Bahama Pundit

A Visit to Savannah and an Update on the Revitalisation of Nassau

by Larry Smith

"Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get." - Forrest Gump

SAVANNAH, Georgia— Live oak and magnolia trees drape the historic squares of this 18th century town, whose cobbled streets and museum-quality buildings attract hordes of movie producers and millions of visitors from all over the world.

Greater Savannah is about the same size as Nassau, and it is a model of architectural preservation, restoration and adaptive reuse. But since this is still America, the park bench where Tom Hanks sat to deliver his opening lines in the movie Forrest Gump is one of the city's top visitor attractions.

Almost every gift shop offers copies of Clint Eastwood's 1997 film, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which portrays Savannah's eccentric Southern society through the lens of a celebrated murder trial. And tour guides will mention these cinematic novelties in the same breath as Savannah's actual history.

Who The Hell Was George Campbell?

by Larry Smith

Shipping is the lifeblood of the global economy. And while most people know that the Bahamas is a major flag of convenience (with over 1600 vessels registered), few are aware that one of the world's greatest ship designers once called our islands home.

George Campbell left his imprint on an entire global industry, but moved about largely unnoticed - and nowhere more so than here. In fact, when his estate recently gave $10 million to the College of the Bahamas, most Bahamians had never heard his name, although he had lived in Nassau intermittently since the late 1960s.

His contribution to industrial development goes back to the dark days of the Second World War, when the first mass-produced freighter - known as the Liberty ship - helped win the war and drove the resurgence of global trade afterwards.

But Campbell had nothing to do with the Liberty ship - a simple 11,000-ton freighter fitted with a crude reciprocating steam engine capable of pushing it at a leisurely 10 ½ knots. Mass produced in American shipyards to a British design, these ships delivered the troops and supplies that were crucial to the Allied war effort.

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?