1954of Pacific Coast Geographers ENGUSH SPEAKING SETTLEMENT OF THE WESTERN CARIBBEAN* James J. Parsons University of California, Berkeley By Way of Preface From Herodotus to Heyerdahl the far-off and seldom visited lands that have been but little known or understood have been a particular concern of geographers. The public is still apt to think of geography primarily in terms of geographical discovery and exploration and it is often a bit disillusioned upon learning how seldom geographers actually are concerned with far-away and romantic places and peoples. This, I think, is rather unfortunate. Certainly it was the prospect of satisfying deep-seated curiosities about distant and dimlyknown corners of the earth that lured many of us initially into this thing we call Geography, stimulated perhaps by a childhood collection of stamps or rocks or by those wonderful pictures in the National Geographic. When we saw that there was a chance to make a living at this sort of thing we became professionals. In the beginning we have had a good bit of the unabashed hedonist in us. The trouble seems to be that somewhere along the line we "get religion," we spend less and less time on the problems and areas that really excite us, the things we really would like to do, and more and more time doing the things that we are asked to do or feel we should do, usually because they seem to bear on local and contemporary problems for which answers are being demanded. We start taking ourselves too seriously, we seem to tense up, and we begin to merit the charge of the editor of that excellent new magazine of the human geography of the Southwest called Landscape that professional geographers as a group are inclined to be somewhat dull lot whose capacities for wonderment are not being properly exercised. As we concern ourselves increasingly with enumeration and description, we stop asking "why" and "how". What is worse, our descriptions too often lack life and imagination. The dearth of widely-read, semi-popular books on geography in America is in embarassing contrast to the situation in Europe. Nor can all the blame be laid to high publishing costs. Good writing, of course, requires practice as well as imagination and persistence. This may be why newspaper experience has been in the background of so many of our most respected geographers — Ratzel and Reclus, to name two. In the days when German geography was great, one or more field seasons or wanderjahre in an unfamiliar physical and cultural environment in one of * Presidential address of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, Pullman. Washington. June 24, 1954. Th^ _':eld work on which this paper is based was carried out in the Spring of 1953 and vas supported by the Geographic Branch, Office of Naval Research. 4 Yearbook of The AssociationVol. 16 the further reaches of the earth was almost a requisite of graduate training. To be thrown into the midst of a totally unfamiliar setting, preferably one that has not been picked over too much by the "experts", and faced with the task of pulling together observations into a meaningful pattern and interpretation is certainly one of the best tests of geographical competence. I should tonight like to put in a good word for the thesis that to know ourselves and our own culture such a point of reference in other lands, in other cultures and even other times puts us on much firmer ground. And further, that the time to stake them out is in graduate student days, when enthusiasms and physical endurance are at full strength, before children, house payments, and heavy teaching loads make arm-chair geographers of us by force of circumstances or habit. At Berkeley, in a certain measure through the influence of Carl Sauer, we have found in Latin America a convenient and relatively inexpensive proving ground for graduate students which has been curiously little exploited by American geographers. It offers not only areas of rich geographical content but enticing problems in systematic geography as well. Moreover, a thesis based on extensive field study in Middle America or the Caribbean frequently has opened the door to a teaching job...