Set in the sea, off the beaten track of early migration routes, the islands of the Caribbean waited long for the beginning of their human history. When people did eventually come to inhabit the islands, almost all arrived in boats carefully crafted to cross the water. Even when it became possible to fly, few of those who travelled in planes became residents and, indeed, the plane was used much more often as a machine in which to escape. Three sea-crossing technologies – canoe, caravel, and container ship – serve as symbols of the main periods of Caribbean history. The last – the container ship – defines a short period, the past fifty years. The caravel stands for a period ten times as long, the 500 years from 1492. The canoe accounts for another multiple of ten, the previous 5,000 years or more. Each of these vessels carried with them whole cultures, representing an increasingly global cargo.

For thousands of years, people paddled canoes to move from one island to the next, to circumnavigate islands, and to get to and from the American mainland. They knew no other way. It was virtually impossible for them to develop connections with a world wider than the archipelago and its continental hinterlands. This did not limit the possibility of building a population and a civilization but the effect was to tie the island cultures to those known from the mainland and these continental foundations were essential to developing an indigenous response to the natural environment of the islands.