Qualla: Long Island, Bahamas

Long Island, Bahamas: Introduction

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wilson44691, Public domain. The Tropic of Cancer does not announce itself when it crosses Long Island. There is no painted line on the road, no monument at the precise latitude where the sun reaches its northernmost point overhead each June. But the invisible boundary slices through the upper quarter of this 80-mile-long island like a quiet declaration: everything south of here is tropical. Long Island is one of the Bahamas' Out Islands, a slender ribbon of land just six kilometers wide at its broadest, situated 265 kilometers southeast of Nassau. Its two coasts could belong to different countries -- steep, wave-battered headlands on the northeast side, broad white-sand beaches stretching languidly along the southwest. Between them, the island holds blue holes, plantation ruins, cave systems once inhabited by the Lucayan Taino, and a farming tradition that grows food in holes in the limestone.

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Image: Wilson44691 | Public domain

Long Island, Bahamas: Into the Blue Darkness

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mjbt, CC BY-SA 3.0. West of Clarence Town, the ocean floor opens into Dean's Blue Hole, one of the world's deepest underwater sinkholes -- at 202 meters, the deepest in the Western Hemisphere. The circular opening drops roughly 200 meters straight down -- more than double the depth of most other blu...

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Image: Mjbt | CC BY-SA 3.0

Long Island, Bahamas: Columbus, or Maybe Not

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rüdiger Stehn from Kiel, Deutschland, CC BY-SA 2.0. Some historians identify Long Island as Fernandina, the third island Christopher Columbus visited during his 1492 voyage. Scholars Joseph Judge and Samuel Eliot Morison made this case, noting that the Lucayan people called the island Yuma, meaning "middle high land." Other resear...

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Image: Rüdiger Stehn from Kiel, Deutschland | CC BY-SA 2.0

Long Island, Bahamas: Loyalists, Cotton, and Collapse

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Igor Liberti, CC BY-SA 4.0. The next wave of settlers came fleeing a revolution of their own. American Loyalists, primarily from New England and New Jersey, arrived on Long Island after the colonies won independence. They started farms, raising cattle and sheep on the thin soil. By the 1790s, settlers from ...

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Image: Igor Liberti | CC BY-SA 4.0

Long Island, Bahamas: Farming in the Holes

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wilson44691 at English Wikipedia, Public domain. Bahamian soil is notoriously inhospitable -- thin, alkaline, and sitting on porous limestone that drains water before roots can drink it. Long Island's farmers solved this problem with a technique as practical as it is improbable: pot-hole farming. Across the island, natural depr...

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Image: Wilson44691 at English Wikipedia | Public domain

Long Island, Bahamas: One Road, Two Airports, and All That Sand

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ton Engwirda, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl. A single road, originally built for horse-drawn carriages, runs the full length of Long Island from Cape Santa Maria at the northern tip to Gordon's at the southern end. Two small airports serve the island: Deadman's Cay Airport near the center, with Bahamasair service, and Stell...

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Image: Ton Engwirda | CC BY-SA 3.0 nl