A

Mid-century[edit]
In 1741, Governor John Tinker and Peter Henry Bruce constructed Fort
Montague. Additionally, the Governor also reported a privateering boom in
the Thirteen Colonies in North America. He also reported that over 2300
sumptuous houses were built. In 1768 Governor William Shirley filled in
mosquito-breeding swamps and extended Nassau.

Loyalists, slaves and Black Seminoles[edit]

During the American War of Independence the Bahamas fell to Spanish
forces under General Galvez in 1782. A British-American Loyalist
expedition led by Colonel Andrew Deveaux, recaptured the islands in 1783.
After the American Revolution, the British issued land grants to American
Loyalists who had gone into exile from the newly established United States.
The sparse population of the Bahamas tripled within a few years. The
Loyalists developed cotton as a commodity crop, but it dwindled from insect
damage and soil exhaustion. In addition to slaves they brought with them,
the planters' descendants imported more African slaves for labour.
Most of the current inhabitants in the islands are descended from the
slaves brought to work on the Loyalist plantations. In addition, thousands of
captive Africans, who were liberated from foreign slave ships by the British
navy after the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, were resettled as
free persons in the Bahamas.
In the early 1820s, following the Adams–Onís Treaty ceding Florida from
Spain to the United States, hundreds of African slaves and Black
Seminoles escaped from Florida, most settling on Andros Island in the
Bahamas. Three hundred escaped in a mass flight in 1823. [18] While the
flow was reduced by federal construction of a lighthouse at Cape Florida in
1825, slaves continued to find freedom in the Bahamas. [18]
In August 1834, the traditional plantation life ended with the British
emancipation of slaves throughout most of its colonies. Freedmen chose to
work on their own small plots of land when possible.