Eaten. Most castaway accounts end up that way, it seems. It’s not always a matter of human flesh, but always gruesome. There are no direct accounts of castaways in the Northern Bahamas. But we know they were there. The Abacos were the gateway to the new world. The Northwest Providence channel – the main route to the new world for the Spanish trade routes. For the pirates that trailed them. The first chance in a cross-Atlantic voyage for an unsuspecting ship to be caught on a shoal, tossed and crushed in shallow seas. The men aboard were no doubt more resilient than their ship. Most cases meant a mile or less to shore.
Just a mile to the shade of mahogany and pine.
Because these ships would wreck in increasing multitudes, there was no doubt - regardless if you were Spanish, French or English, if you lived you were cast onto a shore dotted with bearded and sun-poisoned versions of your adversaries.
Woodes Rogers led expeditions into the South Seas in the beginning of the eighteenth century. His tales would come to be known as some of the greatest in the history of British sailing. Curiously, he rescued a man named Alexander Selkirk who had been marooned on an island off the South American coast for four years. Roger’s accounts of Selkirk’s life on ‘Greater Land’ Island, Leslie explains, was the springboard for the castaway genre.
After his career at sea, Woodes Rogers' dream was to colonize the Bahamas, largely as a means to rid it as a breeding ground for pirates. That’s what the Northern Bahamas was – it was men who had been cast ashore in wrecks. It was men who left their fleet for the bounty of other ships spoils. It was whalers in untouched terrain. It was, at the time, one of the roughest places in the new world.
