The islands prospered under Roman rule, and were eventually distinguished as a Municipium and a Foederata Civitas.

As on other Long Island barrier islands, Coney Island had many and diverse rabbits, and rabbit hunting prospered until resort development eliminated their habitat.

With supply of molasses well exceeding demand, the islands prospered with their reduced expenses while New England ports saw revenue from their rum exports decrease.

Lajes, the town, was the first area to be populated in the southern part of the island, around the 16th Century ; in 1510, owing to its natural port and growing settlement it prospered, attaining the title of " vila " ( town ) by 1515 ( becoming, some say, the oldest settlement in the Western Group of Azorean islands ).

For the remainder of the period of Danish rule, the islands were not economically viable and significant transfers were made from the Danish state budgets to the authorities in the islands.

It was acceptable to return the French economically powerful sugar islands for the defense of the American colonies.

The islands were economically significant for pearl fishing from the end of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of the Second World War.

Because of the deplorable conditions under which the Redlegs lived, a campaign was initiated in the mid-19th century to move portions of the population to other islands which would be more economically hospitable.

The United States Congress, in the Ratification Act of 1929, provided that until the Congress shall provide for the Government of the islands of American Samoa all civil, judicial, and military powers shall be vested in such person or persons and exercised in such manner as the President of the United States shall direct.

Earlier Andronikos III had effected the recovery of the islands of Lesbos and Chios from Martino Zaccaria in 1329 ( although the island remained under Benedetto III Zaccaria until 1330 ) and of Phocaea in 1334 from the last Genoese governor Domenico Cattaneo.

The islands belonged to the Pallavicini-Rusconi family of Genoa until 1874, when they were bought by the Florio family of Palermo.

Ludwig Ross, the German archaeologist appointed Curator of the Antiquities of Athens at the time of the establishment of the Kingdom of Greece, by his explorations in the Greek islands from 1835 onwards, called attention to certain early intaglios, since known as Inselsteine ; but it was not until 1878 that C. T. Newton demonstrated these to be no strayed Phoenician products.

The Arawaks inhabited the islands until the 15th century when they were displaced by the more aggressive Caribs, a tribe from the Lesser Antilles islands, after whom the Caribbean Sea is named.

Excavated sites include Saliagos and Kephala ( on Keos ) with signs of copper-working, Each of the small Cycladic islands could support no more than a few thousand people, though Late Cycladic boat models show that fifty oarsmen could be assembled from the scattered communities ( Rutter ), and when the highly organized palace-culture of Crete arose, the islands faded into insignificance, with the exception of Delos, which retained its archaic reputation as a sanctuary throughout antiquity and until the emergence of Christianity.

The islands saw no more Europeans until missionaries arrived from England in 1821.

Diego Garcia and the rest of the Chagos islands were uninhabited until the late 18th century.

Barnard and his party survived for eighteen months marooned on the islands until rescued by the British ships

Norwegian supremacy continued until 1380, when the islands became part of the dual monarchy Denmark – Norway.

The ice is so massive that its weight presses the bedrock of Greenland below sea level and is so all-concealing that not until recently did scientists discover that Greenland might actually be three islands.

The Greeks held out in the Peloponnese until 1460, and the Venetians and Genoese clung to some of the islands, but by 1500 most of the plains and islands of Greece were in Ottoman hands.

The position was exacerbated by the failure of the islands ' kelp industry that thrived from the 18th century until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and large scale emigration became endemic.

As such many of these islands fell under Norwegian and Ui Imair hegemony between the 9th and 13th centuries and this Norse influence would see almost constant warfare on the western seaboard of Scotland until the partitioning of the Hebrides in 1156.

The islands were not officially named until Captain Charles J. Johnston of the Royal Naval ship sighted them on December 14, 1807.

Most of the Line Islands including Christmas Island, the Phoenix and even the Union ( Tokelau ) islands ( until 1925 ) were incorporated piecemeal into the Gilbert and Ellice Islands over the next 20 years.

The Kerguelen Islands, along with the islands of Amsterdam and St. Paul, and the Crozet archipelago were officially annexed by France in 1893, and were included as possessions in the French constitution in 1924 ( in addition to that portion of Antarctica claimed by France and known as Adélie Land ; as with all Antarctic territorial claims, France's possession on the continent is held in abeyance until a new international treaty is ratified that defines each claimant's rights and obligations ).

Although edicts from King Louis XIV's court regularly came to the islands to suppress the Protestant " heretics ", these were mostly ignored by island authorities until Louis XIV's Edict of Revocation in 1685.

It consisted of two island groups, the ABC islands Curaçao, Bonaire and ( until 1986 ) Aruba just north of Venezuela, and the SSS islands east of the Virgin Islands.

Territory included the islands of Aruba until 1986 and Curaçao, Bonaire, Saba, Sint Eustatius, Sint Maarten ( which is the Dutch part of the island of Saint Martin ) until 2010 when the Netherlands Antilles was dissolved.

Both the British and the French turned their attention to the Comoros islands in the middle of the 19th century.

The northern group consists of the keskmurre or middle dialect that is also the basis for the standard language, the läänemurre or western dialect, roughly corresponding to Läänemaa and Pärnumaa, the saarte murre ( islands ') dialect of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa and the idamurre or eastern dialect on the northwestern shore of Lake Peipsi.

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.

He writes: " In the same year, in the summer, a vapour like an oven's fire boiled up for days out of the middle of the islands of Thera and Therasia from the depths of the sea, and the whole place burned like fire, little by little thickening and turning to stone, and the air seemed to be a fiery torch.

Two islands are also to be found at a middle point of Gouvia and Corfu Bay, which extends across much of the eastern shore of the island ; are known as Lazareto and Ptychia ( or Vido ).

In the 1880s Grove Karl Gilbert predicted that the lake – then in the middle of many years of recession – would virtually disappear except for a small remnant between the islands.

After the first permanent English-speaking settlement was established in April 1607, at Jamestown, Captain Christopher Newport led explorers northwest up the James River, and on May 24, 1607, erected a cross on one of the small islands in the middle of the part of the river that runs through today's downtown area.

Over half of the lake's area is taken up by its many small islands ( including Bogomerom archipelago ), reedbeds and mud banks, and a belt of swampland across the middle divides the northern and southern halves while the shorelines are largely composed of marshes.

Marathon is a city on Knight's Key, Boot Key, Key Vaca, Fat Deer Key, Long Point Key, Crawl Key and Grassy Key islands in the middle Florida Keys, in Monroe County, Florida, in the United States.

In the middle of the 18th century, the fishing of herring blossomed into a full scaled industry, and the islands fishing communities flourished for some 50 years.

Pedestrian refuges or small islands in the middle of a street may be added when a street is very wide, as these crossings can be too long for some individuals to cross in one cycle.

These high-visibility crossing markers are often placed on refuge islands in the middle of the road, in addition to or instead of at the roadside.

The fragments date to the middle or late Miocene, and no satisfying theory has been proposed as to how they got there due to uncertainties about whether these islands were ever connected to the mainland.

In the middle of the Firth are two significant islands, Stroma and Swona.

In 1801, the Danish post office installed a semaphore line across the Great Belt strait, Storebæltstelegrafen, between islands Funen and Zealand with stations at Nyborg on Funen, on the small island Sprogø in the middle of the strait, and at Korsør on Zealand.

Its narrowest point is at its southern opening, with a width of about 20 km between the islands of Lombok and Nusa Penida, in the middle of the strait.

The school was based in the Ionian islands, which were not part of Ottoman Greece, from the middle of the 17th century until the middle of the 19th century.

It is one of the middle islands of the northern Aegean, 255 km² ( 99 mi² ) in area with 102 miles ( 160 km ) of coastline and a population of 8, 312 inhabitants.

* Pedestrian refuges or small islands in the middle of the street

Unlike most islands though, Legan has a very small lake in the middle.

* The Rapids Center, the area in the estuary of the Oulu river consisting of small islands connected with bridges, fountains in the middle of the river, and including a housing area of building blocks planned by Alvar Aalto

When the waters rose, they covered a significant part of the existing rainforest, and the hilltops remained as islands in the middle of the lake.

The town is home to Salisbury Beach State Reservation, a park which includes the entire seacoast and a small portion inland, as well as the Ram Island and Carr Island State Wildlife Management Areas, the two islands lying in the middle of the Merrimack ( along with Eagle Island, which is not protected ).