Bahama Pundit

The African Diaspora to the Bahamas

by Larry Smith

 

Following hard on the heels of his earlier book - The Migration of Peoples from the Caribbean to the Bahamas - Bahamian Keith Tinker has come up with another scholarly page-turner, entitled The African Diaspora to the Bahamas.

Tinker, 57, is a historian who led the Antiquities, Monuments and Museums Corporation from its inception in 1998 until 2011. Before that he was a civil servant in the Ministry of Finance and the Department of Co-operatives, while teaching part-time at the College of the Bahamas. He holds history degrees from West Indies College in Jamaica, Florida Atlantic University, and Florida State University.

In this book, Tinker has compiled information on "the story of the origin of the black masses into a comprehensive, thematic work." A project, he says, inspired by research carried out in the 1990s by two former attorneys-general - Sean McWeeney and Alfred Sears - as well as conversations with Patricia Glinton-Meicholas, a former lecturer at the College of the Bahamas.

The book opens with an overview of the African slave trade. Between 1650 and 1860 as many as 15 million enslaved people were transported from West Africa to the Americas. And from the 9th to the 19th century millions more were dispersed throughout Asia and the Middle East. The African Diaspora refers to the movements of these people and their descendants throughout the world.

 

Sawmill Sink Update & Two Christmas Books

by Larry Smith

Sawmill Sink
The rocks that make up up the Bahamas platform were formed over millions of years in shallow water as layers of sediment. As these layers gradually subsided under the weight of new deposits, they were converted into limestone.The top layers were blown into vast sand dunes, and by the end of the last glacial period - about 12,000 years ago - the geography of the Bahamas was more or less complete.

But during the ice age, when sea levels were much lower, rainwater had eroded the limestone rocks to form solution holes that gradually expanded into huge underground cave systems. These were described as early as 1725 by the great English naturalist Mark Catesby, while the marine caves known as blue holes were first recorded on sea charts in 1843. 

In fact, the entire Bahamas platform is riddled with cracks and fissures like the holes in a piece of Swiss cheese, and everything is tidally connected. One of these fissures is called Sawmill Sink - an inland blue hole in south central Abaco that extends 150 feet below sea level, and then spreads out into miles of horizontal passages. Scientists have spent the last several years investigating a treasure-trove of fossils found in its depths - all perfectly preserved by the cavern's unique water chemistry.

According to top cave diver Brian Kakuk,"These systems hold hidden but vital historical data on our past global climate, giving benchmark evidence of past sea levels. They are not simply holes in the ground in which to throw things, but precious containers of potable water and rare marine life - time vaults of Bahamian history and generators of tourism revenues."

Kakuk has more than 2000 exploration cave dives to his credit, and he is one of the lead investigators in the Sawmill Sink Project, having found the first fossil there in 2004 - an extinct giant tortoise. Later investigations in this undisturbed cave have turned up a range of impressive fossils - the prehistoric reptiles, birds, and mammals that once roamed Abaco.

Among the chief investigators of this treasure trove are Dr David Steadman, curator of birds at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville; and Janet Franklin, a landscape ecologist at Arizona State University. And both were in Nassau last week to update environmentalists and other officials on their Abaco research.

So far, the research team has recovered the bones of 54 land crocodiles - including some that lived 4500 years ago - as well as several giant tortoises, who lived contemporaneously with the crocodiles and often served as their prey. Among the fossils are bones from a Lucayan child dated to about a thousand years ago - the earliest evidence for human occupation in the northern Bahamas and the oldest radiocarbon date on human bone in the entire archipelago. 

"We are also finding lots of bones of birds, snakes, frogs and lizards," Steadman said. "The whole fauna of the last few thousand years before people arrived in the islands and caused many of these animals to become extinct. We are finding a similar species composition to the present, so we will be able to put extinction into perspective over time."

Towards A New Bahamian Flora

 by Larry Smith

A group of top scientists descended on the College of the Bahamas last week for a symposium to commemorate the 30th anniversary of a monumental book on the Bahamas. However, it's a safe bet that most Bahamians have never even heard of that book, much less scanned its pages.

The publication being honoured was Flora of the Bahama Archipelago, authored in 1982 by the American botanist Dr Donovan Correll and his wife Helen, who spent seven years collecting plants throughout the islands. Their 1692-page tome includes hundreds of painstakingly drawn pen and ink illustrations by Priscilla Fawcett. Publication was sponsored by Miami's Fairchild Tropical Garden.

Founded in 1938, the Fairchild Garden is both a world class visitor attraction and a centre for education and research. From the plant exploration done in support of the Correll book, Fairchild developed the most extensive living collection of Bahamian plants outside of the islands. You can see them today in a three-acre plot just off Old Cutler Road in Coral Gables, where more than 138 species collected from the Bahamas are happily growing.

The Correll book superseded the first comprehensive record of Bahamian plant life. The Bahama Flora was produced in 1920 by Nathaniel Britton of the New York Botanical Garden andCharles Millspaugh of Chicago's Field Museum.  It described more than 1900 species that had been collected over the two centuries since Captain Thomas Walker sent the very first specimens of Bahamian plants to England in 1703.

The Policeman who Took on the Numbers Boss

Edited by Larry Smith
In 1952 Paul Thompson was recruited by the Royal Bahamas Police Force in his native Trinidad. One of his early postings was to a special squad assigned to raid the Numbers houses. Thompson was a legendary detective who rose through the ranks at CID to become an assistant commissioner of police before retiring in 1981. Since then he has been a security consultant. Now 85, Thompson is about to publish his memoirs. The following extract from his forthcoming book - A Policeman's Story - describes a dramatic encounter with the equally legendary Numbers boss, the late Talbot "Stokes" Thompson. The encounter led to a blazing shootout on Mackey Street - most unusual for the time. 

From A Policeman's Story, by Paul Thompson
The Numbers racket has been widespread on New Providence for many decades. In my day, Bahamians bought numbers from street vendors, or in bars and petty shops over-the-hill. Some number sellers visited offices, shops and other businesses to provide custom service. 

Buyers would choose a number (often based on their dreams) and the vendor would give him a piece of paper with his number on it. The seller would record the name of the buyer in a notebook for reference when the draw was made. This differed from the present-day operations, in which the numbers are drawn outside of The Bahamas, usually in the United States, and all of the administrative work is done by computers.

Back then, the Numbers houses held the draws locally - except for the Cuban lottery, which was drawn in Havana every Saturday and broadcast over Cuban radio stations. There were three main Numbers houses on New Providence operated by very wealthy men - Talbot Thompson, Percy Munnings and Eugene Toote. 

Apart from their Numbers houses, Thompson and Munnings were known to be involved in heavy personal gambling, often winning or losing small fortunes in a single night. In later years, Father Allen, a well-known restaurant owner, established a fourth Numbers house. All of these men are now dead.

The 1958 General Strike and the Making of the Modern Bahamas

by Larry Smith

Last Friday marked the 54th anniversary of the 1958 general strike, one of the seminal events of the modern Bahamas. On January 13 of that year hundreds of public and private sector workers walked off their jobs, shutting down New Providence for almost three weeks and forcing some much-needed social and political change.

The key labour leaders of the time are no longer with us, but both have left behind a rich legacy in the form of their personal memoirs. Those leaders were Sir Clifford Darling, who died last month at the age of 89, and Sir Randol Fawkes, who died in 2000 at the age of 76.

Sir Randol's 1977 book, The Faith that Moved the Mountain, gives his personal (and what historian Michael Craton described as "somewhat self-serving") perspective as a leader of the Bahamas Federation of Labour, the umbrella union which called the strike. A memorial edition is available online at http://sirrandolfawkes.com.

Sir Clifford's 2002 book, A Bahamian Life Story, provides much of the background necessary to form an appreciation of this unique event. In addition to his personal perspective as leader of the Taxi Cab Union, which instigated the strike, his account includes secret communiques from the colonial authorities, as well as contemporary newspaper reports.

Sir Durward Knowles -- Driven by the Stars

by Simon

There is still at 94 both an irrepressible humour and twinkle in the eyes of Sir Durward Knowles.  They are permanent features of his exuberant spirit and dedication to squeezing out of life every measure of joy.

The title of Sir Durward’s biography is Driven by the Stars.  He has been driven by a constellation of lodestars and virtues, among them extraordinary generosity, sportsmanship and a passion for national unity.  In turn, he has become a guiding star for others.

Quite a bit has been written about Sir Durward’s contribution to sports and his exemplary philanthropy particularly in the areas of physical and mental disability.  Athletic prowess and disability may seem incongruent, but not to Sir Durward.

In both areas the champion athlete and champion of the disabled has sought to empower others, no matter their physical or mental capacity or disability, to be driven by their own stars, overcoming limits to achieve more than one ever dared imagine.

Running Hot on Culture

by Larry Smith

We Bahamians are considered such philistines around the region. They laugh at us for stooping so low as to blow up our own culture, and that's not a joke - it actually happened in 1987, when the government demolished Jumbey Village with explosives.

The village was an offshoot of a community festival launched in 1969 by musician and parliamentarian Ed Moxey. An earlier and more 'cultural' version of the fish fry, it featured music and dance performances as well as displays of arts and crafts, and produce, and was aimed at locals as well as tourists.

In 1971 Moxey persuaded the Pindling government to let the festival take over a former dump site on Blue Hill Road and build a permanent facility. In the period leading up to independence in 1973, there was a lot of buzz about a popular enterprise promoting Bahamian creative arts.

"We put the homestead site up and in '73 we had a meeting with all the teachers. And they agreed right there that all the teachers in the system would donate a half day's pay and every school would have a function...and we came up with $100,000 in the space of three months," Moxey recalled.

"We put up a special cabinet paper, cabinet agreed, and when I pick up the budget, everything was cut out. Everything." Moxey told University of Pennsylvania researcher Tim Rommen in 2007. "That was a little bit too much. Village lingered, lingered...just kept on deteriorating until they came up with this grandiose scheme to put National Insurance there. And when they ready, they blow the whole thing down."

A Bahamian Vacation Reading List

by Larry Smith

Freeport Notebook by Peter Barratt
Barratt is the English-born architect who planned the city of Freeport back in the 1960s, and one of the few remaining people who knew legendary Freeport founder Wallace Groves personally. In fact, he designed the mausoleum near Mary Star of the Sea where Groves and his wife Georgette are buried.

Barratt published the first and only substantive history of Grand Bahama in 1972. Although now a Bahamian citizen, his work permit was refused twice over the years and he now spends much of his time in Florida, but clearly Freeport is still very much on his mind.

It is an untidy mind, he admits, despite his role as a town planner. In this 175-page volume he has thrown together "personal subjective musings that I thought the reader might find interesting...(highlighting) some events in the early period of the Freeport story." The subtitle says it all: "Pines, Port, Politics, Poems and Prose."

Those musings include letters to local newspapers, poetry and doggerel, news clippings, historical photos, observations and recollections. It provides interesting and easy-to-read background to the current condition of Freeport, Grand Bahama - one of the greatest enigmas of the modern Bahamas.

The San Salvador Museum and A Dictionary of Bahamian English

by Larry Smith

COCKBURN TOWN, San Salvador - This is an island of monuments, although none are particularly grandiose and some are positively insignificant and difficult to find. There are at least five markers commemorating the landfall of Columbus, for example.

The locals don't pay much attention to them, but the 400 visitors who stay at Club Med each week certainly do. This is the most historic place in the Bahamas because it was the site of that momentous first encounter between the Old and New Worlds in 1492.

In fact, it was yours truly who broke the story that confirmed San Salvador as the landfall island in 1983 - via the Reuters and Inter Press Service news wires. That's when archaeologist Charles Hoffman excavated Spanish trade goods dated to the contact period at the very site of the Lucayan village adjacent to the Long Bay beach where Columbus was believed to have come ashore.

Why We Overeat and How to End it

by Larry Smith

As Chrissy Love said recently on the ZNS call-in show Immediate Response, "Chile I been on more diet than Oprah".

Her point was that diets don't work - at least not in the long-term. As we all know, it's hard to stick to any diet, and sooner or later we give up and rejoin the world of uncontrolled eating, usually gaining back the few pounds we lost plus a little more.

Most of us simply shrug our shoulders and move on. But a groundbreaking new book by the former head of the US Food and Drug Administration reveals that food is now a top public health issue, and he tries to explain how we can scientifically address our compulsive urge to overeat.

The unfortunate fact is, says Dr David Kessler in The End of Overeating, that we have all become addicts - hooked by overstimulated brain chemicals on huge portions of food layered and loaded with sugar, fat and salt, and offering little or no nutritional value.