A people defines itself as much by its myths as by its material relics and recorded doings. The Lucayans, the first Bahamians of whom we have a record, shared in the general fund of mythic lore of the Arawak people from whom they sprang.¹ According to the account that the Tainan Arawaks of Hispaniola gave to the Spaniards, the entire universe originally existed in darkness, locked in the solid earth. Over all brooded a mighty spirit with a portentous name, Jocchu Vague Maorocon, sometimes called, more simply, Yocahú. īmmortal and invisible like the Christian God, Yocahú was not quite as...

The largest and most completely explored Lucayan site covers twelve acres at the head of Pigeon Creek, on the eastern side of San Salvador. First identified by Theodoor de Booy as early as 1912, raked over by Ruth Wolper in 1964, surveyed by M. K. Pratt in 1974, and scientifically excavated by Richard Rose after 1978, it can tell us much about Lucayan patterns of settlement, lifestyle, and culture in general.¹

San Salvador, which the Lucayans called Guanahaní (the Place of the Iguana), is an oblong island some twelve miles by six at the outer, Atlantic Ocean, edge of the...

What we have learned or inferred from Lucayan artifacts and early writers about Lucayan behavior and beliefs allows us to proceed with some confidence from a relatively complete understanding of their way of life and the difficulties which they faced into the realm of their mentalité.¹

By all accounts the Lucayans were the least warlike of all Amerindians, but this may have been as much due to their lack of formal integration and resources, and a realistic calculation of their chances in combat, as to an intrinsic pacifism. In fact, Lucayans were probably more politically sophisticated, and enjoyed better communications...

It is fortunate that this book deals only indirectly with the history of events, for the Lucayans entered the pages of histoire événementuelle only to be almost instantly (within twenty-five years) destroyed. The fatal first contact occurred at about 7 a.m. on Friday, October 12, 1492, when, having sighted land two hours after midnight and jogging till dawn, the Pinta, Niña, and Santa Maria came off what is now called Long Bay, San Salvador Island, Bahamas.¹

Theodore de Bry in his 1594 engraving of Columbusʹs landing 102 years earlier, got it all right except the details. Some naked Indians flee...

With the Olympian perspective and confidence which informs his most ambitious work, the historical geographer Daniel Meinig visualizes the great movements of peoples and cultures shaping North America between 1500 and 1750 as twin thrusts emanating from northwestern Europe and west Africa, aimed respectively at the mainland and islands of the Caribbean, before converging on what became the plantation colonies of the United States.¹ Yet even Meinig, when considering in more detail the ways in which the northern European powers competed with Spain over the sugar-rich Antilles, and taking into account such marginal imperial properties as the Bahama Islands, is...

William Sayle, the leader of the Eleutherian Adventurers, was a prominent Bermudian sea captain and trader who, though often at sea between Bermuda, England, and the West Indies, had already served as colonial governor from 1640 to 1642 and 1643 to 1645. Identified with the religious Independents who had set up a separate congregationalist church in Bermuda in 1643, he was also close to the radical and republican faction among the Bermuda Companyʹs shareholders in London, led, somewhat strangely, by its chief nobleman, the earl of Warwick. Sayleʹs two terms as governor were therefore marred by the religious and political...

Beneath the picaresque surface of scandal and skulduggery described by John Oldmixon in his History of the Isle of Providence, the phase of Proprietary government in the Bahamas illustrated how the highest-sounding principles evaporated before the profit motive.¹ The Proprietors promised rational and orderly government but appointed governors and agents instructed to squeeze the islandsʹ population and resources, and when the returns proved negligible they neglected the islands almost entirely. The governors and agents themselves, if not naturally incompetent, greedy, and unprincipled, were driven to oppression and corruption by frustration and neglect. The disasters which followed, however, can be blamed...

The piracy era in the Bahamas is usually characterized as a picturesque aberration, a sort of negative state out of which—the pirates being expelled and commerce restored by a right royal government—emerged a more positive and progressive, if still impoverished, colony. Rather, it bears examination as a more formative period in the evolution of the Bahamian national character: one in which a tendency toward opportunistic self-reliance reached its most extreme, even a brutal, form but was at the same time lastingly imprinted.

Piracy stands for the opposite pole in the Bahamian lifestyle and character from that implanted by...

Transforming the Bahamas into a reputable and efficient component of the British imperial system was to prove a protracted business, with many setbacks. The appointment of governors and other officials who were representatives of imperial authority was bound to provoke friction with the lax and opportunistic Bahamian settlers. Also, in a more subtle way, the concurrent emergence of something like a Bahamian consciousness, and the institution of a small but powerful class of administrators inclined to impose metropolitan ideas, attitudes, and style, introduced a new and lasting social division within the Bahamian ruling classes. On the political plane it was...

The troubled regime of Governor Richard Fitzwilliam (1733–38) showed that the changes introduced and proposed by Woodes Rogers were overoptimistic, even premature. The ever-fragile peace with France and Spain was not the economic panacea hoped for, and instead of new settlers and investment the new governor brought with him fresh outbreaks of yellow fever. The effects of poverty, sickness, and the insensitive application of new socioeconomic laws were exacerbated by a governor who was irascible, arbitrary, and tactless. Intermittently facing slave rebellion and military mutiny, Richard Fitzwilliam was also constantly at loggerheads with the local whites and free coloreds....

Wartime prosperity and interwar slumps during the mid-eighteenth century set the pattern of ʺboom and bustʺ which was to characterize all subsequent Bahamian history and have a lasting effect upon the character and psychology of the Bahamian people.

The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 brought an immediate halt to the surge of good fortune during the wars with Spain and France over Jenkinsʹs ear and the question of the Austrian succession. But the trough was followed by an even greater crest during the Seven Yearsʹ War (1756–63) and the regime of Governor William Shirley. As a reflection of Britainʹs...

The resettlement of American Loyalists and their slaves in the Bahamas after the Treaty of Versailles was undoubtedly one of the most crucial phases in Bahamian social history. Of the grand total of about one hundred thousand refugees from the new United States, only some sixteen hundred whites and fifty-seven hundred slaves and free blacks migrated permanently to the Bahamas. Yet this modest influx trebled the colonyʹs population, raised the proportion of slaves and other blacks from one-half to three-quarters of the whole, and increased the number of permanently settled islands from three (or five) to a dozen.¹

As most...

The distribution of lands, the redistribution of seats in the assembly, and the preoccupation of old and new whites alike with developing an oligarchic system quelled discord among the ruling class and should have allowed for rapid and peaceful progress. Advances were made, in the modernization of the administration and the improvement of facilities in Nassau. But progress was slowed and made turbulent by the failure to establish a prosperous plantation economy, by the difficult personality and behavior of Governor Lord Dunmore, and by the social and racial discord that reflected the first whispers of liberal reform in the metropolis,...

When Daniel McKinnen traversed the southern Bahamas in 1802, on his way back to England from the West Indies during the eighteen-month interlude in the last French war, he found cotton plantations reverting to bush or a less intensive form of agriculture, and poor white Out Islanders (ʺConchsʺ) returning to casual salt raking, log-cutting, and ʺracking.ʺ On Long Island alone ʺeight or ten plantations were entirely quitted and thirteen others partially given upʺ since 1795. Nassau, on the other hand, McKinnen found a lively, interesting, and handsome colonial town, ʺas well built as any I saw in the West Indies.ʺ...

The way of life of the ruling class and the social life of the Bahamian capital during the Loyalist slavery era are preserved, as in amber, by the three earliest sets of private documents still surviving: a series of letters by the women of the Kelsall family (1804–47) and two parallel but dissimilar journals kept in 1823–24 by American visitors, a doctor and a young woman of leisure.¹

The Kelsalls were almost the quintessential Bahamian Loyalist family. The patriarch was John Kelsall, owner of Great Ropers Plantation near Beaufort, South Carolina, whose sons Roger and William compromised themselves...

When turning from the world of Nassau and its elite to look in detail at the Bahamian Out Islands and the slaves, one is faced by the problems confronting all would-be historians of the great majority—those who did not, could not, write their own historical account. Inevitably, the persons who wrote about Bahamian slaves, or even of the poor-white ʺConchs,ʺ were mainly white outsiders. There is only one relatively objective description of the day-to-day life of an Out Island slave plantation equal to the Kelsall letters or the Townsend journal—a Watlingʹs Island planterʹs diary that dates from the...

In statistical terms, as we have seen, the slaves of the Bahamas were a relatively healthy population. However, one needs to know much more yet of the conditions under which the slaves lived and worked, both to see how the statistical results came about and to estimate whether a healthy demographic performance necessarily meant a satisfactory, let alone satisfying, life. The causal factors were, of course, interrelated. But it is vital for the present enterprise to discover to what extent slave conditions were determined (as masters and the opponents of slavery alike presumed) by the legal and customary system imposed...

In the straggly bush on the eastern side of San Salvador (alias Watlingʹs Island), four miles from the beach where Columbus landed and a mile from the Lucayan village site on Pigeon Creek, are the scanty remains of the only Bahamian slave plantation for which a day-to-day record survives. This was the estate of Charles Farquharson, a resident owner whose journal for 1831 and 1832 was rescued from oblivion in 1903 and locally published in 1957.¹ Though fairly unusual for the period in still being directly managed by its owner, Farquharsonʹs plantation was otherwise typical. Despite some tantalizing omissions, Charles...

The Farquharson journal clearly disproves two hitherto-common assumptions: that Bahamian slaves were entirely quiescent (having no need to rebel) and that effective slave resistance was limited to outright rebellion. A more general examination of Bahamian slave behavior also points up two related paradoxes: that it was not necessarily the most oppressed slaves who most vigorously resisted and that slave resistance actually increased—rising almost to a climax—in the very last phase of formal slavery.

The Bahamian case bears out what the more intelligent West Indian planters acknowledged: that slave resistance was inevitable and endemic wherever slavery existed and as...