Island, noted only for its length and as one of the
stopping-places of Columbus, who called it Fernan-
dina. But off to the east of this, with Rum Cay between,
standing as an outpost on the Atlantic marge
of the plateau, is Watling Island, the San Salvador
of the great discoverer. It is about twelve miles
long by six wide, and its area is cut up by salt-water
lagoons separated by low, wooded hills. It has a
scattered and rather listless population of perhaps
2000, mostly simple-minded negroes living in primitive
fashion.
Continuing down the range near its central line
we find the group of Fortune, Crooked, and Acklin
among the inhabited islands. T h e y are separated
by narrow and fordable passages and are nearer to
being one island than Andros. Here, too, was a
stopping-place of Columbus, who considered the
group one island and named it Isabella. Fortune
has, next to New Providence, the best port in the
Bahamas, P itt ’s Town, and consequently enjoys
quite a flourishing trade with coasters and visiting
steamers. This is due to its situation on the navigable
channel called Crooked Island Passage. Mariguana
is an insignificant piece of ground, and Great
Inagua has few inhabitants, and those mostly concentrated
in Matthew Town. T he Caicos and Turks,
which have been politically separated from the Bahamas
and attached to Jamaica since 1848, have a
few weary inhabitants, who used to thrive on salt,
but when the United States put a heavy duty on
their chief product it closed their best market, and
they have been obliged to gain a precarious livelihood
from sand and water in some other way than
evaporation. T u rk ’s Islands are so named from a
species of cactus, called Turks -head, which has a
fanciful resemblance to a gray head swathed in
a turban.
Off on the lower verge of the plateau by the deep
channel that separates it from Cuba is Great Ragged
Island, the last touched by Columbus before he
landed on what he thought was Cipango, the realm
of the Grand Khan. I t is in a chain of ragged reefs,
and is more thickly peopled than the rest of the
lower islands, though it is rather arid and sandy,
and supports only a small population. Another
physical feature of the submarine peninsula worthy
of passing notice is called Salt K e y Bank, between
the Florida K e y s and Cuba, lying in fact on a sort
of truncated triangular pyramid between the Straits
of Florida, the Santarem Channel, west of Andros,
and the New Bahama Channel, north of Cuba.
Most of the “ banks ” do not come to the surface of
the water, and this one has an interior depression
five or six fathoms below the surface, but its rim
rises into the air in broken coralline reefs and sandhills,
which sometimes seem in the distance to move
and shift in the sunlight like spectral craft under
sail. A ll about the margins and scattered over the
intermediate spaces of the Bahamas are strings and
clusters of rocks and reefs and lonely islets, with here
and there an inhabited space, but most of their life
and activity are concentrated in about a dozen of the
larger islands, along the two pathways of navigation,
Providence Channel and Crooked Island Passage.