The Flying Gang

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. I'm Mange Shachigular and I'm back with a new season of my podcast, Skyline Drive. This time I talk to scientists, biopunks, curmudgeons, blues owners, super seniors,

and Goa's top cryotherapy lab to try to understand this obsession with living forever and what it means for all of us. And I get into a bit of trouble along the way. I'd say probably start bone smashing.

That doesn't work. Make it look more defined. They say it works. I don't know.

Listen to Skyline Drive, How to Live Forever on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When teenager Joy Morgan discovered the religious group Israel United in Christ, she believed she'd found the truth. Many believe she found a cult. Then she disappeared.

The new podcast, The Missing Sister, explores her story, the family she left, and the religious group she found. You know when you get that freedom, you just, I don't want to be here. I want to get out. I want to go ahead and out.

All episodes available now to Benj. Listen to The Missing Sister on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 150 years ago, they were hunting us down to kill us, and now they're hunting down immigrants to deport them. This is First America, the true story of how the United States came to be and how we got to this present moment.

Listen to First America on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. things about making documentary. What do you want to say? Documentary is all about your ear. What do you hear? I feel like my job is listening really, really hard. Listen to Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. If you're watching this on Netflix, it looks a little different from how it typically looks

because we are recording from the studio at Bahamar in Nassau in the Bahamas. I thought, since we are in the Bahamas, it might be nice to record something that was specific to where we are. and that of course led me to pirates because for a period during its history, NASA was a notorious hotbed of pirate activity.

It is coincidental that the Assassin's Creed franchise has literally just put out a remaster of the game that is set both here and during all the things that we are talking about because we're going to be talking about NASA as a pirate republic, particularly home to a maritime criminal network known as the Flying Gang. And to start with a little bit of background, today there are about 30 inhabited islands in the Bahamas,

which has a total of about 700 islands and more than 2,000 keys. Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the late 15th century, this archipelago was home to the Arawakn-speaking people known as the Lukayo, or Lukayan people. This name comes from their own name for themselves, which is Lukukairi,

meaning island people. They may have shared common ancestry with the Tainos, who lived in other parts of the Caribbean, and they're sometimes called the Lukayan Tainos. They probably made their way to the Bahamas from other parts of the Caribbean by the year 800, and in the late 15th century, their population totaled about 40,000 people. According to a 2014 paper titled Naming

the Bahamas Islands, History and Folk Etymology by Wolfgang P. Ahrens, the name Bahama is Lukian. It comes from their name for Grand Bahama Island. That was Bahama, meaning large upper middle land. New Providence Island, which is where Nassau is located, was called Nima or Middle Water. This paper references 16th and 17th century maps,

a lot of which include Lucayan names for all of these islands and almost no Spanish ones. And that also referenced a lot of earlier scholarship into history and linguistics. The first Europeans to arrive in the Bahamas were part of Christopher Columbus's first expedition to the Americas.

They made landfall on Guanahani, known in English as San Salvador Island, in 1492. Columbus and his crew captured and enslaved some of the people they encountered in the Bahamas, and other Europeans who arrived later in the 15th and 16th centuries did the same. Lucayans also died of diseases that were introduced by the Europeans and as the result of violence,

as well as while they were doing the work that they were forced to do while enslaved. That included diving for pearls off the coast of Venezuela and working in silver mines. Over the course of this enslavement and genocide in the 16th century, the Lucaian people ceased to exist as a distinct cultural group. When Wamponset de Leon arrived in the area in 1513, he said he encountered only one person in the northern Bahama Islands.

It is likely that some people were able to flee to other parts of the Caribbean and to find homes with other indigenous communities. There are definitely people with Taino ancestry still living today. And in recent years, there's been a big resurgence in Taino identity in the Caribbean. There are also other Arawakian-speaking peoples in other parts of the Caribbean and in South America today.

Columbus, of course, claimed all of the islands he encountered for Spain. and in the 17th century, other European powers, including Britain, France, and the Dutch Republic, started claiming parts of the Caribbean as well. In 1629, British King Charles I granted territories in America to Robert Heath, including, quote, Bahama and all other isles and islands

lying southerly there or near upon the foresaid continent. Heath did not really do much to try to settle or occupy the Bahamas. And for a few decades after this, other British efforts to maybe establish some kind of settlement were largely unsuccessful. Then in 1670, the British established Charlestown on the island of New Providence. The Spanish raided Charlestown and

they burned it down in 1684. A little more than a decade later in 1695, the British rebuilt it and