The Cradle of the Deep; An Account of a Voyage to the West Indies

New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1920. Presumed First U. S. Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Good. Frederick Treves (photographer).. xii, 378, [2] pages. With illustrations from photographs by the author, and maps. Color frontis. Folding map at back. Index. Pencil erasure residue on fep. Sir Frederick Treves, 1st Baronet, GCVO, CH, CB (15 February 1853 - 7 December 1923) was a prominent British surgeon of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, now known for his friendship with Joseph Merrick, "the Elephant Man". Treves was also the author of many books, including The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (1923), Surgically Applied Anatomy (1883), The Highways and Byways of Dorset (the county in which he was born) (1906), A Student's Handbook of Surgical Operations (1892), Uganda for a Holiday, The Land That is Desolate, and The Cradle of the Deep (1908). This last volume is an account of his travels in the West Indies, interspersed with portions of their histories; describing (among other things) the death of Blackbeard the pirate, an eruption of Mount Pelée (which destroyed the city of St. Pierre, Martinique), and a powerful earthquake at Kingston, Jamaica, shortly before he landed there. He was also chairman of the Executive Committee from 1905 to 1912 of the British Red Cross, and was the first president of the Society of Dorset Men. From 1905-8, he was Rector of the University of Aberdeen. Around 1920 Sir Frederick went to live in Switzerland where he died in Lausanne on 7 December 1923 at the age of 70. His funeral took place at St. Peter's church, Dorchester on 2 January 1924 and the King and Queen were represented by the Physician-in-Ordinary, Lord Dawson. The West Indies or Caribbean Basin is a region of the North Atlantic Ocean in the Caribbean, that includes the island nations and surrounding waters of three major archipelagoes: the Greater Antilles, the Lesser Antilles and the Lucayan Archipelago. The region is known as the area running from Florida westward along the Gulf Coast, then south along the Mexican coast through Central America and then eastward across the northern coast of South America. Bermuda is also included within the region even though it is in the west-central Atlantic, due to its common cultural history created by European colonization of the region, and in most of the region by the presence of a significant group of African descent. Indigenous peoples were the first inhabitants of the West Indies. In 1492, Christopher Columbus became the first European to arrive at the islands, where he is believed by historians to have first stepped foot in the Bahamas. After the first of the voyages of Christopher Columbus to the Americas, Europeans began to use the term West Indies to distinguish the region from the East Indies of South Asia and Southeast Asia. In the late sixteenth century, French, English and Dutch merchants and privateers began their operations in the Caribbean Sea, attacking Spanish and Portuguese shipping and coastal areas. They often took refuge and refitted their ships in the areas the Spanish could not conquer, including the islands of the Lesser Antilles, the northern coast of South America including the mouth of the Orinoco, and the Atlantic Coast of Central America. In the Lesser Antilles they managed to establish a foothold following the colonization of St. Kitts in 1624 and Barbados in 1626, and when the Sugar Revolution took off in the mid-seventeenth century, they brought in thousands of African slaves to work the fields and mills. These African slaves wrought a demographic revolution, replacing or joining with either the indigenous Caribs or the European settlers who were there as indentured servants. The struggle between the northern Europeans and the Spanish spread southward in the mid to late seventeenth century, as English, Dutch, French and Spanish colonists, and in many cases their slaves from Africa first entered and then occupied the coast of The Guianas (which fell to the French, English and Dutch) and the Orinoco valley, which fell to the Spanish. The Dutch, allied with the Caribs of the Orinoco would eventually carry the struggles deep into South America, first along the Orinoco and then along the northern reaches of the Amazon. Since no European country had occupied much of Central America, gradually the English of Jamaica established alliances with the Miskito Kingdom of modern-day Nicaragua and Honduras, and then began logging on the coast of modern-day Belize. These interconnected commercial and diplomatic relations made up the Western Caribbean Zone which was in place in the early eighteenth century. In the Miskito Kingdom, the rise to power of the Miskito-Zambos, who originated in the survivors of a rebellion aboard a slave ship in the 1640s and the introduction of African slaves by British settlers within the Miskito area and in Belize British Honduras also transformed this area into one with a high percentage of persons of African descent as was found in most of the rest of the Caribbean. From the 17th through the 19th century, the European colonial territories of the West Indies were the French West Indies, British West Indies, the Danish West Indies, the Netherlands Antilles (Dutch West Indies), and the Spanish West Indies.