Desperately Seeking Sunshine # 3: It's Better in the Bahamas

Due to unexpected technical difficulties, I was unable to carry on blogging while I was on the ship. Now that I am back in Canada, the blogging has begun and will continue until I’m all caught up.

 

As a Canadian, it’s certainly something of an oddity that I’ve taken so long to get to visit the city of Nassau, capital of the Bahamas.

 

 

When I was a youngster, a number of my friends had been to Nassau. In those days, flights from Toronto went only to those southern islands which were or had been British colonies – and only if said islands had runways big enough for modern four-engined jet aircraft.

 

In practice, that meant Bermuda, Nassau and Freeport in the Bahamas, Montego Bay and Kingston in Jamaica, and the islands of Antigua, Barbados, and Trinidad in the eastern Caribbean. The very idea of tourism in places like Cuba and the Dominican Republic was incomprehensible half a century ago. 

 

Times change. Today, Nassau (although still popular) is far less well known as a tourist destination for Canadians, as so many choose to go much farther south. It is, however, more often visited by its near neighbours to the west, the people of the southeastern United States. 

 

So here I am, making a first visit to this vibrant city on the Bahamian island of New Providence. The cruise ship terminal at Prince George Wharf in Nassau is capable of handling four or five ships per day. Our ship was one of just two on this Sunday.

Nassau is an excellent example of what geographers call a “primate city,” a term which refers to the fact that its population and political/social/economic importance dwarfs all other cities in the country. This is certainly true here, with Nassau’s population of 275,000 representing 70% of the entire population of the Bahamas!

 

Although the city was founded in the 1690s, it exploded in population in the late 1700s after the American War of Independence. Many Loyalists fled from the United States to such nearby British territories as the Maritimes, Ontario, Quebec – and the Bahamas.

 

The next great wave of growth came with the abolition of the slave trade by Britain in 1807. The Royal Navy undertook an aggressive campaign to capture slave ships travelling to the slave markets of the Caribbean from West Africa. Many of the slaves who were freed from the slave ships were resettled on New Providence and other islands in the region.

 

As for the intriguing name of the city, it was a name with special associations to the British of the late 1600s as it was the honorific title of William, Prince of Nassau and Orange (in the Netherlands) who was invited by Parliament to become joint sovereign of England and Scotland in tandem with his wife Mary, daughter of King James II, after James abdicated and fled to France in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In accepting this invitation, William and Mary became the first (and so far only) joint sovereigns of England, so memorably defined for all time in the 1930 comic history parody by Sellar and Yeatman, 1066 And All That, as “Williamanmary: England Ruled by an Orange.”

 

The historic Dutch connection with William certainly explains why there is a “Nassau County” in New York (which used to be called Nieuw Amsterdam), and also makes this Bahamian city an appropriate port of call for a Dutch ship like the current Nieuw Statendam.

 

Not, mind you, that there is anything especially Dutch about Nassau at all. In appearance, the city centre is thoroughly British/colonial (with strong reminders of Bermuda), while the energetic life is as whole-heartedly Caribbean as you could desire.

 

Frankly, I barely scratched the surface. The tours of Nassau and its surroundings which were offered by the cruise line, and which I most wanted to take, were all sold out by the time I booked this cruise. More tours were added on later, but they were all variants of the “day on the beach” excursion – which doesn’t interest me.

 

So, after breakfast, I walked ashore. And walked and walked. And walked some more. All of this just to get down to the end of the pier and get into the city. Cruise ship piers have to keep getting longer and longer as the ships keep getting bigger and bigger.

 

I was already hooked, just from walking in along the pier and getting a view of the brilliantly-hued buildings on the waterfront in conjunction with a tugboat bearing what I felt to be a particularly honourable name.

 

 

Those colourful buildings, and the wing-like canopy which appears to be an outdoor stage for concerts and the like, are part of a new and ongoing harbourfront development which plainly has a lot of money behind it. But Nassau contains plenty of local colour in its own right, even when you are looking at older buildings such as this beautiful painted map and welcome sign on the wall of the Bahamas Shirt Company. The map, by the way, is more or less correct about the relative positions of the islands to each other, but very far out in terms of the distances between them.

 

 

 

Here's a more accurate map to set the record straight. The country stretches for hundreds of kilometres, all the way from Grand Bahama (and its near neighbours) and Bimini in the northwest right down to the Inagua Islands and Mayaguana in the southeast.

Map from The Nations Online Project -- free for educational use.

Down the street, you pass another iconic local store: "BlackBeard's" -- which claims to be the purveyor of the best rum cake in the country.  

Disclaimer: no hands-on product research was conducted by the author of this blog prior to transmitting this advertising claim.

 

The name "BlackBeard's," of course, refers to the famous pirate Edward Teach (1680-1718) who made use of New Providence Island as his headquarters at one stage of his notorious career. Thus, it struck me as downright ironic that another famous pirate with a long-standing connection to Nassau has his statue standing outside the back entrance of the BlackBeard’s store. Go figure.

 

 

Farther east by another block, you come to the world-famous Straw Market, housed in another highly-colourful building – seen here from the back…

 

 

…and from the front.

 

 

In the middle of downtown, Bay Street swerves north to go around a sizable obstacle, and then swerves back south again at this double bend, with traffic roaring through at top speed. 

 

 

The obstacle was the historic and luxurious British Colonial Hotel dating from 1924, and latterly a Hilton property. It closed in early 2022 due to pandemic losses and continued low bookings. Efforts are underway to revive it under a different brand. The white building in the picture is the hotel's east wing.

The stretch of Bay Street east of the British Colonial, with its covered arcades and pastel colours, appears to me very similar to the streetscape of  Front Street in Hamilton, Bermuda. 

 

 

This area is dominated by stores aimed at the tourist trade, but for once there are almost as many local operators' stores as there are of the chains that have a stranglehold on all of the cruise business in so many Caribbean island destinations. Proof positive: it's a five-minute walk or more from the exit of the cruise terminal to reach the ubiquitous chain restaurant, Senor Frogs, and almost as far to the equally unavoidable jewellery store, Effy's.

 

Directly across from the cruise wharf is Rawson Square, and behind Rawson Square, across Bay Street, is Parliament Square, with is classic pink architecture (right here is where the image of Bermuda became foremost in my mind). 

 

 

The sign on the pediment of Government House commemorates the Fiftieth Anniversary of the gaining of Bahamian independence from Britain in 1973. Like Canada, the Bahamas continues to acknowledge King Charles III as their own symbolic head of state -- but not as a British overlord, a distinction which mightily puzzles people from many countries.

Even though it was only 10:30 am, I was finding both the crowds and the legendary humidity of Nassau were getting to me, big time, so I headed back aboard. To close this post, here's a series of pictures from the ninth deck at the stern of the ship. In this view, looking southwest, you can see clearly the new waterfront development, with the white-roofed Straw Market and the imposing British Colonial Hotel beyond it.

Looking due south, you can see the low hills which form the backbone of New Providence and which, back in colonial times, marked the unofficial boundary between "white" Nassau by the harbour and "coloured" Nassau further south. The "flying saucer" is a sizable new cruise terminal now under construction (we had to walk around the east or left side of the building site to reach the city). Directly behind the terminal are the trees of Rawson Square with the Parliament building beyond.

 

This view to the east clearly shows Nassau's most dramatic landmark, the massive towers of the Atlantis resort on Paradise Island. 

It was the construction of the first phase of this resort which led the development of the entire island, including the building of the first of the two bridges connecting it to New Providence and the city. Today, Atlantis is the biggest single employer in Nassau, outside of the government, providing jobs to some 6,000 Bahamians. The complex contains a total of 3,805 guest rooms in its multiple buildings. I'll just stick to my nice cozy little cruise ship, thanks!