New Plymouth hosted one of the largest wrecking harbours. Over a dozen schooners were geared and maintained for the business of salvaging wrecks.

Wrecking pushed Green Turtle Cay into relative prosperity. But curiously enough, pineapples would pick up the slack as new shipping and navigation technology would lessen the amount of wrecks off the Northern Abaco coasts.

Bahamian soil is considered of low quality, but for pineapples, the sandy desert-like soil meant good drainage for this oversized bromeliad.

These pineapples were found by Columbus' men on the island of Guadeloupe on his second voyages to the Caribbean. Curiously, they were found next to a pot of cooking human body parts.

Before that, they were cultivated for centuries by the Incas in South America. It is believed that they were brought from their native lands of Paraguay and Brazil to the Caribbean islands by Lucayan, Carib and Taino indians. These are the people who populated the West Indies before the Spanish arrived and considered pineapples a staple too important to leave behind. The plant itself comes from the inland valleys of Paraguay and Brazil

Because pineapples, especially those cultivated in the Caribbean, were so quick to go bad on long voyages overseas, became demanded as a delicacy exclusive to royalty and the upper classes in England, and in America as the symbol of hospitality.

Green Turtle residents were quick to turn from wrecking to pineapple farming to meet this demand for new world exotic. By the end of the nineteenth century, after reports of the Bahamian pineapples being the best in the world, England and America were both importing the pineapple by the hundreds of thousands. The industry flourished in Green Turtle Cay until the United States annexed Hawaii, creating a producer who had no duties to pay.