south-west, Great Exuma and Long , with Rum Cay
in the middle. T he larger islands then fall into a
single line, with numerous “ C a y s ,” or “ K e y s ,” on
either side, and the principal ones in order are
Crooked, Acklin, Mariguana, the Caicos, and the
Turks, with Great and L ittle Inagua far off the line
to the south toward the eastern end of Cuba. The
water among these islands is relatively shallow, e x cept
where a deep chasm, called the “ Tongue of the
Ocean,” runs in on the eastern side of Andros toward
New Providence, but it deepens to iooo fathoms
between the great submarine plateau on which
they stand and the northern coast of Cuba.
Before Columbus’s time there were legends of a
land far out in the Atlantic, called Antilla, or A n tiglia.
Sometimes it was represented as one large
island, sometimes as an archipelago, and its place
was a shifting one on the ancient charts. T h e very
year that Columbus reported his first discoveries in
Spain (1493), Peter Martyr d ’Anghiera spoke of
these islands as the Antilles, and the name has been
applied to a part of them ever since. A s the Spaniards
made no use of the Bahamas, except to kidnap
their inhabitants for slaves, the name did not attach
to them. T h e four great islands, stretching from
the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico eastward for
more than 1300 miles, far beyond the last bank and
shoal of the Bahamas, and forming the northern
side of the Caribbean Sea, were called the Greater
Antilles, while the lower curve of the archipelago,
which forms the eastern barrier of that great basin,
was called the Lesser Antilles.
The western end of Cuba, separated by a deep
¡channel from the peninsula of Yucatan, half closes
jLj^g entrance to the Gulf of Mexico, and the island
¡stretches eastward more than seven hundred miles,
'measured straight across the meridians, and nearly
¡nine hundred following the curve of its axis. It
¡has an area of about 48,000 square miles, which is
substantially one half that of the whole archipelago,
dts mean width being about s ix ty miles. Before the
fravages of the last insurrection its population was
¡reckoned at 1,650,000. South of the eastern end
|of Cuba and about one hundred miles away is Jamaica,
third in size of the islands. Its length is one
hundred and forty miles, and its maximum width
fortynine. Its area is 4218 square miles, and its
Population 635,000, according to the latest statistics.
-The Cayman Islands, to the south of Cuba and west
of Jamaica, belong geographically to the former and
¡¡politically to the latter. The second in extent of all
the islands is Haiti, or Santo Domingo, to the east of
Cuba and separated from it b y the Windward Pas-
Ijsage. It is four hundred and seven miles long, and
¡¡has a maximum width of one hundred and six ty
miles. Its area is 28,249 square miles, and its in-
Ihabitants number 1,610,000. Eastward, across the
IfMona Passage from Santo Domingo, is the island of
Puerto Rico, last and smallest of the Greater A n tilles.
It is about one hundred and eight miles long,
Sand thirty-seven wide, contains an area of 355°
»square miles, and has over 806,000 inhabitants.
! The Bahamas and the Greater Antilles together,
starting on either side of the lower end of Florida