History

Recent History

While the thriving tourist industry is occasionally ruffled by hurricanes - such as Hurricanes Dennis and Floyd in 1999, and Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne in 2004 - the country is a relatively wealthy one. It has one of the largest open registry shipping fleets in the world and is a major provider of off-shore financial services. In November 2001 Dame Ivy Dumont became the Bahamas' first woman governor-general, and the following year erstwhile politician Perry Christie's Progressive Liberal Party ended the 10-year rule of the Free National Movement. In 2006, Arthur Dion Hanna took over as governor general. Despite the government's efforts to eradicate the drug trade, drug trafficking remains a very much alive, pumping millions of black market dollars into the economy each year.

Modern Day History

For most of the 19th century, the economy muddled along on subsistence agriculture, fishing, wrecking, smuggling and sponging. But the islands' ticket out of poverty began to materialise when a new class of rich Americans began spending money on health-inducing vacations in balmy climes. By the turn of the century, Florida was booming as a tourist destination and the Bahamas caught the spin-off. The trickle became a flood in 1920 when Prohibition in the US resurrected Nassau's proclivity for smuggling overnight. The Bahamas were ideally situated for running illicit liquor into the States aboard speedboats, and the Nassau waterfront soon became a vast rum warehouse. The city poured its profits into construction, and hotels blossomed like tropical flowers. The islands' first casino attracted gamblers and gangsters and a potpourri of rich tourists and thirsty party animals.. The repeal of Prohibition in 1933 sent Nassau into another economic downturn, this time worsened by the Depression.

WWII rekindled the tourist industry by bringing thousands of American GIs to the islands for a bit of rest and relaxation. Wealthy Americans and Canadians seeking a sunny winter retreat began returning to the Bahamas, encouraged by the presence of the islands' new high profile governor and governess, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The duke gave the islands a new lustre, ensuring that their wealthy acquaintances would pour into Nassau in the post-war years. Their effort coincided with the arrival of the jet age and the Cuban Revolution in 1959, which sent Western travellers in search of a new vacation destination. Concentrating their efforts on Nassau, local leaders expanded the US air base to accommodate international jets, dredged the harbour to lure cruise ships and launched a massive advertising campaign. They also made the country a corporate tax haven, and tourism and finance bloomed together.

The upturn in fortunes coincided with (and perhaps helped spark) the evolution of party politics and festering ethnic tensions, as the white elite reaped vast profits from the development and tourist boom while the black majority remained impoverished. The black-led Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) took power in 1967 under Sir Lynden Pindling, bringing the era of white dominance to an end and paving the way to independence. On 10 July 1973, the islands of the Bahamas officially became a new nation, the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, ending 325 years of British rule. The PLP's attempts at reform led to a real-estate slump that put the kibosh on home building by foreigners and stalled the economy. Meanwhile, the party's leadership was mired in corruption - much of it linked to a burgeoning international drug trade. After a US-assisted crackdown on drug trafficking in the 1980s and the election of a pro-business administration in 1992 (returned in a landslide 1997 election), The Bahamas began turning itself around.

Pre 20th Century History

The original inhabitants of The Bahamas were the Lucayans, a tribe of the Arawak Indian group, who arrived near the turn of the 9th century. The peaceful Lucayans lived primarily off the sea, fishing and harvesting shellfish, conch, lobster and molluscs. Christopher Columbus planted the Spanish flag on San Salvador upon his first landfall in the Americas in 1492. Three years later, Spanish colonialists established the first settlement in the archipelago, which served as a terminus for Lucayan Indians enslaved by the Spaniards for shipment to Hispaniola (the island shared by Dominican Republic and Haiti). Within 25 years, the entire Lucayan population of 50,000 was gone, and the Spanish eventually abandoned the settlement.

After Spaniard Juan Ponce de Léon sailed through the archipelago on his way to North America in 1513, other Spanish galleons, laden with treasure from the empires of Central and South America, passed through the reef-encrusted Bahamas bound for Spain. Many foundered, and the waters of the archipelago were littered with wrecks. Tales of treasure lured pirates, and they swarmed the Bahamian islands, using them 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. British-sponsored privateers patrolled the waters in and around the Bahamas, turning the main settlement of Charles Town into 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 lasted until 1714, when Britain signed the Treaty of Utrecht, which outlawed pirates. 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 prevailed, 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 scraped by trapping turtles, farming salt and, most importantly, 'wrecking' or salvaging shipwrecks.

After America's Revolutionary War, English Loyalists began washing up in the Bahamas by the thousands, tripling the population in three years and introducing cotton and slaves. The land proved unsuitable for growing cotton 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 after emancipation, often bequeathing their lands to their former slaves, who eked out a living from fishing and subsistence farming. Full equality and political rights, however, proved more elusive, for the post-slavery era was marked by the rule of an elite minority of whites over an under-represented black majority.