The Bahamas

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...