32 ISLES OF SUMMER. 
It will be seen upon referring to any good map of the West 
India Islands that an immense number of islands are distributed 
upon a line over two thousand miles long, which trends south- 
easterly from a point relatively near the coast of Florida, to the 
mouth of the Orinoco River in South America. Sprinkled 
among these are many reefs, thousands of rocks, and little islets 
which are called by the English keys and by the Spaniards cays. 
The north-westerly portion of this chain is composed of the 
Bahama archipelago, and embraces thirty-nine islands, six hun- 
dred and sixty-one keys, and two thousand three hundred and 
eighty-seven rocks. 
This Island system constitutes a vast breakwater, and shelters 
from the winds and waves of the wide and stormy Atlantic, the 
Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, which bodies of water are 
perfectly land-locked on their other sides. Were the ocean 
waters drawn off, we should have, in place of this island system, 
the Bahama and Caribbean mountains, a lofty range, elevatcd 
thousands of feet above the neighboring plains and valleys, 
towering high up in the air as they now do in the water, with 
large areas of high tableland. The location of the islands to the 
windward of the banks has favored the formation and growth of 
the latter. 
The Bahama group rises out of several submerged tables of a 
soft calcareous rock, the two largest of which are known respec- 
tively as the Great and Little Bahama Banks. The water upon 
these banks attains a maximum depth of several hundred feet. 
The Little Bank is the most northerly, and is only seventy miles 
from the coast of Florida. It embraces a superficial area of 
5,560 square miles, including 1,200 square miles of islands, and. 
has a breadth of from thirty-five to sixty miles. Its principal 
islands are Great and Little Abaco and Grand Bahama. The 
two former are separated from each other by a narrow channel, 
