2011-10-23

Map card of the West Indies


"9teen87", a friend that I met at the Postcrossing Meeting in Cologne, sent this amazing map postcard of The West Indies, a short-lived Federation composed by the British colonies at the Caribbean.


"The West Indies Federation, also known as the Federation of the West Indies, was a short-lived Caribbean federation that existed from January 3, 1958, to May 31, 1962. It consisted of several Caribbean colonies of the United Kingdom. The expressed intention of the Federation was to create a political unit that would become independent from Britain as a single state—possibly similar to the Canadian Confederation, Australian Federation, or Central African Federation; however, before that could happen, the Federation collapsed due to internal political conflicts.


[…]The West Indies Federation (or just West Indies) consisted of around 24 main inhabited islands and approximately 220–230 minor offshore islands, islets and cays (some inhabited, some uninhabited). The largest island was Jamaica, located in the far northwest of the Federation. To the southeast lay the second largest island, Trinidad, followed by Barbados (in terms of population), located at the eastern extremity of the Federation.
The Federation spanned across all the island groupings in the Caribbean:
1)The Greater Antilles: Jamaica and the Cayman Islands and the Turks and Caicos Islands
2)The Lesser Antilles:
a)Barbados, east of the Windward Islands
b)Leeward Islands: Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla, and Montserrat
c)Windward Islands: Dominica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada
d)Trinidad and Tobago

[…]Historically "West Indian" nations The Bahamas, Bermuda, Belize, the British Virgin Islands, and Guyana opted not to join because they believed that their future lay with association with North America (for both the Bahamas and Bermuda), Central America, the United States Virgin Islands, and South America respectively." In: Wikipedia

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