Islanders in the Stream is an ambitious attempt to give “the Bahamas and its people … a proper history of their own” (p. xi). Written by the leading historians of the Bahamas, the present volume, the first of two, covers “Aboriginal Times to the End of Slavery.” The authors’ stated objective is to write a social history “to give recognition to ordinary Bahamians and to tell the story of their long struggle for self-realization against those same elites to whom their history has hitherto belonged” (p. xx). To a large degree, they succeed.
The book is divided into three parts, corresponding to the three principal migrations of peoples into the Bahamas: the Lucayans about A.D. 600, the early European settlers in the mid-seventeenth century, and the Loyalists and their slaves beginning in 1783. The last section is by far the best. Michael Craton and Gail Saunders bring the Loyalist period to life. The reader experiences the ups and downs of both slaves and masters: how slaves actively challenged and negotiated their status; how, by the time of emancipation, many plantations were barely able to feed and clothe the slaves, let alone make a profit; and how Bahamian slaves molded their living conditions to create successful families.
The middle section is good, standard history. As the authors note, the dearth of documents from this period makes it extremely difficult to write a “social history.” Nevertheless, their attention to detail aptly describes this period of great flux in population and the Bahamas’ position in the emerging world capitalist system.
The weakest section of the book are the chapters that discuss the Lucayans—the native peoples who inhabited the islands when Columbus arrived in 1492 and who disappeared at the hands of the Spanish by 1525. Although the authors’ descriptions of native life and recounting of archaeological research are adequate, many of their interpretations are not. To some degree this results from their having completed this book in 1987. Given the rapid pace of archaeological research in the West Indies, some of the data they use are outdated. The most glaring example is Craton’s insistence that native peoples entered the Bahamas to escape from marauding Caribs. Island Carib culture did not emerge in the West Indies until almost one thousand years after the Bahamas were colonized. In addition, the authors place far too much reliance on the work of avocational archaeologist Fred Olsen (On the Trail of the Arawaks, 1974). Antonio Stevens-Arroyo’s recent book Cave of the Jagua: The Mythological World of the Tainos (1988) completely disregards Olsen’s speculations.
One of the most difficult tasks in West Indian history is to forge a link between the native people and the Africans and Europeans who succeeded them. In most cases there is no direct link between these people (for example, the Bahamas were uninhabited from 1525 to 1647). The authors would have been wise to ignore the “aboriginal” inhabitants and focus solely on the “long struggle for self-realization.” It is in the latter that their work really shines. Freed from reliance on secondhand archaeological reasoning and situating their work in a historical context, Craton and Saunders create a proper history for the Bahamas. In so doing they also succeed in producing a model for histories of all former colonies.
