The Lucayan people called this island Guanima, meaning "middle waters land." For a time, Europeans believed it was Guanahani -- the very first island Columbus reached in the Americas -- until written records clarified that San Salvador held that distinction. The island's modern name has two competing origin stories, and both are perfectly Cat Island. One credits Arthur Catt, a pirate who supposedly used the island as a base. The other points to a once-thriving population of feral cats. Nobody has settled the argument, and nobody seems particularly bothered. The first white settlers arrived in 1783, Loyalists fleeing the newly independent United States after the American Revolution. They established plantations, including the Deveaux House estate near Port Howe, granted to Colonel Andrew Deveaux for recapturing Nassau from the Spanish that same year. The ruins of these plantations still dot the landscape, stone walls crumbling under sea grape and casuarina.

Cat Island is riddled with geological curiosities that have spawned centuries of folklore. Near Orange Creek, the Big Blue Hole plunges to depths that connect through underground caverns to the open ocean -- objects tossed into the freshwater lake have been known to emerge in the sea. Local legend holds that a horse-devouring monster lives in its depths, a story potent enough to keep fishermen at a respectful distance. Farther south, Armbrister Creek feeds a clear tidal lake called the Boiling Hole, where shifting tides force air through submerged passages, sending bubbles churning to the surface. Rays and juvenile sharks patrol the lake while birds nest in the surrounding mangroves. In Bain Town, the 20-meter-wide Mermaid Hole drops three meters to underwater caverns, and the name is not metaphorical -- islanders maintain that a mermaid lives in the passages below. These are not tourist fabrications. They are stories people grew up with, told by grandparents who believed them.

Arthur's Town, the island's capital settlement, was the childhood home of Sidney Poitier, who would become the first Black man to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. Poitier was born in Miami but raised on Cat Island, where his parents farmed tomatoes. He left for Nassau as a teenager and eventually made his way to New York, but Cat Island shaped him. In interviews, he spoke of the island's isolation, its lack of electricity and running water, and the self-reliance it demanded. His childhood home in Arthur's Town still stands. The island also produced the musician Exuma, whose Junkanoo-inflected sound drew on the rhythms Poitier would have heard as a boy -- the goombay drum, the concertina, and the handsaw that together form rake-and-scrape music, a genre that Cat Island claims as its birthplace.

The economic life of Cat Island runs on small-scale farming and one unusual export. Cascarilla bark, harvested from the Croton eluteria shrub that grows wild across the island, is shipped to Italy where it becomes an ingredient in Campari, fragrances, and medicines. It is a strange supply chain -- a Caribbean island's wild shrubs flavoring an Italian aperitif -- but it has sustained families here for generations. The island's spiritual life is equally distinctive. Father Jerome did not limit his architectural devotion to The Hermitage. In Old Bight, he built St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church, decorating it with frescoes, engravings, and sculptures. Along Dickie's Road near Orange Creek, Griffin Bat Cave once served as a hideout for enslaved people seeking freedom. Cat Island holds its history in layers -- Lucayan, colonial, emancipation, modern -- and the population of roughly 1,500 lives among all of them simultaneously.