Bahamas

The Bahamas are an archipelago located north of Cuba and east of the Georgia peninsula. On his first voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus first made landfall on one of the islands of the Bahama archipelago on 12 October 1492, though scholars dispute which particular island it was. After the discovery of gold on Hispaniola, Spanish settlers enslaved much of the native population of the Bahamas to work in the gold mines.

English settlers from Bermuda colonized the Bahamas in 1648, though many of the Bermudans found it difficult to support themselves and returned home. In 1670 King Charles II granted the islands to the Lords Proprietors of the Carolinas. For the next fifty years of proprietary rule, the Bahamas suffered several attacks by the Spanish and the French, and became a haven for pirates, including Edward "Blackbeard" Teach. To put an end to piracy, in 1718 Parliament made the Bahamas a crown colony. Under Governor Woodes Rogers, piracy in the Bahamas was extinguished. In 1729 the Bahamas were granted the right to their own local assembly.

During the North American Rebellion, rebel forces occupied the Bahamian capital of Nassau for two weeks in March 1776, taking all the military supplies they could find. After the Rebellion was put down and the Britannic Design transformed the rebellious colonies into the Confederation of North America, the Bahamas retained its status as an independent colony. During the Trans-Oceanic War of the late 1790s, thousands of Seminoles from Spanish Florida fled to the Bahamas to avoid North American rule. They were joined in the early nineteenth century by Negro slaves fleeing captivity in the Southern Confederation. During the Bloody Eighties, 10,000 inhabitants of London were resettled in the Bahamas, Bermuda, and other islands of the British Caribbean.