Десмонд Бэгли - Bahama Crisis

My name is Tom Mangan and I am a Bahamian — a white Bahamian. This caused some comment when I was up at Cambridge; it is surprising how ill-informed even supposedly educated people can be about my home islands. I was told that I could not be a Bahamian because Bahamians are black; that the Bahamas are in the Caribbean, which they are not; and many confused the Bahamas with Bermuda or even Barbados. For these reasons and because an understanding of the geographical and political nature of the Bahamas is essential to my story it seems to me that I must describe them and also give a brief account of my family involvement.

The Bahamas are a chain of islands beginning about fifty miles off the coast of Florida and sweeping in an arc 500 miles to the south-east to a similar distance off the coast of Cuba. They consist of 700 islands (called cays locally, and pronounced ‘keys’) and about 2000 lesser rocks. The name is derived from the Spanish baja mar which means ‘shallow sea’.

I am descended from one of the Loyalists who fought in the American War of Independence. Surprisingly few people are aware that more Americans fought in that war on the side of the British than ever did under the rebel generals, and that the war was lost more by the incompetence of the British than any superiority on the part of George Washington. Be that as it may, the war was lost by the British, and the American nation was born.

Life in the new United States was not comfortable for the erstwhile Loyalists. Reviled by their compatriots and abandoned by the British, many thought it prudent to leave, the northerners going mostly to Nova Scotia and the southerners to the Bahamas or to the sugar islands in the Caribbean beyond Cuba. So it was that in 1784 John Henry Mangan elected to settle with his family on the island of Abaco in the Bahamas.

There was not much to Abaco. Shaped something like a boomerang, Great and Little Abaco Islands stretch for about 130 miles surrounded by a cluster of lesser cays. Most of these smaller cays are of coral, but Abaco itself is of limestone and covered with thick, almost impenetrable, tropical bush. Sir Guy Carleton intended to settle 1500 Loyalists on Abaco, but they were a footloose and fractious crowd and not many stayed. By 1788 the total population was about 400, half of whom were black slaves.

It is not hard to see why Carleton’s project collapsed. Abaco, like the rest of the Bahamian islands, has a thin, infertile soil, a natural drawback which has plagued the Bahamas throughout their history. Many cash crops have been tried — tomatoes, pineapples, sugar, sisal, cotton — but all have failed as the fertility of the soil became exhausted. It is not by chance that three settlements in the Bahamas are called Hard Bargain.

Still, a man could survive if he did not expect too much; there were fish in the sea, and one could grow enough food for one’s immediate family. Timber was readily available for building, the limestone was easily quarried, and palmetto leaf thatch made a good waterproof roof. John Henry Mangan not only survived but managed to flourish, along with the Sands, the Lowes, the Roberts and other Loyalist families whose names are still common on Abaco today.

The Mangans are a thin line because, possibly due to a genetic defect, they tend to run to girls like the Dutch royal family. Thus they did not grow like a tree with many branches but in a straight line. I am the last of the male Mangans and, as far as I know, there are no others of that name in the Islands.

But they survived and prospered. One of my forebears was a ship-builder at Hope Town on Elbow Cay; most of the local ships sailing the Bahamian waters were built on Abaco and the Mangan family built not a few and so became moderately well-to-do. And then there was the wrecking. As the United States grew in power there was much maritime traffic and many ships were wrecked on the Islands of the Shallow Sea. The goods they contained contributed greatly to the wealth of many an island family, the Mangans not excepted. But the great turning point in the family fortunes came with the American Civil War.

The Confederate south was starved of supplies because of the northern blockade, and cotton rotted on the docks. Any ship putting into Charleston or Wilmington found a ready market for its cargo; quinine costing $10 in Nassau brought in excess of $400 in Charleston, while cotton costing $400 at the dockside was worth $4000 in Liverpool. It was a most profitable, if risky, two-way trade and my great-grandfather saw his opportunity and made the family rich in half a decade.

It was his son, my grandfather, who moved the family from Abaco to Nassau on New Providence — Nassau being the capital of the Bahamas and the centre of trade. Yet we still own land on Abaco and I have been building there recently.

If my great-grandfather made the family rich it was my father who made it really wealthy. He became a multimillionaire which accounts for the fact that a Bahamian was educated at Cambridge. Again, it was running an American blockade which provided the profit.

On 15 January 1920 the United States went dry and, as in the Civil War, the Bahamas became a distribution centre for contraband goods. The Nassau merchants known as the Bay Street Boys, my father among them, soon got busy importing liquor. The profit margin was normally one hundred per cent and the business was totally risk-free; it was cash on the barrel and the actual blockade-running was done by the Americans themselves. It was said that there was so much booze stacked at West End on Grand Bahama that the island tipped by several degrees. And, for a Bahamian, the business was all legal.

All good things come to an end and the 18th Amendment was repealed by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, but by then my father was sitting pretty and had begun to diversify his interests. He saw with a keen eye that the advent of aircraft was going to have an impact on the tourist industry and would alter its structure. Already Pan-American was pioneering the Miami-Nassau route using Sikorsky seaplanes.

Bahamian tourism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was confined to the American rich and the four-month winter season. An American millionaire would bring his family and perhaps a few friends to spend the whole season on New Providence. This, while being profitable to a few, was of little consequence to the Bahamian economy, millionaires not being all that plentiful. My father took the gamble that aircraft would bring the mass market and invested in hotels. He won his gamble, but died before he knew it, in 1949.

I was eleven years old when my father died and had as much interest in money and business as any other boy of eleven, which is to say none. My mother told me that a trust fund had been set up for me and my two sisters and that I would come into my inheritance on my twenty-fifth birthday. She then continued to run the family affairs which she was quite capable of doing.

I went to school in Nassau but spent my holidays on Abaco under the watchful eye of Pete Albury, a black Abaconian whom I thought was old but, in fact, was about thirty at the time. He had worked for the family since he was a boy and looked after our property on Abaco. He had taught me to swim — a non-swimming Bahamian being as common as a wingless bird — and taught me to shoot, and we hunted the wild pig which are common on Abaco. He acted in loco parentis and tanned my hide when he thought I needed it. He stayed in my employ until his death not long ago.

Those early years were, I think, the most enjoyable of my life. In due course I went to England to study at Cambridge, and found England uncomfortably cold and wet; at least in the Bahamas the rain is warm. I took my degree and then went to the United States for a two-year course in business studies at Harvard to prepare myself for the administration of my inheritance. It was there I met Julie Pascoe who was to become my wife. In 1963 I was back in Nassau where, on my twenty-fifth birthday, there was much signing of documents in a lawyer’s office and I took control of the estate.