Seven Hundred Islands and a Bank

From a plane crossing the Bahama Banks the water below is not one colour but a gradient: white sand shallows reading almost luminous, then jade, then a hard line where the shelf drops away and everything goes to ink. The Tongue of the Ocean, between Andros and New Providence, plunges from a couple of metres to over two thousand within a few hundred metres of horizontal distance.

That underwater cliff explains most things about the Bahamas: why the diving is world class, why the fishing built an economy before tourism did, and why an archipelago of low limestone islands with almost no fresh water and no minerals has spent five centuries finding ingenious ways to make a living from its position.

Geology as economy

The Bahamas are not volcanic and not continental. They are carbonate platforms — accumulated skeletal sand and coral built up over tens of millions of years on subsiding crust, cemented into limestone. The highest point in the entire archipelago, on Cat Island, is about 63 metres.

That geology gives the country three things. First, the sand: pure aragonite, white, and on Harbour Island pink from the crushed shells of red foraminifera. Second, the blue holes — vertical caves formed during ice ages when sea level was far lower, then flooded, now among the most significant cave-diving sites in the world. Dean’s Blue Hole off Long Island is one of the deepest known and hosts free-diving world record attempts. Andros has the largest concentration of them anywhere.

Third, and most consequentially, it makes the islands flat. With most land within a few metres of sea level, the Bahamas is among the countries most exposed to sea-level rise on earth, and Hurricane Dorian in 2019 — which stalled over Abaco and Grand Bahama as a Category 5 for a day and a half — demonstrated what that means in practice. Whole settlements were removed.

Five centuries of positioning

The Bahamian economy has always been about location rather than resources, and the pattern repeats with striking regularity.

Columbus made his first landfall in the Americas on a Bahamian island in 1492 — San Salvador on the usual identification, though the exact island is argued about. The Lucayan people he encountered were taken to Hispaniola as forced labour and were essentially gone within a few decades, leaving the islands depopulated for over a century.

Then piracy. Nassau in the early eighteenth century functioned as a base for the golden-age pirates — Blackbeard, Charles Vane, Anne Bonny — because the harbour was shallow enough to exclude naval warships and the position sat astride the Spanish treasure routes. The British ended it in 1718 by sending Woodes Rogers with a royal pardon and a fleet.

Then wrecking: salvaging ships driven onto the reefs, which was a licensed industry and, according to persistent accusation, occasionally encouraged with false lights. Then blockade running during the American Civil War, when Nassau became the transhipment point for Confederate cotton and British goods. Then Prohibition, when the same harbour handled liquor bound for Florida and made a generation of Bahamian fortunes.

Piracy, wrecking, blockade running, rum running, offshore banking, tourism. Six industries, one location, five hundred years.

Then, from the mid-twentieth century, offshore finance — no income tax, no capital gains tax, no corporate tax, and a body of company and trust law built to attract non-resident capital. The sector has been repeatedly reformed under international pressure on transparency and remains a substantial part of the economy alongside tourism, which is the largest.

Junkanoo

The cultural centrepiece is a parade that starts in the dark. Junkanoo runs in the early hours of Boxing Day and New Year’s Day, from around two in the morning until dawn, along Bay Street in Nassau, and it is a competition rather than a procession.

Its origins are in the brief holidays granted to enslaved people at Christmas, and the form — goatskin drums, cowbells, whistles, brass, and costumes built on wire frames covered in crêpe paper — descends from West African masquerade traditions. Groups called shacks work all year on costumes that are worn once, judged, and dismantled.

The rhythm is specific and instantly identifiable, and it has fed into Bahamian popular music and back into the parade continuously. Attending as a spectator is possible and worth arranging bleacher seats for; attending as a participant, which visitors occasionally can through a group, is a different order of experience.

What is under the water

The Bahamas is more water than land by an enormous margin — the archipelago’s territorial sea covers an area comparable to a mid-sized country — and the marine environment is where the country’s ecological significance actually sits.

The Andros barrier reef, along the eastern edge of the largest island, is the third-longest in the world and drops directly into the Tongue of the Ocean, which is why the wall dives there are among the most dramatic anywhere accessible from shore-based operators.

The blue holes are the other distinction, and they are scientifically important for a reason that has nothing to do with diving. Below a certain depth many of them are anoxic — devoid of oxygen — which means organic material does not decay. Palaeontologists working in Bahamian blue holes have recovered intact remains of extinct species, including tortoises and crocodiles that lived on these islands before humans arrived, along with Lucayan human remains and artefacts. Sawmill Sink on Abaco produced one of the richest such assemblages found anywhere in the Caribbean.

The shallows matter too. Bahamian flats are among the most important bonefish habitat on earth, supporting a catch-and-release sport fishery worth a great deal to Out Island economies, and the seagrass beds behind them are significant carbon stores and nurseries for the whole reef system.

The country has committed to protecting a substantial proportion of its marine territory and has established a growing network of reserves, of which the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park — created in 1958 and among the first of its kind anywhere in the world — remains the model.

Which islands, and why

New Providence holds Nassau and roughly seventy per cent of the population on an island of modest size, along with the cruise terminal, the resorts on Paradise Island, and the traffic. It is where almost every visitor lands and where relatively few of them leave.

The Out Islands — or Family Islands, which is what Bahamians call them — are the country. Eleuthera is long, thin and agricultural, with Harbour Island’s pink sand off its northern tip and settlements that have been there since Bermudian Puritans arrived in the 1640s. The Exumas are a chain of 365 cays with sandbars that emerge and vanish with the tide, swimming pigs at Big Major that have become an unlikely global attraction, and Thunderball Grotto, which was in the Bond film.

Andros is the largest island by area and the least visited, with the third-largest barrier reef in the world along its eastern edge, blue holes inland, and bonefish flats that are internationally famous among fly fishers. Long Island has the deep blue hole and the cliffs at Columbus Point. Cat Island has the highest point and a Hermitage built by a priest-architect on top of it.

The practical rule is that the Out Islands are reached by small plane or mailboat, that infrastructure is limited, and that this is precisely the point. A country of seven hundred islands and two thousand cays cannot be seen from Nassau, and almost nobody who visits the Bahamas actually visits it.