CHAPTER II.

THE BAHAMAS.

II.

THE Bahamas are the most northerly of the British West CHAPTER Indian colonies. They are a long line of coral islands, or groups of coral islands, stretching away to the south-east General. from the coast of Florida, running nearly parallel to Cuba, outside and to the north of the main semicircle of West Indian islands. The Caicos and Turks islands are a continuation of the same chain to the south-east, but, though once attached to the Bahamas, they are now separated from them, and are a dependency of Jamaica.

From their geographical position the Bahamas would natu- History. rally be, as they have actually been, only indirectly concerned with the main course of West Indian history—disjointed out- The posts of the archipelago, hardly inviting continuous settle- Spaniards. ment. It has been seen1 that one of the islands was the first point in America reached by Columbus. Guanahani was its native name, but it was rechristened by him San Salvador, in gratitude for his deliverance from the sea.

The whole group was known as the Lucayos2, and was

1 See above, p. 37. Washington Irving, in Appendix 17 to his Columbus, defends the claims of the island now known as San Salvador or Cat Island to have been the real point of first landing against the counter claims of Turks Island. Another theory is that Watling's Island was the spot in question. The Universal History confounds Guanahani and San Salvador with Providence.

2 It is suggested in Martin's British Colonies [chap. on the Bahamas, note] that the name Lucayos is the origin of the Spanish word Cayos,

II.

SECTION inhabited by a gentle superstitious race, who were deported wholesale by the Spaniards, to be worked to death in the mines of Hispaniola, or in the pearl fisheries off the Spanish main 1. In 1512 the archipelago was visited by Ponce de Leon, the discoverer of Florida, in his search for the island of Bimini and the fabled fountain of perpetual youth; but no Spanish settlement was made in the Bahamas; they were visited only and left desolate.

The

2

Some notice of them occurs in connexion with early English. English voyages to the West Indies, Hawkins, for instance, on his return from slave trading in 1562-3 'passing out by the islands of the Caycos3'; and, situated as they are towards the Greater Antilles, they must have been well known to the traders of the sixteenth century, who found their way into West Indian seas.

First
English

settlement.

J

The year 1629 has usually been taken as the date of the first English settlement in the group, on the island which Columbus had called Fernandina, after King Ferdinand, but which is now known as New Providence. It is now, however, proved that the chroniclers confused two islands, each bearing the name of Providence, and that the settlement in question was not in the Bahamas but in the island of Providence off the Mosquito coast of Central America *.

or Keys, the term applied to small islets especially in the Bahamas: but in a marginal note to An excellent ruttier for the islands of the West Indies [Hakluyt], referring to the Cayo de Moa off the east of Cuba, it is stated this word Cayo in the Biskayne tongue signifieth a flat or a shoald.'

1 Early in the sixteenth century some 40,000 natives of the Bahamas were transported to Hispaniola in five years. The Spaniards worked on their superstition by persuading them that they would be taken to Happy Islands where they would meet their dead again (Helps' Spanish Conquest in America).

2 Two little islands in the Bahamas bear this name at the present day.

From Hakluyt's collection. It is stated in some accounts that Sir Humphrey Gilbert annexed the Bahamas about 1578, but the authority for the statement cannot be traced by the present writer.

On the fourth of December, 1630, King Charles the First issued a patent to the Earl of Warwick, Lord Saye and Sele, John Pym, Oliver St. John, and others, incorporating them as the Governor and Company

In 1666 settlers from the Bermudas, finding that colony CHAPTER overpeopled, went to New Providence, and in about two years' time amounted to some 250 in number. They applied to the Governor of Jamaica for recognition of their settlement as a British dependency, and appear to have obtained a commission for their elected Governor, John Wentworth. They found the island apparently very healthy, with 'gallant harbours,' producing as good cotton as is ever grown in America and gallant tobacco'

Meanwhile, as has been already noticed, Eleutheria or Eleuthera, another island in the group, had also been colonised from the Bermudas about 1646. The founder of the colony was Captain William Sayle, and, some twenty years afterwards, he was selected by the proprietors of Carolina to be the first governor of a new settlement, which they contemplated forming in the southern part of their territory.

of Adventurers for the plantation of the islands of Providence, Henrietta, and the adjacent islands between 10 and 20 degrees of North latitude and 290 and 310 degrees of longitude. This patent was wrongly supposed to have referred to the Bahamas, and is so taken in the Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 1574-1660. The confusion, however, was subsequently cleared up by Mr. Sainsbury, the editor of the Calendar, and is fully explained in the Athenæum of the twentyseventh of May, 1876. The colonisation of Providence on the Mosquito coast by this Company lasted till 1641, when the Spaniards expelled the English; the latter, however, reoccupied the island for a short time in 1666, and again in 1671. See below, pp. 294, 297-8.

The authority for the above is the abstract of two letters given in the Calendar of State Papers; one is from the Bermudas to Lord Ashley, dated the seventeenth of February, 1670, the writers of which state that some of the Bermudians had gone 'three or four years since to one of the Bahamas, which they first named Sayle's island but they now call New Providence,' and they urge the issue of a patent for all the Bahamas; the other is dated the twenty-third of August, 1672, and is from the Governor of New Providence to the Governor of Jamaica, covering a petition which recites the circumstances of their settlement and recognition by the Jamaica Government. In the Memorials of the Bermudas, vol. ii. p. 265, a letter is given, written from the Bermudas in 1668, which states 'there is an island among the Bahamas, which some of our people are settled upon and more are going thither. 'Tis called New Providence.'

2 See above, pp. 15, 16.

SECTION

II.

In 16671, on his way to Carolina, Sayle is said to have been driven by stress of weather to land on the island of New Providence, calling it by that name to distinguish it from the then better known island of Providence off the Mosquito

coast.

The So favourable was his report that six of the Carolina proCarolina prietors, among whom were the Duke of Albemarle and Proprietors' Lord Ashley afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury, turned their Company attention to colonising it. Their grant from Charles the Second, dated the first of November, 1670, included all those islands called Bahama, Eleutheria, Ucanis (?), Providence, Inagua, and all other those islands lying in the degrees of 22 to 27 North Latitude, commonly known by the name of the Bahama Islands, or the Islands of the Lucayos 2'; and their attempt at colonisation is styled the first legal settlement of the Bahamas, which had long been 'a shelter for pirates and a disorderly set of people 3. In 1671 a governor's commission was sent out, and the Governor and Council were directed to take steps for forming a Parliament, twenty members of which were to be elected.

4

It would seem, however, that these instructions never reached the colony, for in 1672 the settlers complained to the Governor of Jamaica that they had waited in vain for two years for instructions from the Lords Proprietors of Carolina. In any case, the Bahamas appear to have been left very much to themselves, there was practically little or no government, and little systematic settlement. The residents of New Providence continued to deserve the title of disorderly

1 See Doyle's History of the English in America, vol. i. chapter 12. In the Memorials of the Bermudas, vol. ii. p. 255, note, it is pointed out that there is a confusion about the date, as Sayle left the Bermudas for Carolina in January, 1670. It is almost impossible to trace the exact sequence of events.

2 Sir R. Rawson, in his report on the Bahamas for 1864, states that the proprietary rights were reconveyed to the Crown in 1787, each of the heirs of the original proprietors receiving £2000 in compensation. 3 From the Universal History, p. 331.

* See note 1, on the preceding page.

II.

people; if they did not like their governors, they shipped CHAPTER them off; and if a pirate like Avery visited their island, he had to be dealt with as a friend. In 1680 or 1682 the Spaniards attacked and laid waste the settlement; and in 1703 French and Spaniards combined drove out the English inhabitants, destroyed the fort, and annihilated the colony.

Bahamas

British

govern

New Providence was now for a few years simply a headquarters for pirates, the most notable of whom was one Edward Teach, a Bristol man born,' a ruffian, who under the name of 'Black Beard' became a kind of West Indian ogre. The Bahamas, however, were too well placed and Occupation of the the world was becoming too civilised for such a state of things to last long; representations on the subject were by the made to the British authorities at home; and on the fifth of September, 1717, a royal proclamation was issued and pub- ment. lished in the London Gazette to the effect that 'the usual retreat and general receptacle for pirates is at Providence, the principal of those islands [the Bahamas],' and that 'His Majesty has been further graciously pleased to give directions for dislodging those pirates who have taken shelter in the said islands, as well as for securing those islands and making settlements and a fortification there for the safety and benefit of trade and navigation in those seas for the future.' Accordingly, in 1718, Captain Woodes Rogers, whose name Woodes is famous in the records of English seamen1, Rogers. out to reestablish a regular government and to put down piracy. Himself a buccaneer, though a high class one, and accustomed to deal with lawless men, Rogers was well fitted for the post for which he had been selected. Law and order were restored, some of the pirates were killed or driven out, others settled down into orderly citizens, a small Council

was sent

1 For an account of Rogers' voyage round the world in 1708-11, on which he was accompanied by Dampier, and during which he took Alexander Selkirk off his desert island, see Mr. Leslie's A British Privateer in the reign of Queen Anne, and also Mr. Clark Russell's William Dampier, in the Men of Action Series.