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Points of Pictures: Island

This map furnishes an object lesson, showing by measurement with a familiar object, how great a space the unhappy Island, whose dramatic story we relate, occupies in the American seas, where it is always summer. Long Island is always held in great esteem for her fine figure between the sea and the sound, extended from Manhattan Harbor to Montauk Point, her soil fertile except where the sand hills or the salt marshes encroach, her climate salubrious, the home of the sea breeze, the surrounding marshes teeming with food fishes, far surpassing those that in all the historic ages have been famous in the sea of Marmora, and the Hellespont and the Dardenelles and all the abounding waters from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea.

Now Cuba is twenty-nine times the size of Long Island; indeed is longer measured across degrees of latitude, and larger in superficial area than the state of New York, and is as large as England, omitting Wales. The forests of Cuba are full of precious wood, her mountains charged with iron, copper and coal, her soil ready to yield, under conditions of liberty and order, justice and intelligence, briefly of good government and industry, five million tons of sugar yearly, instead of one, and corn and tobacco galore; while in translucent seas and swift rivers, there are fish innumerable and delicious, and oysters of a flavor and abundance that would be approved in New York or Baltimore; and the turtles crawl like gorgeous and gigantic insects over the coral islands that cluster in strands of gems around the exquisite and enormous Pearl of the Antilles.