Excerpt from The Countries of the World: Being a Popular Description of the Various Continents, Islands, Rivers, Seas, and Peoples of the Globe Hree hundred years ago, or more, the region we are now entering was a land of romance. A century later it was still the scene of many a fight for gold and for glory, and even in the memory of those not long ago dead, its bays, keys, and danky river mouths were the lurking-places of the pirates and buccaneers who made the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico waters dreaded by the peaceful mariner. The neck of land connecting North and South America. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.