Everybody knows the 66 Steps. Almost nobody knows there are two separate stories buried in that hillside, and the one currently on the plaque is the newest one.
Start with what’s least disputed. The channel itself, that long narrow trench cut straight down through solid limestone, was carved by hand by enslaved Africans and completed around 1794. Sources generally cite around 600 people working with pickaxes and hand tools, cutting a 102 foot drop through rock at a time when Britain was fortifying New Providence against European rivals. Fort Fincastle went up on Bennet’s Hill, the highest point in Nassau, in 1793 under Lord Dunmore, alongside Fort Charlotte 1789 and Fort Montagu 1741.
Now here’s where it gets interesting, and where the standard tourist version falls apart. The staircase and the channel are not the same project. The steps came decades later, somewhere in the mid to late 1800s, carved by freedmen and dedicated to Queen Victoria. There’s a gap of roughly forty to fifty years between the trench and the stairs. You can actually see the problem in the sources themselves. Several accounts state the steps were originally cut to 64, one for each year of Victoria’s reign, with two more added for practical access. Victoria’s reign didn’t end until 1901. There is no way a staircase counted out to match the length of her reign was carved decades earlier. The tourism industry collapsed two separate events into one date and it’s been repeated ever since.
The older story, the one many Bahamians actually grew up with, and the one I tell people when I walk them through it, is that the trench existed to serve an escape route. There’s an underground tunnel running from Fort Fincastle that still exists, and the traditional account is that the channel was connected to it, so that if the fort were ever attacked, soldiers could slip out through the tunnel and come down through the passage rather than being trapped on the hilltop. A bait and switch, essentially. Several published accounts describe the project as creating both a tunnel to the fort and a stairway in the process, which lines up with that version.
Since 2024 there’s a plaque at the bottom of the staircase telling visitors the channel is simply the remains of an old quarry. That framing has started showing up on tourism websites too. A lot of locals find it hard to accept, and the objection is a practical one. You don’t quarry limestone that way. Limestone quarrying works across a face, cutting broadly and evenly down a hillside, because the material is soft and abundant and there’s no reason to be selective about which section you take. What’s actually there is a long, narrow, deep corridor bored through the middle of a hill, which is a strange shape for extraction and a very sensible shape for a defensive passage.
To be fair about it, I don’t know what evidence the plaque is based on, and it’s possible there’s archaeological reasoning behind it that hasn’t been made public. It’s also worth saying that a lot of Bahamian history from this period is thin on documentation, which is exactly why oral tradition carries as much weight as it does here. But the quarry explanation is the newest account, it displaced a much older one, and nobody has publicly explained why.
So when you walk down there, know you’re looking at two different centuries of labor in the same cut of rock. The walls were made by enslaved people. The steps were made by their descendants, free. And the reason those walls exist in the first place is a question that’s still open, no matter what the sign at the bottom says. It’s the kind of thing I’d stop and point out if you were standing there next to me, because the staircase is one of the places I take people on the walk, and the plaque is never the whole story.
I’m Eliyah, and I run KINDWalk, a pay-what-you-feel walking tour of Nassau. The Queen’s Staircase is one of the stops.