The Bahamas: From Guanahaní to Independence

Seven hundred islands on the edge of the Atlantic

The Bahamas is a chain of about 700 low coral islands and thousands of cays running some 500 miles from off the Florida coast towards Hispaniola. Only around 30 are inhabited, and most of the roughly 400,000 Bahamians live on New Providence, the small island that holds the capital, Nassau. The land is thin and dry, with no rivers and little farming soil, so the country's history has been made less by what grows there than by what passes through: treasure fleets, pirates, refugees, smugglers, and now cruise ships.

A short history

1. c. 500–800 CE

   The Lucayans

   Taíno people begin settling the islands from the south; perhaps 30,000–40,000 live here by 1492.

2. 12 October 1492

   Columbus

   His first American landfall is on a Bahamian island the Lucayans called Guanahaní; which island it was is still debated.

3. by 1520

   Depopulation

   The entire Lucayan population is enslaved and shipped away; the islands are left empty.

4. 1648

   The Eleutheran Adventurers

   English religious refugees from Bermuda make the first lasting settlement.

5. 1690s–1718

   The pirate base

   Nassau becomes a haven for pirates until a royal governor clears them out.

6. 1780s

   The Loyalists

   American Loyalists arrive with enslaved people and set up cotton plantations that soon fail.

7. 19th–20th c.

   Wrecking and running

   Salvaging wrecks, Civil War blockade-running and Prohibition rum-running sustain Nassau.

8. 10 January 1967

   Majority Rule

   The Black-majority Progressive Liberal Party wins power for the first time.

9. 10 July 1973

   Independence

   The Bahamas becomes a sovereign country within the Commonwealth.

The Lucayans and the emptying of the islands

The first Bahamians were the Lucayans, a branch of the Taíno who moved up the island chain from Hispaniola and Cuba over several centuries and lived by fishing, farming cassava, and trading. When Columbus made his first Atlantic crossing in 1492, the island where he landed — which the Lucayans called Guanahaní — was the first American land he saw. It has traditionally been identified with the island now named San Salvador, but scholars remain divided over the identification. Within a generation the Lucayans were gone. The Spanish, who had no other use for the islands, carried the entire population off as forced labourers to Hispaniola and as pearl divers off the South American coast, where they died. By about 1520 the Bahamas were uninhabited, and they stayed nearly empty for over a century.

Adventurers and pirates

The first lasting settlers were English Puritans from Bermuda, the "Eleutheran Adventurers", who founded a colony on the island of Eleuthera in 1648. Settlers from Bermuda reached New Providence in 1666, and its town, founded in 1670 as Charles Town, was rebuilt and renamed Nassau in 1695. But the islands' maze of reefs and channels, close to the shipping lanes out of the Caribbean, made them ideal for a different trade. From the 1690s Nassau became the base for hundreds of pirates — Blackbeard, Charles Vane, Anne Bonny and Calico Jack among them — operating in the vacuum left by a weak or absent government.

In 1718 the Crown made the Bahamas a royal colony and sent Woodes Rogers as its first governor with orders — and a squadron — to end the piracy. He offered a pardon, hanged eight men who went back to piracy, and within a few years the pirate republic was finished. The colony's new motto put it plainly: "Pirates expelled, commerce restored."

Loyalists, wrecking, and running

After the American Revolution, several thousand Loyalists fled the new United States for the Bahamas in the 1780s, bringing enslaved Africans with them and tripling the colony's population. They tried to grow cotton on the Out Islands, but the soil exhausted quickly and the plantations collapsed within a generation, leaving behind a scatter of settlements and a population that was now overwhelmingly of African descent. Slavery was abolished in 1834, and the freed population turned to fishing, sponging, boatbuilding, and "wrecking" — legally salvaging the cargo of ships that came to grief on the reefs, for a long time the most lucrative trade in the islands.

Nassau's biggest windfalls came from other people's prohibitions. During the American Civil War it boomed as a transfer point for blockade-runners carrying cotton out of the Confederacy and weapons in. Sixty years later, American Prohibition turned it into a warehouse for liquor bound illegally for the United States. Each boom faded when the law that created it changed.

Majority Rule

For most of the colonial period the Bahamas was run by a small clique of white Nassau merchants — known as the "Bay Street Boys" — through their hold on the House of Assembly, which left the Black majority largely unrepresented. Change came through the labour movement and the Progressive Liberal Party, founded in 1953. A general strike in 1958 strengthened the movement; universal adult suffrage, including for women, followed in 1962; and in the general election of 10 January 1967 the PLP tied the governing party on seats and, with the support of other members, formed the first government led by the Black majority, under Lynden Pindling. Bahamians mark the date as Majority Rule Day.

Full independence, within the Commonwealth, came on 10 July 1973, with Pindling as the first prime minister. He would govern for 25 years.

The modern country

Independent Bahamas built one of the highest incomes in the Caribbean on two industries: tourism, which now brings millions of visitors a year, most of them on cruise ships, and offshore financial services, which have repeatedly drawn international pressure over secrecy and tax. Pindling's long rule was later clouded by allegations of corruption and links with drug cartels. In 2019 Hurricane Dorian, one of the strongest Atlantic storms ever recorded, struck Abaco and then stalled over Grand Bahama for more than a day, devastating both. Since independence power has alternated between the PLP and the Free National Movement; in May 2026 the PLP under Philip Davis won a second consecutive term.

Junkanoo is now a national institution, with rival groups building elaborate costumes for the parades on Boxing Day and New Year's Day.

What the Bahamas keeps

The Bahamas is a country that was emptied once, completely, and rebuilt from outside — by English dissenters, by pirates, by Loyalist refugees and the people they enslaved. The population that resulted, overwhelmingly of African descent, spent almost two centuries governed by a tiny merchant elite before winning the vote and then the country. Its modern prosperity still depends, as its whole history has, on its position between the Caribbean and the North American mainland.