The mid-seventeenth century is a period of…
1648 CE
The mid-seventeenth century is a period of constant religious and political turmoil in England and in Europe that culminates in the English Civil War fought between the king, Charles I and Parliament, represented by the Puritan Oliver Cromwell.
This conflict has spread to Bermuda, where a period of civil strife has resulted in a victory for the supporters of the Royalist party in the English Civil War.
The struggle eventually leads to the expulsion of those who do not swear allegiance to the Crown, particularly the colony's Puritans and independents.
The small group of Puritan settlers, led by a man named William Sayle, search for a place in which they can freely practice their faith.
The English had laid claim to the Bahamas in 1629, in the midst of the English Civil War, but had made no permanent settlements.
Bermuda is also becoming overcrowded, and the Bahamas offers both religious and political freedom and economic opportunity.
The Bermuda Puritans had sent an expedition to explore these new islands in 1644, but one vessel had been lost and the other had failed to find a suitable island.
Sayle nevertheless takes some seventy people to settle in the Bahamas, sometime between spring 1646 and autumn 1648, as 'The Company of Adventurers for the Plantation of the Islands of Eleutheria'.
They make landfall on the island called Cigateo, which they name Eleutheria, from the Greek word for "freedom", although the name later becomes Eleuthera.
The island's original inhabitants, the Lucayans, had been decimated through the slaving activities of the Spanish and the numerous European diseases, especially smallpox, that had followed.
The larger of the company's two ships wrecks on the reef at the north end of what is now called Eleuthera Island, with the loss of all provisions.
Despite the arrival of additional settlers from Bermuda, including whites, enslaved blacks and free blacks, and the receipt of relief supplies from Virginia and New England, the Eleuthera colony is to struggle for many years.
This group represents the first concerted European effort to colonize the Bahamas—no effort had been made while the islands were under Spanish rule—but their claim to the islands will not survive the political turmoil of the Restoration in England.
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