The original inhabitants of The Bahamas were the Lucayans, a tribe of the Arawak Indian group, who arrived near the turn of the 9th century. The peaceful Lucayans lived primarily off the sea, fishing and harvesting shellfish, conch, lobster and molluscs. Christopher Columbus planted the Spanish flag on San Salvador upon his first landfall in the Americas in 1492. Three years later, Spanish colonialists established the first settlement in the archipelago, which served as a terminus for Lucayan Indians enslaved by the Spaniards for shipment to Hispaniola (the island shared by Dominican Republic and Haiti). Within 25 years, the entire Lucayan population of 50,000 was gone, and the Spanish eventually abandoned the settlement.
After Spaniard Juan Ponce de Léon sailed through the archipelago on his way to North America in 1513, other Spanish galleons, laden with treasure from the empires of Central and South America, passed through the reef-encrusted Bahamas bound for Spain. Many foundered, and the waters of the archipelago were littered with wrecks. Tales of treasure lured pirates, and they swarmed the Bahamian islands, using them as hideaways and bases. For the most part, the islands remained unsettled and unclaimed until over a century later, when King Charles I of England granted them to his attorney general.
British-sponsored privateers patrolled the waters in and around the Bahamas, turning the main settlement of Charles Town into Buccaneer Central. After the town was destroyed by a joint French and Spanish fleet in 1703, the pirates proclaimed a 'Privateer's Republic' without laws or government, and Edward Teach - better known as Blackbeard - made himself their magistrate. This lasted until 1714, when Britain signed the Treaty of Utrecht, which outlawed pirates. For the next century, pirates plundered ships of all nations and raided towns and plantations both in the Caribbean and the Carolinas. The crown's appointed governor (himself a former privateer) eventually prevailed, proclaiming, in words that became the nation's motto: Expulsis Piratis - Restituta Commercia ('Pirates Expelled - Commerce Restored'). With the pirates went the islands' main source of income, and those who remained scraped by trapping turtles, farming salt and, most importantly, 'wrecking' or salvaging shipwrecks.
After America's Revolutionary War, English Loyalists began washing up in the Bahamas by the thousands, tripling the population in three years and introducing cotton and slaves. The land proved unsuitable for growing cotton and most of the farms failed within a few years. When the Crown outlawed the slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy began intercepting ships and depositing freed slaves in the Bahamas. Many Loyalists left after emancipation, often bequeathing their lands to their former slaves, who eked out a living from fishing and subsistence farming. Full equality and political rights, however, proved more elusive, for the post-slavery era was marked by the rule of an elite minority of whites over an under-represented black majority.
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