Qualla: Abaco Islands

Abaco Islands: Introduction

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nzeemin, CC BY-SA 3.0. Juan de la Cosa's map of the New World, printed in 1500, labels these islands Habacoa. The Turin map of 1523 calls them Iucayonique. By the time English cartographers caught up decades later, the name had simplified to Abaco, though nothing else about these islands has ever been simple. Sitting 193 miles east of Miami in the northern Bahamas, the Abaco chain stretches across Great Abaco and Little Abaco and a constellation of smaller cays, barrier islands that enclose turquoise shallows on one side and face the open Atlantic on the other. Protected by the third-largest barrier reef in the world, the islands have attracted and repelled settlers for five centuries, from the Lucayan people who were seized and enslaved by the Spanish until none remained, to the American Loyalists who arrived fleeing one revolution and nearly started another.

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Image: Nzeemin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Abaco Islands: Before the Maps Had Names

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joachim Greiner, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Lucayans were the first people to inhabit Abaco. A branch of the Taino who populated much of the Caribbean, they were also the first inhabitants of the Americas encountered by Christopher Columbus. What followed was swift and total. The Spanish began seizing Lucayans as slave...

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Image: Joachim Greiner | CC BY-SA 3.0

Abaco Islands: The Loyalists' Gamble

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Niemi, CC BY-SA 3.0. That same year, 1783, a call went out in the Royal Gazette of New York City for volunteers to settle Abaco. About 1,500 Loyalists, refugees from the newly independent American states, sailed south and founded the town of Carleton near modern-day Treasure Cay, naming it after Sir ...

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Image: Mike Niemi | CC BY-SA 3.0

Abaco Islands: Wrecked Chains

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dmadeo, CC BY-SA 4.0. The waters off Abaco became the site of a different kind of reckoning. In December 1830, the American slave ship Comet wrecked off the coast. Bahamian customs officers in Nassau seized the 165 enslaved people aboard and freed them, despite furious protests from the American crew....

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Image: Dmadeo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Abaco Islands: The Islands That Almost Left

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thomas Brown, CC BY 2.0. When Bahamian Prime Minister Lynden Pindling announced independence from Britain in June 1971, Abaco pushed back. The Greater Abaco Council formed to lobby for continued British rule and submitted a petition to the Queen asking that Abaco become a self-contained territory under B...

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Image: Thomas Brown | CC BY 2.0

Abaco Islands: Dorian's Mark

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit GOES imagery: CSU/CIRA & NOAA, Public domain. On September 1, 2019, Hurricane Dorian made landfall on Elbow Cay in the Abaco Islands as a Category 5 storm, tying the 1935 Labor Day hurricane as the strongest landfalling Atlantic hurricane on record. The damage was described as catastrophic. Seventy-five percent of homes acro...

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Image: GOES imagery: CSU/CIRA & NOAA | Public domain