The Bahamas

From the Lucayan islanders and Columbus's first New World landfall, through Spanish depopulation, the pirate republic of Nassau, Loyalist plantations and emancipation, to majority rule, independence in 1973, and a modern nation of tourism, finance and hurricanes.

The Bahamas is an archipelago of some seven hundred low coral islands and cays strung across the western Atlantic between Florida and Hispaniola. Its recorded history opens dramatically: it was on a Bahamian island the Lucayan people called Guanahani — usually identified with San Salvador — that Christopher Columbus made his first landfall in the Americas on 12 October 1492, after which Spanish slaving emptied the islands of their original inhabitants within a few decades. Left largely abandoned, the Bahamas drew English settlers from 1648, became a notorious pirate haven until Woodes Rogers restored Crown control in 1718, and was transformed after 1783 by American Loyalists who brought enslaved Africans to short-lived cotton plantations. Out of emancipation in the 1830s grew a majority-Black society that won majority rule in 1967 under Lynden Pindling and independence from Britain on 10 July 1973, sustaining itself today on tourism and offshore finance while contending with the ever-present threat of hurricanes such as Dorian in 2019.