MIAMI -- A three-member team has found artifacts from a Puritan settlement in a cave on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera -- which they say confirms Bahamian legends about the nearly 350-year-old settlement.
'This is the Plymouth Rock of the Bahamas,' said Jane Day of Lighthouse Point, project director for the team that worked on the two- week archaelogical dig in Preacher's Cave on the Bahamian out island of Eleuthera.
Seventy Puritans led by William Sayles, called the Eleutherian Adventurers, are thought to have sailed from Bermuda in 1648 on a quest for religious freedom.
The larger of their two boats, the William, ran aground on Devil's Backbone reef off the eastern shore of Eleuthera, which they had named from the Greek word for freedom.
The survivors settled in the 50-foot-high cave and later built a village, but returned to the cave for meetings and religious services.
The team of Miami archaeologist Robert Carr, Day and historian Sandra Norman of Deerfield Beach uncovered the skeletons of two children and a young adult in the cave, as well as pottery shards, clay pipes, a musket ball, brass straight pins, lead bailing seals, seeds, and thousands of animal bones from a communal cooking pit.
'The most fun for us was to take the rumor of the Eleutherans living in the cave and, through history and archaeology, prove it,' Norman said.
'It's the first British colony in the Bahamas and it marks the beginning of permanent British occupation,' she said.
She said the cave is mentioned continually in Bermuda records for the next 20 to 25 years after 1648 as meeting place, church and courthouse.
Carr, director of Miami's Archaeological and Historical Conservancy, said he was surprised the graves were found undisturbed under three to four feet of sand although the cave has been visited frequently by tourists and residents over the years.
'Nobody dug them up,' he said. 'It's absolutely amazing.'
The remains were sent to Gainesville for further analysis.
Included in the artifacts were five shards of pottery made in Puebla, Mexico, from 1650 to 1720, which suggests the cave was used as a center of trade for some time, said Day, president of the research firm Research Atlantica in Boca Raton.
Norman, an assistant professor of history at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, said much more work remains to be done, but those involved in the project intend to proceed slowly.
'We don't want to do any more digging in the cave or look outside the cave until we look at all the artifacts we have, and dig deeper in the archives in Bermuda and London,' she said. 'We want to take it very slowly so we don't miss anything either archaeologically or historically.'
Marvin Pinder, the Bahamas minister of local government, said he wants to declare Preacher's Cave a national historic site.
'I personally am a direct descendant of the Eleutheran Adventurers, so it's very exciting to me to make what I see is a direct link with history,' he said. 'It confirms verbal history and whatever written history there is.'
Norman said Sayles had been governor of Bermuda, but fell out of favor during the English Civil War, which began in 1642 and ended in 1649.
'Most of the island remained Royalist and supported Charles I (who was beheaded in 1649),' she said.
She said Sayles sailed to England, received a charter in 1647 for establishment of the Eleutheran colony, picked up a few followers and sailed back to Bermuda, where there are two versions of what happened next.
'If we take what Sayles and his people say, they left of their own volition for religious freedom,' she said. 'If we read Bermuda records, they talk how they banished and threw out those trouble makers. Obviously we have a little more research to do to figure out the reality there.'
When the group reached Eleuthera, they had a falling out aboard ship.
'A few people are dropped off, we don't know where yet, and the rest wreck on the Devil's Backbone and take up occupation in the Preacher's Cave,' Norman said.
She said Sayles and eight others sailed to a small Puritan colony in Virginia aboard their remaining ship, the six-ton Shallop.
'They get supplies from them and from there word goes to the Massachusetts Bay Colony that these Puritans in Eleuthera are in trouble, so they raise a shipload of goods and ship it off to them as well.
'In return for the supplies, the Eleutherans cut down several tons of braziletto wood, which is very valuable as a dye, and sent that back to Boston as a gift and asked that the cargo be sold and the money be donated to Harvard College.
'It was the largest gift the college had received (up to that time) since the original Harvard donation, and is known as the Eleutheran donation in the Harvard records,' she said.
