Local Bahamas Architecture

The unique geography and history of The Bahamas contributed to a distinctive architectural feature — the Bahamian clapboard house — that is today one of the most broadly copied styles in the tropics. But this design wasn’t perfected and standardized until the early 19th century. The earliest clapboard-sided houses were usually angled to receive the trade winds. Large window openings and high ceilings increased airflow, and awning-style push-out shutters shaded the windows and helped direct breezes indoors, even during rainstorms. Unlike larger, more impressive houses where foundations were massive edifices of coral, brick, or stone, the first floors of Bahamian cottages were elevated on low stilts or light masonry pilings to allow more air circulation. Raising the building also kept the floor joists, beams, and planks above floodwaters during a hurricane surge.
Ruggedly built of timbers whose ends were often pegged (not nailed) together and pinned to stone pilings several feet above the ground, Bahamian-style clapboard houses survived when many rigid and unyielding stone-built structures collapsed during hurricanes. Modern engineers claim that the flexibility of these structures increases their stability in high winds.
Within The Bahamas, you can check out some of the best-preserved and most charming examples of the Bahamian cottage style in Harbour Island (off the coast of Eleuthera) and, to a lesser extent, in Spanish Wells and Green Turtle Cay.

World War II Through the Bahamas Independence

On August 17, 1940, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor arrived in Nassau following his appointment as governor of the colony. The duke abdicated his throne as King Edward VIII so he could marry the woman he loved, the divorcée American Wallis Simpson. The people of The Bahamas were shocked that such a once-powerful figure was assigned to govern their impoverished colony, which was viewed then as a backwater of the British Empire. The duke tried to bring self-sufficiency to The Bahamas and provide more employment for its out-of-work population. World War II healed the wounds left over from the bootlegging days. The Bahamas served as an air and sea station in the Atlantic; as a result, the country inherited two airports built by the U.S. Air Force. The islands also were strategically important when Nazi submarines intruded Atlantic coastal and Caribbean waters. Today, some of the outlying islands still house U.S. missile-tracking stations.
In the years after World War II, party politics developed in The Bahamas as independence from Britain seemed more possible, and change came at the ballot box. In 1967, Lynden Pindling won a close election to become prime minister. During the general election of 1972, the Bahamian people voted for total independence. The people of The Bahamas agreed to be a part of the British Commonwealth, presided over by Queen Elizabeth II. Her representative in The Bahamas would be a governor-general, a position with mostly symbolic power. In 1992, after years of corruption under Pindling and countless exposés in the Miami Herald, Hubert A. Ingraham became prime minister. In office, he pledged to promote quality tourism for his nation.
In May 2002, Perry Gladstone Christie led the Progressive Liberal Party to victory, becoming the third prime minister to govern the island nation. Public opinion seems divided on Christie’s reign. Many voters praise him as a progressive, modern leader; others have attacked him, including scorching editorials in The Nassau Guardian. Christie has been accused of receiving a vast amount of campaign money from known drug dealers, an accusation that the prime minister denies.

Loyalists, blockade runners, and bootleggers

After the American Revolution, several thousand Loyalists from the former colonies immigrated to The Bahamas. Some of the immigrants, especially Southerners, brought slaves with them and tried their luck at planting sea-island cotton in the Out Islands. Growing cotton was unsuccessful (the plants fell prey to the chenille bug), but the former deep South planters learned to fish, grow vegetables, and provide for themselves in other ways.
The first white settlers of The Bahamas also brought slaves with them, but when slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1834, they were freed. The settlers achieved a fairly peaceful transition, although many years passed before any real equality between blacks and whites existed.
During the American Civil War, blockade running brought prosperity to The Bahamas. Nassau became a vital base for the Confederacy, with vessels taking manufactured goods to South Carolina and North Carolina and bringing back cotton. The Union victory ended blockade running and plunged Nassau into an economic depression. The islands’ next real economic boom resulted from Prohibition in the U.S. Just like the blockade runners who preceded them — only with faster boats and more of them — rumrunners plied the waters between The Bahamas and the southeastern U.S. From the enforcement of the 18th Amendment in 1920 to the repeal of that law in 1933, bootleggers used Nassau, Bimini, and Grand Bahama as bases for running contraband alcoholic beverages across the Gulf Stream. The U.S. Coast Guard and the bootleggers waged a ceaseless battle on each other. The repeal of Prohibition dealt another shattering blow to the vulnerable Bahamian economy.

Pirates and privateers era in The Bahamas

England formally claimed The Bahamas — by then unpopulated — in 1629. No settling took place, however, until the 1640s, following a religious dispute that arose in Bermuda. Dissident English and Bermudian settlers (known as the Eleutheran Adventurers) sailed to an island called Cigatoo, changed the name to Eleuthera (from the Greek word for freedom), and launched a tough battle for survival. Many settlers became discouraged and went back to Bermuda, but a few hardy souls remained, living on fish and salvage from shipwrecks. Other people from Bermuda and England eventually followed, and they helped settle New Providence Island in 1656. They planted crops of cotton, tobacco, and sugar cane and established Charles Towne (named in honor of Charles II) at the harbor.
The promising agricultural economy of The Bahamas was short-lived. Several of the governors of The Bahamas during the late 17th century were corrupt, and soon the island became a refuge for English, Dutch, and French buccaneers who plundered Spanish ships. The Spaniards repeatedly attacked New Providence for revenge, and many of the settlers left. Those settlers who remained found supplying the rich pirates to be a good source of income. Privateers, a slightly more respectable type of freebooter (they had their sovereign’s permission to prey on enemy ships), also found the many islets, tricky shoals, and secret harbors of the islands to be good hiding places from which they could stage their attacks on ships sailing between the New and Old Worlds.
Late in the 17th century, the settlers changed the name of Charles Towne to Nassau to honor King William III, who also held the title Prince of Nassau. At the time, some 1,000 pirates still called New Providence their home base.
Finally, the appeals of merchants and law-abiding islanders in favor of Crown control were taken seriously, and in 1717 the lord proprietors turned over the government of The Bahamas, both civil and military, to King George I, who commissioned Captain Woodes Rogers as the first royal governor.
Rogers captured hundreds of the lawless pirates. He sent some pirates to England to be tried; eight were hanged, and the king pardoned others after they promised to lead law-abiding lives. Later, Rogers was given the authority to set up a representative assembly, the precursor of today’s Parliament. Despite such interruptions as the fledgling U.S. Navy capturing Nassau in 1776 (for only a few days) and the Crown Colony surrendering to Spain in 1782 (which lasted almost a year), the government of The Bahamas since Rogers’s time has been conducted in an orderly fashion. In early 1783 under the Treaty of Paris, Spain permanently ceded The Bahamas to Britain, ending some 300 years of disputed ownership.

The early years of Bahamas

Columbus first landed in the New World somewhere in The Bahamas on October 12, 1492. He landed on an island called “Guanahani” by the local inhabitants, who were Arawak Indians known as Lucayans. Columbus renamed the island San Salvador. Over the years, exactly which island Columbus landed on has been much disputed. Recent research places the first landing on Samana Cay, 105km (65 miles) southeast of the island that today is known as San Salvador. (Just to make things more confusing, San Salvador is also sometimes called Watling Island.) The Lucayans Columbus encountered are believed to have come to the islands from the Greater Antilles in the eighth century A.D. They were seeking refuge from the Carib Indians then living in the Lesser Antilles. The Lucayans were peaceful people who welcomed the Spaniards and taught them a skill soon shared with the entire seafaring world: how to make hammocks from heavy cotton cloth.
The Spanish conquistadors, who claimed the islands for their king and queen, didn’t repay the Lucayans kindly. Finding neither gold nor silver mines nor fertile soil, the conquistadors cleared out the population of the islands, taking some 40,000 doomed Lucayans to other islands in the Spanish empire to work in mines or dive for pearls. Ponce de León voyaged here in 1513 looking for the legendary Fountain of Youth. His journey led to the European discovery of Florida and the Gulf Stream — but not the magic fountain. Ponce de León’s historian described the waters of the Little Bahama Bank — just north of Grand Bahama — as bajamar (pronounced “bahamar,” which is Spanish for “shallow water”). This word seems to be a reasonable source of the name “Bahamas.” Other than this mention, however, practically no references were made to the islands first discovered by Columbus for 135 years.