Bahama Pundit

The Story of South Eleuthera

by Larry Smith

ROCK SOUND: Other than sun, sand and sea, South Eleuthera's attractions are rather modest - a landlocked ocean hole where you can feed the snappers, an 87-year-old fig tree spreading along the highway, and a historic Methodist manse.

The Mission House dates back two centuries, and has been meticulously restored as a museum and community centre. The work has been driven by Peter MacClean (a retired British helicopter pilot who looks every bit the part of a Methodist minister) and his wife Pat (who sold land on Eleuthera in the 1950s for Sir Sidney Oakes). A foundation, led by Chandra Sands (daughter of the late Rock Sound entrepeneur Albert Sands), has raised over half a million dollars to support the project.

Plans to operate this two-storey frame house on the waterfront are now being drafted with the help of the Antiquities Corporation. The Mission has seen a lot of history in its time, and among the items featured in its museum will be obsolete medical equipment. That's because in 1942 the building became a clinic, courtesy of American industrialist Arthur Vining Davis.

Davis was chairman of Alcoa, the world's biggest producer of aluminium. He was also one of the famous 'three tycoons' who triple-handedly created Eleuthera's 20th century economy. The other two were a New England clothmaker named Austin Levy, and Pan American Airways founder Juan Trippe.

America's CIA Legacy

by Larry Smith

"We went all over the world and we did what we wanted. God, we had fun." -- Al Ulmer, chief of the CIA's Far East division in the 1950s.

There was just one book on my holiday reading list this year - the 700-page Legacy of Ashes published recently by Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter, Tim Weiner.

It is an utterly absorbing history of the United States Central Intelligence Agency - from its foundation after World War Two to its recent humiliation after asserting that Iraq bristled with weapons of mass destruction.

Weiner presents on-the-record accounts taken from recently declassified documents as well as the personal recollections of those involved. And the bottom line is that “the most powerful country in the history of Western civilization has failed to create a first-rate spy service (and) that failure constitutes a danger to the national security of the United States.”

Wow! When Tough Call was a leftist college student in the early 1970s, the CIA was considered omnipotent - a mythical monster whose tentacles reached out to control the world. We believed it was capable of the most extraordinary things, and we detested its power and influence.

Going Down Burma Road

by Larry Smith

Goin' down Burma Road...ain' ga lick nobody.

For most Bahamians Burma Road refers to the 1942 riots over pay for the men who worked on the wartime air bases in Nassau. Two rioters were killed by British troops, more than 40 people injured and over a hundred arrested, but those unprecedented events also led to long overdue reforms.

The name 'Burma Road' had currency because of what went on at the same time on the other side of the world. In Southeast Asia work was underway on the real Burma Road so that the Allies could move troops and supplies into China to fight the Japanese.

Construction of that Burma Road began in December 1942. Cutting through mountainous territory in the north of Burma, it was considered a remarkable engineering achievement. The Bahamian equivalent was in the vicinity of Blake Road, which runs from Caves Point to the former pine barren that became Windsor Field - and later our international airport.

Explosives were used to cut through the limestone hills behind the caves to provide fill for the new airfield. But there are more significant parallels between what is going on in Burma today, and what took place in the Bahamas 65 years ago.

Here's to the Bootleggers of the Bahamas!

by Larry Smith

Here's to the bootleggers of the Bahamas,
Who sit on rye kegs, resting feet on beer kegs,
Singing 'yes, we want no bananas'.
--bootlegger's toast

Ever heard of the Bahama Queen?

Not a mailboat, but a flesh and blood woman who, for a few years during the "Roaring Twenties", became an international celebrity as a bootlegger in Nassau.

Gertrude Lythgoe was the only woman to hold a wholesale liquor license here - at a time when women were to be seen and not heard. Her autobiography has just been republished - along with the memoirs of several other rum-runners - by Flat Hammock Press, which says its mission is to is "to salvage many of the maritime classics of the past and introduce them and the authors to today’s readers."

Most of these accounts have long been out of print. But now they have been updated for modern readers with added insight, information and photographs. For example, Lythgoe's brief memoir (available in local bookstores or from Media Enterprises)includes the full series of newspaper articles that made her famous.

In those days, the Bahamas was considered a "land of rascals, rogues and peddlers" (no comments from the peanut gallery please). And according to the London Daily News, Bay Street was little more than a row of "crazy old liquor stores, unpainted and dilapidated, (that) have given it the nickname of booze avenue."

The More Things Change...Nassau's Straw Market Controversy

by Larry Smith

"The daily passage of market women up and down Market Street, under the stone arch named after Govenor Gregory, completed in 1852, was one of the picturesque Nassau sights. Some vendors walked great distances, their goods expertly balanced in flat wooden trays on their heads."-- Islanders in the Stream, by Gail Saunders & Michael Craton.

It seems that the more things change in Nassau, the more they stay the same. The following comment was written to a local newspaper in 1880, and we are still making the same complaints today.

"Anyone walking down Bay Street may count dozens of lewd characters of both sexes lurking especially in the vicinity of Vendue House using most obscene language...while perchance may be seen a policeman listlessly walking by, apparently heedless of what is happening."

Vendue House - now the Pompey Museum - was already a century old when that letter to the editor was written. It had been built on the site of an earlier market (at the junction of George and Bay Streets) to process the arrival of enslaved Africans.

Soon after, another market was set up on the waterfront further east. This is the site which is now - 200 years later - just a big hole in the ground. And it was those same enslaved Africans who gave rise to the straw vendors who once occupied that market, by adapting basketware traditions brought from their home cultures.

A Footnote in the History of Bahamian Political Journalism

by Sir Arthur Foulkes

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers …

It was not as grand as the enterprise upon which the king was embarking in Shakespeare’s play, Henry V, but it was of some significance for the history of politics and journalism in The Bahamas as a happy few, a band of brothers, gathered in a small house on Wulff Road in 1963.

Dudley Nathaniel Gilbert was one of them. Mr. Gilbert’s recent passing was hardly noticed except for the grateful congregation of Our Lady of All Souls Catholic Church on Deveaux Street where he was for many years acolyte, and a few in the newspaper fraternity who remembered him from past years.

The story started in 1960 when a group of activists in the PLP decided to add a new dimension to the political debate raging in the country at the time. Warren Levarity, a young, newly-elected Member of Parliament (MHA in those days), went to S. J. Amoury’s store on Bay Street and negotiated the purchase on credit of an electric Gestetner copying machine.

So a 12-page typewritten and stapled political journal called Bahamian Times started to publish once or twice a month and immediately attracted a small but devoted readership. The new publication found its way onto the shelves of Moseley’s Bookstore on Bank Lane, which in those days was notable.

The Very Mixed Track Record of Out Island Resort Projects in the Bahamas

by Larry Smith

The so-called 'anchor project' model of development is a hot-button topic these days - critics say we are selling our birthright to foreign speculators for a mess of pottage.

But this model is not new. It dates back to the early years of the 20th century. And over the past hundred years, most examples in the out islands have failed, often leaving derelict buildings and environmental havoc in their wake.

Although the 'anchor project' policy was codified by the Pindling government in the late 1970s, the idea actually originated in response to the new-found prosperity generated by bootlegging in the 1920s.

During prohibition, liquor was profitably smuggled in huge quantities from the Bahamas to the United States, and since West End and Bimini were nearest to the American mainland - that's where the first out island resorts were conceived.

On Abolition

by Nicolette Bethel

In 2007, we in the British New World will observe a bicentenary of great significance. The anniversary I'm talking about is the Abolition of the slave trade by Great Britain. That is a different thing from the Abolition of slavery, which made it illegal for anyone throughout the British Empire to own other human beings. Rather, it was the abolition of the practice of sailing to other people's countries and enslaving their people to provide free labour on land appropriated from yet another set of people.

In 1807, the British Parliament made it illegal to enslave human beings afresh. The Abolition Act didn't grant immediate freedom to those people who were already slaves; but it put an end to the profiteering that came from capturing new people.

We know slavery was bad. We know it's an indelible part of our history. But it's over, and it has been in our country for almost two hundred years. So why should we commemorate Abolition, when it didn't actually erase the institution of slavery or free the slaves?

Slavery and the Struggle to End It

by Larry Smith

Old pirates, yes, they rob I;
Sold I to the merchant ships,
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit.

--Redemption Song by Bob Marley

Question is - just who were those robbing pirates, and what impact did they have on the the way we live today?

Turns out, the pirates were most often Africans, under whose authority the Atlantic slave trade was conducted.

According to Syracuse University historian Zayde Antrim, "Not only was slavery an established institution in West Africa before European traders arrived, but Africans were also involved in a trans-Saharan trade in slaves."

Last week's article on the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade drew three interesting comments. And since one of the declared aims of the abolition bicentenary is to generate a discussion on slavery and race relations, we thought that republishing them here would be a good way to get the ball rolling.

Bahamas Commemoration of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

by Larry Smith

"May the time come...when the sable people shall gratefully commemorate the auspicious era of extensive freedom." -- Olaudah Equiano

Olaudah Equiano was born in what is now Nigeria and kidnapped into slavery at the age of 11. He was shipped to Barbados and then to Virginia, where he was able to buy his freedom in 1766.

In later life, he played an active role in the British movement to abolish the slave trade. And his autobiography was an international bestseller, presenting an eyewitness account of slavery from a true insider's perspective.

Winston Saunders was a Bahamian teacher and writer, as well as a lawyer and judge. His untimely death in Jamaica on Saturday at the age of 65 is a profound loss to the cultural community in the Bahamas.

At the time, Mr Saunders was meeting with Jamaican officials to discuss the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in his role as co-chairman of the Bahamas Cultural Development Commission.

The actual 200th anniversary of the British law that ended the slave trade occurs on March 25, 2007. It marks a tremendous achievement that represented the beginning of the end of human slavery - a condition that has existed in various forms since ancient times.

Next year's commemoration will feature special events throughout Britain and in other countries that were involved in the transatlantic slave trade.

Cyril Stevenson and the Political History of The Bahamas

by Larry Smith

"Cyril St John Stevenson was probably the most intelligent and determined of the (PLP's) founding troika, and probably for that reason was regarded by Bay Street as the most dangerous." -- Michael Craton

Cyril Stevenson's lifetime spanned the entire modern political history of the Bahamas - and he was intimately involved in a lot of that history. Born in another era, at the time of the First World War, he died last week at the age of 92.

Tough Call was not one of Stevenson's contemporaries, nor do we claim any special insight into his life. But we do recall some engaging moments spent with him in the 1970s when we were both part of the government's communications infrastructure - I was a junior hack at the Bahamas News Bureau, and he was a semi-retired flack at Bahamas Information Services.

A big, friendly man, Stevenson was a self-taught journalist, and closely related to the Farrington family - a well-known clan of printers. He wrote for the Nassau Guardian when it was run by the arch-conservative Mary Moseley, but found his metier as editor of the anti-establishment Nassau Herald.

On the Dangers of Fundamentalism

by Larry Smith

"If you have suffered a defeat, so did the the enemy. We alternate these vicissitudes among mankind so that God may know the true believers and choose martyrs from among you; and that God may test the faithful and annihilate the infidels." -- The Koran (3:140).

"Most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday. Surely, if we create the world anew, the practice of organising our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature—to say nothing of killing and dying for them— would be impossible to justify."-- Sam Harris, The End of Faith.

According to the pope, since Islam has attacked the West, Christians should destroy Muslims as the enemies of God.

Of course, it was not the recently anointed Pope Benedict XVI who made this call. It was Pope Urban II - about a thousand years ago when he launched the first crusade against the Turks and Arabs who had conquered the formerly Christian Middle East.

But Ayman al-Zawahiri, the top deputy to Osama bin Laden, was quick to compare the two: "This charlatan Benedict brings back to our memories the speech of his predecessor charlatan Urban II in the 11th century...in which he instigated Europeans to fight Muslims."

The al Quaeda leader was referring to a recent lecture by Pope Benedict on the subject of faith and reason. In it, the pope referred to a 14th century religious debate between Greek and Persian scholars. This conversation took place about 50 years before the Turks captured Constantinople - putting an end to Christian civilisation in the East.

Carlos Lehder's Bahamian Legacy

by Larry Smith

Recently, a Bahamian political weblog posted a claim that Carlos Lehder - the notorious Colombian drug lord sentenced to life imprisonment in Florida in 1988 - was living comfortably with his wife on Paradise Island.

How could this be? Well it turns out that Lehder cut a deal with the US government in 1992 to help convict former Panama dictator Manuel Noriega on drug trafficking and money laundering charges. Noriega was part of Lehder's cocaine cartel in the 1980s.

That much is true, and there doesn't seem to be any doubt that Noriega remains in a federal prison in Miami (although he is due for release next year). But some are convinced that the US government freed Lehder in the 1990s.

How Bahamians Benefited from Majority Rule

by Sir Arthur Foulkes

All of Bahamian society benefitted in one way or another from the historic event that took place on January 10, 1967, a day that now wears the rather inelegant appellation of Majority Rule Day.

Popular movements for freedom and justice can be suppressed and sometimes even crushed. But, more often than not, attempts at suppression lead only to more radical - and sometimes violent -resurgence. There are vivid examples of this right now on the world stage.

What is disturbing is that so many world leaders seem not to understand this or else they are recklessly willing to play the odds.

The architects of the progressive movement in the Bahamas in the Sixties often told the uncompromising old guard that the country would be better off if the old guard dealt with them rather than face a more radicalized generation later on.

After all, most of the majority rule architects were committed to orderly non-violent change and had already moderated their political philosophy away from the far left thinking which dominated insurgent movements around the world.

The March to Majority Rule in The Bahamas

by Sir Arthur Foulkes

Another January 10 has come and gone and with it another round in the debate about what it means and whether it should be officially recognized in the calendar of national holidays.

There were many interesting comments on the radio talk shows and two particularly good contributions in the print media. One was by Tribune columnist Zhivargo Laing on January 12 and the other by Guardian writer Andrew Edwards. The piece by Mr. Edwards was tucked away in the Weekender supplement of The Guardian distributed with its January 13 issue. Both are well worth reading.

Unfortunately, today’s PLP, despite some appropriate comments by Prime Minister Perry Christie, has not matured enough to accept the full implications of the change, how it came to be and how it has been sustained and developed. It is unable to resist the temptation to treat it as a PLP thing and to milk it for partisan advantage.

One of the interesting questions posed by a caller on one of the radio shows went something like this: Why does not the 1962 general election mark the real beginning of majority rule and the full flowering of democracy in the Bahamas?

On History

by Nicolette Bethel

Too many of us, still, thirty-two years after independence and thirty-eight years after we began to govern ourselves, believe that things Bahamian are second-class, gauche, nothing much to write home about. And too many of us who think that are black.

I once taught a class of English students the beginning principles of argumentation. They were a bright group, eager to engage with the topics we raised, anxious to master new skills. They had only one limitation, through no fault of their own: they knew very little about Bahamian history.

It surprised me then, but it shouldn’t have. After all, history has never been our strong suit. The success of Majority Rule in the 1960s created a kind of intellectual myopia that led us to reject everything that oppressed us before in our embracing of our newfound freedom. Unlike our neighbours in the USA and Cuba, Haiti and Jamaica, we did not embark upon a massive campaign of education about the Bahamian people, political or otherwise. The first comprehensive Bahamian history book was written by an Englishman, the second by a white Bahamian. The majority of us existed the ever-living Now.

In the three decades that we have been content to go with the flow, to sail along, catching the currents wherever they take us, we have allowed what is past get taken by the slipstream. Our old buildings decay, our elderly die; too much that is fundamental is being forgotten. And we have raised up generations who know so little about themselves and their past that think they are descended from nothing.

The Origins of Bahamian Aviation

by Larry Smith

It was liquor that brought flying to the Bahamas – just a decade or two after the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903.

Commercial aviation took off after the First World War, when many military aircraft and the men who flew them converted to civilian life. It was a time when liquor was banned in the United States, but smuggling it was big business.

A mechanic from Kentucky named Arthur ‘Pappy’ Chalk is often credited with starting the world’s first airline. In 1917 he ran charters from Miami, and two years later began scheduled flights to Bimini, carrying both rum runners and lawmen. Pappy Chalk retired in 1964 and died 13 years later. But Chalk’s Ocean Airways still operates seaplanes to the Bahamas.

Bahamian & American Freedom Fighters

by Sir Arthur Foulkes

Rosa Parks, the black American woman whose simple act of defiance sparked one of the great movements of the 20th century, died in October in her sleep.

It was in December 1955 that Mrs. Parks, a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat on a bus for a white man. She was arrested, convicted and fined. That launched a bus boycott and the civil rights movement which changed the history of the United States.

It inspired and challenged leadership in the black community and that challenge was magnificently met by a young Baptist preacher who went on to lead a great non-violent revolution and to become a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. paid the ultimate price when he was struck down by an assassin’s bullet in April 1968.

Who Were the First Bahamians?

by Larry Smith

•Languages of the Pre-Columbian Antilles by Dr Julian Granberry was published in 2004 by the University of Alabama Press. It is available in Nassau bookstores.

When Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492 – after sailing the ocean blue - there were some 3,000 native Indian groups living in the Americas.

But the only Indians that Columbus himself saw were the Tainos of the Caribbean - including the Bahamian Lucayans - a society that the Europeans completely destroyed in a few short years.

Although Columbus and his brothers were men of their times, the brutal subjugation of Taino societies really began in 1502, under the direction of Nicolas de Ovando. Within two decades they ceased to exist as a separate population due to forced labour, warfare, disease, emigration and outmarriage.

And the whole regional culture officially expired in 1797, when the British deported the last independent group of Indians from St Vincent to Central America.

A Hurricane Across the Green Fields of Life: How the 1918 Flu Affected the Caribbean

by Larry Smith

“So vast was the catastrophe...that our minds, surfeited with the horrors of war, refused to realise it. It came and went, a hurricane across the green fields of life, sweeping away our youth in the hundreds of thousands and leaving a toll of sickness and infirmity which will not be reckoned in this
generation.” -- Article in the Times of London on the 1918 influenza pandemic.

The Purple Death (or Spanish Flu) was born in March 1918 in the American midwest. A second, more deadly, wave of infection began in August of that year - probably in France - and continued into 1919.

This outbreak rapidly engulfed the world, killing more than 50 million people in a few months at the end of the Great War. And it is now known that the Purple Death (so named because it turned patients blue as they died) was a bird flu, similar to the one threatening us today.

The Effie Knowles Saga

by Larry Smith

This is a story about unusual Bahamian connections...a tale that begins in the 18th century and still spins today. A story about Indians, lawyers and land sharks...and a glimpse of the life of one little-known woman of Bahamian descent who made good in the United States, but left open a pandora's box of island intrigue.

**********

Florida lawyer Effie Knowles is something of a celebrity in Bahamian real estate and legal circles these days, although she has been dead for 20 years and few people have ever heard of her.

Her parents were Bahamian emigres. She was born in Key West in 1892 and died in Miami in 1984 at the ripe old age of 92. Her grandfather – James Alexander Knowles was born on Long Island in 1839 and moved to Key West. Florida did not become a US territory until 1821 and for a long time Bahamians looked on the Keys as northern Out Islands.

At the height of the Depression, the 1930 census puts Effie living with her widowed mother (Julia), two sisters (Laura and Beatrice) and a brother (William) in Miami. All five were described as white and literate, and Effie - a lawyer - owned the house. All are now dead.

But their legacy lives on - a legacy that stretches back to the earliest land grants in the Bahamas. In fact, Effie’s claim to more than 12,000 acres on several Bahamian islands has generated enormous controversy lately, with some describing transactions involving this estate as “the biggest land fraud in our history”.