The Bahamas

 

The Bahamas officially the Commonwealth of The Bahamas is an island country within the Lucayan Archipelago of the West Indies in the North Atlantic. 

It contains 97% of the Lucayan Archipelago's land area and 88% of its population. 

Lying to the north of Cuba and Hispaniola the archipelago comprises nearly 700 islands and cays only about 30 of which are inhabited and more than 2,000 low barren rock formations. 

It stretches more than 500 miles (800 km) southeast-northwest between Grand Bahama Island which has an area of 530 square miles (1,373 square km) and lies about 60 miles (100 km) off the southeastern coast of the U.S. state of Florida and Great Inagua Island some 50 miles (80 km) from the eastern tip of Cuba. 

The islands other than New Providence are known collectively as the Out (Family) Islands. 

They include Grand Bahama, which contains the major settlements of Freeport and West End; Andros (2,300 square miles) the largest island of The Bahamas Abaco, or Great Abaco, (372 square miles) and Eleuthera (187 square miles) the site of one of the early attempts at colonization.

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.

Later, the Spanish shipped the native Lucayans to Hispaniola and enslaved them there, after which the Bahama islands were mostly deserted from 1513 until 1648, nearly all native Bahamians having been forcibly removed for enslavement or having died of diseases that Europeans brought with them from Europe. 

In 1649 English colonists from Bermuda, known as the Eleutheran Adventurers, settled on the island of Eleuthera.

The Bahamas became a British crown colony 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 enslaved people with them and established plantations on land grants. 

Enslaved Africans 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 abolished in 1834. 

Subsequently, The Bahamas became a haven for freed African slaves.

 Africans liberated from illegal slave ships were resettled on the islands by the Royal Navy while some North American slaves and Seminoles escaped to The Bahamas from Florida. 

Bahamians were even known to recognise the freedom of enslaved people carried by the ships of other nations which reached The Bahamas. 

Today Black-Bahamians make up 90% of the population of 400,516.

The country gained governmental independence in 1973, led by Sir Lynden O. Pindling. Charles III is currently its monarch.

The Bahamas has the third-largest gross domestic product per capita in the Americas, after the United States and Canada. 

Its economy is based on tourism and offshore finance.