Bahamas: Offshore Eden

The dice, roulette wheels, chemin de fer and blackjack were going full tilt. At one table a gambler toyed with $1,200 worth of chips; hovering over the dice was a Sidney Greenstreet character who, they said, picked up $29,000 at the tables a few weeks ago. Former Light-Heavyweight Champ Joey Maxim was guarding the door. “Can’t drink,” he mumbled. “I’m watching for hustling broads and big-time gamblers.” Cannes? Monte Carlo? Vegas? Not quite. Freeport, in tiny Grand Bahama Island, is not even marked on many maps. Yet Freeport boosters already call it the Riviera of the Americas, vow that in time the bustling little town will become one of the Caribbean’s biggest tourist and industrial centers.

One of 700 British Bahamian islands, the tiny rock looks big. For the tourist, there is an average temperature of 76°, fresh water aplenty (if that’s what he wants), miles of beaches and a swash buckling past peopled by buccaneers and Prohibition rumrunners. Even to day, one Freeport beer baron still uses his old Chicago sobriquet, “Shotgun John.” For the industrialist, there is total exemption from corporate, personal and export taxes, and the kind of environment to attract executive talent.

Crown Concessions. Freeport is the stubborn dream of U.S. Financier and Developer Wallace Groves. In the late 1940s, Groves bought a small lumber company on Grand Bahama, then little more than a desert island. In 1955, in exchange for tax concessions and a 99-year lease on 50,000 acres of Crown land, he agreed to dredge a harbor, build a port city — Freeport — provide school, health and utility needs, and bring in industry. But industry was not interested. All Groves had forgotten, says an associate, was “to make the place livable.” So he got 100,000 more Crown acres, agreed to build a luxury hotel and expand development of Freeport and the harbor area. In all, cracks one old Freeport hand, Groves won “the most sweeping land charter since the Hudson’s Bay Company.”

To raise the needed capital, Groves set up the Grand Bahama Port Authority, Ltd.; he sold one 25% interest to a London holding company headed by British Hardware Tycoon Charles Hayward, another 25% to a New York group led by Investment Banker Charles Allen. To build the hotel and supply the other resort and residential amenities, the Port Authority organized the Grand Bahama Development Co., Ltd. with Canadian Entrepreneur Louis Chesler. The Port Authority put up $2,000,000 and 100,000 acres, Chesler $23 million. Today the $100 million pleasure isle is slowly taking shape.

People Shortage. Freeport’s first hotel, the lush, 254-room neo-Aztec Lucayan Beach, opened last January (cheapest room: $37), and its casino—the first in the Bahamas—is kept busy by visitors from Miami. A topnotch 18-hole golf course and country club are completed. Just up the beach, there will be a 500-room Holiday Inn Hotel and a 150-room boatel and marina; other land has been bought for nightspots, motels, office buildings, a shopping center, private homes, a draught-and-rafters English pub. The biggest moneymaker so far is a $1,500,000 bunkering terminal where ten ships at a time—more than at any other single station in the hemisphere—can refuel with tax-free oil.

Grand Bahama Island is not yet the other Eden that its promoters picture. Like Eden, as one Freeporter puts it, “all it needs is people.”