History of Bahamas
The history of the Bahamas begin in the 7th century AD with the inhabitance of the Taino people to the Bahamas from Cuba and Puerto Rico. These people are known as the Lucayans. There were no remarkable historical changes in the Bahamas until the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492. The population of the islands before this was about 30,000. Christopher Columbus’s first landfall on the continental America was on the island of San Salvador of Bahamas. After Columbus, many Spaniards visited the islands of Bahamas and the islands were depopulated both by slavery of the local inhabitants and the smallpox disease that was carried by the Europeans to the islands. Local inhabitants’ immune system were deneseless to smallpox and thousands of locals died.
It is generally accepted as the islands were uninhabited until the mid of 17th century. In 1648, English Puritans migrated to the Bahamas from the Bermuda Island searching for religious freedom. They were the first established European community in the Bahamas and the island which they chose to settle was Eleuthera.
In these years, the islands attracted many famous pirates, like the Blackbeard, Henry Morgan, and Anne Bonney, who dominated the Bahamas for the next 70 Years in "The Golden Age of Piracy." Their chief occupation was trapping ships into the shallow waters of the Bahamas and then pouncing on and plundering them. The British Kingdom, which claimed islands in 1670, remained quite powerless against their dominancy for almost 50 years.
In 1718, the Bahamas were made a colony of British Kingdom because of the increased threat of piracy. After a difficult struggle, they were successful in defeating piracy in and around the islands of Bahamas.
During the American Revolutionary War, the Bahamas were a natural target for American naval forces. The capital of Nassau was occupied by US Marines for about 2 weeks. In 1782, after the British naval defeat at Yorktown, a Spanish fleet surrendered Nassau without fight. But after the 1783 Treaty of Versailles, the global conflict between Britain, France and Spain was ended and the Bahamas returned to the British sovereignty.
After the American Revolution, about 7,300 Americans and their slaves moved to the Bahamas from New York and Florida. These Americans established large farms on several Bahamian islands and became a political force in the capital Nassau.
Hard times followed after the end of the Civil War until Prohibition. But after Prohibition was repealed, the islands again lapsed into economic stagnation. Prosperity did not come back until World War II, when the Bahamas became an important air and sea base in the Atlantic Ocean. Shortly after the War, the new industry of tourism changed the priorities in the islands. After Cuba was closed to United states visitors in the 1950's, The Bahamas became one of the world's most popular tourist destinations.