Christ Church Cathedral: the church that wasn’t there when Blackbeard ran Nassau

In Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, the present cathedral is the fifth building to stand on the same site. The first, built between 1670 and 1684, was destroyed by the Spanish in 1684. The second, completed by 1695, was destroyed in 1703 during the Franco-Spanish raid on Nassau, a colonial military operation in the War of the Spanish Succession, not a pirate attack. No source attributes damage to the church during Nassau’s so-called “pirate republic” (roughly 1706-1718, the age of Blackbeard and the “Flying Gang”). On the contrary, the church was absent for the whole period, since the third building, in wood, was completed only in 1724, six years after Governor Woodes Rogers ended the era of piracy in 1718: the town of the most famous pirates in history literally had no church for its entire existence. The fourth building, in local limestone, was built in 1754, with a spire added in 1774 and replaced by a square tower in 1830 because of decay. The present, fifth building had its foundation stone laid in 1837 by Governor Sir Francis Cockburn, opened for worship in 1841 and was extended eastwards in 1861 to form the present chancel, the same year in which it became a cathedral, coinciding with Nassau’s elevation to a city. The first bishop, Charles Caulfield, was however consecrated at Lambeth Palace, in London, on 24 November 1861, not in the cathedral itself. Nor is any specific link documented between the building and the Loyalists who arrived after the American Revolution, although such a link is well documented for the nearby, and different, St. Matthew’s Church. In Gothic style, with blocks of local limestone held together mainly by their own weight rather than by mortar, and a vaulted mahogany ceiling with beams worked by shipbuilders, the cathedral lost its original stained glass in a fire in 1942. The replacements, the work of M. Fassi-Cadet of Nice, were donated in 1949 by Charles Munroe in memory of his son, Lieutenant Logan Munroe, who fell in the Second World War. The present organ, built by the German firm Gebr. Oberlinger, was installed in 1986, with three manuals, 64 stops and about 3,200 pipes. The tower clock, made by the London firm Thwaites and Reed in 1926, replaced earlier mechanisms of 1796 and 1865 that once regulated the hours for selling alcohol in town. Despite circulating promotional claims that the British royal family always visits the cathedral on its trips to the Bahamas, no primary source confirms a specific, dated visit to the building, nor is any hurricane damage to this specific structure documented, despite the devastation suffered by Nassau’s churches in the cyclones of 1926 and 1929. The Anglican diocese of Nassau was established on 4 November 1861; the present bishop is the Right Reverend Laish Z. Boyd Sr., in office since 2009.