The Turks and Caicos Islands are a British Overseas Territory consisting of the larger Caicos Islands and smaller Turks Islands, two groups of tropical islands in the Lucayan Archipelago of the Atlantic Ocean and northern West Indies. They are known primarily for tourism and as an offshore financial centre. The resident population in 2023 was estimated by The World Factbook at 59,367, making it the third-largest of the British overseas territories by population. However, according to a Department of Statistics estimate in 2022, the population was 47,720.
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.
United States v. Schooner Amistad, 40 U.S. 518 (1841), was a United States Supreme Court case resulting from the rebellion of Africans on board the Spanish schooner La Amistad in 1839. It was an unusual freedom suit that involved international diplomacy as well as United States law. The historian Samuel Eliot Morison described it in 1969 as the most important court case involving slavery before being eclipsed by that of Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857.
The Blockade of Africa began in 1808 after the United Kingdom outlawed the Atlantic slave trade, making it illegal for British ships to transport slaves. The Royal Navy immediately established a presence off Africa to enforce the ban, called the West Africa Squadron. Although the ban initially applied only to British ships, Britain negotiated treaties with other countries to give the Royal Navy the right to intercept and search their ships for slaves.
USS Chippewa was a brig built in 1815 at Warren, Rhode Island, under the direction of Commodore Oliver Perry, and sent to New York City to be outfitted and manned. Chippewa sailed from Boston, Massachusetts, 3 July 1815, with Lieutenant George C. Read in command, as a part of a squadron under the command of Commodore William Bainbridge. It was intended to go to the Mediterranean for use against the Barbary pirates based in North Africa.
La Amistad was a 19th-century two-masted schooner owned by a Spaniard living in Cuba. It became renowned in July 1839 for a slave revolt by Mende captives who had been captured and sold to European slave traders and illegally transported by a Portuguese ship from West Africa to Cuba, in violation of European treaties against the Atlantic slave trade. Spanish plantation owners Don José Ruiz and Don Pedro Montes bought 53 captives in Havana, Cuba, including four children, and were transporting them on the ship to their plantations near Puerto Príncipe. The revolt began after the schooner's cook jokingly told the slaves that they were to be "killed, salted, and cooked." Sengbe Pieh unshackled himself and the others on the third day and started the revolt. They took control of the ship, killing the captain and the cook. Two Africans were also killed in the melee.
HMS Sappho was a Royal Navy brig that gained public notoriety for causing a diplomatic incident over the slave trade with the United States of America and then went missing off the Australian coast in 1857–58.
East Caicos is the fourth largest island in the Turks and Caicos Islands. To the west, it is separated from Middle Caicos by Lorimer Creek, a narrow passage that can accommodate only small boats. To the south is South Caicos. East Caicos has no inhabitants.
The Henrietta Marie was a slave ship that carried captive Africans to the West Indies, where they were sold as slaves. The ship wrecked at the southern tip of Florida on its way home to England, and is one of only a few wrecks of slave ships that have been identified.
USS Onkahye was a topsail schooner of the United States Navy. A unique ship in the American Navy under sail, the vessel occupied a significant place in ship development, being the only converted sailing yacht to serve on a distant station before the American Civil War. Its design was influential and it is considered the model for modern American sailing yachts.
The Molasses Reef Shipwreck is the site of a ship which wrecked in the Turks and Caicos Islands early in the 16th century. It is the oldest wreck of a European ship in the Americas to have been scientifically excavated.
HMS Nimble was a Royal Navy 5-gun schooner-of-war. She was employed in anti-slave trade patrol from 1826 until 1834, when she was wrecked on a reef with the loss of 70 Africans who had been rescued from a slave ship.
Guerrero was a Spanish slave ship that wrecked in 1827 on a reef near the Florida Keys with 561 Africans aboard. Forty-one of the Africans drowned in the wreck. Guerrero had been engaged in a battle with a British anti-slavery patrol ship, HMS Nimble, stationed on the northern approaches to Cuba. Nimble also ran onto the reef, but was refloated and returned to service. The two ships were attended by wreckers, who rescued the Spanish crew and surviving Africans from their ship and helped refloat Nimble. Spanish crew members hijacked two of the wrecking vessels and took almost 400 Africans to Cuba, where they were sold as slaves. Most of the remaining Africans were eventually returned to Africa.
The Capture of Veloz Passagera was a single-ship action that occurred during the British Royal Navy's anti-slavery blockade of Africa in the early and mid 19th century. The sloop-of-war HMS Primrose, of 18 guns, under Captain William Broughton, captured the 20-gun Spanish slave ship Veloz Passagera, Jozé Antonio de la Vega, master.
The Enterprise was a United States merchant vessel active in the coastwise slave trade in the early 19th century along the Atlantic Coast. Bad weather forced it into Hamilton, Bermuda waters on February 11, 1835 while it carried 78 slaves in addition to other cargo. It became the centre of a minor international incident when the British authorities freed nearly all the slaves. Britain had abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies effective 1834. At that time it advised "foreign nations that any slavers found in Bermuda [and the Bahamas] waters would be subject to arrest and seizure. Their cargoes were liable to forfeiture" without compensation.
The Turks and Caicos National Museum is the national museum of the Turks and Caicos Islands. It is located in Guinep House on Front Street to the north of Cockburn Town on Grand Turk Island, which is also the capital of the archipelago. Established in the 1980s and opened in 1991, the museum is publicly funded as a nonprofit trust. It exhibits pre-historic Lucayan culture and records the history of the islands of the colonial era and the slave trade, all related to the sea. An arboretum is adjacent to the museum.
The São José Paquete Africa was a Portuguese slave ship that sank in 1794 off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. Close to shore, but in deep water, 212 of the 400 to 500 African slaves who were aboard died when the ship sank. In 2015, the Smithsonian's African American History Museum, South Africa's Iziko Museums, the Slave Wrecks Project, and other partners, confirmed discovery of the wreck near where it sank. The ship and its slaves were headed from Portuguese Mozambique to Colonial Brazil, during the height of the international African slave trade. Few other former slave ships have been found, but the São José is the first and only shipwreck discovered, as of June 3, 2015, of a working slave ship, which sank in transit with its human cargo aboard.
HMS Saracen was a Cherokee-class brig-sloop of the Royal Navy. Launched 30 January 1831 at the Plymouth Dockyard, at Plymouth, England, this vessel held a gun deck of eight 18-Pounder carronades and two 6-Pounder bow chasers. She also held a crew complement of 75. Henry Worsley Hill served as her commander starting on 15 March 1841.
Thomas Leyland was an English slave trader. In 1776, he won a lottery and with his share of the winnings, he set himself up in the slave trade. Leyland bought at least 22,365 enslaved Africans and took them on his slave ships to the Americas.
