Lesser Antilles

Our political editor Chris Mason reports from Antigua.

From this humid vantage point in the Lesser Antilles, Commonwealth leaders have tilted an ear towards the northwest of here.

What might these results in the United States mean for them, mean around the world? The overwhelming sentiment, unsurprisingly, who knows? The underlying private fear, domestic rejection of President Trump, might make him angrier abroad.

Both the Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband and the Prime Minister are publicly alighting on the concern they believe they share with many American voters, the cost of living, and a big causal factor in driving those costs up, the war in Iran.

Ponce de Leon was a member of the crew.

They crossed in just 20 days this time and hit the Lesser Antilles.

There they met the Carib people, who were violent and fought anyone who tried to land.

Columbus didn't want to mess with them because he was focused on getting back to La Navidad.

Now they were crowded onto just two ships.

Their only hope was to make it back to Santo Domingo.

Columbus ordered the fleet to follow the lesser Antilles up to Hispaniola, but his captains disagreed.

They said going straight north was quicker.

The stranger placed his wooden case carefully upon the floor.

My name is Lucien Magnifique, and I am presently the finest illusionist performing anywhere in the Lesser Antilles.

Brontheim looked at his clothes, then at the cave.

Your professional success appears to have brought you to a remarkable venue.

Wow.

And we went through the Virgin Islands and the Lesser Antilles, the volcanic islands.

They were awesome, too.

Very, very different from Bahamas.

So he really was into his systems.

What made you decide to sell it? Well, after three years, we had done the Bahamas several times.

We'd done the Virgin Islands and the Lesser Antilles several times back and forth.

And after the accident, neither one of us wanted to go cross a big ocean.

See.

Social spiders range from Panama through northern southern America to southern Brazil, east to Trinidad and Lesser Antilles, and west to Peru.

Not Mexico.

I just really wanted to learn about Tenochtitlan.

And the Lesser here does not refer to the bird's size as it does in many other species like the Lesser Prairie Chicken, Lesser Kestrel, or Lesser Horned Owl.

No, Lesser in this case refers to the island group called the Lesser Antilles.

because this bird is found in the Caribbean region.

The Lesser Antilles is a group of islands, a little archipelago, at the eastern edge of the Caribbean Sea.

Islands in the archipelago include Aruba, Grenada, St. Vincent, Martinique, etc.

Lesser Antilles as opposed to the Greater Antilles, which includes Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and so on, Puerto Rico.

Okay, so Lesser Antillian Tanager.

Let's talk about this bird.

We move into, if we can move up to the forties and fifties where we're getting to the big, the end of the fourth Republic and the beginning of the fifth Republic, which we're in now, you start to see, okay, we've got all these regions that we need to rebuild.

We've got all of these systems we have to rebuild after the war and Maybe we need to really standardize the school system and turn that into something that we can spread everywhere, not just within the country that speaks five or six different languages, but how do we standardize things for the colonies, the former colonies, the Outre-mer, so like Guadeloupe and Martinique, Antibes, those kinds of places, they are technically French.

And so as you start to get into the school standardization system, we see a heavy-handed approach to what is French? What is the French standard? And they kind of have a different approach than we English speakers would.

There's this idea that in English cultures, there is the standard and then everybody who's privileged exists way beyond the standard.

If we have not given them all the tools to be successful adults, we have made them a successful army.

And just the fact that some of these smaller ones started to they they started again in the Banyuleu.

They started in the Outremer in like these other colonial vestiges like Guadeloupe and Martinique and Antibes.

Like they they had started protesting.

And in the case of Puerto Rico, which of course sits close to the Dominican Republic, Haiti, that larger island of Hispaniola, and then of course Cuba, the largest of the Caribbean islands.

We had the Taino culture, who we think, according to the prevailing theories, originated in Venezuela and Colombia and migrated through the Lesser Antilles, those smaller islands, majority English and French speaking now, and eventually settled in Puerto Rico and some of these larger islands in the Greater Antilles area.

Now, what is unique about Puerto Rico is unlike, for example, Cuba or Hispaniola, where there were multiple different kingdoms or tribes of Tainos, Arawaks, Caribs vying for control, Puerto Rico experienced a remarkably unified indigenous history.

In fact, the entire island was actually ruled by a single cacique or chiefdom.

And the genocide of the Taino people of Puerto Rico was complete.

Now, this is really important to highlight that the Caribbean in particular suffered a total extermination of its indigenous people with a few very, very, very small exceptions.

For example, Dominica, some of these smaller, lesser Antilles Islands, but in Puerto Rico, Hispaniola and Cuba, of course, the entire population of indigenous people was eradicated by the Spaniards through a combination of these wars, the diseases that were brought across and then slavery.

and the treatment of the slaves in the aftermath of this conquest.