Bahamas

Lore & Background

The name Bahamas is derived from the Lucayan name Bahama ('large upper middle island'), used by the Indigenous Lucayan people for the island of Grand Bahama. Bahama referred to Grand Bahama alone when first attested on the c. 1523 Turin Map, but was used in English for the archipelago as a whole by 1670. Tourist guides often state that the name comes from the Spanish baja mar ('shallow sea'), but Wolfgang Ahrens of York University argues that this is a folk etymology. Alternatively, Bahama may have been derived from Guanahaní, a local name of unclear meaning. Isaac Taylor, a toponymist, argues that the name was derived from Bimani (Bimini), which Spaniards in Haiti identified with Palombe, a legendary place where John Mandeville's Travels said there was a fountain of youth. The Bahamas is one of two countries whose official short name starts with the definite article, the other being The Gambia.

In Their Own Story

The morning mist clings to the limestone cliffs of Eleuthera as the first light catches the gradient of the sea, shifting from deep indigo to impossible shades of aquamarine. A small wooden sloop cuts silently through the glassy water, its sail catching the trade winds that have guided sailors here for centuries. On deck, an elder points toward a distant cay where the ruins of a Loyalist plantation stand silent against the sky, a ghostly reminder of the complex tapestry woven into this soil. Below the hull, coral gardens bloom in vibrant hues, teeming with life that has thrived long before the first ship sailed these waters, linking the past and present in an endless, rhythmic tide.

Reader's Guide

The Bahama islands were inhabited by the Arawak and Lucayans, a branch of the Arawakan-speaking Taíno, for many centuries. Christopher Columbus was the first European to see the islands, making his first landfall in the New World in 1492 when he landed on the island of San Salvador (which the Lucayans called Guanahaní). Later, the Kingdom of Spain shipped the native Lucayans to Hispaniola and enslaved them there, leaving the Bahama islands mostly deserted from 1513 until 1648. In 1649, English colonists from Bermuda, known as the Eleutheran Adventurers, settled on the island of Eleuthera. The Bahamas became a crown colony of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1718 when the British clamped down on piracy. After the American Revolutionary War, the Crown resettled thousands of American Loyalists to the Bahamas; they took slaves with them and established plantations on land grants. African slaves and their descendants constituted the majority of the population from this period on. The slave trade was abolished by the British in 1807. Slavery in the Bahamas was not abolished until 1834, but in 1818 the Bahamas became a haven of manumission for African slaves from outside the British West Indies. Africans liberated from illegal slave ships were resettled on the islands by the Royal Navy, while some North American slaves and Seminoles escaped to the Bahamas from Florida. During this period, Bahamians were known to recognise the freedom of slaves carried by the ships of other nations which reached their country. Today Black Bahamians make up 90 per cent of the population of 400,516. The Bahamas became an independent Commonwealth realm separate from the United Kingdom in 1973. Its first prime minister was Lynden Pindling. The Bahamas maintains King Charles III as its monarch; the appointed representative of the Crown is the governor-general of the Bahamas. The Bahamas has the fourteenth-largest gross domestic product per capita in the Americas. Its economy is based on tourism and offshore finance. Though the Bahamas is in the Lucayan Archipelago, and not in the Caribbean Sea, it is still considered part of the wider Caribbean region. The Bahamas is a full member of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), but is not part of the CARICOM Single Market and Economy.

Did You Know?

• The name 'Bahamas' may derive from the Lucayan word 'Bahama' meaning 'large upper middle island', but alternative derivations exist, such as from the Spanish 'baja mar' (shallow sea) or from 'Guanahaní'.
• The Bahamas is one of only two countries whose official short name begins with the definite article 'the', the other being The Gambia.
• Christopher Columbus made his first landfall in the New World in 1492 on an island in the Bahamas, which he named San Salvador (called Guanahaní by the Lucayans).