It seems less is said about Ragged Island than is known; and even that is vague. To start with, it has two names: Jumentos Cays and Ragged Island, only one town, Duncan Town, and one primary deed holder, in the 1700s at least, George Lockhart. 

The only settlement varies from 44 to 72 not including itinerant workers or soldiers. Well known for shipbuilding, owning, and the seamanship skills of its captains, this outpost of the south was attacked by a German submarine which pinned an Allied convoy against the shallows, and hit three of them in 1942, and then by Russian MiG jets just after Bahamas independence.

Named by Lucayans as the island of the western Hutia critter, most of this crescent of un-numbered cays rocks and islets heading north towards Long Island and Little Exuma are uninhabited and stunningly beautiful – and thus known to yacht sailors as an Exuma Cays without the people. And of course, the islands have their share of wrecks. The Nicaraguan steamer Rama ran aground and wrecked at Seal Cay in the Jumentos Cays in 1932. She was a passenger and cargo ship of 1,726 tons. The Mimi hit the Cayo Lobos reef on the Grand Bahama Bank in 1975. A Panamanian motor ship built in 1961; the vessel was 499 tons.

There are several islets in Bahamas known as “Green Cay,” including one in the southeast Tongue of the Ocean known to boaters from Nassau as a waypoint on fishing trips or to Great Exuma. However, a Green Cay known as Cayo Verde lies 30 miles east-southeast of Ragged Island, and west of Castle Island.

Being located in a prominent passage north from the Windward Passage, it was often used by slaving ships under Cuban and Spanish control in the 1800s, and then British ships of the Royal Navy out to interdict them and liberate the poor persons carried as cargo.

This is the story of one of those ships, named HMS Nimble, a 5-gun schooner-of-war. Engaged in anti-slavery patrol from 1826 to 1834, the shipwrecked Green Cay, losing 70 previously rescued Africans.  HMS Nimble was assigned to maintained approaches to Cuba, where captured Spanish slavers were sailed by the British. To show how porous and corrupt the process could be, it is believed “64,000 Africans may have been illegally landed in Cuba between 1822 and 1829.” Nimble had been built for the Spanish in 1822 as the ship General Bolivar, probably as a slaver. Her predecessor and namesake had been built by McLeans in Jamaica but rejected by the Royal Navy. The ship was armed with four 18-pounder carronades and a single 18-pounder cannon.

Nimble had an active career, particularly from 1827 against the slave trade. She ran aground near the Florida Keys during a battle with the slave ship Guerrerothat December, which sank with 41 Africans chained below, leaving the crew and 520 Africans survivors. Somehow Spanish crews overpowered and took two of the wrecking vessels, escaping to Cuba with 398 African persons. Though she lost her rudder on the reef, wreckers floated her and gave the ship Guerrero’s rudder. Two years later HMS Nimble salvaged the ship La Fayette and later assisted HMS Monkey which took a Spanish slaver Midas near

After capturing Gallito with 136 Africans near Berry Islands, Nimble caught a Portuguese slaver Hebe, with 401 Angolans who “were in such poor condition that they were deemed unfit for a voyage to Sierra Leone, and were kept in The Bahamas. At first [they] settled on isolated Highbourn Cay, [then] many were later recruited into the West India Regiment, and the rest were apprenticed to white Bahamians.” The Spanish slaver La Negrita was captured by HMS Nimble in mid-1833, carrying 189 Africans, who were taken to Trinidad.

The crew next captured and stripped the slaver Joaquina with 348 Africans, sinking it near the Pines, Cuba. A few days later, Nimble drove the Spanish schooner Amistad Habanera ashore, captured the Africans aboard it, and blew up the empty slave ship. The Spanish placed a bounty on HMS Nimble, which soon captured the Manuelita with 485 Africans, then a Portuguese slaver with 162 Africans who were delivered to The Bahamas. Nimble managed to free 1,902 Africans from six Spanish or Portuguese ships, through “freedom” was rarely absolute or immediate.

Nimble and her crew remained active to the end; in November 1834 they tenaciously went after a slaver named Carlota until it was destroyed on Cuban rocks. During its voyage to Havana with 272 liberated Africans that November, fierce weather drove Nimble atop a reef near Cayo Verde – described as “on the north side of the Old Bahama Channel.” After 70 Africans drowned, investigators recorded that “the Africans in the hold were making so much noise that the crew could not hear the sound of the breakers on the reef.”

Unlike those they blamed however, all the British crew were saved, along with roughly 200 Africans. History records how “Nimble's captain, Lieutenant Charles Bolton, was cleared by a court martial on 21 January 1835 of all blame in the loss.” This wreck illustrates how in one country – The Bahamas – there can be as many as three “green cays,” in trying to determine where wrecks happened (The Royal Navy, Morning Post, London, 1835, Wikipedia).

In 1895 as insurgents were waging war against the Spanish empire in Cuba, with tacit and later direct support from the United States, a trove of valuable military supplies were uncovered on the Grassy Creek Cays off the southeast tip of Andros, southeast of Mars Bay, at the southwest tip of the Tongue of the Ocean. An article of September 1895 in the Louisville Courrier-Journal relates how the Governor of The Bahamas, Sir Gilbert Thomas Carter (1848-1927), informed the US State Department that the British had seized “a quantity of arms, ammunition …on an uninhabited island known as Grassy Cay.”

The letter explains that “…it is presumed that the shippers of these munition of war, apparently residents of the state of Florida, intended to convey them to the Cuban insurgents.” In the cases, which had the senders’ and receivers names and addresses on them, were a dozen “Remington carbines, a quantity of medical stores, 1,000 cartridges, 19,000 rounds” each of Remington and Winchester bullets. The file was sent to the federal attorney in Key West for follow up. It seems doubtful, given their expertise at blockade-running and getting around the Prohibition, that Bahamians would have left their names and addresses on boxes of contraband unattended. Until that happens, we may never know…