My hand-painted map of the Caribbean: the Lucayan islands, the Greater Antilles and the volcanic arc of the Lesser Antilles.
Updated September 29, 2026
The Caribbean Basin contains a string of intensely unique islands, cultures and ecosystems, known collectively as The West Indies. My handpainted map attempts to make it easy to learn and identify the islands of the West Indies.
The stories behind the islands on this map: Habana Vieja · The Big Red Boat · Green Turtle Cay · St. Lucia · Bakers Bay · Dominican Republic sketch journal
The West Indies is three distinct regions. To the north is the Lucayan Archipelago, which consists of hundreds of islands; The Bahamas and Turk & Caicos. The Greater Antilles — the large, central islands of Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, the Caymans and Puerto Rico — forms the beginning of a long chain of islands.
The next island chain — the Lesser Antilles — is a long volcanic arc of numerous small countries and territories.
That arc marks the edge of a tectonic plate. Along the eastern rim of the Caribbean, the floor of the Atlantic slides beneath the Caribbean Plate, and the magma rising from that collision built the volcanoes of the Lesser Antilles, from Montserrat and Guadeloupe down through Dominica, Martinique, St. Lucia and St. Vincent, several of them still active. Barbados, alone to the east, is the exception, a wedge of old seafloor capped with coral rather than a volcano, and Trinidad, at the bottom of the map, is really a broken-off piece of South America, its mountains a continuation of the Venezuelan coast. The Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos are something else again, low limestone islands on shallow banks, with no mountains at all.
Isolation made each island its own experiment. The todies, tiny green birds found nowhere but the Greater Antilles, have a species each on Cuba, Jamaica and Puerto Rico, and two on Hispaniola. Nearly every large island down the Lesser Antilles once had a parrot of its own, and St. Lucia, St. Vincent and Dominica still do. Columbus reached these islands in 1492 believing he had found the edge of the Indies, and the name stayed with them.
I used Copic markers and watercolors to create this map of the West Indies.
Most of my time in the West Indies has been spent in the Abaco Islands of the northern Bahamas, where I first came when I was young, and where I later reported on the fight over a golf development in Bakers Bay and the Eyes of the West Indies. Farther south, I went looking for Cuba’s Pedorrera in Habana Vieja and the Little Farter, drove across the Dominican Republic in my Dominican Republic Sketch Journal, and followed the plants of the islands in St. Lucia and the Botanical History of the Antilles. I have also painted closer maps of Cuba, Hispaniola, St. Lucia and the Abaco Islands.
