloops to negotiate the reefs and encircle their bulkier foes to broadside them to pieces. Though the settlers of the islands were very poor at this time, the rampant privateering created trade throughout the Bahamas. Taverns and merchants began to cater to the buccaneers and their prized booty.
The party ended in 1717 with the surrender of rights to the British Crown that made Eleuthera part of the crown colony of the Bahamas. In 1718 England sent Governor Woodes Rogers to Nassau, armed with three warships. Blackbeard Privateer's Republic in Nassau was over. Rogers promptly hung eight pirates, and coined the famous motto Expulsis Piratis – Resituta Commercia (Pirates Expelled – Commerce Restored). The British would later kill Blackbeard in a battle off the coast of Virginia. Not long after, in 1720, Woodes Rogers also fought and defeated the infamous pirates Calico Jack, Anne Bonny, and Mary Read.
The good news was the coming of representative democracy 12 years later when Harbour Island sent four representatives to the first parliament in Nassau. The Sugar Mill monument at the foot of Government Dock commemorates that breakthrough.
This complicated history of theft and adventure would continue for many years to come in the shallow maze of waters around The Bahamas. Tales and legends survive and a fairy tale notion of buried treasure remains a real possibility on the hundreds of islands that make up The Bahamas.
A government-sanctioned form of piracy was practiced during Britain's war with Spain and the American Revolution, and brought periods of prosperity to the islands. Spain entered the fray on the side of the Americans and briefly retook The Bahamas in May 1782. A year later, under the Treaty of Versailles, Britain had little choice but to exchange Florida for the Bahamas in 1783, approx eight thousand displaced American Loyalists with few other options were given land grants for them to settle throughout the islands.
----------------------------------- Dunmore History ---------------------------------------
One of the first to be established was on Harbour Island which was a sleepy fishing village in 1787 when Gov. John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore of Virginia fled from the American Revolution to be appointed the first Governor of the Bahamas. He was asked to set out a settlement for the American refugees and founded Dunmore Town. The Governor immediately started a building boom, evidence of which can be seen throughout the island despite numerous hurricanes. The protection of the natural harbour between the island and mainland Eleuthera was auspicious for a rapid and lengthy growth process, becoming the capital of the Bahamas
Harbour Island features 18th century New England style buildings and cottages restored in a Bahamian Brigadoon setting along a three-mile pink sand beach. The Harbour Island settlement of Dunmore Town was once the Bahamian capital and larger and more important than Nassau.
Many of the Loyalists that fled here brought with them their Creole workers and freed black slaves from their plantations in the Carolinas. But the cotton plantations they recreated were soon to fail due to the poor soil, its erosion and insect infestations. So not being commercially viable, many estate owners moved elsewhere and left their land to be divided up between those workers that had followed them, as subsistence farming was going to be their only foreseeable future. To become the rightful owner of these lands they took the surname of the donating owner, meaning the larger the estate the larger the number of descendants with the same surname like Albury, Bethel, Carey, Higgs, Johnson, Pinder, Roberts, Rolle, Sands, Sweeting & Thompson.
----------------------------------Up Thru Independence to today -------------------------
In 1807 when England's Parliament banned the slave trade, many slave ships were intercepted by the Royal Navy and the captured West Africans were set free here. Nassau's Over-the-Hill district was first established as a settlement for liberated West Africans. By the time Parliament declared general Emancipation in 1834, about three-quarters of the Bahamian population was descended from West Africa.
Soon, the economy and survival of the Bahamas became completely dependent upon activities in North America. When nations were at war, the cays and small islands would be transformed into supply bases, bringing commerce to the impoverished nation.
The Out Islands saw their economy strengthen once again when the American Civil War broke out from 1861-1865. Confederate blockade-runners would tuck away their ships in the nooks and crannies along the coasts of the Abacos and Andros to evade the Union navy. During the American Civil War, privateering had something of resurgence. England and Nassau defied the North's blockade and continued to trade with Southern states. In the famous Civil War novel Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler is a well-known man about town in Nassau. Bahamian merchants, already benefiting from increased commerce, would additionally profit by letting the smugglers use their facilities as supply bases. The end of the war brought a deep recession to the Bahamas and wrecking returned as one of the primary industries.
When the United States enacted Prohibition in 1919, the Bahamas would again become the port-of-call for the nefarious. Bahamian Rum became the export of choice to the mainland, where liquors were now illegal. Bootleggers set up camp among the Biminis, only 50 miles from Miami, as well as smaller operations throughout the islands. Inns and taverns sprung up to gain patronage from the criminal element. This proved quite profitable for the economy of The Bahamas until the1930’s when the America went into a deep depression and the Bahamas returned to a life of subsistence agriculture and fishing.
.
Prosperity did not return until World War II, when the Bahamas served as an air and sea way-station in the Atlantic. In the 1940s, King Edward VIII gave up his throne to marry "the woman I love" and settled in Nassau. The new couple, known as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, began a new era of peaceful glamour here, attracting an ever increasing number of visitors and developers to The Bahamas. In 1941 Bahamas Air began weekly flights. In 1949, the first year records were kept, 32,018 visitors arrived in the Bahamas.
The population of America soon possessed enough extra income to afford vacations. This would mark the beginning of the first stable industry in the Bahamas—tourism. Resorts, restaurants, and shops sprung up to welcome the influx of visitors in the 1950s and 1960s. Though much of the development took place in Nassau and Freeport, the Out Islands also got their share of the bounty. They quickly gained a reputation for excellent sport fishing and natural splendor. In 1961, when American tourists could no longer travel to Cuba because of the Cuban missile crisis, The Bahamas forged ahead to become one of the world's most popular tourist destinations.
In 1953, young politician Lynden Pindling, who had grown up in Nassau's West African Over-the-Hill district, formed the Progressive Liberal Party. He would become its first Prime minister. Great Britain granted the islands self-government in 1964 and changed their status from colony to Commonwealth in 1969. In 1973, the Commonwealth of The Bahamas became independent within the Commonwealth of Nations, but retained Queen Elizabeth II as constitutional head of state.
In the late 70's and early 80's, The Bahamas became a route through which cocaine traveled from Columbia to Florida, largely through the use of high speed 'Cigarette Boats’. This drug scourge affected politics, the economy, and the people of the Bahamas, but has largely disappeared due to the combined efforts of the authorities of the Bahamas and the United States.
The Bahamas is a renowned tax haven with no corporate, income, capital gains, or estate tax. By 1990, total arrivals to the Bahamas set an all-time record of 3.628 million!
From its rich history of Piracy, slavery, adventure, treasure, smuggling, and independence The Bahamas has created a world class tourist destination with 250 years of stable Parliamentary democracy. Harbour Island with its famous 3 mile pink colored sand beach, created by the ancient reddish hue of ground-up shells and coral, remains a hidden gem ready to be explored. The permanent population of Eleuthera and Harbour Island is approximately 10,500 (Bahamas 1990 census) Eighty-five percent of which is of African descent.