It was to reach that region for gathering worldly
wealth and disseminating the “ true fa ith ,” by a
shorter route than the old one around the African
cape, that Columbus sailed westward; and when he
came to land he supposed that he had attained his
goal. Hence he called the native people ‘ ‘ Indians,
and the lands which he visited he spoke of as “ the
Indies.” Cuba, whose southern coast he skirted for
hundreds of miles without coming to the western
limit, he believed to be part of that Cipango whose
Grand Khan he had determined to convert to Christianity.
T h e Great Navigator died in his errors,
and when, among later discoveries, the truth was
found, his “ Indies were called the ‘ ‘ West Indies ”
to distinguish them from those of the East, instead
of being called the Archipelago of Columbus as they
might have been. So it happened that the word
“ Indian ” was imposed not only upon the natives
of the islands but upon the aborigines of the two
American continents as well.
This great archipelago is the barrier which divides
from the Atlantic Ocean the two deep basins that
constitute the American Mediterranean. But for
this, the larger and deeper of these, the Caribbean
Sea, would not exist as a separate expanse, and the
Gulf of Mexico alone, inclosed b y the peninsulas of
Florida and Yucatan, would be divided from the
ocean. This vast island barrier sweeps in a double
curve from the north-west, from about 30° north latitude,
off the southern part of Florida, for 1800
miles, to the very coast of South America, at latitude
io° north.
I I t will be well, as a preliminary to our study of
this vast domain of islands, to have in mind an outline
map of its extent and of its main features as
they exist to-day. Starting at the north, we have
the great group of the Bahamas, beginning scarcely
a hundred miles off Jupiter Inlet on the Florida
coast, and running in a band approximately one
hundred and fifty miles wide, to the south-east for
about seven hundred and eighty miles. Their number
has been variously estimated, and if we include
all the rocks and reefs that appear and disappear on
the surface of the water, as the work of the coral
builders grows and crumbles away, it is not always
¡the same. Including every bit of land or of rock at
any time visible, there are more than 2000, and of
those which can fairly be called islands or islets
there are nearly seven hundred, but only thirty-one
are inhabited. The total area of the group is generally
stated at 5450 square miles, and the latest statistics
give the aggregate population as about 50,000.
[ The northernmost island nearest the Florida coast
is the Great Bahama, and to the east of that are the
Tattle and Great Abaco. N e x t on the outer or
north-eastern line is the narrow, crescent-shaped
lEleuthera, and on the inner or south-western verge
the triple island of Andros, the largest of the whole
»group, containing, indeed, nearly one third of all its
ffdry land. Between these is the small but populous
Sand important island of New Providence, containing
¡¡Nassau, the capital of the British colony of the
1 Bahamas. Proceeding again on the outer edge we
|h a v e Cat and Watling, and on the other side, to the