Lucayo

The Lucayo, or Lucayans, were the Indigenous people of the Bahamas. Their own name, Lukku-Cairi, means people of the islands, and their word cairi for island lives on in the Spanish cayo and the English cay.

They were a branch of the Taíno who began crossing from Hispaniola and Cuba in canoes between about 500 and 800, spreading through the archipelago over eight centuries until they numbered perhaps forty thousand, in coastal villages under matrilineal custom, farming cassava and drawing most of their protein from the reefs and shallows.

In October 1492 they became the first Americans encountered by Columbus when he landed at Guanahani, which he renamed San Salvador. Spanish raiders seized the islanders as slaves, and by 1520 the Lucayo had been entirely emptied out of the Bahamas, one of the swiftest erasures of a people in the colonial Caribbean.