We sailed down from Exumas to Long Island. This is such a beautiful area of the Bahamas. We wanted to go explore the Christopher Columbus and Lucayan Monument. There is a new road that just opened, on December 18, 2020 named The Monument Road. We rode our bikes, Lily Belle and Bumble Bee, directly to the monument. I want to do a little research and I found out quite a bit.
The Christopher Columbus history of the Spanish expedition to the Bahamas led him to several of the archipelago’s islands and Long Island one of them, known to the indigenous tribe of Lucayan people as “Yumi”. Columbus renamed it “Fernandina” but the name didn’t stick.
Columbus arrived on Long Island on the 17th October 1492. Looking out across the ocean and enjoying the panoramic view of Long Island will make you realize why Columbus named this the most beautiful island in the world. I can see why. The blue water is so unbelievable, the beaches have gorgeous, white, sand, and the white cliffs are giant.
Columbus thought the Lucayans resembled the Guanche of the Canary Islands because they were intermediate in skin color between Europeans and Africans. He described the Lucayans as handsome, graceful, well-proportioned, gentle, generous and peaceful, and customarily going almost completely naked. Peter Martyr d'Anghiera said that the Lucayan women were so beautiful that men from "other countries" moved to the islands to be near them. Women past puberty wore a small skirt of cotton, and the men might wear a loincloth made of plaited leaves or cotton. Some people wore head bands, waist bands, feathers, bones and ear and nose jewelry on occasion. They were often tattooed and usually applied paint to their bodies and/or faces. They also practiced head flattening. Their hair was black and straight, and they kept it cut short except for a few hairs in back which were never cut. Columbus reported seeing scars on the bodies of some of the men, which were explained to him as resulting from attempts by people from other islands to capture them
Admiral Columbus kidnapped several Lucayans on San Salvador and Santa María de la Concepción. Two fled, but Columbus took some Lucayans back to Spain at the end of his first voyage. Vespucci took 232 Lucayans to Spain as slaves in 1500. Spanish exploitation of the labor of the natives of Hispaniola rapidly reduced that population, leading the Governor of Hispaniola to complain to the Spanish crown. After Columbus's death, Ferdinand II of Aragon ordered in 1509 that Indians be imported from nearby islands to make up the population losses in Hispaniola, and the Spanish began capturing Lucayans in the Bahamas for use as laborers in Hispaniola. At first the Lucayans sold for no more than four gold pesos in Hispaniola, but when it was realized that the Lucayans were practiced at diving for conches, the price rose to 100 to 150 gold pesos and the Lucayans were sent to the Isle of Cubagua as pearl divers. Within two years the southern Bahamas were largely depopulated. The Spanish may have carried away as many as 40,000 Lucayans by 1513.
Carl O. Sauer described Ponce de León's 1513 expedition in which he "discovered" Florida as simply "an extension of slave hunting beyond the empty islands." When the Spanish decided to traffic the remaining Lucayans to Hispaniola in 1520, they could find only eleven in all of the Bahamas. Thereafter the Bahamas remained uninhabited for 130 years
A monument was erected in honor of this event in 1989. The current monument features a towering stone obelisk with a cross and globe at the top.
Today, Afro-Bahamians are an ethnicity originating in The Bahamas of predominantly African descent. They are descendants of various African ethnic groups, many associated with the Empires of Ghana, Songhai and Mali, and the Kingdom of Kongo.
The earliest African inhabitants of the Bahamas came during the 1640s from Bermuda and England with the Eleutheran Adventurers, many were also brought from other parts of the West Indies. In the 1780s after the American Revolutionary war, many British loyalists resettled in the Bahamas. This migration brought some 7000 people, the vast majority being African slaves from the Gullah people in Georgia and the Carolinas. Some Africans earned their freedoms and immigrated to the Bahamas by fighting for the British during the American Revolutionary War as members of the Ethiopian Regiment. This migration made the Bahamian population majority of African descent for the first time, with a proportion of 2 to 1 over the European inhabitants.
In 1807, the British abolished the slave trade. Throughout the 19th century, close to 7000 Africans were resettled in the Bahamas after being freed from slave ships by the Royal Navy, which intercepted the trade, in the Bahamian islands. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire on 1 August 1834.
Monument Road is by far the best road that we've been on the Bahamas. It's very wide and leads directly to the monument. We a met a couple of local women that said they come up to the monument on a regular basis to look at the beautiful water and get a little exercise going up the cement stairs. They, as all Bahamians they we've met, were a joy to be around and so sweet.
