Antiques.(Caribbean history)(Brief Article)

I have traveled everywhere in your sea of the Caribbean...from Haiti to Barbados, to Martinique and Guadeloupe, and I know what I am speaking about....You are all together, in the same boat, sailing the same uncertain sea...citizenship and race unimportant, feeble little labels compared to the message that my spirit brings to me: that of the position and predicament which History has imposed upon you.

Jean Baptiste Labat, A New Voyage to the Isles of America, 1722; English ed. 1742

The physical geography of the Caribbean islands has been the dominant influence on the pattern of life in the region. The larger northern islands--Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti and the Dominican Republic (which together occupy the island of Hispaniola), and Puerto Rico--form the Greater Antilles. The double chain of islands between Puerto Rico and Trinidad form the Lesser Antilles, of which the more northerly comprise the Leeward Islands and the more southerly the Windward Islands.

The natural beauty and salubrious climate of the islands tend to obscure the parallel hazards of hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, insects, and disease. The first outside intrusion into the Greater Antilles came from the Spanish in the late fifteenth century and they maintained a relative monopoly until the end of the seventeenth century. At one time or another the English, French, Dutch, Danes, and Swedes all attempted to establish colonies in the Americas. The earliest foreign settlements were microcosms of European metropolitan societies. It was a novel and challenging environment for the settlers, yet by the eighteenth century they had succeeded in creating single crop economies supplying sugar, ...