The Bahamas, officially the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, is an archipelagic country in the Caribbean located within the Lucayan Archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean. The country comprises 700 islands, and more than 2,500 cays in the Atlantic Ocean, located north of Cuba and north-west of the island of Hispaniola (split between the Dominican Republic and Haiti) and the Turks and Caicos Islands, southeast of the US state of Florida and east of the Florida Keys. The capital and largest city is Nassau on the island of New Providence. The Royal Bahamas Defence Force describes the Bahamas' territory as encompassing 470,000 km2 (180,000 sq mi) of ocean space.
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 (which the Lucayans called Guanahaní). Later, the Kingdom of Spain shipped the native Lucayans to Hispaniola and enslaved them there, leaving the Bahama islands mostly deserted from 1513 until 1648. 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. Slavery in the Bahamas was not abolished until 1834, but in 1818 the Bahamas became a haven of manumission for African slaves from outside the British West Indies. 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. During this period, Bahamians were known to recognise the freedom of slaves carried by the ships of other nations which reached their country. Today Black Bahamians make up 90 per cent of the population of 400,516.
The Bahamas became an independent Commonwealth realm separate from the United Kingdom in 1973. Its first prime minister was Lynden Pindling. The Bahamas maintains King Charles III as its monarch; the appointed representative of the Crown is the governor-general of the Bahamas. The Bahamas has the fourteenth-largest gross domestic product per capita in the Americas. Its economy is based on tourism and offshore finance. Though the Bahamas is in the Lucayan Archipelago, and not in the Caribbean Sea, it is still considered part of the wider Caribbean region. The Bahamas is a full member of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), but is not part of the CARICOM Single Market and Economy.
The name Bahamas is derived from the Lucayan name Bahama ('large upper middle island'), used by the Indigenous Lucayan people for the island of Grand Bahama. Bahama referred to Grand Bahama alone when first attested on the c. 1523 Turin Map, but was used in English for the archipelago as a whole by 1670.
Tourist guides often state that the name comes from the Spanish baja mar ('shallow sea'). Wolfgang Ahrens of York University argues that this is a folk etymology. Alternatively, Bahama may have been derived from Guanahaní, a local name of unclear meaning. Isaac Taylor, a toponymist, argues that the name was derived from Bimani (Bimini), which Spaniards in Haiti identified with Palombe, a legendary place where John Mandeville's Travels said there was a fountain of youth.
The Bahamas is one of two countries whose official short name starts with the definite article, the other being The Gambia.
The first inhabitants of the Bahamas were Indigenous people Taíno, who moved into the uninhabited southern islands from Hispaniola and Cuba sometime between AD 500 and 800, having migrated there from mainland South America; they came to be known as the Lucayan people. An estimated 30,000 Lucayans inhabited the Bahamas at the time of Christopher Columbus' arrival in 1492.
Columbus' first landfall in what was to Europeans a "New World" was on an island he named San Salvador (known to the Lucayans as Guanahani). While there is a general consensus that this island lay within the Bahamas, precisely which island Columbus landed on is a matter of scholarly debate. Some researchers believe the site to be present-day San Salvador Island (formerly known as Watling's Island), situated in the southeastern Bahamas, whilst an alternative theory holds that Columbus landed to the southeast on Samana Cay, according to calculations made in 1986 by National Geographic writer and editor Joseph Judge, based on Columbus' log. On the landfall island, Columbus made first contact with the Lucayans and exchanged goods with them, claiming the islands for the Crown of Castile, before proceeding to explore the larger isles of the Greater Antilles.
The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas theoretically divided the new territories between the Kingdom of Castile and the Kingdom of Portugal, placing the Bahamas in the Spanish sphere; however, they did little to press their claim on the ground. The Spanish did, however, exploit the Native Lucayan peoples, many of whom were enslaved and sent to Hispaniola for use as forced labour. The slaves suffered harsh conditions and most died from contracting diseases to which they had no immunity; half of the Lucayans died from smallpox alone. As a result of these depredations the population of the Bahamas was severely diminished.
The English had expressed an interest in the Bahamas as early as 1629. However, it was not until 1648 that the first English settlers arrived on the islands. Known as the Eleutherian Adventurers and led by William Sayle, they migrated from Bermuda seeking greater religious freedom. These English Puritans established the first permanent European settlement on an island which they named Eleuthera, Greek for free. They later settled New Providence, naming it Sayle's Island. Life proved harder than envisaged however, and many – including Sayle – chose to return to Bermuda. To survive, the remaining settlers salvaged goods from wrecks.
In 1670 King Charles II granted the islands to the Lords Proprietors of the Carolinas in North America. They rented the islands from the king with rights of trading, tax, appointing governors, and administering the country from their base on New Providence. Piracy and attacks from hostile foreign powers were a constant threat. In 1684 the Spanish corsair Juan de Alcon raided the capital Charles Town (later renamed Nassau), and in 1703 a joint Franco-Spanish expedition briefly occupied Nassau during the War of the Spanish Succession.
During proprietary rule the Bahamas became a haven for pirates, including Blackbeard (circa 1680–1718). To put an end to the "Pirates' republic" and restore orderly government, Britain made the Bahamas a crown colony in 1718, which they dubbed "the Bahama islands" under the governorship of Woodes Rogers. After a difficult struggle he succeeded in suppressing piracy. In 1720 the Spanish attacked Nassau during the War of the Quadruple Alliance. In 1729 a local assembly was established giving a degree of self-governance for British settlers. The reforms had been planned by the previous Governor George Phenney and authorised in July 1728.
During the American War of Independence in the late 18th century, the islands became a target for US naval forces. Under the command of Commodore Esek Hopkins, US Marines, the US Navy occupied Nassau in 1776, before being evacuated a few days later. In 1782 a Spanish fleet appeared off the coast of Nassau, and the city surrendered without a fight. Later, in April 1783, on a visit made by Prince William of the United Kingdom (later King William IV) to Luis de Unzaga at his residence in the Captaincy General of Havana, they made prisoner exchange agreements and also dealt with the preliminaries of the Treaty of Paris (1783), in which the recently conquered Bahamas would be exchanged for East Florida, which would still have to conquer the city of St. Augustine, Florida in 1784 by order of Luis de Unzaga; after that, also in 1784, the Bahamas would be declared a British colony.