When asked in school history lessons what made the year 1492 so special, almost all students know the answer. It was the year Christopher Columbus discovered America. The word America has different connotations in Europe and in America itself. When people in Europe talk about the United States, they are almost invariably referring to the United States of America, with Washington, DC as its capital. In Europe, people don’t even know the geographic term North America, which includes Canada, the United States, and Mexico. So when they are asked about Christopher Columbus and his discovery, they believe that he landed somewhere near Boston.

In fact, the place where Columbus first landed in the Western Hemisphere was The Bahamas. The Bahamas are a group of islands and it was on one of them, San Salvador, where Christopher Columbus set foot on October 12, 1492.

The Bahamas themselves were never of much interest to the Spanish and they never really settled there. What they did do was turn all the local residents into slaves and send them to the mines of Santo Domingo. Basically, the entire population disappeared in a very short time.

But it seems that not many people lived in the Bahamas, because after their kidnapping and forced slavery there was hardly any evidence of civilization left such as abandoned houses, temples and ruins. Nor was there much evidence of extensive agriculture or cultivation of the soil. Today there are many fruit trees on the islands, but their introduction through the Spanish dates back and there are absolutely no animals that can serve as food for human consumption. The aborigines who lived there were evidently fishermen or lived on wild fruits and maize.

Very little is known about the original inhabitants so it is almost impossible to classify them. Perhaps they originally came from what is now known as Florida. What is known is that they were not cannibals and seemed to have been very mild.

The first foreigners to settle in the Bahamas were a group of religious refugees from England. They were adventurers from Eleutheran, persecuted by their local church and gave the island of Eleuthera its name. After other groups of settlers from different parts of the world established their own settlements with their own governments in the Bahamas, the islands became a British crown colony.

Ongoing animosity and sometimes outright warfare between Spain and Great Britain gave adventurers, many of them English and French, the opportunity to use the islands as a base to attack Spanish ships going to or coming from the New World. It was the natural geological formations of the islands and their coastlines that gave these pirates a great advantage and provided them with a perfect hiding place.

When in 1697 Europe came to peace through the Treaty of Riswick, England stopped protecting the islands. The Bahamas, now on its own and without official alliances, soon became a haven for pirates who fought against all nations and attacked all ships regardless of origin. Lawlessness reigned and The Bahamas became synonymous with crime at the time.

Obviously this state of affairs could not continue indefinitely and in 1718 England once again assumed responsibility for the islands and began to exterminate all pirates. Law and order was soon restored and the British Crown was back in possession of the islands until 1973, when the Bahamas gained full independence within the Commonwealth of Nations.