BAHAMIAN GULLAH/GEECHEE CONNECTION
In 1492, Christopher Columbus made his first landfall in the Western Hemisphere in the Bahamas. He encountered friendly Arawak Indians and exchanged gifts with them. Spanish slave traders later captured the Arawaks and their cousins, the Lucayans to work in gold mines in Hispaniola (later called Santo Domingo and later still, Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and within 25 years, the Lucayans and the Arawaks vanished from the face of the earth. Lacking a source of slaves, the Spanish did not bother to colonize the islands. In 1647 during the time of the English Civil War, a group of Puritan religious refugees from the royalist colony of Bermuda, the Eleutheran Adventurers, founded the first permanent European settlement in The Bahamas and gave Eleuthera Island its name. Similar groups of settlers formed governments in The Bahamas, but the isolated cays sheltered pirates and wreckers through the 17th century. Charles 11 granted land in the Bahamas to the Lords Proprietors of the Carolinas, but the islands were left entirely to themselves. After Charles Town was destroyed by a joint French and Spanish fleet in 1703, the local pirates proclaimed an anarchic ‘Privateers’ Republic’ with Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard— for chief magistrate. In 1718, the islands became a British Crown colony , and the first Royal Governor, a reformed pirate named Woodes Rogers, expelled the buccaneers who had used the islands as hideouts. During the American War of Independence the Bahamas fell briefly to Spanish forces under General Galvez in 1782. After the American Revolutionary War, the British government issued land grants in Jamaica, Canada and the Bahamas to a group of British Loyalists, who chose the wrong side in the war. The sparse population of The Bahamas tripled in a few years. The planters thought to grow cotton, but the limestone soil, the boll weevil and chenille bug put an end to those dreams. After a few years, the plantations failed and soon both the Black and White settlers turned to the sea for their fortunes. The new arrivals however, brought their food, culture, folkways and most importantly, their language. Although a British colony from 1670 to independence in 1973, culturally and linguistically, the character and personality of the Bahamian people owe much to the Gullah people who live in the coastal Islands offshore South Carolina, and Georgia.
