Nassau in the early 1780s was a thorn in Spain's side. Perched on the island of New Providence, the colonial capital served as a major base for British privateers who harried Spanish and American shipping across the Caribbean. Spain had entered the American War of Independence in 1779 as an ally of France, and its commander in the region, Bernardo de Galvez, had already swept the British out of the Gulf of Mexico, capturing the outposts at Mobile and Pensacola in rapid succession. Nassau was the logical next target, and Galvez authorized an expedition against it in late 1781. But the campaign at Yorktown consumed everyone's attention that autumn, and the Bahamas plan was shelved. When it resurfaced in early 1782, Galvez gave the command to Cagigal, only to revoke it shortly after, demanding those troops for his grander Jamaican scheme.

Cagigal ignored the recall. He had already assembled his force and secured additional ships from an unlikely source: the South Carolina Navy, under the command of Alexander Gillon. On April 18, 1782, the flotilla sailed from Havana, leaving the city's garrison dangerously thin but Cagigal's ambition fully intact. Eighteen days later, his ships appeared off Nassau. Vice Admiral John Maxwell, the British commander, assessed the situation and chose discretion. Confronted by a force that vastly outnumbered his 600-man garrison, Maxwell offered twelve articles of surrender. Cagigal made minor revisions and accepted. Spanish troops marched into town, took the entire British garrison prisoner, and captured several vessels, including a frigate. Not a shot had been fired.

Galvez was furious. The troops Cagigal had taken to Nassau were the same forces Galvez needed for Jamaica, and that invasion had already collapsed after the British naval victory at the Battle of the Saintes shattered Franco-Spanish plans in the Caribbean. Rather than celebrate the bloodless acquisition of the Bahamas, Galvez arranged to have Cagigal arrested on charges of mistreating a British general, John Campbell, after the Siege of Pensacola the previous year. The charges were a pretext; the real offense was insubordination. Cagigal was shipped to Cadiz in chains, and his military career was destroyed. Francisco de Miranda, one of Cagigal's associates, faced similar charges. Miranda later said Galvez acted out of jealousy, and the experience may have helped push him toward his later career as an advocate for Latin American independence.

The Spanish held Nassau for less than a year. In April 1783, an American Loyalist named Andrew Deveaux sailed from St. Augustine with a tiny force of 220 men and just 150 muskets. Facing a Spanish garrison of 600 trained soldiers, Deveaux used an audacious ruse, ferrying the same group of men back and forth to shore in boats to make his force appear far larger than it was. The trick worked. The Spanish surrendered Nassau to what they believed was a substantial army. It was a fitting bookend to a campaign defined by bluffs and bloodless capitulations. By that point, diplomacy had already settled the matter: under the Treaty of Paris, Spain had recognized British sovereignty over the Bahamas in exchange for East Florida.

Perhaps the strangest twist is who received credit for the capture. It was Galvez, the man who tried to cancel the expedition, whose name became attached to the conquest of the Bahamas in official Spanish accounts. Cagigal, the man who actually did it, rotted in a Spanish prison. The whole episode captures something essential about the late-eighteenth-century Caribbean: a theater where empires traded islands like playing cards, where a governor could win a colony in a morning and lose his freedom for the achievement, and where the boundary between heroism and treason depended entirely on who was writing the dispatches.