The Bahamas in the 1680s occupied an uncomfortable position in the Caribbean. English colonists had settled there, but the islands sat squarely in waters Spain considered its own. The colonial economy depended on privateering - a polite term for state-sanctioned piracy - with English captains raiding Spanish merchant vessels and splitting the proceeds with the colonial government.

Governor Robert Clarke made little effort to disguise the arrangement. His letters of marque went beyond authorizing defensive measures, permitting attacks on Spanish ports and settlements far from Bahamian waters. From Spain's perspective, Charles Town was not a colony but a pirate base operating under a thin veneer of English authority. The question was never whether Spain would retaliate, but when.

Alarcon struck without warning. Charles Town's population consisted of roughly 400 men capable of bearing arms, along with perhaps 200 women, a similar number of children, and 200 enslaved people. None were prepared for what arrived at daybreak.

Former governor Clarke, still on the island when his successor Robert Lilburne had recently taken office, attempted a countercharge and was wounded and captured. Lilburne fled his bedroom at the Wheel of Fortune - whether an inn or a residence, history does not clarify - along with most other colonists who could run. The Spanish force overwhelmed what little resistance materialized. The historian John Oldmixon later recorded a grim claim: that Clarke died after the Spaniards roasted him on a spit. Whether literally true or a piece of anti-Spanish propaganda hardened by retelling, the story captures the terror of that morning.

Alarcon was not finished with Charles Town. After the initial assault, he sailed north to Eleuthera and attacked the English settlement there with equal ferocity. Then he returned to Charles Town on November 15, 1684, set fire to what remained of its buildings, and carried numerous residents back to Havana as prisoners.

The destruction was total. Most structures in Charles Town were burned to the ground. The Bahamas, which had been a functioning if lawless English colony, were left essentially depopulated. Approximately 200 colonists fled south to Jamaica. Another 50 from Eleuthera scattered as far as Casco in Maine - a journey of over a thousand miles to a climate that could not have been more different from the Caribbean they had lost.

For two years, no recognizable English presence existed in the Bahamas. The islands reverted to what they had been before colonization: empty stretches of sand and scrub surrounded by clear water, visited only by passing ships and whatever formerly enslaved people or colonists remained hidden in the bush. Spain did not bother to occupy the territory it had cleared. The raid was punitive, not acquisitive.

In December 1686, a small group from Jamaica under a preacher named Thomas Bridges ventured back to New Providence Island and began rebuilding. Other colonists trickled in gradually. Governor Lilburne, who had fled in his bedclothes, returned from England to resume his post. Within a decade, the cycle that had provoked the raid began again - pirates and privateers drifted back to the Bahamas, and the islands' reputation as a haven for maritime outlaws deepened until it culminated in the golden age of Caribbean piracy in the early 1700s. Alarcon's fire had burned hot, but it had not burned long enough.