The Tribune

By LARRY SMITH

THE following is an excerpt from Bahamas Sketchbook, Islands in the Sun, a new hardcover picture book by acclaimed watercolour artist Graham Byfield which launches next month. Published by Singapore-based Editions Didier Millet, the 72-page book captures the vernacular architecture of the islands in a series of graceful illustrations, with accompanying historical text by Bahamian journalist Larry Smith. Bahamas Sketchbook is a celebration of the built environment on several Bahamian islands, portraying classic scenes and architectural details on New Providence, Abaco, Eleuthera, Long Island and Cat Island.

“The island…was discovered by Capt. William Sayle, who was afterwards governor of Carolina. He was driven thither by a storm, as he was on a voyage to the continent (of America). From him it had the name of Sayle’s Island…People went from England and the other colonies to settle there, and living a lewd, licentious sort of life, they were impatient of government.” – John Oldmixon, 1741

The name “Bahamas” first appears in the historical record a few years after Columbus’ accidental landfall in these islands just off the Florida coast. Thought to be a corruption of the Lucayan term for the island of Grand Bahama, the earliest English reference occurs in the account of a 1567 voyage, in which the “chanell and gulfe of Bahama, which is between the cape of Florida and the Ilandes of Lucayos” is mentioned.

The pre-Columbian Bahamians were known as Lucayans (a corruption of Lukku-Cairi, meaning island people). Over centuries they had migrated north from Venezuela to the greater Antilles, where they created the Taino culture, arriving at the end of their journey in the Bahamas about 600 AD. It is thought that some 40,000 Lucayans may have lived in the Bahamas at the time of their encounter with Columbus.

In search of riches, the Spaniards who followed Columbus had little interest in the poor Bahamian islands, but forced the hapless Lucayans into slavery in Hispaniola, where they died helping to establish the first European colony in the Americas. After 1500 the Bahamas was virtually deserted until English puritans from Bermuda arrived on the island of Eleuthera in the mid-1600s, led by a former Bermuda governor named William Sayle.

Some of these early colonists also settled on nearby New Providence, originally known as Sayle’s Island, and by 1670 Charles Town (as the settlement was then called) had a few hundred inhabitants. In 1695 the little town was formally laid out by Governor Nicholas Trott and rechristened Nassau in honour of the Dutch ruler, Prince William of Orange-Nassau, who had become king of England. Back then there were some 160 buildings hugging the harbour formed by the island now called Paradise.

Little remains of that 17th century settlement other than the central street layout, between the ridge and the harbour. Nassau remained relatively undeveloped before the Bahamas became a British Crown colony in 1718 because the islands had become a lawless pirate republic led by larger-than-life characters like Ben Hornigold, Charles Vane and Blackbeard. These buccaneers were part of “a maritime revolt that shook the very foundations of the British Empire” between the late 17th and early 18th centuries, according to author Colin Woodard.

When Woodes Rogers, the first royal governor and himself a former privateer, arrived on the scene, the town of Nassau was inhabited by several hundred pirates together with scores of other residents who “live poorly (and) indolently..and pray for nothing but (ship) wrecks or the pirates”. As Rogers complained to his superiors in London, the inhabitants “would rather spend all they have in a punch house than pay me (a tax) to save their families.”

But despite this less than auspicious beginning, Rogers was able to enlist those pirates willing to reform - while executing those who wouldn’t - and set about securing and refurbishing the town and its fortifications.

In 1729 he was responsible for calling the first general assembly. And within a few decades, Nassau was stable enough for the assembly to pass an act “for re-surveying the town”, creating new roads to connect the expanding eastern and western districts, and setting the stage for the arrival of thousands of continental refugees fleeing the American Revolution.

The loyalists who migrated from New York, Florida and the Carolinas with their African slaves (and some free blacks) built plantations on New Providence and other islands like Clifton, Hobby Horse Hall and Tusculum (many of whose names survived into the 20th century). They also built some of the city’s finest structures, still in use today – including St Matthew’s Church, the House of Assembly, the old law courts facing Rawson Square, and a new home for the governor on Mt Fitzwilliam.

According to historian Gail Saunders, “The architectural styles of the southern states and New England towns were transported to Nassau.” And by the late 1700s, the town stretched from West Street to East Street, bounded on the north by Bay Street and on the south by East Hill and West Hill Streets, flanking Government House.

As a traveller named Johann David Schoepf, reported in 1784, “The capital...is the little town of Nassau, which hugs the hilly shore...There is but one tolerably regular street, or line of houses, which runs next to the water...A church, a goal and an assembly-house make up the public buildings of the town.”

The loyalist attempt to transplant American plantation society to a chain of small arid islands failed due to soil exhaustion, insect pests and hurricanes, as well as the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and of slavery itself in 1834. After 1807, the Royal Navy settled thousands of Africans liberated from slave ships on New Providence, where they established peasant communities on the outskirts of Nassau that now form the area known as over-the-hill.

By the 1840s, Nassau had a population of some 8,000, and the pace of life began to quicken. For decades a benign climate had attracted wealthy travellers for health reasons, as this 18th century report by a British official testifies: “The Bahama Islands enjoy the most serene and the most temperate air in all America, the heat of the sun being greatly allayed by refreshing breezes from the east, and the earth and the air cooled by constant dews which fall in the night and by gentle showers which fall in their proper seasons.”

But in the 1860s tourism became an official industry for the first time, with the inauguration of a Nassau to New York steamship route and the construction of the 90-room Royal Victoria Hotel (demolished in the 1970s), which was then the largest building in the town. The outbreak of the American Civil War also brought droves of Confederate blockade runners and Union spies into the colony.

Nassau became one of the busiest ports in the region during this period, when the north side of Bay Street was reclaimed for warehouses and wharves while the street itself was provided with kerbstones and lights.

At the time, a local newspaper compared the harbour to its pre-war state: “There were no quays along the strand, and instead of vessels lying, as they now do, along the shore loaded and unloaded by a steam crane, they were approached only from the middle of the harbour by lighters.”

But despite these developments, the city as we know it today was largely built from revenue generated by the smuggling of liquor to the United States during the Prohibition years, from 1920-1933. This was a time when easy money fueled a speculative land boom, the first tentative air links brought in many more visitors, and modern infrastructure like the cruise port, water and sewerage system, electricity grid and new residential suburbs were grafted onto the old Georgian capital built by the Loyalists.

The modern contours of the Bahamas began to take shape in 1923, when the harbour was dredged and the spoil used to create Clifford Park below Fort Charlotte. A nine-hole golf course was laid out here, and another was built at Cable Beach. The new Hotel Colonial on Bay Street became the centre of Nassau’s social life. And nearby Paradise Island beach was a major “sea bathing” attraction for tourists, many of whom arrived on the first scheduled Pan American air services from Miami.

During Prohibition, the Bahamas was once again considered a “land of rascals, rogues and peddlers”. And according to the London Daily News, Bay Street was little more than a row of “crazy old liquor stores, unpainted and dilapidated, (that) have given it the nickname of booze avenue.”

According to an official US Coast Guard history, “Enormous profits were to be made, with stories of 700 per cent or more for Scotch or Cognac. Probably the only reliable clue to the extent of the trade were the statistics on liquor passing through Nassau en route to the US: 50,000 quarts in 1917 to 10,000,000 in 1922.”

One American visitor described a typical tour of New Providence at the time: “We started from Bay Street, with its row of little shops, on past the site for the 300-room (Colonial) hotel, by the esplanade, Fort Charlotte, past beautiful white beaches...We returned by way of the Queen’s Staircase...and...passed the quite modern Bahama General Hospital...(arriving) back at the hotel ready for more daiquiri cocktails.”

The economic depression that followed the end of Prohibition was ameliorated only by the Second World War, which brought thousands of British, Canadian and American servicemen to the islands, while many unemployed Bahamians were recruited as migrant labourers in the United States. The wartime Windsor Field air base eventually became Nassau International Airport, catering to thousands of new air travellers from Europe and North America.

“The postwar years witnessed a phenomenal growth in the tourist and banking industries,” wrote Gail Saunders, “which was reflected in the building of new hotels and the expansion of Nassau to eastern, western and southern suburbs...(what) was once ‘a quiet, sleepy, hollow sort of place’ had become a rapidly expanding city.”

Today, Nassau is a single, congested conurbation that sprawls over virtually the entire 80-square-mile island of New Providence, now home to more than 220,000 people (out of a total population of 330,000). In the span of a few decades it has grown from a sparsely populated colonial backwater run by a handful of white shopkeepers and lawyers – to the bustling capital of a new multiracial society.

Puritans, pirates, loyalists, slaves, liberated Africans, rum runners, tourists and financiers have all contributed to the evolution of Nassau and the Bahamas over the past 500 years. This sketchbook provides an artist’s version of the city’s varied past, linked to the buildings and neighbourhoods that persist today, as well as a glimpse of some of the picturesque historic settlements on nearby islands.

• What do you think? Send comments to larry@tribunemedia.net or visit www.bahamapundit.com.