The Bahamas

• 1. Introduction

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  The Bahamas sits at an unusual crossroads of geography and identity. Officially the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, it comprises 700 islands and more than 2,500 cays scattered across roughly 180,000 square miles of ocean space. Nassau, the capital, rests on New Providence island, while the country stretches from southeast Florida all the way past Cuba and Hispaniola. The question this documentary sets out to explore is how a chain of mostly flat, limestone islands came to be one of the wealthiest nations in the Americas, a place where the word freedom carries centuries of contested meaning.

• 2. A Name With Many Fathers

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  The word Bahamas traces back to the Lucayan people who originally called the island of Grand Bahama by the name Bahama, meaning "large upper middle island." That name first appeared on the c. 1523 Turin Map, referring only to Grand Bahama, before English speakers extended it to the whole archipelago by 1670. Tourist guides often explain the name differently, pointing to the Spanish phrase baja mar, meaning "shallow sea." Wolfgang Ahrens of York University dismisses that as folk etymology. A third theory links the name to Guanahaní, a local word of unclear meaning, while the toponymist Isaac Taylor traced it instead to Bimani, which Spaniards in Haiti connected with a legendary place from John Mandeville's Travels, said to contain a fountain of youth. The Bahamas also holds a singular linguistic distinction: it is one of only two countries whose official short name begins with the definite article. The other is The Gambia.

• 3. First Peoples and First Contact

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  Sometime between AD 500 and 800, the Taíno migrated from Hispaniola and Cuba into the uninhabited southern islands of the Bahamas, having originally come from mainland South America. These settlers became known as the Lucayan people. When Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492, an estimated 30,000 Lucayans were living across the islands. His first landfall in what Europeans called the New World was on an island he named San Salvador, known to the Lucayans as Guanahani. Scholars still debate the exact location: some point to present-day San Salvador Island in the southeastern Bahamas, while Joseph Judge, a writer and editor for National Geographic, argued in 1986 from Columbus' own log that the landing occurred further southeast on Samana Cay. Columbus made first contact with the Lucayans, exchanged goods with them, and claimed the islands for the Crown of Castile before sailing on to the Greater Antilles. The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas placed the Bahamas within Spain's sphere, but the Spanish did little to settle the islands. They did, however, systematically enslave the Lucayan population and transport them to Hispaniola for forced labour. Disease followed enslavement: half of the Lucayans died from smallpox alone. By 1513, the Bahama islands were largely empty.

• 4. Pirates, Puritans, and Loyalists

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  In 1648, English settlers arrived on an island they named Eleuthera, the Greek word for free. Led by William Sayle and known as the Eleutheran Adventurers, they had migrated from Bermuda in search of greater religious freedom. Life proved harder than anticipated. Many, including Sayle himself, eventually returned to Bermuda. Those who stayed survived partly by salvaging goods from shipwrecks. In 1670 King Charles II granted the islands to the Lords Proprietors of the Carolinas, who administered the territory from New Providence. Piracy became endemic under their rule. In 1684 the Spanish corsair Juan de Alcon raided the capital, then called Charles Town. In 1703 a joint Franco-Spanish force briefly occupied Nassau during the War of the Spanish Succession. Among the most notorious figures sheltering in these waters was Blackbeard, who lived from around 1680 to 1718. Britain ended the era it called the "Pirates' republic" in 1718 by making the Bahamas a crown colony under Governor Woodes Rogers. After US independence, the British resettled some 7,300 Loyalists along with their enslaved people, including at least 1,033 Europeans and 2,214 people of African descent who came from East Florida. The government granted land to planters to compensate for losses during the war. Those settlers quickly became a political force, and ethnic Europeans found themselves a minority in the territory from that point forward.

• 5. The Bahamas and the Fight Against Slavery

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  The Slave Trade Act 1807 abolished slave trading to British possessions, and the Royal Navy was given authority to intercept ships carrying enslaved people on the high seas. Thousands of Africans liberated from those ships were resettled in the Bahamas. In the 1820s, during the Seminole Wars in Florida, hundreds of enslaved North Americans and African Seminoles escaped from Cape Florida to the Bahamas, mostly settling on northwest Andros Island, where they built the village of Red Bays. From eyewitness accounts, 300 escaped in a single mass flight in 1823, aided by Bahamians in 27 sloops. That escape was commemorated in 2004 by a large sign at Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park. The Home Office ruled in 1818 that any enslaved person brought to the Bahamas from outside the British West Indies would be freed. Two US slave ships, the Comet and the Encomium, wrecked off Abaco Island in December 1830 and February 1834 respectively; Bahamian customs officers seized the enslaved people aboard and colonial officials freed them over American protests. The Comet carried 165 enslaved people, the Encomium 48. The United Kingdom ultimately paid an indemnity to the United States in those two cases in 1855, under the Treaty of Claims of 1853. The most celebrated incident came in 1841, when a revolt on board the US brig Creole, carrying 135 enslaved people from Virginia destined for sale in New Orleans, led its leaders to steer the vessel to Nassau. Bahamian officials freed the 128 enslaved people who chose to remain. That episode has since been described as the "most successful slave revolt in U.S. history." In total, 447 enslaved people belonging to US nationals were freed in the Bahamas from 1830 to 1842, and these incidents repeatedly strained relations between Washington and London.

• 6. The Duke of Windsor Interlude

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  In August 1940 the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, was appointed Governor of the Bahamas and arrived with his wife, Wallis, Duchess of Windsor. He opened the small local parliament on the 29th of October 1940. The couple visited the outer islands that November aboard the yacht of Axel Wenner-Gren, a choice that drew sharp criticism: the British Foreign Office had been advised by US intelligence that Wenner-Gren was a close friend of Hermann Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe. The Duke was publicly praised for his efforts to address poverty on the islands and for his handling of a "full-scale riot" over low wages in Nassau in June 1942. A 1991 biography by Philip Ziegler offered a sharply different portrait, describing the Duke as contemptuous of Bahamians and other non-European peoples of the Empire. Ziegler also recorded the Duke's private interpretation of the 1942 unrest, in which he blamed "mischief makers - communists" and "men of Central European Jewish descent, who had secured jobs as a pretext for obtaining a deferment of draft." The Duke resigned from the post on the 16th of March 1945.

• 7. Independence and Modern Politics

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  Modern political life in the Bahamas took shape after the Second World War around two parties divided broadly along ethnic lines: the United Bahamian Party, representing English-descended Bahamians known informally as the "Bay Street Boys," and the Progressive Liberal Party, representing the Black Bahamian majority. A new constitution granting internal autonomy came into force on the 7th of January 1964, with Sir Roland Symonette as the first premier. In 1967, Sir Lynden Pindling of the PLP became the first Black premier of the Bahamian colony. He announced in 1968 that the Bahamas would seek full independence. Her Majesty's Government gave the Bahamas that independence through an Order in Council dated the 20th of June 1973, which came into force on the 10th of July 1973, when Charles, Prince of Wales, delivered the official documents to Pindling. Sir Milo Butler was appointed the first governor-general shortly after. The Bahamas joined the IMF and the World Bank on the 22nd of August 1973, and the United Nations on the 18th of September 1973. Pindling's party dominated the next two decades despite allegations of corruption and links with drug cartels, his personal popularity never seriously eroded. In 1992 he was unseated by Hubert Ingraham of the Free National Movement. The parties traded power through the following decades, with Phillip Davis sworn in as prime minister on the 17th of September 2021 after the FNM lost the general election that year amid the country's deepest economic contraction since at least 1971.

• 8. Economy, Climate, and Identity

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  Tourism accounts for roughly 70 per cent of Bahamian GDP and employs about half the country's workforce. The Bahamas attracted 5.8 million visitors in 2012, and by 2024 that figure had climbed to approximately 11.22 million, a rise of around 16 per cent from 2023. After tourism, offshore banking is the next largest sector, contributing some 15 per cent of GDP. The Panama Papers revealed that the Bahamas hosts more offshore entities than any other jurisdiction in the world. Estimates place roughly US$13.7 trillion in private household wealth and an additional US$12 trillion in corporate wealth within offshore shell companies there, a combined figure representing roughly a quarter of the world's annual wealth creation. The Bahamian dollar is pegged one-to-one with the US dollar, and the country has the fourteenth-largest GDP per capita in the Americas. The climate is tropical and largely warm year-round, averaging more than 3,000 hours of sunlight annually. The only recorded instance of snow in the Bahamas occurred on the 19th of January 1977, when snow mixed with rain was briefly visible in Freeport. The more present danger is hurricane intensity: Hurricane Dorian struck in September 2019 at Category 5 strength with sustained winds of 185 mph and gusts up to 220 mph, killing more than 50 people and leaving 1,300 missing after two weeks, and inflicting at least US$7 billion in damages. At least 80 per cent of the Bahamas' total land sits below 10 meters elevation, making rising sea levels a direct existential concern. The government has pledged to raise solar energy capacity to 30 per cent of national energy production by 2033, and has committed to cutting emissions by 30 per cent by 2030, conditional on receiving international support.