Windward Islands
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- This article is about the Caribbean island group. For the eastern Society Islands in French Polynesia, see Windward Islands (Society Islands). The southeastern Hawaiian Islands are also occasionally referred to as the Windward Islands.
The Windward Islands are the southern islands of the Lesser Antilles.
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[edit] Name and geography
The Windward Islands are called such because they were more windward to sailing ships arriving in the New World than the Leeward Islands, given that the prevailing trade winds in the West Indies (the informal name for all of the Lesser Antilles) blow east to west. The trans-Atlantic currents and winds that provided the fastest route across the ocean brought these ships to the rough dividing line between the Windward and Leeward islands. Vessels in the Atlantic slave trade departing from the African Gold Coast and Gulf of Guinea would first encounter to southeasternmost islands of the Lesser Antilles in their west-northwesterly heading to final destinations in the Caribbean and North and Central America.
The Antillian Windward Islands are :
- Martinique (French; all the others are part of the Commonwealth of Nations)
- Saint Lucia
- Saint Vincent
- The Grenadines
- Grenada
[edit] British colonial entity
The name Windward islands was also used to refer to a British colony on several of these islands, existing between 1833 and 1960 and consisting of the islands of Grenada, St Lucia, Saint Vincent, the Grenadines, Barbados (seat of the governor to 1885, when it became a separate colony), Tobago (to 1889 when it was joined to Trinidad), and Dominica (from 1940, when it was transferred from the Leeward Islands colony to the Windward Islands).
The colony was known as the Federal Colony of the Windward Islands from 1871 to June 1956, and then as the Territory of the Windward Islands to its dissolution in 1960.
Its capital was Saint George's on Grenada (originally Bridgetown on Barbados, 1871-1885). They were not a single colony, but a confederation of separate colonies with a common governor-in-chief, while each island retained its own institutions, and they had neither legislature, laws, revenue nor tariff in common. There was, however, a common court of appeal for the group as well as for Barbados, composed of the chief justices of the respective islands, and there was also a common audit system, while the islands unite in maintaining certain institutions of general utility.
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* now a Commonwealth Realm · now a member of the Commonwealth of Nations
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1 Now the San Andrés y Providencia Department of Colombia. |
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3 Now part of the *Realm of New Zealand. |
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7 Dependencies of St. Helena since 1922 (Ascension Island) and 1938 (Tristan da Cunha). |
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[edit] See also
[edit] Sources and references
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
- WorldStatesmen- Grenada, also shows flags
