British noblemen found Charles Town, the settlement that becomes Nassau

Story: 1670 C.E.  |  Last updated: January 1, 1670

In 1670 C.E., a group of British noblemen arrived on the island of New Providence in the Caribbean with a small party of settlers, a plan to establish a colonial foothold, and a name ready for their new fort: Charles Town, in honor of King Charles II of England. What they built that year would eventually become Nassau — the capital of an independent Bahamian nation, home to nearly 300,000 people, and one of the most storied cities in Atlantic history.

Key findings

• Nassau founding: British noblemen established Charles Town on New Providence Island in 1670 C.E., constructing a fort and laying the groundwork for permanent European settlement.
• Charles Town renaming: The settlement was destroyed in a Spanish raid in 1684 C.E., rebuilt in 1695 C.E. under Governor Nicholas Trott, and renamed Nassau in honor of King William III, who belonged to the House of Nassau.
• New Providence settlement: The island’s position in the Atlantic — shallow harbors, abundant fresh water, and proximity to major shipping lanes — made it strategically valuable and deeply contested for more than a century after the founding.

A city built on contested ground

The Nassau founding was not an arrival into empty land. New Providence and the broader Bahamian archipelago had been home to the Lucayan people, an Indigenous Taíno-related group, until Spanish colonizers decimated and enslaved them in the early 16th century C.E. By the time British noblemen arrived in 1670 C.E., the island was largely depopulated — a consequence of one of the earliest and most complete colonial erasures in the Americas.

The settlers who came with the British founders were a modest group. They built a fort, established basic governance, and named their town after the reigning English king. It was, by the standards of the era, an unremarkable colonial outpost. What made it remarkable was everything that happened next.

Charles Town was burned to the ground in 1684 C.E. during a Spanish raid. The rebuilt settlement, renamed Nassau in 1695 C.E., became a pirate haven of global notoriety — home at various points to Blackbeard, Anne Bonny, Mary Read, and dozens of others who declared it a “pirate republic.” For fifteen years, from 1703 C.E. to 1718 C.E., there was no legitimate governor on the island. Pirates outnumbered ordinary residents ten to one.

Order, trade, and a city takes shape

The turning point came in 1718 C.E., when the British Crown appointed Captain Woodes Rogers as Royal Governor. Rogers used his own wealth to rebuild the fort, restore civil administration, and drive out or execute the pirates. His motto — Expulsis Piratis, Restituta Commercia (“Pirates expelled, commerce restored”) — became Nassau’s unofficial creed and later the basis for the Bahamas’ national motto.

Trade brought prosperity. So did geography. Nassau sits roughly 290 kilometers east-southeast of Miami, making it one of the closest Caribbean ports to the North American mainland. During the American War of Independence, privateering money funded new streets and thousands of new buildings. After the war, thousands of American Loyalists — and the enslaved people they brought with them — resettled in Nassau, dramatically expanding the city’s population and its plantation economy.

After Britain abolished the international slave trade in 1807 C.E., the Royal Navy began intercepting slave ships in the Atlantic and resettling liberated Africans on New Providence. Thousands of people — survivors of one of history’s worst crimes — built new lives in Nassau’s “Over-the-Hill” suburbs, communities whose descendants would eventually form the core of Bahamian national identity.

Lasting impact

The city founded as Charles Town in 1670 C.E. is today the political, economic, and cultural center of an independent nation. The Bahamas gained independence from Britain in 1973 C.E., and Nassau has served as its capital ever since. The city is home to the national parliament, the courts, the major international airport, and the majority of the country’s population.

Nassau’s position in the Atlantic also made it a relay point for ideas as much as goods. The pirate republic era, however chaotic, represented an unusual experiment in flat hierarchy and cross-cultural mixing — crews that included formerly enslaved Africans, Indigenous people, and European sailors living under self-imposed codes of conduct. Historians debate how far to read freedom into piracy, but the Bahamian chapter is among the most studied in Atlantic piracy scholarship.

The city’s story is also a story of the African diaspora in the Caribbean. The communities resettled after 1807 C.E., along with the descendants of enslaved people brought by Loyalists, built much of what Nassau became — its food traditions, its music, its neighborhoods, its Junkanoo festival. That history is inseparable from any honest account of the city’s founding and growth.

Blindspots and limits

The 1670 C.E. founding is most accurately described as the beginning of sustained British colonial settlement — not the beginning of human habitation, and not a straightforward milestone in civic progress. The Lucayan erasure that preceded it, the enslaved labor that built much of colonial Nassau, and the exploitation embedded in its plantation economy are not footnotes. They are foundational to understanding what the city is and how it came to be. The good news in Nassau’s story belongs above all to the people who survived, rebuilt, and eventually claimed the city as their own.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Nassau, Bahamas — Wikipedia

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Ghana establishes a new marine protected area at Cape Three Points
• Indigenous land rights: 160 million hectares recognized ahead of COP30
• The Good News for Humankind archive on Bahamas

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