After a prolonged guerrilla campaign, Hatuey and successive chieftains were captured and burnt alive, and within three years the Spanish had gained control of the island.

In 1890, Germany had gained the island of Heligoland in the North Sea from Britain in exchange for the eastern African island of Zanzibar, and proceeded to construct a great naval base there.

The monarchy collapsed in 1896 when the island was conquered and absorbed into the French colonial empire, from which the island gained independence in 1960.

However, in 1942, with the entry of Japan into the Second World War, the island gained a strategic importance in the Indian Ocean and thus the British government hastily built a new airport in the south of the island at Plaisance.

Even though the Almoravides soon reconquered the island, the booty taken helped the Pisans in their magnificent programme of buildings, especially the cathedral and Pisa gained a role of pre-eminence in the Western Mediterranean.

The overwhelming French troops attacked the English settlements and gained control of the whole island from 1665 – 1667.

Diplomatic relations between Seychelles and the Soviet Union were established on 30 June 1976, a day after the island nation gained its independence from the United Kingdom.

Taiwan has historically benefited from the flight of many well-educated, wealthy Chinese to settle on the island: during early Qing Dynasty, the preceding Ming dynasty supporters survived for a brief period of time in exile in Taiwan, and in 1949, as the Chinese Communist Party gained control of mainland China, two million Kuomintang ( KMT ) supporters fled to the island.

In 1916, pro-Venizelist Greek army officers and civilians, with the support of the Allies, launched the Movement of National Defence, creating a pro-Allied temporary government by the name of the " State of Thessaloniki " that controlled " new lands " ( lands that were gained by Greece in the Balkan Wars, most of Northern Greece including Greek Macedonia, the North Aegean as well as the island of Crete ); the official government of the King in Athens, the " State of Athens ", controlled the " old lands " which were traditionally monarchist.

After a brief de facto protectorate period beginning in 1885 the island became a full formal French protectorate in 1890, then a colony in 1896, and gained full independence from France in 1960 in the wake of decolonization.

The Aristides were in the island for several months until the Jamaican government gained acceptance by the Republic of South Africa for the family to relocate there.

A small but well-equipped team of terrorists who call themselves the " 49ers " have parachuted onto the island, and gained control of it.

* Bryce's The Geology of Arran 1855 notes: " Many years ago, a large population, the largest then collected in any one spot in island of Arran, inhabited glen, and gained a scanty subsistence by fishing and by cultivating fertile plots on the sunny hill-sides.

Charles Simms won the case and gained possession of the island.

In those days, access to the island could be gained only at low tide by driving or riding across the marsh on beds of oyster shells.

Moreover, the House of Savoy gained the Kingdom of Sicily, and the Kingdom of Great Britain gained the island of Minorca and the fortress at Gibraltar.

The Irish language movement, initially seen as eccentric, gained a mass following throughout the island.

Japan made territorial delimitation treaty with Russia in 1875, Japan gained all the Kuril islands in exchange for Sakhalin island.

Dumouriez then visited Italy and Corsica, Spain and Portugal, and his memoranda to the duc de Choiseul on Corsican affairs at the time of the Corsican Republic led to his re-employment on the staff of the French expeditionary corps sent to the island, for which he gained the rank of lieutenant-colonel.

There were two separate economies, dollar-economy and the peso-economy, creating a social split in the island because those in the dollar-economy made much more money ( as in the tourist-industry ).

Diego Garcia and the Chagos Archipelago were administered by the colonial government on the island of Mauritius until 1965, when the United Kingdom purchased them from the self-governing government of Mauritius for £ 3 million, and declared them to be a separate British Overseas Territory.

On the large island, there exists a " wall of deserts " that separates the island into a large main area and separate smaller strips of land.

On 15 July 2007 the island communes of Saint-Martin and Saint-Barthélemy were officially detached from Guadeloupe and became two separate French overseas collectivities with their own local administration.

King James I & VI as he was styled became the first monarch to rule the entire island of Great Britain, although it was merely a union of the English and Scottish crowns, and both countries remained separate political entities until 1707.

Administratively the island forms a separate municipality within the Chios regional unit, which is part of the North Aegean region.

The committee recommended constitutional reform and the establishment of an island administration for Saint Kitts, separate from the Federal Government.

The southern part of the island became the separate settlement of Newport after disagreements among the founders.

The island ( s ) of Miquelon-Langlade consists of three formerly separate islands Miquelon ( 110 km² ), Langlade ( 91 km² ) and Le Cap.

It has a total land area of, including satellite islands ( but excluding the South Sandwich Islands which form a separate island group ).

In March 1837, ornithologist John Gould announced that Darwin's Rhea was a separate species from the previously described rhea ( though their territories overlapped ), that mockingbirds collected on the Galápagos Islands represented three separate species each unique to a particular island, and that several distinct birds from those islands were all classified as finches.

A central lagoon has lesser and greater flamingos, waterfowl, an island with colobus monkeys, and an interpretive research camp on a separate island.

This island has been divided into three or four separate sections by the violence of the waves, and boats could pass from the open sea into the port, in calm weather, using the channels so formed.

At its southeastern reaches, the Andaman Sea narrows to form the Straits of Malacca, which separate the Malay Peninsula from the island of Sumatra.

The island is the result of two separate shield volcanoes:

The island ( along with its surrounding islets ) became a separate insular council ( with the same territory as the municipality of the same name ) after 1977 ; before that, it was administered in the former insular council of Ibiza and Formentera ( covering the whole group of the Pitiusic Islands ), but in a separate comarca ( which already covered the current municipality of Formentera ).

In 1885, the island was made into a separate Chinese province.

A buffer zone was established across the island along the ceasefire line to separate the northern Turkish controlled part of the island, and the south.

On 5 June 1594 Barentsz left the island of Texel aboard the small ship Mercury, as part of a group of three ships sent out in separate directions to try and enter the Kara Sea, with the hopes of finding the Northeast passage above Siberia.

A fishing colony was established on the island about 1521 – 22 by the Portuguese under João Álvares Fagundes.

Britain merged the island with its adjacent colony of Nova Scotia ( present day peninsular Nova Scotia and New Brunswick ).

From 1763 to 1784 the island was administratively part of the colony of Nova Scotia and governed from Halifax.

On 25 March 1841, France purchased the island of Maore ( the name of the island was corrupted in French to " Mayotte ") ( ratified 13 June 1843 ), which became a colony.

In 1727 the first French commander, M. Le Grand, took charge of the island and established a rudimentary government thus making Dominica formally a colony of France.

Pitman's short book about his desperate escape from a Caribbean penal colony for his part in the Monmouth Rebellion, his shipwrecking and subsequent desert island misadventures was published by J. Taylor of Paternoster Street, London, whose son William Taylor later published Defoe's novel.

At the time of his death, Janssen had just begun filming a television movie playing the part of Father Damien, the priest who dedicated himself to the leper colony on the island of Molokai.

On September 19 the Colonial Guard and the Civil Guard began the rebellion and took control of the island of Fernando Poo, while the rest of the colony remained loyal to the Republic.

Götaland, south Sweden, with the island of Gotland in the east, a possible colony of the Goths.

Accra was followed by a visit to Funchal on the Portuguese colony of Madeira ; they would spend most of the next nine years on the island, only returning to England for three or four months in the summer.

The capital of the colony was moved to Santo Domingo in 1496, on the south west coast of the island also in the territory of the present day Dominican Republic.

In 1664, the newly established French West India Company took control of the new colony, and France formally claimed control of the western portion of the island of Hispaniola.

The Spanish sent a fleet from Cartagena which destroyed the English colony at Providence island in 1641, and for a time the presence of an English base so close to the shore was eliminated.

However, they still clung to Macau, and settled a new colony on the island of Timor.

* 1624 – Sir Thomas Warner founds the first British colony in the Caribbean, on the island of Saint Kitts.

At this time the main island was being used as a penal colony.

Thus no permanent colony was established on the island by the Portuguese.

The later was a man of vision and wanted to make the island into an agricultural colony.

Abandoned by the Dutch, the island became a French colony when, in September 1715, Guillaume Dufresne d ' Arsel landed and took possession of this port of call on the route to India.

There was no native population to oppose a settlement on Norfolk Island, which also possessed those desirable natural resources, but the island was too small of itself to sustain a colony.

As part of the French colony of Acadia, the island was called " Île Saint-Jean ".

In an attempt to attract settlers from Ireland, in one of his first acts ( 1770 ) Patterson led the island's colonial assembly to rename the island " New Ireland ", but the British Government promptly vetoed this as exceeding the authority vested in the colonial government ; only the Privy Council in London could change the name of a colony.

The principal islands are those of the Archipiélago de las Perlas in the middle of the Gulf of Panama, the penal colony on the Isla de Coiba in the Golfo de Chiriquí, and the decorative island of Taboga, a tourist attraction that can be seen from Panama City.