The Bahamas, officially the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, is an island country located within the Lucayan Archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean. It comprises more than 3,000 islands, cays and islets. The capital and largest city is Nassau on the island of New Providence.
The Bahama islands were inhabited by the Arawak and Lucayans, a branch of the Arawakan-speaking Taíno, for many centuries. Christopher Columbus was the first European to see the islands, making his first landfall in the “New World” in 1492 when he landed on the island of San Salvador.
Later, the Kingdom of Spain shipped the native Lucayans to Hispaniola and enslaved them there, after which the Bahama islands were mostly deserted from 1513 until 1648, as nearly all native Bahamians had been forcibly removed for enslavement or had died of European diseases. In 1649 English colonists from Bermuda, known as the Eleutheran Adventurers, settled on the island of Eleuthera.
The Bahamas became a crown colony of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1718 when the British clamped down on piracy. After the American Revolutionary War, the Crown resettled thousands of American Loyalists to the Bahamas; they took slaves with them and established plantations on land grants. African slaves and their descendants constituted the majority of the population from this period on. The slave trade was abolished by the British in 1807.
Although slavery in the Bahamas was not abolished until 1834, the Bahamas became a haven of manumission for African slaves, from outside the British West Indies, in 1818. Africans liberated from illegal slave ships were resettled on the islands by the Royal Navy, while some North American slaves and Seminoles escaped to the Bahamas from Florida. Bahamians were even known to recognise the freedom of slaves carried by the ships of other nations which reached the Bahamas.
The country became an independent Commonwealth realm separate from the United Kingdom in 1973, led by its first prime minister, Sir Lynden Pindling.
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1969 – Calypso Distributors Ltd (P70600 Series – Type BC1)
1968 – Calypso Distributors Ltd (P77600 Series – Type CC2)
