Bahama Crisis

The Mangans are a thin line because, possibly due to a genetic defect, they tend to run to girls like the Dutch royal family. Thus they did not grow like a tree with many branches but in a straight line. I am the last of the male Mangans and, as far as I know, there are no others of that name in the Islands.

But they survived and prospered. One of my forebears was a ship-builder at Hope Town on Elbow Cay; most of the local ships sailing the Bahamian waters were built on Abaco and the Mangan family built not a few and so became moderately well-to-do. And then there was the wrecking. As the United States grew in power there was much maritime traffic and many ships were wrecked on the Islands of the Shallow Sea. The goods they contained contributed greatly to the wealth of many an island family, the Mangans not excepted. But the great turning point in the family fortunes came with the American Civil War.

The Confederate south was starved of supplies because of the northern blockade, and cotton rotted on the docks. Any ship putting into Charleston or Wilmington found a ready market for its cargo; quinine costing $ i o in Nassau brought in excess of $400 in Charleston, while cotton costing $400 at the dockside was worth $4000 in Liverpool. It was a most profitable, if risky, two-way trade and my great-grandfather saw his opportunity and made the family rich in half a decade.

It was his son, my grandfather, who moved the family from Abaco to Nassau on New Providence Nassau being the capital of the Bahamas and the centre of trade. Yet we still own land on Abaco and I have been building there recently.

If my great-grandfather made the family rich it was my father who made it really wealthy. He became a multimillionaire which accounts for the fact that a Bahamian was educated at Cambridge. Again, it was running an American blockade which provided the profit.

On 15 January 1920 the United States went dry and, as in the Civil War, the Bahamas became a distribution centre for contraband goods.

The Nassau merchants known as the Bay Street Boys, my father among them, soon got busy importing liquor. The profit margin was normally one hundred per cent and the business was totally risk-free; it was cash on the barrel and the actual blockade-running was done by the Americans themselves. It was said that there was so much booze stacked at West End on Grand Bahama that the island tipped by several degrees. And, for a Bahamian, the business was all legal.

All good things come to an end and the 18th Amendment was repealed by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, but by then my father was sitting pretty and had begun to diversify his interests. He saw with a keen eye that the advent of aircraft was going to have an impact on the tourist industry and would alter its structure. Already Pan-American was pioneering the Miami-Nassau oute using Sikorsky seaplanes.

Bahamian tourism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was confined to the American rich and the four- month winter season. An American millionaire would bring his family and perhaps a few friends to spend the whole season on New Providence. This, while being profitable to a few, was of little consequence to the Bahamian economy, millionaires not being all that plentiful. My father took the gamble that aircraft would bring the mass market and invested in hotels. He won his gamble, but died before he knew it, in 1949.

I was eleven years old when my father died and had as much interest in money and business as any other boy of eleven, which is to say none. My mother told me that a trust fund had been set up for me and my two sisters and that I would come into my inheritance on my twenty-fifth birthday. She then continued to run the family affairs which she was quite capable of doing.

I went to school in Nassau but spent my holidays on Abaco under the watchful eye of Pete Albury, a black Abaconian whom I thought was old but, in fact, was about thirty at the time. He had worked for the family since he was a boy and looked after our property on Abaco. He had taught me to swim a non-swimming Bahamian being as common as a wingless bird and taught me to shoot, and we hunted the wild pig which are common on Abaco. He acted in loco parentis and tanned my hide when he thought I needed it. He stayed in my employ until his death not long ago.

Those early years were, I think, the most enjoyable of my life. In due course I went to England to study at Cambridge, and found England uncomfortably cold and wet; at least in the Bahamas the rain is warm.

I took my degree and then went to the United States for a two-year course in business studies at Harvard to prepare myself for the administration of my inheritance. It was there I met Julie Pascoe who was to become my wife. In 1963 I was back in Nassau where, on my twenty-fifth birthday, there was much signing of documents in a lawyer's office and I took control of the estate.