| The
beautiful and interesting Commonwealth of The Bahamas is an independent
English-speaking nation in the West Indies. An archipelago of 700 islands
and cays (which are small islands), the Bahamas are located in the Atlantic Ocean,
east of Florida. It is north of Cuba and the Caribbean, and northwest of
the British dependency of the Turks and Caicos Islands. History of the
Bahamas is the landfall of Christopher Columbus's in the New World in 1492 is
believed to have been on the island of San Salvador (also called Watling's
Island), in the southeastern Bahamas. Columbus encountered Taino (also known as
Lucayan) Amerindians. Columbus also exchanged gifts with these people. Taino
Indians from both the northwestern Hispaniola and northeastern Cuba moved into the southern
Bahamas on or about the 7th century AD and became the Lucayans. These people appear to
have settled the entire archipelago believe it or not, by the 12th century AD.
There may have been as many as 40,000 Lucayans living in the Bahamas when
Christopher Columbus arrived. The Bahamian Lucayans were deported to Hispaniola as slaves,
and within two decades Taino societies ceased to exist as a separate
population. This happened to these societies due to forced labour, warfare,
disease, emigration and outmarriage. Some say the name 'Bahamas' derives
from the Spanish for "shallow sea", baja mar. Others trace it back
to the Lucayan word for Grand Bahama Island, ba-ha-ma ("large upper middle land").
After the Lucayans were destroyed, the Bahamian islands were virtually deserted until the
arrival of English settlers from Bermuda in 1650. Known as the Eleutherian
Adventurers, these new people established settlements on the island that is now called
Eleuthera (from the Greek word for freedom). The Bahamas became a British
crown colony in 1718 but remained sparsely settled until the very newly
independent United States expelled thousands of American Tories and their
slaves. Many of these British Loyalists were given compensatory land
grants in Canada and the Bahamas. Some 8,000 loyalists and their slaves
moved to the Bahamas in the late 1700s from New York, Florida and the
Carolinas. The British did grant the islands internal self-government in
1964 and, in 1973, Bahamians achieved full independence while remaining a
member of the Commonwealth of Nations. Since the 1950s, the Bahamian
economy has prospered based on the twin pillars of very strong tourism
and financial services. Despite this however, the country still faces significant
challenges in areas such as education, healthcare, and correctional facilites.
Violent crime and illegal immigration is also dire issues. The urban renewal project has been
launched in recent years to help impoverished urban areas in social
decline in the main islands. Today, the country enjoys the third highest
per capita income in the western hemisphere. |
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