Bahamas - 18th Century
The Bahamas was one of the last outposts of pirates in the British Empire. Throughout the seventeenth century, the islands served as a favorite base for pirates. In July 1703 the French and Spaniards made a descent on New Providence, blew up the fort, spiked the guns, burnt the church and carried off the governor, with the principal inhabitants, to Havana. In October the Spaniards made a second descent and completed the work of destruction. It is said that when the last of the governors appointed by the lords proprietors, in ignorance of the Spanish raid, arrived in New Providence, he found the island without an inhabitant.
It again, however, became the resort of pirates, and the names of many of the worst of these ruffians are associated with New Providence; the notorious Edward Teach, called Blackbeard, who was afterwards killed in action against two American ships in 1718, being chief among the number.
In 1716, hundreds of pirates came to the Bahamas - an estimated 1,400 pirates operated out of Nassau during the early 18th century. Complaints about their large presence led Charles I to appoint the first Royal Governor of the Bahamas in 1718 to suppress and scatter the Nassau pirates. After the era of piracy came to a close in 1718, commerce was restored to the settlement.
An early form of democratic government, with a bicameral parliament and elected lower house, developed but was abolished in 1717, when the Crown resumed government. Although the other colonial powers did not formally dispute possession, the settlers were at times harassed by the French and Spanish as well as by pirates.
Matters became so intolerable that the merchants of London and Bristol petitioned the crown to take possession and restore order, and Captain Woodes Rogers was sent out as the first crown governor and arrived at New Providence in 1718. Many families of good character now settled at the Bahamas, and some progress was made in developing the resources of the colony, although this was interrupted by the tyrannical conduct of some of the governors who succeeded Captain Woodes Rogers. At this time the pine-apple was introduced as an article of cultivation at Eleuthera.
Fortunes fluctuated. Apart from fishing, wrecking, and buccaneering, economic development was nonexistent in the Bahamas in the 17th and early 18th centuries. Fewer than one thousand people inhabited four of the Bahamian islands in 1722 and though the first ship of 300 slaves had arrived in 1721, plantation culture, prevalent throughout much of the British Caribbean, was absent from the Bahamas.
Between 1720 and 1780, the slave population increased ten-fold to 2,250 due to increased slave trade and importation of captured slaves, but plantations remained relatively small. Economic activity was dominated by wrecking, woodcutting, and turtling and most trading boats arrived in the Bahamas looking for raw materials including Braziletto, Madera Plank, Lignum Vitae, Turtle Shell. Fishing was a common employment of the lower classes and among the items annually imported from Britain were 50 GBP worth of fish hooks, nets, and twine.
British loyalists and their slaves arrived from the mainland colonies in the wake of the British defeat in the American Revolution. In the 1780s, the population of New Providence tripled, and the first substantial settlement was made on Great Abaco Island.
By 1782, the population had increased to 4,000 people spread over four Bahamian islands. In the next decade, the demographics and economics of the Bahamas changed quickly as American Loyalists from the Carolinas, New York, and other areas of the mainland migrated to the Bahamas.
Cotton plantations were established as the southern life of the North American mainland colonies was reproduced in the Bahamas. In 1783, at Long Island, 800 slaves were at work, and nearly 4000 acres of land under cultivation. By the 1790s, 128 large plantations with ten or more slaves existed in the Bahamas and the total area of cultivated land quadrupled between 1783 and 1793. But the usual bad luck of the Bahamas prevailed; the red bug destroyed the cotton crops in 1788 and again in 1794, and by the year 1800 cotton cultivation was almost abandoned.
The Spaniards retained nominal possession of the Bahamas until 1783, but before peace was notified New Providence was recaptured by a loyalist, Lieutenant-Colonel Deveaux, of the South Carolina militia, in June 1783.
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