Bahamas

The Bahamas, officially the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, is a country within the Lucayan Archipelago of the West Indies in the Atlantic. The archipelagic state consists of more than 3,000 islands, cays, and islets in the Atlantic Ocean. The capital is Nassau on the island of New Providence.

The Bahama Islands were inhabited by the 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 Spanish shipped the native Lucayans to, and enslaved them, on Hispaniola, after which the Bahama islands were mostly deserted from 1513 until 1648 due to nearly all native Bahamians being forcefully removed through enslavement or dying due to diseases brought to the islands by the Europeans. In 1649, English colonists from Bermuda, known as the Eleutheran Adventurers, settled on the island of Eleuthera. The Bahamas became a British crown colony 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 enslaved people with them and established plantations on land grants. Enslaved African people and their descendants constituted the majority of the population from this period on. The slave trade was abolished by the British in 1807; slavery in the Bahamas was abolished in 1834. Subsequently, the Bahamas became a haven for freed African slaves. 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 enslaved people carried by the ships of other nations which reached the Bahamas.

The country gained governmental independence in 1973, led by Sir Lynden O. Pindling, with Elizabeth II as its queen.