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U.S. Refugees--A Forgotten People

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NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Starfish are clearly visible on the sandy bottom of Green Turtle Cay’s White Sound as Nigel Lowe’s ferryboat, Bolo II, roars over. Lowe, 36, casts experienced eyes over the brightly sunlit bay--the same scene that greeted his ancestors more than 200 years ago.

“We’ve had good weather lately, but a couple of weeks ago we had 80-knot winds and water spouts,” he says, his laconic speech not quite British and not quite American.

In a way, it is both. Among Lowe’s forebears were the remnants of an ill-fated band whose story is largely overlooked in U.S. history: English colonists who remained loyal to the British crown during the American Revolution.

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New Plymouth, a neat seaside village where Lowe lives in a colonial Cape Cod-style cottage, was one of the principal gathering points for loyalists abandoning the mainland by the thousands during and after the revolution, in many cases just ahead of bloodthirsty mobs. Others sought refuge in nearby Man O’ War Cay, Guana Cay and Hope Town.

“They are the forgotten people,” Sandra Riley, a Coral Gables, Fla., historian, told National Geographic. “Many of them were Americans, born in America. Yet, they were the other side--the enemy. It must have been difficult for them to make that choice.”

Although the loyalists’ descendants are scattered throughout the Bahamas, the isolated northern archipelago of Abaco, with its numerous cays, is their traditional stronghold.

Most of Abaco’s year-round population of about 8,000 live in villages on the outer cays and in the commercial center, Marsh Harbour. Thanks to much intermarrying, a few family names--including Lowe--dominate, and many residents are related to each other.

On Green Turtle Cay, the Albert Lowe Museum and a small sculpture garden commemorate the loyalists’ flight. Residents speak with pride of their heritage and some dress up in period costumes to welcome tourists.

That the American loyalists’ story is so little remembered is all the more surprising because there were so many of them. During the revolution, historians estimate, half the residents of New York were Tories.

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For the most part, though, the American loyalists were a despised minority in a country seized with a fever for independence.

Although atrocities of the American Revolution never reached the level of the wholesale bloodletting of the French Revolution, treatment of loyalists sometimes was exceptionally cruel. Records and contemporary accounts refer to rapes, murders, brandings, whippings, ear-croppings, tarring and feathering, plunder and destruction of property.

In a 1983 book, Riley tells of a Rev. Peters, whose family and some loyalist followers were attacked by a drunken mob in 1774. “They stripped off the clergyman’s gown and clothes, hung some of the women up by their heels after tarring and feathering them, and wretchedly abused others, marking them with excrement in the sign of the cross.”

Such tales spread quickly through the warring colonies. Soon loyalist refugees flocked to British strongholds in New York, Georgia and Florida--only to be uprooted again after the final British surrender at Yorktown, Va., in 1781.

Eventually an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 loyalists emigrated to lands still ruled by Britain. Most of those from the northern colonies went to places such as Quebec and Nova Scotia. Southerners, many of them large-scale cotton planters, tended to gravitate to warmer spots.

Those bound for the Bahamas had been encouraged by glowing reports representing the islands as tropical paradises.

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Upon arrival, the refugees discovered far less agreeable realities: unsuitably thin layers of soil and inhospitable rock, along with a “plague of numerous vermin or insects,” including cockroaches, mosquitoes and sand flies.

To these disappointments was added friction between the loyalist newcomers and earlier residents of the islands, themselves descendants of English adventurers who had come to the Bahamas via Bermuda well more than 100 years before.

By the late 1700s, loyalists were hopping from island to island in search of soil that would sustain cotton, their crop of choice. Most of them eventually dispersed to other lands.

Those who remained were mostly poorer immigrants below the social and economic station of the planter grandees. They intermarried with the earlier English inhabitants and adopted their subsistence life styles, all tied in some way to the surrounding sea.

Nigel Lowe, who has worked on the water since youth, carries on this tradition, as do most other residents of Abaco and its numerous cays.

Lowe nestles his ferryboat against the dock at the Green Turtle Club resort and reflects on the fortunes that led to his birth in these islands.

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“I love the boat and the water and the beach,” he says as his passengers disembark. “I’ve got it made.”

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