50 Fun Facts About Lesser Antilles

In 1804 the Royal Navy officially commissioned Diamond Rock, a steep islet off Martinique, as what?

The rock became a warship, the sloop HMS Diamond Rock, after sailors hoisted cannon to its summit. Its guns harassed French shipping for 17 months.

Which island lost its capital, Plymouth, to eruptions of the Soufrière Hills volcano that began in 1995?

Montserrat is nicknamed the Emerald Isle of the Caribbean for the Irish ancestry of many islanders, and it keeps St Patrick's Day as a public holiday.

Which Founding Father of the United States was born in Charlestown on the island of Nevis?

Alexander Hamilton was born out of wedlock, orphaned as a child and taken in by a prosperous merchant.

The 'mountain chicken', hunted as a delicacy on two Lesser Antilles islands, is actually what kind of animal?

The mountain chicken is a frog, one of the largest in the world. Hunting and a fungal disease have left it critically endangered.

Which island of only 87 square kilometres has been divided between France and the Netherlands since 1648?

Saint Martin was split by the Treaty of Concordia. The smaller Dutch side, Sint Maarten, has more people than the French side.

Which island, the easternmost in the Caribbean, replaced its monarchy with a president to become a republic in 2021?

Barbados made the switch on 30 November 2021, the 55th anniversary of its independence, and stayed in the Commonwealth.

Which British royal accepted a plot of land on the private island of Mustique as a wedding present in 1960?

Princess Margaret was given the ten-acre plot by the island's owner, Colin Tennant, and built a villa there called Les Jolies Eaux.

Which volcano on Martinique destroyed the town of Saint-Pierre within minutes in May 1902?

Mount Pelée killed about 29,000 people in the worst volcanic disaster of the 20th century. The main eruption left only three known survivors.

From which country did the United States buy the islands of St Thomas, St John and St Croix in 1917?

Denmark sold the islands for $25 million in gold. Washington feared that Germany might seize them as a submarine base.

Which British tycoon was married in 1989 on Necker Island, his private retreat in the British Virgin Islands?

Richard Branson later offered Necker Island as collateral for a loan to keep his airline, Virgin Atlantic, flying during the pandemic.

Which pop star, born in Saint Michael and raised in Bridgetown, was declared a National Hero of her island in 2021?

Rihanna, born Robyn Rihanna Fenty, grew up in a three-bedroom bungalow and helped her father sell clothes at a street stall.

Which Caribbean island gives its name to a liqueur, often dyed blue, flavoured with dried laraha peel?

Curaçao liqueur relies on the laraha, a bitter orange that adapted to the island's conditions. The famous blue is only dye.

Which island, called the Island of Spice for its nutmeg, was invaded by US-led forces in Operation Urgent Fury?

Grenada got its first nutmeg trees in 1843, when a merchant ship bound for England from the East Indies left a few behind.

Which island, home to the Boiling Lake and the Kalinago Territory, is known as the Nature Island of the Caribbean?

Dominica is the youngest island in the Lesser Antilles and is still being formed by volcanic activity. Its Boiling Lake is the world's second-largest hot spring.

Which island, fought over 14 times by Britain and France, has the twin volcanic peaks called the Pitons?

Saint Lucia changed hands so often that it was nicknamed the Helen of the West, after Helen of Troy. It is named after Saint Lucy of Syracuse.

La Grande Soufrière, the highest peak in the Lesser Antilles, stands on which butterfly-shaped island?

Guadeloupe's two main islands form the wings of the butterfly, separated by a narrow channel, and the active volcano rises to 1,467 metres.

Which British admiral gives his name to the Georgian naval dockyard at English Harbour in Antigua?

Horatio Nelson lived at the dockyard from 1784 to 1787. It is the only continuously working Georgian-era dockyard in the world.

After the Bounty mutiny, William Bligh's second voyage carried which Tahitian food plant to Saint Vincent?

Breadfruit was wanted as a cheap, high-energy food for enslaved workers in British colonies. Bligh's first attempt to fetch it had ended with the mutiny.

Which musical instrument grew out of Carnival percussion bands in Trinidad during the 1930s and 1940s?

The steelpan evolved from earlier traditions such as tamboo bamboo and was declared the national instrument of Trinidad and Tobago in 1992.

The Duchy of Courland, which founded a colony on Tobago in 1654, lay in which present-day Baltic country?

Latvia's Duchy of Courland had only about 200,000 people, making it the second-smallest state ever to colonise the Americas.

Which people of mixed African and Carib descent were deported by the British from Saint Vincent to Roatán in 1797?

Only about half of the Garifuna deportees lived to reach Roatán, and the survivors spread along the coast of Central America as far as Belize and Nicaragua.

Which music genre did Lord Shorty create in Trinidad in the 1970s to revive the fading popularity of calypso?

Soca was defined by its creator as the Soul of Calypso, and he first spelled the word sokah.

Which dance music was pioneered in the early 1980s by Kassav', a band from the French Antilles?

Zouk began as a fast carnival sound, later nicknamed zouk béton, before an offshoot called zouk-love appeared.

Which Nobel Prize-winning author of A House for Mr Biswas was born in Chaguanas, Trinidad, in 1932?

V. S. Naipaul was the son of a Trinidad Guardian reporter. He was knighted in 1990 and took the literature prize in 2001.

Which Martinique-born psychiatrist backed Algerian independence and wrote The Wretched of the Earth?

Frantz Fanon joined the Algerian National Liberation Front and dictated the book in Tunis shortly before his death in 1961.

Tobago's Main Ridge, set aside by a law of 1776, is one of the world's oldest protected examples of what?

It is a forest reserve, kept uncleared after an MP spent eleven years persuading Parliament that the trees would attract rain to the island's plantations.

Which cocktail bitters, sold in a bottle with a famously oversized label, is produced in Trinidad and Tobago?

Angostura bitters are named after the town on the Orinoco River where they were first made, and they contain no angostura bark.

Rhum agricole, the rum style of Martinique and the French Caribbean, is distilled from what instead of molasses?

Rhum agricole is made from fresh cane juice, squeezed straight from the stalks. Most rum uses molasses, a by-product of sugar refining.

Which Portuguese-based creole, shaped by Dutch and Spanish, is the most widely spoken language on Aruba and Bonaire?

Papiamento is spelled with a final u on Bonaire, and it is largely based on Portuguese as spoken in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Codrington Lagoon on Barbuda holds a vast nesting colony of which seabird, whose males inflate a red throat pouch?

The frigatebird colony sits on tiny Man of War Island at the north of the lagoon, the largest saltwater lagoon in the Eastern Caribbean.

Which animals, carried from West Africa on slave ships in the late 1600s, now live wild on Saint Kitts and Nevis?

Green monkeys were also taken to the Cape Verde islands, off north-western Africa, about a century earlier.

Which wading bird, one of the two national birds of Trinidad and Tobago, has a sanctuary at Caroni Swamp?

The scarlet ibis represents Trinidad, while Tobago's bird is the cocrico. Both appear on the national coat of arms.

Which 2017 hurricane wrecked over 90 percent of Barbuda's buildings and forced the whole population to evacuate?

Irma struck Barbuda at peak strength with winds of 180 mph, and every resident was moved to neighbouring Antigua.

Which shared currency of Antigua, Saint Kitts and Saint Vincent has been pegged to its US counterpart since 1976?

The Eastern Caribbean dollar has kept the same rate, EC$2.70 to one US dollar, ever since. Before the switch it was tied to the pound sterling.

Martinique, although 7,000 km from Paris, is an 'outermost region' of which international organisation?

The European Union counts Martinique as its own territory, so islanders spend euros even though they are outside the Schengen Area.

Gustavia, the capital of Saint Barthélemy, is named after a king of which country that once ruled the island?

Sweden got the island in 1784 from Louis XVI, who thought it of little worth and swapped it for trading privileges in Gothenburg.

Which city is the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, though it is smaller than both Chaguanas and San Fernando?

Port of Spain has been Trinidad's capital since 1757, and commuters swell its daytime population to about 250,000.

Which city is the capital of Saint Kitts and Nevis, the smallest sovereign state in the Western Hemisphere?

Basseterre was founded by the French in 1627, which makes it one of the oldest towns in the Eastern Caribbean.

Which Antiguan batsman and former West Indies captain has a cricket stadium on the island named in his honour?

Viv Richards won 27 of his 50 Tests as captain and lost only 8. The ground that bears his name was built for the 2007 Cricket World Cup.

Which tiny Lesser Antilles island has a 400-metre airport runway, reputed to be the shortest in commercial use?

Saba is mostly one dormant volcano, Mount Scenery, whose 870-metre summit is the highest point in the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

Which island threw out the Saint Kitts police in 1967 and voted to break away from rule by Saint Kitts?

Anguilla takes its name from a word for eel, after its long shape. British troops landed in 1969, and in 1980 the island formally became a separate British territory.

Which island's Fort Oranje answered the American brig Andrew Doria in 1776 with the so-called First Salute?

Sint Eustatius was then so rich from trade that it was known as the Golden Rock. Franklin D. Roosevelt later presented a plaque marking the salute.

Which uninhabited islet of Antigua and Barbuda is the seat of a mock kingdom dreamed up by the novelist M. P. Shiel?

Redonda's crown later went to the poet John Gawsworth, who popularised the title and is reported to have sold it several times.

The Windward and Leeward Islands take their names from which prevailing air currents that carried ships from Europe?

Trade winds blow from east to west here, so sailing ships arrived at a dividing line. Islands that fell to windward of it got one name, the rest the other.

Which fortress on Saint Kitts, built by enslaved Africans to British designs, was called the Gibraltar of the Caribbean?

Brimstone Hill was thought impregnable by 1780, but two years later a French siege forced its outnumbered garrison to surrender after a month.

The name Antilles comes from Antillia, which appeared on medieval European charts of the Atlantic as what?

Antillia was a phantom island, placed far to the west of Portugal and Spain by 15th-century mapmakers. Its name was later given to the real ones Columbus reached.

Soufrière, a name shared by volcanoes on several Lesser Antilles islands, refers in French to an outlet of what?

Sulphur vents are so typical of the region's volcanoes that many share the name, including the one whose eruptions buried the town of Plymouth.

Bequia, Mustique, Canouan and Union Island all belong to which chain of small islands south of Saint Vincent?

The Grenadines stretch in a line between two larger islands and are split between two countries. Nine of them are inhabited and open to the public.

Sir Walter Raleigh stopped in 1595 at a lake in Trinidad that is the world's largest natural deposit of what?

Asphalt fills the Pitch Lake at La Brea, which is estimated to hold 10 million tons. Raleigh, shown the way by local Amerindians, used it to caulk his ship.

Christopher Columbus named the Virgin Islands in 1493 after the legend of which saint and her 11,000 companions?

Saint Ursula's legend gave the islands their first Spanish name, Santa Úrsula y las Once Mil Vírgenes, which was later shortened.