Photos of our World.....
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The Caribbean Sea, in the western Atlantic Ocean between the West Indies and Central and South America, measures about 2740 kilometres from west to east and between 800 and 1300 kilometres from north to south. Its greatest depth is over 7500 metres. This is where Columbus first landed in 1492, probably at San Salvador in the Bahamas, now an independent nation to the north east of Cuba; he also visited Cuba and Hispaniola, where he is buried in the cathedral of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Thinking he was in the Indies on his way to China, he called the inhabitants "Indians", a name that has endured to this day. The Antilles, the group of islands, popularly known as the West Indies, is actually comprised of the summits of two submerged mountain ranges, from the southern tip of Florida to the northern coast of Venezuela.
The archipelago is divided into two main groups of islands: the Greater Antilles, that are in the north and comprise the four large islands of Jamaica, Cuba, Hispaniola (an island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and Puerto Rico. The Lesser Antilles form the eastern boundary of the Caribbean Sea and include islands off the northern coast of South America: Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, Barbados, Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua and Barbuda, and St. Kitts-Nevis are independent nations. Martinique, Guadeloupe and the greater part of St. Martin are French dependencies; Saba, St. Eustatius and the smaller part of St. Martin are part of the Netherlands Antilles; Curaçao and Bonaire, off the coast of Venezuela are also part of the Netherlands Antilles and nearby Aruba has a separate autonomous status. Anguilla, Montserrat, the Cayman islands (just to the south of Cuba) and the Turks and Caicos Islands, north of Hispaniola, are still officially British, as is Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands. The nearby US Virgin Islands, an "incorporated Territory". The islands in the northern half of the Lesser Antilles are called the Leeward Islands and the southern half is called the Windward Islands.
Originally the islands were inhabited by two main indigenous Indian groups: the Arawaks, described by Columbus as "gentle, lovable and peaceful", and the Caribs, described as very warlike, who, apart from giving their name to the region, also are the source of the word "cannibal", which they were. They waged a bitter war against the white invaders until late 18th century. Nowadays, only small colonies of Caribs are left on Dominica and St. Vincent, while there are a few descendants of Arawaks still left in Puerto Rico, although Arawaks still inhabit tropical forests in South America.
Now most of the inhabitants of the islands are at least partially of African descent. The first African inhabitants of the Caribbean were brought there as slaves by European plantation owners but, over the years, there has been a great deal of intermarriage with Europeans. Mainly on Trinidad there are also East Indians, people from India who were brought there around the middle of the 19th century as indentured laborers when slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833.
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