THE CARIBBEAN, 18th century

The island of Guanahani (today's San Salvador) was the land where Christopher Columbus landed in 1492 as believed by many scholars. But it was Hispaniola that was first colonized by Spaniards followed by the French. By the 1600s every island in the Caribbean was under the Spanish. The Dutch started colonizing in 1616 and later were joined by the British and French (1623) and Denmark-Norway in 1672. A brief colonization by the Duchy of Courland (in today's Latvia) between 1637 to 1690 and by the Order of Malta in 1651 also took place.

But even more interesting is the nomenclature of these islands and to see how things changed through history. For example, the Bahamas wasn't always the name of these chain of islands. On old maps one would find the name Isles Lucayes while Bahama is marked as a tiny island closest to Florida. Today the island's name is Grand Bahama Island and has a town named Lucaya. Also, the size of the islands mapped by early Europeans was much bigger than its original size, which looks like skinny strands of lands scattered between Florida, Cuba and Hispaniola.

Today the island group is popularly known as West Indies or the Caribbean Islands. Interestingly, the Lesser Antilles group of islands starting from the US Virgin Islands to Grenada were known as Isles Caribes (translating to Caribbean Islands) in olden days. Hispaniola has been referred to as Isle de Santo Domingue, the derivation of Santo Domingo (capital of Dominican Republic). Santo Domingo is also the name of plenty of towns and cities from USA to South America and also in Philippines (since it being a former Spanish colony). Jamaica was a former Spanish colony before occupied by the British and was written as La Iamaica, Cuba has been spelled as 'Isle Cuba de la Couve', Santiago is Sant Iago, Puerto Rico is written as Porto Rico etc.

While Britain, France and Spain occupied islands in most of the West Indies, the Dutch were restricted to Lesser Antilles islands such as Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire. They were part of the Netherlands Antilles, a constituent country under the Kingdom of Netherlands between 1954 to 2010. The three islands are currently individual constituent countries under the Kingdom of Netherlands. A tiny entity called as Caribbean Netherlands consisting of special municipalities such as Saba, St. Eustatius along with Bonaire also belongs to the Kingdom of Netherlands.

At present there are still dependencies, special administrative units, overseas departments etc. of various European countries still existing in the Caribbean. The Virgin Islands territories are divided into the UK and the USA, making it one of the only two unincorporated and organized US territories in the Caribbean (other being Puerto Rico).

Below here is a map of 18th century Caribbean islands that had just been scrambled between all the mighty European powers.