Nassau History

Pre-Columbian Nassau

The original inhabitants of the Bahamas were the Lucayans, a branch of the Arawakan-speaking Taino people. It is believed that they arrived on the islands circa 500 to 800 AD from Hispaniola and Cuba, sailing in dugout canoes.

The Lucayans were a forest people who lived in theocratic kingdoms, with a hierarchically arranged pantheon of gods, called zemis, and village chiefs, or caciques. The zemis were represented by icons of wood, stone, bones and human remains. Arawaks believed that being in the good graces of their zemis protected them from disease, hurricanes or disaster in war.

The Arawaks--who were light brown, generally short with coarse black hair, with broad faces and flat noses--painted their bodies in bright colors, and some wore small ornaments of gold and shells. Body-painting was common, mostly employed to intimidate opponents in warfare.

They lived in small villages in huts constructed of wooden frames topped by straw, and featured earthen floors. The buildings were strong enough to resist hurricanes.

Their diet consisted of manioc, maize, potatoes, peanuts, peppers, beans, and arrowroot that they cultivated twice each year. In addition, they hunted ducks, geese, parrots, iguanas, small rodents and giant tree sloths. Most fishing, done by hand along the coast and in rivers, was for mollusks, lobsters and turtles. Bigger fish were caught with baskets, spears, hooks and nets.

At the time of the arrival of Columbus, it is estimated that as many as 40,000 Lucayans natives lived in the Bahamas.

Spanish Discovery and Administration

On his first voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus left Palos de la Frontera, Spain, on August 3, 1492 to discover a direct route to Asia. His fleet consisted of three ships--the Santa Maria, Nina and Pinta.

At 2:00 am on October 12, 1492, Columbus sited a fire burning in the distance, and made way for the light. Columbus called the island San Salvador. Exactly which island in the Bahamas this corresponds to is an unresolved topic; prime candidates are Samana Cay, Plana Cays, or San Salvador Island (so named in 1925 in the belief that it was Columbus's San Salvador). The indigenous Lucayan people he encountered were peaceful and friendly.

The Bahamas held little of interest to the Spanish other than the Lucayans. In later years, when the Spanish exploitation of the labor of the Hispaniolan people rapidly reduced that population, they returned to the Bahamas to capture the Lucayans for use as laborers in Hispaniola. It is estimated that the Spanish captured over 40,000 Lucayans over a 20 year period, leaving the Bahamas unpopulated. When the Spanish decided to evacuated the remaining Lucayans to Hispaniola in 1520, they could only find eleven in all of the Bahamas. Thereafter, the Bahamas remained uninhabited for 130 years.

With no gold to be found, and with no population remaining, the Bahamas effectively abandoned the islands, but did not formally relinquish their claims until the Treaty of Versailles, in 1783.

Christopher Columbus

Early English Settlement

In 1648, a group of puritans and republicans from Bermuda called "The Company of Adventurers for the Plantation of the Islands of Eleuthera" sailed to the Bahamas to found a colony. They elected to leave Bermuda because it was "overcrowded," and the Bahamas could offer both religious and political freedom and economic opportunity. The larger of the two ships making the voyage was wrecked on the reef at the north end of Eleuthera Island, with the loss of all provisions.

The agrarian-based Eleuthera colony struggled for many years, despite the arrival of additional settlers and relief supplies. In the mid-1650s, many of the settlers returned to Bermuda. Those who remained founded communities on Harbour Island and Saint George's Cay at the north end of Eleuthera. In 1670, there were about 20 families living in the Eleuthera communities.

In 1666 other settlers from Bermuda arrived on New Providence Island (the site of today's Nassau), which soon became the center of population and commerce in the Bahamas; almost 500 people lived on the island by 1670.

The first settlers on New Providence made their living from the sea, salvaging (mainly Spanish) wrecks, making salt, and taking fish, turtles, conchs and ambergris. Farmers from Bermuda soon followed the seamen to New Providence, where they found good, plentiful land.

Neither the Eleutherian colony nor the settlement on New Providence had any legal standing under English law. In 1670 the Proprietors of Carolina--a group of English noblemen that included the Earl of Clarendon, the Duke of Albemarle, Lord Craven, Lord Berkeley, Lord Ashley, Sir George Carteret, Sir William Berkeley, and Sir John Colleton--were issued a patent (an ownership deed) by Charles II for the Bahamas, but the governors sent by the Proprietors had difficulty in imposing their authority on the independent-minded residents of New Providence.

The early settlers continued to live much as they had in Bermuda, fishing, taking turtles, whales and seals, finding ambergris, making salt on the drier islands, cutting the abundant hardwoods of the islands for lumber, dyewood and medicinal bark, and wrecking, or salvaging wrecks. The Bahamas were close to the sailing routes between Europe and the Caribbean, so shipwrecks in the islands were common, and wrecking was the most lucrative occupation available to the Bahamians.

Lord Ashley

The Pirate Era in the Bahamas

The Bahamians soon came into conflict with the Spanish over the salvaging of wrecks. The Bahamian wreckers drove the Spanish away from their wrecked ships, and even attacked the Spanish salvors and seized goods the Spanish had already recovered from the wrecks. The Spanish raided the Bahamas, and the Bahamians in turn commissioned privateers against Spain, even though England and Spain were at peace. In 1684 the Spanish burned the settlements on New Providence and Eleuthera, after which they were largely abandoned. New Providence was settled a second time in 1686 by settlers from Jamaica.

In the 1690s English privateers (England was at war with France) established themselves in the Bahamas. In 1696 Henry Every (or Avery), using the assumed name Henry Bridgeman, brought his ship Fancy, loaded with pirate's loot, into Nassau harbor. Every bribed the governor with gold and silver, and by leaving him the Fancy, still loaded with 50 tons of elephant tusks and 100 barrels of gunpowder.

Following peace with France in 1697, many of the privateers became the pirates. From this time the pirates increasingly made the Bahamian capital of Nassau, founded in 1694, their base. The governors appointed by the Proprietors usually made a show of suppressing the pirates, but most were often accused of dealing with the pirates. By 1701 England was at war with France and Spain. In 1703 and in 1706 combined French-Spanish fleets attacked and sacked Nassau, after which some settlers left and the Proprietors gave up on trying to govern the Bahamas.

With no effective government in the Bahamas, Nassau was taken over by English privateers, in what has been called a "privateers' republic," which lasted for eleven years. The privateers attacked French and Spanish ships, while French and Spanish forces burned Nassau several times. The War of the Spanish Succession ended in 1714, but some privateers were slow to get the news, or reluctant to accept it, and slipped into piracy. One estimate puts at least 1,000 pirates in the Bahamas in 1713, outnumbering the 200 families of more permanent settlers. The "privateers' republic" in Nassau became a "pirates' republic".

At least 20 pirate captains used Nassau and other places in the Bahamas as a home port during this period, including Henry Jennings, Edward Teach (Blackbeard), Benjamin Hornigold and Stede Bonnet. Many settler families moved from New Providence to Eleuthera or Abaco to escape harassment from the pirates. On the other hand, residents of Harbor Island were happy to serve as middlemen for the pirates, as merchants from New England and Virginia came there to exchange needed supplies for pirate plunder.

The "pirates' republic" came to an end in 1718, when Woodes Rogers, the first Royal Governor of the Bahamas, reached Nassau with a small fleet of warships.

Edward Teach (Blackbeard)

Loyalist Emigration to the Bahamas

During the American War of Independence, the Bahamas fell to Spanish forces under General Bernardo de Galvez in 1782. A British-American loyalist expedition later recaptured the islands. After the American Revolution, the British issued land grants to American Loyalists, and the sparse population of the Bahamas tripled within a few years. The planters had planned to grow cotton, but the thin, rocky soil was unsuited to large-scale cultivation, and the plantations soon failed.

Most of the current inhabitants of the Bahamas are descended from the slaves brought to work on the Loyalist plantations, or from liberated Africans set free by the British navy after the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807. Plantation life ended with the British emancipation of slaves on August 1, 1834. However, the Bahamian slaves remained bound to their former owners' service until 1838, under what was called the "Apprenticeship System."

During the American Civil War, the Bahamas prospered as a base for Confederate blockade-running, bringing in cotton for the mills of England and running out arms and munitions.

Gen. Bernardo de Galvez

The Bahamas in the 20th Century

During Prohibition after World War I, the islands were a base for American rum-runners, smuggling liquor into the US.

During World War II, the Allies based their flight training and antisubmarine operations for the Caribbean in the Bahamas. The wartime airfield became Nassau's international airport in 1957 and helped spur the growth of mass tourism, which accelerated after Havana was closed to American tourists in 1961. Freeport, on the island of Grand Bahama, was established as a free trade zone in the 1950s and became the country's second city. Bank secrecy combined with the lack of corporate and income taxes led to a rapid growth in the offshore financial sector during the postwar years.

Bahamians achieved self-government in 1964 and full independence within the Commonwealth of Nations on July 10, 1973. The country's first prime minister was Lynden O. Pindling, leader of the Progressive Liberal Party. Pindling ruled for nearly 20 years, during which the Bahamas benefited from tourism and foreign investment.

By the early 1980s, the islands had also become a major center for the drug trade, with 90% of all the cocaine entering the United States reportedly passing through the Bahamas.

In September 2004, Hurricane Frances swept through the Bahamas, leaving widespread damage in its wake. Just three weeks later, Hurricane Jeanne flattened the islands. Jeanne uprooted trees, blew out windows, and sent seawater flooding through neighborhoods on the islands of Abaco and Grand Bahama. Receding floodwaters left boats tossed on roads and homes battered.

Hurricane Frances

The Development of Nassau as a Gambling Mecca

Swedish industrialist Dr. Axel Wenner-Gren, the owner of the Swedish vacuum cleaner maker Electrolux, purchased Hog Island in 1939 after visiting Nassau while on a world cruise. At the time, the island was largely deserted, but was endowed with white sand beaches and featured a few entertainment venues.

Wenner-Gren built an estate on the island that he called Shangri-La. The estate included a large house and the beginnings of intricately landscaped gardens, modeled after those at the Chateau de Versailles. He visited his estate often, but by 1961 he elected to sell the property when his finances were running low.

Huntington Hartford II, heir to the A&P supermarket fortune, purchased the island for $9.5 million. Hartford changed the name from Hog Island to Paradise Island. He hired the Palm Beach architect John Volk and built the Ocean Club, Cafe Martinique, Hurricane Hole and the Golf Course, among other island landmarks. He hired Gary Player to be the Golf Pro and Pancho Gonzales to be the Tennis Pro. His opening of Paradise Island in 1962 was covered in Newsweek and Time magazines.

Hartford had designs for Paradise Island to become the new Monte Carlo, and he obtained a gambling license for a casino he planned to build on the island. In 1964, Hartford sold a portion of his interests in the island to an investment group headed by Jim Crosby and Jack Davis. Crosby and Davis in turn created Resorts International, which developed the Paradise Island Resort, a major casino and hotel property.

When New Jersey approved casino gambling in 1977, Resorts built the first casino, the Resorts Casino Hotel. Because the hotel/casino was the first and only casino property in Atlantic City, it initially generated substantial returns, and Resorts elected to focus primarily on their New Jersey casino interests. However, the company became highly indebted as they built their new hotel/casino, the Taj Mahal, and in 1987, real estate tycoon Donald Trump purchased control of Resorts from the estate of Jim Crosby for $79 million. In 1988, Trump sold this interest in Resorts to entertainer and entrepreneur Merv Griffin for $400 million.

In 1994, Sol Kerzner, a South African gambling magnate, purchased the 1,150-room Paradise Island Resort out of bankruptcy for $125 million. Following the purchase, Kerzner launched a major re-development and expansion program that transformed the property, rechristened the Atlantis Resort Paradise Island, into a 2,300-room facility that included one of the world's largest man-made marine habitats and the Caribbean's biggest casino.