Barely sixty miles of water separates Porto Rico from Santo Domingo,—or, as the Spaniards called it, Hispaniola,—and midway in this strait lies the island of Mona, from which the passage takes its name. Barren, gray, and forbidding, Mona is little more than a mass of austere rock rising above the sea, with Monita or Little Mona at her feet. The only signs of life are the lighthouse and the flocks of screaming sea-birds, but there is a stunted growth of scrub upon the island, and hunting-parties come here at times; while the guano deposits of Mona have been worked for years.
Beyond—vast, mysterious, overwhelming in its magnitude and majesty—is Santo Domingo, second largest of the Antilles, nearly two hundred miles in width, nearly five hundred in length; a territory close to thirty thousand square miles in area, or three times the size of Belgium, twice the size of [[192]]Denmark, almost as large as Portugal or Ireland, and, compared with more familiar places, about as large as the state of Maine; or larger than Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined.
SANTA CRUZ
Plantation
PORTO RICO
City wall and house of Ponce de Leon
PORTO RICO