esents them. If a secondary position on that line were
required, it would be at Antigua, which would play to Santa Lucia the
part which Pensacola does to the Mississippi. In like manner the
French Guadeloupe merges in Martinique. The intrinsic importance of
these positions consists in the fact that, being otherwise suitable
and properly defended, they are the nearest to the mother-countries,
between whom and themselves there lies no point of danger near which
it is necessary to pass. They have the disadvantage of being very
small islands, consequently without adequate natural resources, and
easy to be blockaded on all sides. They are therefore essentially
dependent for their usefulness in war upon control of the sea, which
neither Pensacola nor New Orleans is, having the continent at their
backs.

It is in this respect that the pre-eminent intrinsic advantages of
Cuba, or rather of Spain in Cuba, are to be seen; and also, but in
much less degree, those of Great Britain in Jamaica. Cuba, though
narrow throughout, is over six hundred miles long, from Cape San
Antonio to Cape Maysi. It is, in short, not so much an island as a
continent, susceptible, under proper development, of great
resources--of self-sufficingness. In area it is half as large again as
Ireland, but, owing to its peculiar form, is much more than twice as
long. Marine distances, therefore, are drawn out to an extreme degree.
Its many natural harbors concentrate themselves, to a military
examination, into three principal groups, whose representatives are,
in the west, Havana; in the east, Santiago; while near midway of the
southern shore lies Cienfuegos. The shortest water distance separating
any two of these is 335 miles, from Santiago to Cienfuegos. To get
from Cienfuegos to Havana 450 miles of water must be traversed and the
western point of the island doubled; yet the two ports are distant by
land only a little more than a hundred miles of fairly easy country.
Regarded, therefore, as a base of naval operations, as a source of
supplies to a fleet, Cuba presents a condition wholly unique among the
islands of the Caribbean and of the Gulf of Mexico; to both which it,
and it alone of all the archipelago, belongs. It is unique in its
size, which should render it largely self-supporting, either by its
own products, or by the accumulation of foreign necessaries which
naturally obtains in a large and prosperous maritime community; and it
is unique in that such