Cayman Islands – from turtle-hunting outpost to financial centre
The three Cayman Islands, Grand Cayman, Cayman Brac and Little Cayman, had no known indigenous population when Christopher Columbus sighted them in 1503 on his final voyage. Because of the many sea turtles, they were first called Las Tortugas; the name Cayman later came from a Carib word for the caimans or crocodiles once found there.
For more than a century the islands were visited mainly by sailors, privateers and turtle hunters. With the Treaty of Madrid in 1670, English possession was recognised together with Jamaica, and permanent settlement began in the early eighteenth century. Settlers, some of them with enslaved Africans, built a modest economy on turtling, shipbuilding, rope-making and seafaring. The Caymans were governed as a dependency of Jamaica, and slavery ended with emancipation in the 1830s. The legendary 'Wreck of the Ten Sail' off the East End in 1794 remains part of local folklore.
For much of the twentieth century many Caymanian men worked as seamen around the world. When Jamaica became independent in 1962, the Cayman Islands chose to remain a British territory. From the 1960s onward, a new airport, tourism and the growth of the islands as an international financial centre transformed them into one of the most prosperous places in the Caribbean. Hurricane Ivan caused severe damage in 2004.
Today the Cayman Islands are shaped by their seafaring heritage, tourism, finance and a diverse population from many countries.
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