The Compass Archives: More than just a novelty

Over the past 60 years, the Cayman Islands has grown precipitously, from a largely seafaring territory with just over 10,000 residents, to a financial services and tourism powerhouse with a population approaching 100,000.

Over those 60 years, the Cayman Compass has been there, reporting on all the happenings and key moments in our Islands.

Now, for the first time, members of the public can visit – free of charge – the newly launched Archive section of the Compass website and read any of its published newspapers since October 1965. Even more importantly, the Archive is searchable, meaning that anyone can type the name of person or company or a description of a historical event and read what was written on the topic by Compass journalists.

Would you like to read about when world-famous boxer Muhammad Ali visited Grand Cayman in 1984? It’s there. How about when a British Airways Concorde, the world’s only supersonic passenger jet, landed at Owen Roberts International Airport that same year? It’s there, too.

You’ll also find an article about the time one of country music’s biggest stars, the Man in Black himself – Johnny Cash – performed a concert at the Lions Centre in 1988.

There’s also stories about more turbulent occurrences, like the hijacking drama that played out in 1969 at Owen Roberts International Airport involving a Lanica Airlines jet and a stewardess – as they were then called – held at gunpoint.

There are also stories about Hurricane Ivan, the 2020 pandemic lockdown and the building of gallows at Northward Prison, which were never used because of a UK Order in Council abolishing the death penalty in its Overseas Territories.

You can also find articles on big courtroom trials, including the infamous ‘Operation Tempura’ and Euro Bank cases, the latter of which reads like a spy novel and involved an undercover secret agent and an MI6 informant code-named ‘Warlock’.

More than just a fun novelty, the Compass Archives gives residents – ranging from students, teachers, historians, government officials and those with a curiosity about the place they call home – an invaluable resource for research.

The Herculean effort to digitise 60 years’ worth of newspapers and make the contents searchable – and thus particularly useful – was both time-consuming and costly. However, the Dart Group and the Kenneth B. Dart Foundation decided the project was essential in preserving the written history of the Cayman Islands during arguably its most important period, as reported by the many outstanding past and present journalists of the country’s national newspaper.

Compass Media is proud to present the gift of the Compass Archive to the people of the Cayman Islands. We encourage all our readers to visit the Archive site to explore the rich history presented by the hundreds of thousands of articles published since 1965.

You can look up old friends and acquaintances, family members, businesses of yesteryear, memorable events and historic milestones. On any given day, you can also see some of the front pages of newspapers on that same day over the past 60 years.

If you haven’t visited our Archive site already, we invite you to grab a glass or mug of your favourite beverage and do so here. We do want to warn you, however: Exploring the Compass Archives can be addictive, and you might find several hours have passed before you realise it!