Talk:Bahamas

Comment

I appreciate the creation of articles pertaining to NAL provinces, but I have a couple rather minor qualms. First, and with all due respect, this is a perfect example of how nòt to use the "here be dragons" template. That one is really intended for areas of IB -- broad topics -- where we have no clue what lies behind the door. The Bahamas, quite frankly, are covered by quite a lot of QAA: the only real differences between *here* and *there* are events that lead up to the Covenant of 1803. The earlier history and much of later events are either known or readily knowable. Of course, we don't know a whole lot about recent Bahamian history under F-C's thumb (dissidents, protests, covert military ops, etc, I would suspect), but these places aren't totally clean slates is what I'm saying! I would suggest removing the tag.

The other is that we need to be careful of creating a whole slew of stub articles. Unless it's your plan to take on the histories of a dozen North American provinces, we risk the future deletion of empty articles, just like what we witnessed re South America. We also need to be very careful about creating a whole slew of articles just to fill gaps. We took that gamble with Africa a while ago and lost. Had to redecorate the whole place. I'ld rather not see the NAL turned into a bunch of patch-work articles!

It's not my intention to curb creative juices -- just want to make sure we're not biting off more than can be chewed without choking. Patience is a virtue: take your time with these twelve provinces, David! ;) Elemtilas

Actually, I'm not planning on nor interested in writing up every single un-taken province of the NAL. Understandable you might think so from my actions, but it happens that is not the case. This is Thanksgiving Weekend, the first I've spent alone in five years, and two weeks since my Colleen passed on. Quite simply, I was just making busy work for myself, filling in a few things that--it seems to me--belonged. Better than brooding. But I must also point out that while there may well be things established about (for example) the Bahamas, I don't see it anywhere. Honestly, I wasn't going to add anything, just put the templates and flags in place. Zahir 19:47, 27 November 2005 (PST)

Don't take me the wrong way, please! Far be it from me to step on your toes or to keep you from some good old fashionned busy work (especially given the circumstances)! I'm also not saying you shouldn't have created the stub articles. But I am reminded that we just deleted several score such articles from the Wiki for no other reason than that they were empty templates of places! Sooner or later, someone will probably want to take on those provinces (even though at present it won't be you) so the effort is probably not wasted.

I understand that mány things are not written anywhere. This will always be the case for a project like this, and as we go along, the situation will not get any better. This will be worse as time goes on, and believe you me, it be hardest on newer Members, such as yourself. I also understand that it will be the cause of frustration -- we've talked about the situation before and have never really come up with a perfect solution. You can also take my word for it that the present Wiki, imperfect and incomplete as it is, is fár better than what we had a couple years ago, which was basically the memories of myself and John Cowan (at that time, the folks who had been around the longest.

This is where QAA comes in to play. It was devised, by Jan as I recall, to work in tandem with the known (written) facts covered by QSS. When things are not specifically written out for a place, it is assumed that the situation *there* is reasonably similar if not identical to the situation *here*. A good example is the Commonwealth itself. It wasn't actually made QSS until it was written down by me -- but, right from the beginning, it was assumed that Britain's power and prestige and extent of domain were more or less similar to *here*. Thus, places like Bahamas and Malta and Hong Kong, etc. are assumed to tag along even if there is nothing specific written (though we later agreed that India would not be part of Britain's domain). Elemtilas

Well, at least now they're lying in wait for whoever eventually wants to take them up. The templates are ready, and the ones with flags have the flags in place. Zahir 17:50, 28 November 2005 (PST)

To Do List

Guess I’m digging my hands into another piece of IB territory and expanding the Constantinian franchise. Here’s a more in-depth history for the Bahamas that doesn’t (purposely) violate what’s already on its page. It goes until just before the Floridian invasion in 1974. That’s going to require more research on how the country operated and how it fell apart.

The Bahamas has one of the most curious histories in the entire Caribbean. The island chain was where Columbus made his first landfall in the New World in 1492. The Spanish, despite being the first Europeans to find the island chain, did not properly colonize it, instead they merely used it as a slavers’ depot and kidnapped native Lucayan (Arawak) natives to bring to their plantations on the nearby island of Hispaniola. The Bahamas, after its massive depopulating, was left abandoned for nearly a century. Nature even reclaimed the settlements of the Lucayan peoples. The first attempt at colonization was an English attempt during the early years of King Charles I’s reign, but the few ragtag colonists were woefully unprepared for the rocky soil and high heat and humidity and almost all perished, the last survivors choosing to get picked up as POW’s by passing Spanish ships. After the first colonization attempt, the archipelago received a bad reputation in Europe, which made it the perfect place for both illegal pirates and legal privateers to hide out since they would not be followed by enemy armies.

The Bahamas’ existence owes a great deal to one man: DiBrock Rogeres. Captain Rogeres as he was better known was a Cambro-Norman from Bristow who chose to not follow in the illustrious footsteps of his family and instead become a buccaneer. As fate would have it, he would redeem himself under the colors of another flag, that of the English. The English crown offered him full clemency and letters of writ/mark as a privateer if he would tame the so-called ‘wild islands’ (becoming more frequently known as ‘the Bahamas,’ a word for unknown origin). Rogeres accepted and the same year, in 1657, he would have a profound, religious experience that solidified his firm dedication to the law and doing right by his God. Although his methods were brutal, he was able to unite the various English, Kemrese, Spanish, and French pirates and cutthroats in the core islands and extinguish uncertified piracy there. He invited in Jesuit counter-reformers of the Cambrian rite to found a monastery in the new colony’s capital, Charles Town (only renamed “Port Rogeres” many years after his death). The small town was utterly dominated by the massive monastery complex founded by the Jesuit archimandrites (monk-priests). Ironically, although they found their spiritual charges repulsive and borderline unfixable, they had no qualms using slave labor of mixed natives, prisoners of war, unrepentant Protestants from nearby islands, and kidnapped Africans. It was only through the personal intervention by Rogeres that slavery was outlawed in the colony, one of the many times that he would publicly go against the Catholic Church. Even while Rogeres sparred with the Jesuits he invited in, he would work closely with them to pacify the formerly independent colony of Elefftheria (or ‘Lefftera’).

Elefftheria was founded just months before Rogeres received his letters of mark from the English. The island, formerly known as “Cigateo” by the extinct natives, was founded by a diverse mix of Kemrese Protestants who felt unwelcome in Ter Mair (Mary’s Land, run as the petty fief by a despotic Hiberno-Cambrian family), English Protestants who were forcibly exiled to the Somer Islands (Bermuda), and former African slaves that opted to go with the latter group instead of languish as second-class citizens since returning their disparate homelands would be impossible. The Kemrese Protestants sailed first to the Somer/Hogg Islands and then went due south, landing on Cigateo. They called this land “freedom,” or «ἐλευθερία». Their freedom would be shortlived, for the Counter-Reformation would land on their shores only a few years after the main island, Nova Providentia, was pacified & permanently rid of pirates’ nests. Rogeres, as a fellow Cambrian, was not tough on these Protestant refugees, and indeed kept the more zealous missionaries at bay, but he made it abundantly clear that he could not let them remain as followers of Jean Cauvin’s movement. He allowed converts to keep many of their traditions of home Bible-reading and austere, some might say pietistic living, and lauded their treatment of biracial and African colonists with respect. Some say that Rogeres felt extreme kinship with the colonists on Eleffthera because he missed his kinsmen as an agent of a foreign country not always friendly to the country of his birth.

Some say that it was for this reason that Rogeres invited proper, civilian colonists to fill the ranks of the mostly uninhabited islands from Kemr, not England. England itself was in the throes of its civil war and so needed all hands on deck, which is perhaps why no one at Whitehall seemed to mind that non-English were being used to pack the place. The Jesuits of the new Monastery of the Holy Family also supported this decision. While almost everyone in the island were Catholic save for the occasional Dutchman, the regional liturgics of Kemr, England, Castile, & France were all different, but the monks were adamant that the colony only have facilities for the Cambrian rite, which used an older Brithenig still comprehensible to contemporary speakers. Since Kemrese, Castilian, & French ex-pirates all outnumbered any English on the island, a highly simplified Kemrese was the lingua franca on the island, with many loanwords pulled from these languages as well as the languages of the Arawak natives and captured West Africans. The influx of Kemrese fleeing the carnage of War of the Three Kingdoms wracking the Anglo-Cambrian borderlands only solidified the numerical superiority of Brithenig. Only occasional correspondences with the English colonies on the mainland during the War were the only times the colonial administration used English. It is for this reason that after Rogeres’ death in 1676 at the ripe old age of 93 and slavery was legalized in the colony that slaves brought in from passing Portuguese ships and by Castilian & French slaveholders fleeing insurrections on their island created a new type of Kemrese, an even more simplified dialect than the kind spoken by the first generations of former-pirates, peppered with words from Arawak, Portuguese, Ladino, and blended with over a dozen West African languages. This is known as “Patwa” (pronounced “Pat-oo-ah) by the island’s rather large African community. Patwa has survived even after the gradual shift of the white populace away from Brithenig to English over the better part of two whole centuries, with the last monolingual (white) Brithenig speakers only dying out in the late 1960’s and into the mid 1970’s on the Outer Islands.

In 1677, after news of Rogeres’ death reached London, King Charles II placed the colony under the dominionship of the colony of the Carolinas, perhaps because the crown was worried that the Kemrese influences might be a threat to England’s possession of the land. The colonial viceroy there sent out a rougher wave of colonists that the reformed pirates and ex-Protestants were used to. While they began clearing the land at a faster rate than the nativized privateers and Kemrese imports of yesteryear could, they were rude if not hostile to the locals. Indeed, skirmishes were not uncommon. The worst case was the death of 3 English Carolinians during the group’s only foray to settlement on Elefftheria. The crypto-Protestants fought back after a local woman was founded raped and near dead but it was more the poor quality of soil it is believed by historians that kept the newcomers from coming back a second time. While the Kemrese felt that they were chaffing under Carolinan rule, eventually after the shock abated, the English newcomers and Cambrian old-comers learned to rely on each other, especially when the mortality rate during this time was so high. Bilingualism became the norm by all accounts even before the 1720’s.

Immigration stopped off after the last waves of excess Carolinans sent by the viceroy of the island in the first half of the 1700’s. This is because periods of stability were frequently punctuated by Spanish and French raids on the islands during the Wars for American Territory. Port Rogeres was rebuilt several times during this period. French forces operating out of Sainte Domingue burned P.R. down to the ground for the second to last time in 1755. Only Holy Family monastery with its stone walls several feet thick was spared a complete destruction. This is why H.F.M. is by far the oldest building and one of the oldest continuous institutions in the region. After France burned Rogersport down, the Spanish, on-again-off-again allies of the French, quickly moved in to occupy the islands until a small Scottish force of militiamen were sent out by their own crown to aid their English allies. “The Great Raid” as it is known was a nighttime raid on the smoldering, barely refortified ruins of Rogeres by a highly ethnically-mixed force of Scotsmen, Englishman, German immigrants seeking freedom, & Native (most likely Cherokee) auxiliaries who felt some degree loyalty to their vague sovereign in Edinburgh.

Some give the 1755 taking back of Rogeres as the beginning of the Bahamian identity. During the defenses of the islands, Anglo-Carolinans, Kemrese, New Christians, and both free and enslaved Africans worked together to defend not only themselves, but the entire colony, in concert with each other. The island militias organized as one coherent fighting force and not by ethnic group as they might have only a decade ago. While the mixed Afro-Kemrese of Elefftheria bore arms since the time that they got there in the 1670’s, now, all freemen were armed and deployed against the French and Spanish from 1755 and onward. Only slaves were left unarmed and crammed into the walls of the monastery or hidden across the other islands. This is when feelings of abolition took off, notions only furthered when Quaker and Hussite missionaries proselytized enslaved peoples even against the wishes of the state.

In 1803, the Bahamas separated from the Carolinas after putting in a request to London and the newly separated viceroyalty was one of the first colonies to sign the Solemn League & Covenant. The Bahamians, while feeling more Bahamian now than English or American, were not stupid. They knew that the lion’s share of trade and aid came from the American continent and not mother England (or Kemr). Port Rogeres now had more people from other colonies who were setting up shop there and staying in increasingly large numbers than Anglo-Carolinans and “pure” Kemrese (but did not outnumber them both combined). That same year, white French refugees from Sainte Domingue sailed to Port Rogeres to seek refuge, but they were turned away down to the last man, woman, & child with only some Italian and Polish mercenaries among them allowed to disembark. The memories of the 1755 War were just too fresh in the minds of the people. These refugees would quickly make their way to the cities of Biloxi & Mobile.

The end of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807 brought about the foreshadowing of a new era for the Bahamian Islands. After 1755, slavery was a hotbed topic, but it was still a legal institution except for on the island of Elefftheria. However, with relations cut off from the other Caribbean islands under Castilian or French rule and the American colonies not sending anymore slaves since the institution there was threatened, the Bahamian slaveocrats turned to smuggling. Portugal, England’s oldest continuous ally, turned a great profit bringing excess slaves from Brazil up north to the US South, making frequent stops in Port Rogeres. In order to hide their crimes, slaveowners mixed in their new prisoners, who only spoke Portuguese and their native languages with their (mainly Brithenig-speaking) slaves. By the eve of abolition, the African population had sextupled, from three-and-two-thirds of a percent to 22% of the islands’ population. Slavers also forced both older generations of slaves and new Brazilians to procreate at higher rates, knowing that now, they would have no ways to replenish their ranks with outside people. As the Afro-Brazilians outnumbered the older, thoroughly Cambrified and increasingly anglicizing Africans, they changed the culture within a few years time. Catholic monks of the Jesuit order and Quaker activists coming in from the mainland worked to teach these newcomers Brithenig and decrease syncretism, but this endeavor took over a century. The Brazilians brought with them their languages, religions, and ways of life, and those that remembered Africa let alone Brazil were resistant to conform. Even the white populace could easily distinguish between the Afro-Cambrians and the Brazilians. Only the slavers’ forced miscegenation brought (at first limited) Cambrification to the entire Afro-Brazilian body. Islam was praxticed by what is estimated to be 10% of the Afro-Brazilians, with many more completely unchristianized animists who spoke little to no Portuguese. The Jesuits worked literally day and night to teach these unreached people Brithenig (easier for Romance language speakers to learn than Germanic English) in order to explain Catholicism to them. After a minor skirmish between Muslim slaves and slavers, the Jesuits went into plantations to tear down makeshift mosques or lone minarets and confiscate any Muslim paraphernalia, be it entire qurans written down from memory, amulets with quranic verses inside, or even carpets that might have doubled as prayer-rugs. Islam and animism would die out with these new captives completely, but it would take several decades of work.

The 1828 War was the last time that Port Rogeres would be burned to the ground (although not the last time it would be invaded; the Floridians would enter the city without firing a shot in the 20th Cent). The French, acting under the orders of their sovereign, would invade the Bahamas from their base in Guadeloupe and pull American troops away from the fighting along the Louisianne border. The trick would work and cost many civilian lives, but it would not win France the war. This started another round of manumissions and an arming of the civilian populace.

The post-slavery era came only in 1834, a year after it was signed into law at Whitehall and six years after the shock of the 1828 War. By early 1835, every single slave held in even the most rural of the Outer Islands was free. Because the Bahamas were so economically tied to England’s mills and America’s crops, they had no reason to seek economic independence and no reason to shift farms away from cash crops. Many freemen and poor whites who were never technically slaves languished as sharecroppers and formed the island chains’ discontented underclass. As Catholics in miserable conditions, many of each group would intermingle, accelerating the increase in the percentage of mixed-race Bahamians.

Immigration to the islands would pick up again from the 1850’s to 1960’s. This is when non-British Europeans, Asians, & Middle Easterners would move to the archipelago. First came the northern Italians that embarked off passing ships bound for New Amsterdam or Havana. The Italians came as middlemen in the colony’s trade in tobacco, which, while much smaller than that of its neighbors, was still profitable. Next came the Greeks and Lebanese. Mainlander Greek sea-captains plied the waters of the Caribbean beginning in the 1860’s and found a great economic niche to inhabit—sponge-diving. Sponges were useful cleaning appliances for anything from homes to ships, and they were hard to harvest which made them rather expensive at market. It was after the genius of one Captain Michaelis Hatzikostas, jokingly referred to as “the Columbus of Greece,” that Greek immigration exploded in the Bahamas. He gathered all Greeks who had some stake in the Bahamas (the earliest arriving in the 1880’s) to pool their money together and recruit professional sponge-divers from poorer islands in the Aegean: highly skilled laborers who would work for cheap. He also brought in a small task-force of Cypriots to act as go-between’s. The British had occupied Cyprus since 1878, and while not common, there were Cypriots who had learned passing English. So, this colonial venture funded by Peloponnesians, staffed by Cypriots, & worked by Aegean islanders was underway in July of 1904. The venture was highly successful; by 1911, almost all laborers and staff were able to bring their wives and children from Greece. The Greeks, as non-Catholics and mostly non English-speakers, were distrusted by the rest of the Bahamian society. However, because the Greeks brought with them ties to international markets all across the Mediterranean, the old elite begrudgingly came to accept them. Today, 4.6% of the island is of Greek ancestry, with .8% being monolingual Greeks. The Greeks, who in time came to be a beloved novelty in Bahamian society, lived almost in a parallel one of their own. They practiced absolute endogamy, only marrying Orthodox Lebanese occasionally when they came or black converts. Many did not learn English at all. Although the Jesuits at Holy Family hoped that they would convert to Catholicism as they brought with them no priest, the men served readers’ vespers and buried their dead with only the trisagion service for years. A priest from mainland Greece was one of the first people the entire mini-colony paid to bring over in 1909. The Lebanese came right around the same time as the Greeks. In 1844, the independent Druze state in coastal Lebanon was finally overrun by the Ottoman Empire, and decades of misrule followed. Discontented Lebanese, mainly Maronites with some Druze & Orthodox Christians, fled to greener pastures in Greece, Western Europe, & the Americas. As Catholics, they had a decisive leg up over the Greeks, but they occupied a lower economic rung on the ladder of Bahamian society as they came only to open dry-goods stores and peddler wares from island to island. They formed a tight-knit network of vendors that quickly came to dominate the dry goods market in the viceroyalty. Although it took them longer, in time they became easily on-par with the Greeks in terms of profit. Five families dominated Lebanese life in the Bahamas: the Ouwade, Amoury, Abraham, Bustros, & Fayaz, with a sixth & seventh, the Maloufs and Khazens, coming in as close contenders. It is estimated that over three quarters of all Lebanese people in the Bahamas have these seven surnames. Unlike the Greeks, however, the Lebanese Maronites (and crypto-Druze?) had no problem fully joining the dominant Cambrian Catholic scene on the island. For their loyalty to the papacy, however, and perhaps to keep anymore than already had from converting to Orthodoxy, the Jesuit order gave them a side-chapel in Port Rogeres’ cathedral of the immaculate conception, which they dedicated to St. Maron. There was an experiment by the Jesuits to translate the Cambrian use of the Latin rite into Arabic for the people, but this only lasted for maybe seven years. The people were quickly learning English & even Brithenig and had no problem marrying English, Kemrese, and African women. Only perhaps .1% of the Bahamas still speaks Arabic natively, out of 3.2% of the population that claims some kind of Arab ancestry. The Chinese came next, but not from where one might expect. Laborers brought over from the Hakka, Hokkien, & Cantonese regions of China were put into virtual indentured servitude all across the Caribbean with the oldest contracts starting in the 1830’s to offset the loss of African slavery and white indentured servitude. By the 1890’s, these people and their children had mostly thrown off the yoke of slavery-in-all-but-name and made something of themselves in the island region. The first Chinese immigrant came from Castilian Cuba, “Gulliermo” Pan Yuong, opened a restaurant on East Bay Street (a branch of P.R.’s main thoroughfare). By 1883, he brought over 28 other assorted family & friends. They came not as agricultural workers like their ancestors did to Cuba, but as restauranteurs and middlemen. They faced staunch competition from the Lebanese & Jews, but they did what they could and thrived in Port Rogeres just as well as any other new group. The Wong & Hsieh (Shea) families came to dominate Chinese life in the Bahamas. First, the Chinese opened little hole-in-the-wall greasy spoons, then they opened grocery stores, and by the 1930’s began buying up real estate around Nova Providentia. Around the 1930’s and ‘40’s, the Bahamas had its economic boom based around tourism, and the Chinese cashed in on this trend and made quite a bit of money for themselves. The Chinese immigrants were all southerners, and as such, Mandarin is not spoken much in the Bahamas save by new laborers brought in to build casinos in the mid 2000’s who have since either gone back to China or melded into the melange of Hispano-Chinese and Anglo-Kemrese life. Jews came at around the same time as the other three big immigrant groups in the 1880’s. The first were Ashkenazi Jews who had settled first in New Amsterdam. Many already spoke English & Kemrese before setting up shop in the Bahamas, giving them a leg up over the others. Unlike the Chinese, the Jews worked with the Lebanese together since they entered different industries. The Jews cornered the market on furniture in the Bahamas which they sold in Lebanese general stores or as traveling salesmen all the way to the most outer of the Outer Islands. They hooked themselves and their connections in N.A. to the Lebanese network of goods that started in Bahia, Brazil and went up across Latin America to the Caribbean with its nexus in Havana, Cuba. The Jews were just as unliked as the Chinese because they were non-Christians, but there have been no documented cases of sectarian violence against Jews in the colony’s history. The bigger wave of Jewish migration would come after 1898 when Mueva Sefarad joined the NAL and thus could trade freely with its members. They came to the Bahamas first and worked with their countrymen of a different rite. Now, the Jewish-Lebanese allied trade network spanned from northern Brazil to the border with New France. The Sephardic Jews outnumbered the original Ashkenazi middlemen and they were the first to set up tiny synagogues in P.R. & Elefftheria. The communities merged, although begrudgingly at first since the New Amsterdam Jews had their own language and liturgical style very different from the Ladino-speaking Sephardim. The synagogue in the capital is still Orthodox, whereas the one on Elefftheria is now Reform Jewish.

The former governor-general of Mauritius was nominated the governorship of the Bahamas in 1931. With him would come a huge retinue of ethnically-homogenous Mauritians and Malagasy servants that served at his estate house. Many would go home after his tenure, but some stayed, and they invited family and friends to come to the viceroyalty in the 1940’s and ‘50’s. The Madagascarians would be the last big wave of immigrants save for mainland American retirees before the Floridian invasion & annexation in 1974.

Capital

Certainly not Nassau, since England/Scotland *there* followed the Jacobite succession and never had William of Orange-Nassau as King. Benkarnell 14:38, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Maybe the capital could be named "Stuart". On the other hand, the town could have been founded by dutches.--Marc Pasquin 14:49, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

The original name *here* was Charles Town, for King Charles I. With the uncreative naming habits of the Stuarts, there are too many James Towns and Charles Towns scattered across the New World, if you ask me. "Stuarton" could work. Or maybe, since the Bahamas were an English colony, name it after an English statesman rather than a Scottish monarch. Benkarnell 15:49, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Hear hear! Port Rogeres, then! Comment moved to Bahamas#History. Elemtilas 00:00, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

New London? West London? Well it could be New Edinburgh or "South New Castreleon". Misterxeight 21:16, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Padraic, I added your historical episode to the page. In that spirit I attempted to give the Bahamas a motto. I changed the traditional Expulsis piratis, restitutia commercia (Rogers' motto *here*, unfortunately changed upon Independence in the 70s) to Pacificatis piratis... since the pirates *there* were not expelled, merely pacified. I don't know Latin, however, and that word may need a reconjugation. Benkarnell 03:37, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Colonizer

There's a discrepancy: the Infobox and the name of the Lady Governor (taken from a news article?) suggest that the Bahamas was an English colony, later province. But the Viceregal College page and Padraic's Rogeres history give the honor to Kemr. Does anyone know which it is? I added the bit about Charles I myself based on real life, so don't take that as QSS. Benkarnell 04:37, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

OK. I'd prefer Kemr, actually, only because an inodinate number of provinces seem to be Enlgish. But if that's the way it is, fine. Benkarnell 16:12, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

I have no preference one way or the other -- it's simply QAA that Bahamas were English as per *here*. Like many other places in America, its actual population is quite mixed. For example, there are many Kemrese there, and the majority of all Bahamians are Kemrese Rite, whether English speaking or not. Elemtilas 23:16, 3 May 2009 (UTC)