The Wreckers, Pineapples and Pirates of Green Turtle Cay

The Bahamian islet known as Green Turtle Cay is named for the hundreds of sea turtles which once inhabited the island’s many Atlantic coves and the shallow waters of protected natural harbors.

Lucayan Indians once lived on Green Turtle Cay, but within a generation of Columbus they were enslaved by Spaniards and carried off to the mines of Hispaniola and the pearl beds of Venezuela, where their skill as divers made them valuable and killed them. By about 1520 the Bahamas were empty. After they were gone, pirates used those harbors, and they called their provisions belly timber. There was no better belly timber than a green turtle. Turtles were so plentiful here, and so good to eat on long voyages, that sailors stacked them alive on their backs in the hold, where they would live for weeks without food or water.

Now, few sea turtles inhabit the waters off Green Turtle Cay, and even fewer pirates, but when you arrive on this island, usually by ferry from nearby Treasure Cay, you are likely to enter at New Plymouth, a harbor town of 450 whose eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture is largely preserved. Because New Plymouth has changed so little, its original architecture is a living document of New England fishing village architecture, painted in Bahamian color.

The King’s Refugees

To this day, most of the Bahamian residents of New Plymouth trace their roots back to the original colonizers of this town. New Plymouth is one of the many settlements where Americans loyal to the British, living beforehand primarily in Florida and New York, came to escape their shunned existence in America. For one reason or another, they chose allegiance to the British Crown over the new republic, and they paid for it. The bronze plaques in New Plymouth’s Loyalist Memorial Sculpture Garden remember neighbors who suffered verbal abuse, lost their civil rights and property, and endured beatings and prison.

When the war was lost, the British still held two refuges. New York City was evacuated in 1783, and the ships that sailed south in August of that year landed a mixed company of white and Black Loyalists, free and enslaved, at the north end of Great Abaco, where they founded a town named Carleton, after the British commander in New York. East Florida was handed back to Spain in the peace treaty, and its Loyalists, many of them Southern planters with enslaved workers, had to move again. Between 1783 and 1788 several thousand refugees came to the Bahamas. Carleton lasted only about a year before failed crops and quarrels split it, and most of its people moved south to found Marsh Harbour. Others spread out onto the barrier cays, and by about 1786 families had settled the harbor at the south end of Green Turtle Cay.

Some of these small island settlements flourished, and some perished in the century after the revolutionary war. The cays were no place for plantations, and the people who stayed on them were mostly small farmers, fishermen, carpenters and boatbuilders. New Plymouth would grow into a town whose white families carried Loyalist names like Lowe and Curry, alongside a Black community descended from the enslaved people the Loyalists brought with them, who were freed when Britain abolished slavery in 1834.

Learning the Tropics

Most of these settlers had never lived in the tropics. They came from the farms and waterfronts of New York, the Carolinas and Florida, and they had been promised good land. What they found was limestone with a skin of soil over it. Abaco’s pine barrens and scrubby coppice sat on rock so shallow that in the dry season the sun heated the stone and burned whatever they planted. Cotton grew for a few seasons, and then the chenille caterpillar and the exhausted soil finished it. Across the Bahamas the Loyalist cotton boom was over within a generation.

So they learned the way of the islands, from the old hands already in the Bahamas and from the enslaved Africans among them, who knew hot-country farming far better than their owners did. With cutlass, hoe and planting stick, they cut the scrub, set fire to it, pulled up the burned stumps, and when the rains came, planted in the pockets of soil between the rock: corn, pigeon peas, sweet potatoes, cassava and pumpkins. When the soil tired, they moved on and cut a fresh field.

There are no rivers in the Abacos, and wells dug into the rock often turned brackish, so every roof became a water supply, and every house needed a cistern to catch the rain. Kitchens were built as separate little buildings behind the house, to keep the heat and the danger of fire away from the living quarters. You can still see an original outside kitchen and latrine behind the Albert Lowe Museum.

The sea fed them more reliably than the land. They dove for conch, caught fish and turtles in homemade cotton nets and lines, and preserved fish by corning it: slicing the flesh, salting it heavily and hanging it to dry in the sun. They doctored themselves with bush medicine, the fever bush and cough bush of the coppice. And because every man on a cay had to be his own boatwright, carpenter and sailor, the Loyalist craftsmen of the Abacos became some of the finest boatbuilders in the Bahamas, working in pine and island hardwoods and sailing their sloops and schooners to Nassau, Florida and beyond.

Wreckers and Pineapples

Green Turtle Cay in its earliest days, adjacent to the shipping routes to and from the New World, was lucky enough to face a continuous stream of wrecked ships. This Bahamian stretch of water could prove perilous in rough seas, and wrecked ships became giant salvage sites to those brave enough to wipe clean the abandoned vessels’ wood, metal, rations, oils and cargo.

New Plymouth hosted one of the largest wrecking harbours. Over a dozen schooners were geared and maintained for the business of salvaging wrecks. The merchants who sold the salvage stored it where they could; the house that is now the Albert Lowe Museum kept its salvaged goods in the cellar.

Wrecking pushed Green Turtle Cay into relative prosperity, and it pulled many of its young men away. Key West was the wrecking capital of the Florida Straits, and Bahamian families moved there by the boatload. William Curry was born on Green Turtle Cay in 1821, sailed for Key West at sixteen, and made a fortune as a wrecker, merchant and shipbuilder, becoming Florida’s first self-made millionaire. Key West and New Plymouth are sister cities today.

But curiously enough, pineapples would pick up the slack as lighthouses and new shipping and navigation technology would lessen the amount of wrecks off the Northern Abaco coasts. When the Elbow Reef Lighthouse at Hope Town was lit in 1863, the wreckers of the Abacos were not happy about it.

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

These pineapples were found by Columbus’ men on the island of Guadeloupe on his second voyage to the Caribbean, in November 1493. Curiously, they were found next to a pot of cooking human body parts.

Before that, they were cultivated for centuries by the Indigenous peoples of South America. The plant itself comes from the lowlands around the Paraná and Paraguay Rivers, in what is now Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, and it is believed that Tupi-Guarani and Carib peoples carried it north to the Caribbean islands. These are the people who populated the West Indies before the Spanish arrived and considered pineapples a staple too important to leave behind.

Because pineapples, especially those cultivated in the Caribbean, were so quick to go bad on long voyages overseas, they became a delicacy exclusive to royalty and the upper classes in England, and in eighteenth-century America a symbol of hospitality, carved into gateposts and doorways.

Green Turtle residents were quick to turn from wrecking to pineapple farming to meet this demand for the New World exotic. The pineapple years on Green Turtle Cay ran from the late 1860s to about 1900. In 1870 a single schooner carried six thousand dozen pineapples to New York, and a Baltimore company built a canning factory on Black Sound, where the fruit was pared, sliced and sealed in tins with cistern water and sugar. 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 in 1898, creating a producer who had no duties to pay. American tariffs on Bahamian fruit, exhausted soil and plant disease did the rest.

Sponges, Storms and the Crown

After pineapples, Green Turtle Cay experimented with a number of industries, from sponging, to crawfishing and sharking. Sponging was the big one. For a time around the turn of the twentieth century it employed a third of the working men in the Bahamas, until a blight in 1938 killed nearly every sponge in Bahamian waters in two months.

By then the town had already been knocked flat. On September 5, 1932, the first Category 5 hurricane on record in the Bahamas crossed Green Turtle Cay with winds near 160 miles per hour and a storm surge that flattened most of New Plymouth. Families rebuilt on the old lines, in the old style.

The Loyalist loyalty never quite left. When the Bahamas moved toward independence in 1973, a delegation from Abaco petitioned the Queen to let the islands remain a British colony, and an Abaco Independence Movement kept the idea alive for a while afterward, with supporters in New Plymouth. The petition went nowhere. What remains is memory: the Albert Lowe Museum, opened in 1976 in one of the finest old houses in the Bahamas, and the Loyalist Memorial Sculpture Garden, where two dozen bronze busts of settlers stand alongside a young Black girl holding a conch shell and a young white girl holding the Union Jack. In 2019 Hurricane Dorian tested the town again.

I like to visit Green Turtle Cay, because, unlike so many destinations in the Caribbean, the history wasn’t re-imagined, emulated, or constructed to attract tourism dollars. Green Turtle Cay, on a quiet Sunday evening with a fresh tradewind breeze, is ageless.