San Salvador Island: History
=== Columbus's arrival ===
Christopher Columbus's voyages west were sponsored by Spain in the hopes that he would reach China and the East Indies, circumventing both Turkish and Portuguese control of the eastern and southern routes of the lucrative spice trade. Letters from Columbus to the Spanish monarchs Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon record that the first island sighted during his first voyage was known to its Lucayan inhabitants as Guanahaní and that he renamed it San Salvador in thanks to God.
Arriving on 12 October 1492, he described the Lucayans as "sweet and gentle", "naked as they were born", possessed of "neither iron, nor steel, nor arms, nor... competent to use them", "timid to a surprising degree", and—combined with the other islands he visited—would enable to him to deliver to Spain "slaves, as many of these idolators as their Highnesses shall command to be shipped". Earlier in the same letter, Columbus had explained that the Lucayans were not idolators but, as chattel slavery had largely disappeared from Europe during the High Middle Ages and Early Renaissance, its revival under Nicholas V's 1452 Dum Diversas... and similar bulls were dependent on the idolatrous status of the enslaved.
Columbus himself seized several Guanahamians by force to use as translators and ambassadors, despite forcing his crew to stop cheating them in exchanges of random trash for items of great worth, including one who received 12 g of gold for a used leather strap. Despite their general intelligence, the Guanahamian slaves considered him sent from the heavens and secured him welcome at every island he visited.
The location of this first island visited by Columbus is disputed. In the 19th century, it was usually thought to be Cat Island but arguments from Juan Bautista Muñoz; Captain Alexander B. Becher, a hydrographer in the Royal Navy; Rear Adm. Joseph B. Murdock of the U.S. Navy; Richard Henry Major, map custodian of the British Museum; the geographer Clements Markham; the naval historian Samuel E. Morison; and the Benedictine priest Chrysostom Schreiner eventually led to the island's 1926 renaming. Fr. Schreiner relocated to San Salvador, where his tomb is still preserved. More recently, the National Geographic Society, Keith Pickering, and others have argued for alternative locations, including Samana Cay.
The island now called San Salvador was settled in the 17th century by the English buccaneer George or John Watling. Britain formally colonised the Bahamas in the early 18th century.
Watling Island's name would later be officially changed to San Salvador in 1925 in order to recognize Columbus' first landing, with this name change going into effect on 6 May 1926.
During the Cold War, the United States Navy's Mobile Construction Battalion 7 constructed a long-range navigation (LORAN) station on Grahams Harbour at the north end of the island from 1957 to 1959. After the LORAN station was decommissioned, it became the Bahamian Field Station and then the Gerace Research Centre. More than 1,000 students and researchers work from the station every year as a base of operations for studying tropical marine geology, biology, and archaeology.
San Salvador has required extensive rebuilding following Hurricane Lili in 1996, Hurricane Floyd in 1999, and Hurricane Joaquin in 2015. Floyd in particular caused considerable beach erosion.