There are several versions of how Bloody Bay, Tobago got its name. One legend has it that a naval battle took place there in 1666, when British admiral Sir John Harman encountered the combined fleets of France and Holland which had rendezvoused off a bay then called Rasp House Bay. It is said that the British defeated them with such great slaughter that the sea ran red with their blood History suggests this bloody battle may have been one that took place in Barbados, not Tobago. But the story has been assimilated into local Tobagan history and there it will stay.
Early Dutch maps gave the bay the name 'Rasphuys Bay." Rasphius, according to English historian Simon Schama, was a 17th century workhouse in Amsterdam where brazilwood was powdered to produce a dye. The timber was rasped by convicts; hence the name "Rasp House." One of the most important dyewoods from Tobago, called redwood, used to also be known as "bloodwood", for it stained the rivers red in which the logs were floated. Was "Bloody Bay" a similar use of "bloodwood?"
Finally there is the Bloody Bay Poison Frog, a species of frog endemic to the islands of Tobago and Trinidad, and nowhere else While the name suggests the frog is toxic, they are not.