Before European colonization, the Turks and Caicos Islands were inhabited by Taíno and Lucayan peoples. The first recorded European sighting of the islands now known as the Turks and Caicos occurred in 1512."World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples – Turks and Caicos Islands : Overview". Minority Rights Group International, 2007. In the subsequent centuries, the islands were claimed by several European powers, with the British Empire eventually gaining control. For many years the islands were governed indirectly through Bermuda, the Bahamas, and Jamaica. When the Bahamas gained independence in 1973, the islands received their own governor, and have remained a separate autonomous British Overseas Territory since. In August 2009, the United Kingdom suspended the Turks and Caicos Islands' self-government following allegations of ministerial corruption. Home rule was restored in the islands after the November 2012 elections.
Pre-colonial history
Long before Christopher Columbus first set foot on the capital island of Grand Turk during his discovery voyage of the new world in 1492, the islands of the Turks and Caicos were inhabited by Taíno and Lucayan peoples. These original settlers left a rich heritage of seafaring, salt raking and farming, which still lingers on today. Words such as "canoe", Caribbean and "caicos" are derived from the Arawak language. Even the name of the country comes from these earliest inhabitants. Turks is a reference to the indigenous Turk's head cactus and Caicos is from the Lucayan term "caya hico" meaning string of islands, words which entered the natives' language through an early colonist, Bernard Caicos.
For almost 700 years, the Taíno and Lucayan were the sole residents of the islands, settling mainly in Middle Caicos and Grand Turk. They lived peacefully and were skilled in farming, fishing and gardening. They cultivated almost 50 types of plants, some of which can still be found on undeveloped sections of the islands.
Another peculiarity that has been passed down through the generations is a love of shellfish, particularly conch – which is actually available in abundance to this day, thanks to the work of the Caicos Conch farm, the only commercial conch farm in the world. It closed after damages caused by Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria in 2017.
Colonial history prior to settlement
Shortly after Columbus arrived in 1492, the Lucayan civilization was killed through slavery and disease and the islands remained sparsely populated for about 30 years.
The island Caico[s] received its name from the Lucayan caya hico, meaning 'string of islands'. The Turks Islands were named after the Turk's cap cactus, Melocactus intortus, whose red cephalium resembles the fez hat worn by Turkish men in the late Ottoman Empire.
During the second half of the 16th century the salt making industry was born. Bermudians came to Turks and Caicos to rake the salt and take it back to Bermuda. Salt was a precious commodity back then as it was used for preserving food. The shallow waters surrounding the islands were ideal for salt raking but treacherous for nautical navigation and more than 1000 ships were wrecked during the journey to and from.
The first recorded European sighting of the islands now known as the Turks and Caicos occurred in 1512. During the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, the islands passed from Spanish, to French, to English (subsequently British) control, but none of the three powers ever established any settlements. In 1709, an early British colonist, Bernard Caicos, settled on the island.
From about 1690 to 1720, pirates hid in the cays of the Turks and Caicos Islands, attacking Spanish treasure galleons en route to Spain from Cuba, Hispaniola, and the Spanish possessions in Central America and Peru. The islands were not fully colonised until 1681, when salt collectors from Bermuda built the first permanent settlement on Grand Turk Island.
The salt collectors were drawn by the shallow waters around the islands that made salt mining a much easier process than in Bermuda. They occupied the Turks only seasonally, for six months a year, however, returning to Bermuda when it was no longer viable to rake salt. Their colonization established the British dominance of the archipelago that has lasted into the present day. Huge numbers of trees were felled by the Bermudians to discourage rainfall that would adversely affect the salt mining operation. This deforestation has yet to be repaired. Most of the salt mined in the Turks and Caicos Islands was sold through Bermudian merchant houses on the American seaboard, including in Newfoundland where it was used for preserving cod.
The agricultural industry sprung up in the islands in the late 1780s after 40 Loyalists arrived after the end of the American Revolution, primarily from Georgia and South Carolina. Granted large tracts of land by the British government to make up for what they lost in the American colonies, the Loyalists imported well over a thousand slaves and planted vast fields of sisal, harvested for its stiff fibre used in making various products such as rope.
Though in the short term highly successful, the cotton industry quickly went into decline, with hurricanes and pests destroying many crops. Though a few of the former cotton magnates changed to salt mining, just about every one of the original Loyalists had left the islands by 1820, leaving their slaves to live a subsistence lifestyle through fishing and hunter-gathering.
Bermudian century
In 1706, the French and the Spanish briefly captured the Turks and Caicos Islands from the Bermudians. Four years later the British reclaimed the islands for Bermuda but in subsequent years the place became primarily a haven for pirates and British Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution. Ultimately, Britain retained the island country by the end of the century as part of the Treaty of Versailles. In 1766, after being controlled by the Spanish, French and British, Turks and Caicos became part of the Bahamas colony and was placed under the Bahamian government. Attempts to integrate the two distinct communities failed and in 1874 after "the Great Bahamas Hurricane" devastated much of the chain of islands, the Turks & Caicos Islands became dependencies to the British Crown Colony of Jamaica.
Bermuda spent much of the 18th century in a protracted legal battle with the Bahamas (which had itself been colonised by Bermudian Puritans in 1647) over the Turks Islands. Under British law, no colony could hold colonies of its own. The Turks Islands were not recognised by Britain either as a colony in its own right, or as a part of Bermuda. They were held to be, like rivers in Britain, for the common use. As a result, there was a great deal of political turmoil surrounding the ownership of the Turks (and Caicos).
Spanish and French forces seized the Turks in 1706, but Bermudian forces expelled them four years later in what was probably Bermuda's only independent military operation. The Bermudian privateer, the Rose, under the command of Captain Lewis Middleton, attacked a Spanish and a French privateer holding a captive English vessel. Defeating the two enemy vessels, the Rose then cleared out the thirty-man garrison left by the Spanish and French.Maritimes: The Magazine of the Bermuda Maritime Museum. 2002. Vol. 15, No. 2. "Foreign Interlopers at Bermuda's Turks Islands", by Dr. Bill Cooke.
A virtual state-of-war existed between Bermuda and the Bahamas through much of the 18th century. When the Bermudian sloop Seaflower was seized by the Bahamians in 1701, the response of Bermuda Governor Bennett was to issue letters-of-marque to Bermudians vessels. The legal struggle with the Bahamas began in 1766, when the King's representative in the Bahamas, Andrew Symmer, on his own authority, wrote a constitution which legislated for and taxed the Bermudians on the Turks. The Secretary of State, Lord Hillsborough, for the Crown, issued orders that the Bermudian activities on the Turks should not be obstructed or restrained in any way. As a result of this order, Symmer's constitution was dissolved. The Bermudians on the Turks appointed commissioners to govern themselves, with the assent of the King's local agent. They drew up regulations for good government, but the Bahamian governor Shirley drew up his own regulations for the Turks and ordered that no one might work at salt raking who had not signed assent to his regulations.
Following this, a raker was arrested and the salt pans were seized and divided by force. The Bahamas government attempted to appoint judicial authorities for the Turks in 1768, but these were refused by the Bermudians. In 1773 the Bahamian government passed an act attempting to tax the salt produced in the Turks, but the Bermudians refused to pay it. In 1774, the Bahamians passed another, similar act, and this they submitted for the Crown's assent. The Crown passed this act on to the Bermudian government which objected to it, and which rejected Bahamian jurisdiction over the Turks. The Crown, as a consequence, refused assent of the Act as applied to include the Turks, and, in the form in which it finally passed, the Bahamas, but not the Turks, were included.
The Bermudians on the Turks continued to be governed under their own regulations, with the assent of the royal agent, until 1780, when a more formal version of those regulations was submitted for the assent of the Crown, which was given. Those regulations, issued as a royal order, stated that all British subjects had the right ("free liberty") to rake and gather salt on the Turks, providing that they conformed to the regulations, which expressly rejected Bahamian jurisdiction over the Turks. Despite this refutation by a higher authority of their right to impinge upon Bermudian activities on the Turks, the Bahamian government continued to harass the Bermudians (unsurprisingly, given the lucrativeness of the Turks salt trade).
Although the salt industry on the Turks had largely been a Bermudian preserve, it had been seen throughout the 17th century as the right of all British subjects to rake there, and small numbers of Bahamians had been involved. In 1783, the French landed a force on Grand Turk which a British force of 100 men, under then-Captain Horatio Nelson, was unable to dislodge.
Following this, the Bahamians were slow to return to the Turks, while the Bermudians quickly resumed salt production, sending sixty to seventy-five ships to the Turks each year, during the six months that salt could be raked. Nearly a thousand Bermudians spent part of the year on the Turks engaged in salt production, and the industry became more productive.
The Bahamas, meanwhile, was incurring considerable expense in absorbing loyalist refugees from the now-independent American colonies, and returned to the idea of taxing Turks salt for the needed funds. The Bahamian government ordered that all ships bound for the Turk Islands obtain a license at Nassau first. The Bermudians refused to do this. Following this, Bahamian authorities seized the Bermuda sloops Friendship and Fanny in 1786. Shortly after, three Bermudian vessels were seized at Grand Caicos, with $35,000 worth of goods salvaged from a French ship. French privateers were becoming a menace to Bermudian operations in the area, at the time, but the Bahamians were their primary concern.