Bahamas

The most accepted explanation traces Bahamas to the Spanish phrase baja mar, meaning shallow sea. The waters around the island chain sit on the Great Bahama Bank, a vast limestone shelf that keeps the ocean remarkably thin in places, sometimes only a few meters deep for miles. Spanish sailors approaching from Cuba and Hispaniola in the early sixteenth century named the surrounding sea for its most immediately striking characteristic.

An older theory, persistent in some Bahamian histories, holds that the Lucayan Taíno called the main island Baha Ma, meaning large upper middle land. The Lucayan people were the indigenous inhabitants Columbus encountered in 1492 on what he called San Salvador. They were enslaved and removed to work the Spanish mines of Hispaniola within two decades of contact, and their language left almost no written record.

By the mid-sixteenth century, the Spanish were using Bahama as a placename for the northern island and the surrounding channel. The Bahama Channel was the principal route for treasure fleets returning from the Americas to Spain, a narrow, reef-studded passage that Atlantic pilots navigated with extreme care. The name moved from the sea to the islands as English pirates and settlers began using the archipelago as a base in the seventeenth century.

England claimed the islands formally in 1629, and the name settled into English usage as The Bahamas, taking the plural form to gesture at the chain of some seven hundred islands and cays. The pirate republic of Nassau flourished there in the early 1700s before the British Crown reasserted control in 1718 under Governor Woodes Rogers. The Spanish phrase had become, by then, the permanent address of a place that neither the Spanish nor the Lucayan Taíno any longer controlled.