San Salvador Island Guanahaní Watling's Island | |
---|---|
Island and District | |
![]() A map of San Salvador Island | |
Coordinates: 24°06′N74°29′W / 24.100°N 74.483°W | |
Country | Bahamas |
Island | San Salvador |
District | San Salvador |
Area | |
• Total | 163 km2 (63 sq mi) |
Population (2022) | |
• Total | 824 [1] |
Time zone | UTC−5 (Eastern Time Zone) |
Area code | 242 |
San Salvador Island, previously Watling's Island, is an island and district of the Bahamas, famed for being the probable location of Christopher Columbus's first landing of the Americas on 12 October 1492 during his first voyage. This historical importance, the island's tropical beaches, and its proximity to the United States have made tourism central to the local economy. The island has a population of 824 (2022) and is under the administration of Gilbert C. Kemp. Its largest settlement and seat of local government is Cockburn Town.
Watling's Island was named for George or John Watling, an Englishman who settled it in the 17th century. The name was used officially from the 1680s [2] until 1926. It is still used unofficially in discussions of the actual location of Columbus's first landfall.
San Salvador derives from the Spanish Isla San Salvador ("Island of the Holy Savior"), bestowed by Christopher Columbus in honor of Jesus Christ in thanks for his fleet's safe arrival [3] in what he thought was East Asia. Columbus recorded the native's name for the place as Guanaham, [3] now considered to be a mistranscription of Taíno Guanahaní , meaning "Small Land in the Upper Waters". [4]
San Salvador Island sits on its own isolated carbonate platform surrounded by a narrow shelf that reaches a depth of up to 40 meters (130 ft). [5] [6] Past the shelf, the slope becomes almost vertical and depth quickly increases to 4,000 meters (13,000 ft). [5] [7] San Salvador Island experiences a semidiurnal tide, with two high tides and two low tides per day. [8] Water temperature in San Salvador can range from 23 to 29 °C (73 to 84 °F) depending on the location and time of year. Salinity and dissolved oxygen are consistent throughout the island and throughout the year (35 ppt and 6.0% respectively). [7]
Most of San Salvador Island is surrounded by fringing reefs. [7] In many areas, such as Fernandez Bay, the shore is rocky and populated by reef urchins (Echinometra viridis). Moving away from shore, the bottom slopes gradually and may have several patch reefs surrounded by a sandy bottom. These patch reefs are home to hundreds of fish, invertebrates, and algae. [7] The depth continues to increase to about 25 meters (82 ft) at the farthest edge of the shelf, which can be 400 to 1,500 meters (1,300 to 4,900 ft) from shore. [7]
Wind and wave action in San Salvador is influenced by the Antilles Current. The Antilles Current originates south of the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and Cuba and moves northward where it merges with the Gulf Stream. [9] [10] This current cools the waters around San Salvador in the summer and warms the water around the island in the winter. This keeps the water temperature relatively mild and consistent throughout the year. [7]
The coasts of San Salvador are very different from each other. The west coast of San Salvador faces the rest of the Bahamas and the Great Bahama Bank. Most of these islands are sheltered from significant winds and wave action, making the water generally calmer with greater visibility. In contrast, the eastern coast of San Salvador is windward and completely exposed to the rest of the Atlantic Ocean and is not protected by any other geological formations. [6]
As a result, wave action is much stronger and visibility is lower. Evidence of currents from the Atlantic Ocean can be found on the east coast in the form of trash and debris on the beaches. During Hurricane Joaquin in October 2015, cargo steamer El Faro went down approximately 50 miles east of San Salvador. Several weeks later, pieces of the containers that had been swept away by the current were reported on the beaches of San Salvador. [11]
Christopher Columbus's voyages west were sponsored by Spain in the hopes that he would reach China and the East Indies, circumventing both Turkish and Portuguese control of the eastern and southern routes of the lucrative spice trade. [12] Letters from Columbus to the Spanish monarchs Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon record that the first island sighted during his first voyage was known to its Lucayan inhabitants as Guanahaní and that he renamed it San Salvador in thanks to God. [3] [13]
Arriving on 12 October 1492, he described the Lucayans as "sweet and gentle", [14] "naked as they were born", [15] possessed of "neither iron, nor steel, nor arms, nor... competent to use them", [16] "timid to a surprising degree", [16] and—combined with the other islands he visited—would enable to him to deliver to Spain "slaves, as many of these idolators as their Highnesses shall command to be shipped". [17] Earlier in the same letter, Columbus had explained that the Lucayans were not idolators [18] but—as chattel slavery had largely disappeared from Europe during the High Middle Ages and Early Renaissance —its revival under Nicholas V's 1452 Dum Diversas... and similar bulls were dependent on the idolatrous status of the enslaved. [19]
Columbus himself seized several Guanahamians by force to use as translators and ambassadors, [20] despite forcing his crew to stop cheating them in exchanges of random trash for items of great worth, [21] including one who received 12 g of gold for a used leather strap. [22] Despite their general intelligence, [21] the Guanahamian slaves considered him sent from the heavens and secured him welcome at every island he visited. [20]
The location of this first island visited by Columbus is disputed. In the 19th century, it was usually thought to be Cat Island [23] but arguments from Juan Bautista Muñoz; [24] Captain Alexander B. Becher, [25] a hydrographer in the Royal Navy; Rear Adm. Joseph B. Murdock of the U.S. Navy; [26] Richard Henry Major, [27] map custodian of the British Museum; the geographer Clements Markham; [28] the naval historian Samuel E. Morison; and the Benedictine priest Chrysostom Schreiner eventually led to the island's 1926 renaming. Fr. Schreiner relocated to San Salvador, where his tomb is still preserved. [23] More recently, the National Geographic Society, Keith Pickering, [29] and others have argued for alternative locations, including Samana Cay. [30]
The island now called San Salvador was settled in the 17th century by the English buccaneer George or John Watling. Britain formally colonized the Bahamas in the early 18th century.
During the Cold War, the United States Navy's Mobile Construction Battalion 7 constructed a long-range navigation (LORAN) station on Grahams Harbor at the north end of the island from 1957 to 1959. [31] After the LORAN station was decommissioned, it became the Bahamian Field Station and then the Gerace Research Center. [32] More than 1,000 students and researchers work from the station every year as a base of operations for studying tropical marine geology, biology, and archeology.
San Salvador has required extensive rebuilding following Hurricane Lili in 1996, [33] Hurricane Floyd in 1999, [34] and Hurricane Joaquin in 2015. [35] Floyd in particular caused considerable beach erosion. [34]
Tourism is the island's main industry, thanks to its historical importance, many sandy beaches, and proximity to the United States. It is served by San Salvador International Airport. Columbus Isle, a Club Med resort, is located just north of the main settlement at Cockburn Town.
The island is home to many shallow-water coral reefs, where snorkellers can observe hundreds of fish species without the use of scuba equipment. The Pleistocene Cockburn Town Fossil Reef is near the main town and resort. [36] Fossilized staghorn coral ( Acropora cervicornis ) and elkhorn coral ( Acropora palmata ) are present near the crest of the fossil reef and other corals such as Montastraea annularis , Diploria , and Porites are scattered in the periphery. San Salvador is also known for the quick dropoff of the submerged platform of the island, allowing for numerous deep dive sites. The western coast has many wall reefs with steep drop offs, while the northern coast has many shallow barrier reefs, particularly surrounding the large shallow lagoon of Grahams Harbor.
There are three endemic fish species found only in the inland hypersaline lakes on this island. The scale-eating pupfish (Cyprinodon desquamator), the molluscivore pupfish (Cyprinodon brontotheroides), and the widemouth pupfish (Cyprinodon sp. widemouth) are all endemic to this island (Martin and Wainwright 2011, 2013, Richards et al. 2021).
The Dixon Hill lighthouse is located on the island south of Dixon Hill Settlement on the east side of the island. It is approximately 160 feet (49 m) tall and was constructed in 1887 by the Imperial Lighthouse Service. [37]
There are also several monuments, ruins, and shipwrecks in the area. [38] [39]
The seat of local government is Cockburn Town, with a population of 271 (2010). [40] The current administrator is Gilbert C. Kemp.[ citation needed ]
The Bahamas, officially the Commonwealth of The Bahamas, is a country in the Atlantic Ocean. It is an island country within the Lucayan Archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean. It contains 97% of the Lucayan Archipelago's land area and 88% of its population. The archipelagic country consists of more than 3,000 islands, cays, and islets in the Atlantic Ocean, and is located north of Cuba and northwest of the island of Hispaniola and the Turks and Caicos Islands, southeast of the U.S. state of Florida, and east of the Florida Keys. The capital is Nassau on the island of New Providence. The Royal Bahamas Defence Force describes The Bahamas' territory as encompassing 470,000 km2 (180,000 sq mi) of ocean space.
The earliest arrival of people in the islands now known as The Bahamas was in the first millennium AD. The first inhabitants of the islands were the Lucayans, an Arawakan language-speaking Taino people, who arrived between about 500 and 800 AD from other islands of the Caribbean.
The Lucayan people were the original residents of The Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands before the European colonisation of the Americas. They were a branch of the Taínos who inhabited most of the Caribbean islands at the time. The Lucayans were the first Indigenous Americans encountered by Christopher Columbus. Shortly after contact, the Spanish kidnapped and enslaved Lucayans, with the displacement culminating in the complete eradication of the Lucayan people from the Bahamas by 1520.
Andros Island is an archipelago within The Bahamas, the largest of the Bahamian Islands. Politically considered a single island, Andros in total has an area greater than all the other 700 Bahamian islands combined. The land area of Andros consists of hundreds of small islets and cays connected by mangrove estuaries and tidal swamplands, together with three major islands: North Andros, Mangrove Cay, and South Andros. The three main islands are separated by bights, estuaries that trifurcate the island from east to west. It is 167 kilometres (104 mi) long by 64 km (40 mi) wide at the widest point.
A cay, also spelled caye or key, is a small, low-elevation, sandy island on the surface of a coral reef. Cays occur in tropical environments throughout the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans, including in the Caribbean and on the Great Barrier Reef and Belize Barrier Reef.
Grand Turk is an island in the Turks and Caicos Islands, a British Overseas Territory, tropical islands in the Lucayan Archipelago of the Atlantic Ocean and northern West Indies. It is the largest island in the Turks Islands with 18 km2 (6.9 sq mi). Grand Turk contains the territory's capital, Cockburn Town, and the JAGS McCartney International Airport. The island is the administrative, historic, cultural and financial centre of the territory and has the second-largest population of the islands at approximately 4,831 people in 2012.
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Rum Cay is an island and district of the Bahamas. It measures 30 square miles (78 km2) in area, it is located at Lat.: N23 42' 30" - Long.: W 74 50' 00". It has many rolling hills that rise to about 120 feet.
Guanahaní was the Taíno name of an island in the Bahamas that was the first land in the New World sighted and visited by Christopher Columbus' first voyage, on 12 October 1492. It is a bean-shaped island that Columbus called San Salvador. Guanahaní has traditionally been identified with Watlings Island, which was officially renamed San Salvador Island in 1925 as a result, but modern scholars are divided on the accuracy of this identification and several alternative candidates in and around the southern Bahamas have been proposed as well.
The Plana Cays are a group of two small uninhabited islands in the southern Bahama Islands, located east of Acklins Island and west of Mayaguana Island. The indigenous Lucayan people called the islands Amaguaya, meaning "toward the middle lands".
Samana Cay is a now uninhabited island in the Bahamas believed by some researchers to have been the location of Christopher Columbus's first landfall in the Americas on October 12, 1492.
Pupfish are a group of small killifish belonging to ten genera of the family Cyprinodontidae of ray-finned fish. Pupfish are especially noted for being found in extreme and isolated situations. They are primarily found in North America, South America, and the Caribbean region. As of August 2006, 120 nominal species and 9 subspecies were known. Several pupfish species are extinct and most extant species are listed. In the U.S., the most well-known pupfish species may be the Devils Hole pupfish, native to Devils Hole on the Nevada side of Death Valley National Park. Since 1995 the Devils Hole pupfish has been in a nearly steady decline, where it was close to extinction at 35–68 fish in 2013.
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John, or George, Watling was a 17th-century English buccaneer. It was said that he would never plunder on the Sabbath and refused to allow his crew to play cards on this holy day.
Cyprinodon is a genus of pupfishes found in waters that range from fresh to hypersaline. The genus is primarily found in Mexico, the Caribbean Islands and southern United States, but C. variegatus occurs as far north as Massachusetts and along the entire Gulf of Mexico coastline, and C. dearborni and C. variegatus are found in northern South America. Many species have tiny ranges and are highly threatened, in some cases already extinct. Cyprinodon are small; the largest reaches 10 cm (3.9 in) in length and most other species only reach about half that size.
Blackfin pupfish is a species of fish in the family Cyprinodontidae. This pupfish is endemic to Lake Chichancanab in Quintana Roo, Mexico. In almost all places, different Cyprinodon species do not overlap in their range, but there are two notable exceptions and one of these is Lake Chichancanab, which is inhabited by C. beltrani, C. esconditus, C. labiosus, C. maya, C. simus, C. suavium and C. verecundus. Among the endemic Cyprinodon species in Lake Chichancanab, only C. beltrani and C. labiosus still occur in some numbers in their habitat, while the remaining are virtually—if not fully—extinct in the wild. This species feeds on detritus. Compared to the other species of pupfish mentioned previously, the C. beltrani prefer a different feeding substrate. In regards to mating, the female blackfin pupfish seems to mate with other species of pupfish and not just the C. beltrani. The male blackfin pupfish have similar markings and courting behaviors to other pupfish in their habitat. The person honored in the specific name of this pupfish is the Mexican biologist Enrique Beltrán Castillo (1903–1994) to mark his quarter century of being a biologist.
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