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.