Many cultures were Indigenous to these islands, with evidence dating some of them back to the mid-6th millennium BCE. In the late 16th century, French, English and Dutch merchants and privateers began operations in the
Caribbean Sea, attacking Spanish and Portuguese shipping and coastal areas. They often took refuge and refitted their ships in the areas the Spanish could not conquer, including the islands of the
Lesser Antilles, the northern coast of South America, including the mouth of the
Orinoco, and the Atlantic Coast of Central America. In the Lesser Antilles, they managed to establish a foothold following the colonisation of
Saint Kitts in 1624 and
Barbados in 1626, and when the
Sugar Revolution took off in the mid-17th century, they brought in thousands of enslaved Africans to work the fields and mills as labourers. These enslaved Africans wrought a demographic revolution, replacing or joining with either the Indigenous
Kalinago or the European settlers who were there as
indentured servants. The struggle between the northern Europeans and the Spanish spread southward in the mid- to late-17th century, as English, Dutch, French and Spanish colonists, and in many cases, enslaved Africans first entered and then occupied the coast of
The Guianas (which fell to the French, English and Dutch) and the Orinoco valley, which fell to the Spanish. The Dutch, allied with the Kalinago of the Orinoco, would eventually carry the struggles deep into South America, first along the Orinoco and then along the northern reaches of the
Amazon. Since no European country had occupied much of Central America, gradually the English of Jamaica established alliances with the
Miskito Kingdom of modern-day
Nicaragua and
Honduras and then began logging on the coast of modern-day
Belize. These interconnected commercial and diplomatic relations comprised the
Western Caribbean Zone in place in the early-18th century. In the Miskito Kingdom, the rise to power of the
Miskito-Zambos—who originated in the survivors of a rebellion aboard a slave ship in the 1640s and the introduction of enslaved Africans by British settlers within the Miskito area and in Belize—transformed this area into one with a high percentage of persons of African descent as was found in most of the rest of the
Caribbean. In 1916, Denmark sold the Danish West Indies to the United States for US$25 million in gold, per the
Treaty of the Danish West Indies, which became an
insular area of the U.S., called the
United States Virgin Islands. Between 1958 and 1962, the United Kingdom re-organised all their West Indies island territories (except the
British Virgin Islands and
The Bahamas) into the
West Indies Federation. They hoped that the federation would coalesce into a single, independent nation. The federation had limited powers, numerous practical problems, and a lack of popular support; consequently, it was dissolved in 1963, with nine provinces eventually becoming independent sovereign states and four becoming
British Overseas Territories. == Geology ==