Qualla: Blue Lagoon Island

Blue Lagoon Island: Introduction

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit SallySwims, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1875, an Englishman named Charles King-Harman bought a small Bahamian island from the British Crown for thirty-five pounds. He would go on to be knighted, govern Cyprus, and presumably accumulate many fine possessions -- but none with a story quite like Salt Cay, the legal name for a scrubby island whose lagoon had been a salt marsh for as long as anyone could remember. Pirates had stopped there to harvest salt for preserving food while they waited for permission to enter Nassau Harbour. Privateers did the same. The island changed hands five times in the next three decades, its price ticking up and down with the modest ambitions of each owner. Today it is called Blue Lagoon Island, and tourists arrive by ferry to swim with dolphins in a lagoon that was, not so long ago, a swamp.

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Image: SallySwims | CC BY-SA 4.0

Blue Lagoon Island: Thirty-Five Pounds and a Salt Marsh

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gregory Varnum, CC BY-SA 4.0. The island's early transaction history reads like a lesson in Bahamian real estate speculation -- modest, hopeful, and frequently disappointed. King-Harman held it for eleven years before selling to Sir Augustus John Adderley for one hundred and five pounds. Adderley kept it six ...

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Image: Gregory Varnum | CC BY-SA 4.0

Blue Lagoon Island: The Cartoonist's Treasure Island

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gregory Varnum, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1916, John T. McCutcheon bought the island sight unseen -- by mail -- for seventeen thousand five hundred dollars, from Van Winkle's estate. McCutcheon was the chief foreign correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, and apparently the...

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Image: Gregory Varnum | CC BY-SA 4.0

Blue Lagoon Island: Demolition Squads and Depth Charges

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gregory Varnum, CC BY-SA 4.0. During World War II, the Allies requisitioned Treasure Island for a year and put it to use that Van Winkle and McCutcheon could never have imagined. Three teams of British and American underwater demolition squads trained there, swimming the seven-mile circuit around the island d...

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Image: Gregory Varnum | CC BY-SA 4.0

Blue Lagoon Island: Dolphins in the Lagoon

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Williamclay18, CC BY-SA 4.0. The modern era of Blue Lagoon Island began in 1979 when L. A. Meister purchased it. In 1991, a distant storm -- over two thousand kilometers away -- sent nine-meter swells that cut the island physically in two at the lagoon's northwestern corner. A bridge now spans the gap. Two y...

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Image: Williamclay18 | CC BY-SA 4.0