ABSTRACT
The situation becomes even more complicated when one is talking not merely of islands but also of parts of the mainland of Central and Southern America, and when an island such as Dominica is listed variously as belonging now to the Leeward Islands, and then elsewhere to the Windward Islands. The climate of the West Indian region generally is tropical – in fact, the whole of the area with which people are concerned lies between the Tropic of Cancer and the Equator, from British Honduras and the Virgin Islands in the north to Guyana in the south. The aboriginal inhabitants of the West Indian islands are usually referred to as Amerindians, or the ‘Indians of America’. The lands which Europe peopled with Portuguese, Spanish, French, British and Dutch, as well as black Africans, Indians and Chinese, are sending back to Britain their own white descendants, Creoles, coloureds and blacks.
