Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II AROUND THE CARIBBEAN PROBABLY every one has in his or her head a tolerably vague map of such portions of the earth as are reasonably familiar — "tolerably vague" being said with reason and by design. By the light of this mental atlas one has an indefinite sense of geography as a sort of glittering generality, with certain bench-marks to which dependable reference may be made, but with very little else that is accurate behind it. Therefore it is likely that every one visualizes the Antilles as a roughly semi-circular group of islands, mostly small and apparently lying in close proximity to one another, their line extending from the toe of Florida down to the huge shoulder of the South American continent and sufficing to contain the body of water known to all mankind as the Caribbean Sea. The notable regularity of this group in the matter of curvature and alignment and the fact that, together with the peninsula of Yucatan and the long curve of the Central American mainland, a fairly symmetrical ellipse is pro duced on the charts, must stamp the image on even the most casual observer. The ordinary recollection will instantly place Cuba at the upper end of this curving archipelago, partly because it is the largest of the entire group, partly because it lies nearest us, and more especially, perhaps, because certain events in 1898 forced us to take a direct personal cognizance of this great but previously little considered island. I venture the guess, however, that at this point the average man's knowledge ceases to be definite. Until one ventures into the locality and is compelled to learn a little more clearly just where Haiti and Porto Rico are, their exact locus is but dimly sensed. And as for such fascinating names as Trinidad, Barbados, Guadeloupe, Dominica, T...