The Cayman Islands were discovered by accident when Christopher Columbus, on his fourth journey to the New World in 1503, got blown off course. He saw Cayman Brac and Little Cayman first and named them Las Tortugas because they looked like little rocks. By 1523, Grand Cayman Island was appearing on the maps along with the first two. Explorer Sir Francis Drake visited Grand Cayman and the other islands in 1585.
The first settlers of the Cayman Islands were the British who came from the island of Jamaica between 1661 and 1671. The Treaty of Madrid in 1670 gave the Cayman Islands to Britain, however the settlers feared the Spanish privateers who were prevalent in the area at that time and returned to Jamaica. Privateers were legal pirates, they took ships, but did it on the order of the government to attack the ships of an enemy. Of course, they also attacked any other ship that struck their fancy and kept the loot.
Treaty of Utrecht, in 1713 banned privateering, however the privateers were not ones for obeying treaties and British privateers like Black Beard used the Cayman Islands as their home base. The governor of Jamaica issued the first land grant on Grand Cayman Island in 1734 for 3,000 acres. By 1742 enough grants were issued to build a thriving community. The Cayman Islands supplied Jamaica with products such as cotton, turtle, sarsaparilla and wood during this time and in 1790, Fort George was built to defend the islands from privateers.
The 19th century brought great changes to Grand Cayman and the rest of the Cayman Islands. In the first census ever taken, in 1802, the population of Grand Cayman Island was 933 and out of those 933, 545 were slaves. Slavery was abolished in all of the Cayman Islands in 1834. Grand Cayman and the Cayman Island were considered a colony of Jamaica. In 1831 when they established their own legislature which was a dual body consisting of eight magistrates who were appointed by the governor of Jamaica and 10 representatives elected by the citizens. Before this, local laws were passed by the principal inhabitants. The relationship between the two was made formal in 1863 when Parliament declared the Cayman Islands a dependency of Jamaica.
In 1920, government schools were established in all districts and in 1937 the first cruise ship ever to visit the Cayman Islands, the Atlantis, started a whole new tourist industry. World War II slowed the tourist trade down, but in the 1950s there was a boom in hotel construction. Three major events occurred in 1953: the opening of the first air field, the opening of George Town Hospital and the opening of Barclays Bank, the first commercial bank in the islands. In 1959, the Cayman Islands got their first written constitution and was finally a free country. The constitution also gave women the right to vote for the first time. Jamaica became an independent country in 1962, but the Cayman Islands opted to be remain a British Dependency and an administrator from the UK took over the administration of the islands.
