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 Dominica
(pronounced Domineeca) is the largest and most mountainous
of the Anglophone Windward Islands. The official title,
Commonwealth of Dominica, should always be used in
addresses to avoid confusion with the Dominican Republic.
It is 29 miles long and 16 miles wide, with an area of 290
square miles (750 square kilometers). The highest peak,
Morne Diablo tin, rises to 4,747 feet and is often covered
in mist. Dominica Materially,
it is one of the poorest islands in the Caribbean, but the
people are some of the friendliest; many of them are small
farmers: the island’s mountainous terrain discourages
the creation of large estates. In Dominica, over 2,000
descendants of the original inhabitants of the Caribbean,
the once warlike Caribs, live in the Carib Territory, a
3,700-acre ‘reservation’ established in 1903 in the
northeast, near Melville Hall airport. There are no
surviving speakers of the Carib language on the island.
The total population, which is otherwise almost entirely
of African descent, is around 74,400, of whom about 29
percent live in the parish of St George, around Roseau,
the capital, on the Caribbean coast. Other parishes are
much more sparsely populated. The parish of St John, in
which Portsmouth (the second largest town) is situated
contains only about 5,000 people, or seven percent of the
population.
Like
St Lucia, Dominica was once a French possession; although
English is the official tongue, most of the inhabitants
also speak Creole French (French-based patois). In the
Marigot/Wesley area a type of English called ‘cocoy’
is used; the original settlers of the area, freed slaves,
came from Antigua and are mostly Methodists. Catholicism
predominates, though there are some Protestant
denominations and an increasing number of fundamentalist
sects, imported from the USA.
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