Hatchet Bay Cave on Eleuthera: a hidden underground network and the island's nineteenth-century farming history
On the east side of Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas, just off Queen's Highway near the old Hatchet Bay silos, a cave system most tourists never know exists hides in the limestone. With local records going back to the early nineteenth century, Hatchet Bay Cave is the largest known underground formation in the Bahamas — about 1.6 kilometres long across three levels of limestone caverns.
The descent begins down a rough set of stone stairs. In the first chamber natural light still filters in and small stalactites and stalagmites begin to appear. Beyond that point, the cave runs about a mile underground across three levels. Names that locals and visitors have given to the formations include 'Cathedral Hall', 'The Wizard's Hat', 'Wedding Cake' and 'Frozen Waterfall'. A thin guide string runs along the floor to keep visitors from losing direction.
The cave's documented history begins with the early written records of Bahamian historian John Stark in 1842. In his reports on the cotton plantations that were Eleuthera's main economic activity at the time, Stark noted that the cave 'was used to store cotton and tobacco because of its constant cool temperature'. Eleuthera was the first Bahamas colony, founded in the mid-seventeenth century by Puritans from England; the independent-farmer economy that emerged took a different shape from the plantation economies of other Caribbean islands.
The cave's strategic use was not limited to agriculture. Conservation records suggest that during mid-nineteenth-century tensions between the United States and Britain in the Caribbean, sections of the cave's underground network were used by Royal Navy ships anchored off Eleuthera as gunpowder stores. Nicholas Heild, a former mayor of the island, told BBC Caribbean: 'The cave is the invisible layer of island history; what plantations couldn't protect, the cave preserved through its cool, damp environment.'
Geologically, the cave was formed at the end of the last ice age (about 125,000 years ago) by rain dissolving the limestone, in common with the rest of the Bahamas. Dr Karl Aiken of the Bahamas Geological Survey explains: 'Hatchet Bay Cave is a classic solution cave, but its size is unusual. Most Bahamian caves are 200-300 metres long; this multi-level long cave system indicates a significant underground water system during the last ice age.'
The cave's renewed agricultural use came in the mid-twentieth century. Between 1937 and 1956, Eleuthera's largest agricultural owner Owen Roberts mechanised the cave's second level to store sisal — a tropical fibre plant that became the lifeblood of the island's post-cotton economy. Roberts installed a lighting system, ventilation fans and shelving racks; some remnants of that installation are still visible today. The sisal industry collapsed in the 1960s with the spread of synthetic fibres, and Roberts's infrastructure was abandoned.
Since the late 1980s, Hatchet Bay Cave has been a protected area under the Bahamas National Trust. The Trust runs semi-organised tours for visitors; each tour restricts access to areas designated as biological conservation zones. Seven different bat species live in the cave, along with two species of blind fish endemic to the Bahamas that entered the cave through water-crossing fissures.
For those who wish to visit, local guide Sandra Cartwright runs private tours offering the cave's history and natural setting; advance booking is required. Cartwright told Atlas Obscura: 'In Eleuthera most visitors only see the pink-sand beaches; the cave is the real museum of the island's hidden history. Every room here is a page on island economy, colonial resistance and natural geology.'
The cave also remains an active research site. A team led by Dr Mark Norris of Brigham Young University has spent the past three years documenting 4,000-year-old Lucayan markings on the cave's upper level. The Lucayans were the indigenous Bahamian people who were wiped out following European contact in 1492. Pottery fragments and flint tools found in the cave indicate that a region previously thought to lie outside Eleuthera's indigenous settlement map was also inhabited.
In its cultural and historical dimensions, Hatchet Bay Cave is a rare site that preserves three distinct periods of island history — colonial agriculture, the sisal industry and the indigenous Lucayan era — in a single place. For visitors to the Bahamas, if they are willing to venture down, the silence and darkness of this underground complex evoke the layered 350-year story of Eleuthera directly.