Moreover, he had spent six months on the Galapagos islands, among the great turtles that Captain Cook had found there, and now and then he would disappear into some small island of the West Indies.

It is now used to refer to any island group or, sometimes, to a sea containing a large number of scattered islands such as the Aegean Sea.

The Ainu were distributed in the northern and central islands of Japan, from Sakhalin island in the north to the Kuril islands and the island of Hokkaidō and Northern Honshū, although some investigators place their former range as throughout Honshū and as far north as the southern tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula in what is now Cape Lopatka.

The crusade was a notable success for Byzantium, as Alexios now recovered a number of important cities and islands.

Thus the " Aegean Area " has now come to mean the Archipelago with Crete and Cyprus, the Hellenic peninsula with the Ionian islands, and Western Anatolia.

The language belongs to the Eskimo-Aleut language family and includes three dialect groupings: Eastern Aleut, spoken on the Eastern Aleutian, Shumagin, Fox and Pribilof islands ; Atkan, spoken on Atka and Bering islands ; and the now extinct Attuan dialect.

Subsequently, the islands are now largely self-governing.

These islands are now under Serbian police control.

He was trained, supported and funded by the white regimes in South Africa ( SA ) and Rhodesia ( now Zimbabwe ) in return for permission to set up a secret listening post on the islands.

Much of the lower portion of the river ( List of islands in the Detroit River # Mud Island | Mud Island pictured ) is now part of the Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge.

English Captain John Strong, commander of the Welfare, sailed between the two principal islands in 1690 and called the passage " Falkland Channel " ( now Falkland Sound ), after Anthony Cary, 5th Viscount Falkland ( 1659 – 1694 ), who as Commissioner of the Admiralty had financed the expedition and later became First Lord of the Admiralty.

Farmland accounts for a little over 80 % of the Falklands land area and a sheep appears on the islands ' coat of arms, but agriculture is now less than 2 % of the economy.

There is now an international airport, a domestic airport, a number of airstrips, a growing road network and a much-improved ferry service between the two main islands.

But just as these islands have been uninhabited from the beginning of the world, so now the Norwegian pirates have driven away the monks ; but countless sheep and many different species of sea-fowl are to be found there ..."

The Faroes ' two largest islands were connected into what is now referred to as " Meginlandið ", the Mainland.

Many birds in other families are also commonly called " finches ", including some species in the very similar-looking waxbills or estrildid finches ( family Passeridae, subfamily Estrildinae ) of the Old World tropics and Australia ; several groups of the bunting and American sparrow family ( Emberizidae ); and Darwin's finches of the Galapagos islands, which provided evidence of natural selection and are now recognized to be peculiar tanagers ( Thraupidae ).

The islands were formerly coincident with municipality or Minţaqat Juzur Ḩawār ( م ِ ن ْ ط َ ق َ ة ج ُ ز ُ ر ح َ و َ ار ) and are now administered as part of the Southern Governorate of Bahrain.

Hengist continued to send for more ships from his country, so that some islands where his people had previously dwelt are now free of inhabitants.

The islands which now form the Republic of Kiribati have been inhabited for at least seven hundred years, and possibly much longer.

In 1854 the hami ( sultan ) of Muscat ( later Muscat and Oman, now Oman ), ceded the islands to Britain and in 1868 they were attached to the Aden Settlement ( in modern Yemen ).

According to Manoel de Almeida ( a Portuguese missionary in the early 17th century ), there were 21 islands, seven to eight of which had monasteries on them " formerly large, but now much diminished.

* 1493 – Explorer Christopher Columbus arrives back in Lisbon, Portugal, aboard his ship Niña from his voyage to what is now The Bahamas and other islands in the Caribbean.

Tierra Firme later received control over other territories: the Isla de Santiago ( now Jamaica ) the Cayman Islands ; Roncador, Quitasueño, and Providencia and other islands now under Colombian control.

Several peaks rise above the water and form islands.

Finally, sets of islands formed close to the coast of a continent are considered continental archipelagos when they form part of the same continental shelf so islands are just exposed continental shelf.

This may exemplify a rare example of insular dwarfing in a mainland context, with the " islands " being formed by the extensive river networks in the Amazon Basin, which form effective biogeographic barriers.

Appear mostly occupying favorable areas named geographically Umbrias, this is north hillsides or slopes of the mountainous areas that are oriented behind the sun, be cause the islands are in the northern hemisphere, between 600 and 1500 meters, thus benefiting from the humidity provided by the trade winds to form such a sea of clouds.

Crete with its nearby islands form the Crete Region (), one of the 13 regions of Greece which were established in the 1987 administrative reform.

The main island is the largest of about 60 islands which form the Chagos Archipelago.

Separated from the four main island groups are the islands of Nukuoro and Kapingamarangi, which geographically and politically are part of Micronesia, but linguistically and culturally form part of Polynesia: the languages spoken on these two islands are of the Samoic family of Polynesian languages.

In addition to the Outer Hebrides, they form basement deposits on the Scottish mainland west of the Moine Thrust and on the islands of Coll and Tiree.

In the Caribbean Sea, the islands of Roatán ( Isla de Roatán ), Utila, and Guanaja together form Islas de la Bahía ( Bay Islands ), one of the eighteen departments into which Honduras is divided.

The mountainous islands of the Japanese Archipelago form a crescent off the eastern coast of Asia.

The four major islands are separated by narrow straits and form a natural entity.

Japan seized part of the islands during World War II to form part of their island defenses.

The islands form part of the province of Shalim and the Hallaniyat Islands in the governorate of Dhofar.

In India and the Asian islands the tiger is the most common form ; in North Europe, the bear ( see berserker ); in Japan, the fox, tanuki ( raccoon dog ), and sometimes a wolf ; in Africa, the leopard, hyena, or lion ; and in South America, the jaguar.

The Pacific plate is subducted beneath the Mariana Plate, creating the Mariana trench, and ( further on ) the arc of the Mariana islands, as water trapped in the plate is released and explodes upward to form island volcanoes.

The atolls and islands form two groups: the Ratak Chain and the Ralik Chain ( meaning " sunrise " and " sunset " chains ).

* The Matthew and Hunter Islands, at 450 and 520 km east, respectively, are volcanic islands that form the southern end of the arc of the New Hebrides

After the second failure, the United Kingdom and the six windward and leeward islands — Grenada, St. Vincent, Dominica, Antigua, St. Kitts and Nevis and Anguilla, and St. Lucia — developed a novel form of cooperation called associated statehood.

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

The mountains that rise up above the Mediterranean Sea to form these islands are an extension of the Sistema Penibetico.

The islands lie some to the northeast of Orkney and southeast of the Faroe Islands and form part of the division between the Atlantic Ocean to the west and the North Sea to the east.