The Caribbean and Its Culture
This course consists of travel through the eastern, southern and western Caribbean aboard the MS Veendam for the purpose of visiting a variety of island nations to experience and understand how each played a role in the discovery and conquest of the New World.
The journey will begin and end in Tampa, and will include travel to the Bahamian island of Half Moon Cay, the Virgin Island known as St. Thomas, the Windward Islands of Dominica and Grenada, the anomaly island of Barbados, the Spanish island known as Isla de Margarita, the two Dutch Antilles known as Bonaire and Aruba, and the English island known as Grand Cayman.
- When visiting Half Moon Cay, students will discover how dramatically different the geography of the Bahamian islands is from that of the Greater and Lesser Antilles.
- When arriving in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, students will discover from the island's deep-water port why this particular island, which has very little fresh water and plant and animal life to offer explorers, was nevertheless identified by early mariners as one of the most important staging areas for western and southern discovery.
- A trip to the island's north shore to see Drake's Seat and Megan's Bay is always a must.
- When experiencing Rouseau, in the south of Dominica, students will understand why this rugged island known as ASunday Island, with its abundance of fresh water and fauna and flora, was the most sought after island after the trans-Atlantic voyage.
- A trip to the rain forest there makes it very clear how rainfall three hundred and sixty-five days a year makes this an ideal island for watering, refitting, and provisioning before further westward travel.
- When arriving at Bridgetown, Barbados, students will have the opportunity, from the initial panorama afforded them, of understanding how this one hundred and sixty-one square mile island in the East West Indies became one of the major cane sugar producing islands during the Plantation EraBan island that once boasted having three thousand plantations, and rivaled in sugar production the great island of Jamaica to the west.
- When approaching St. George's, Grenada, students will again have the opportunity to appreciate how an island's natural deep-water port determined its historical outcome, especially at the hands of the French and the English explorers and planters.
- When arriving at Isla de Margarita students will be reminded of how Hispanicized the Windward and Leeward Islands initially were, and how much that Hispanicization was initially devoted to exploiting the great pearl fisheries found around this island and its neighboring islands, along the Spanish Main (Tierra Firma), and along the coast of Panama.
- When seeing Kralendijk, Bonaire and Oranjestand, Aruba for the first time, students will understand why the Dutch, with their dedication to the fishing and slave industries in the early part of their colonization of the Caribbean, chose these islands for their salt, their good air, and their easy access to be used as slave entrepôts.
- When approaching George Town, Grand Cayman, students will understand why the English chose to position themselves on this island in the later period of colonization owing to its relation to Cuba and Jamaica, to the northeast and southeast, and to the major Spanish sea route between Cartagena and Vera Cruz or Havana, to the west.
While on each island, one group trip will be arranged, at everyone's expense, to experience a particular feature of the island to underscore the interterm's thematic focus. In addition, students will be able to avail themselves, at their own expense, of numerous side trips on each island offered by the cruise line, as well as by independent vendors in each port of call. As all cruise ships shut down services, except for meal service, when in port, participation in off-ship excursions is a necessary and certainly rewarding part of each day's activity.
Learning Objectives: For students to begin to understand how the history of each island visited is integrally related to such realities of the Caribbean as prevailing winds, deep-water harbors, scarcity or abundance of rainfall water, etc., and how that relationship ultimately determined which European nation would hold that island as a colony the longest, from the beginning of the Discovery and Conquest until the end of the seventeenth century.