No locality is more filled with romance, more remindful of adventurous deeds of the past, more closely associated with the early history of our country than the Caribbean. Here is the islet first sighted by Columbus after his long and thrilling voyage into the west. Here dwelt the conquistadors, the explorers, the voyagers who with fire and blood blazed their trails across the continents of North and South America. Here one may still see the crumbling houses in which such noted old dons as Ponce de Leon, De Soto, Pizarro, Cortez, and others dwelt when Hispaniola (Santo Domingo) was the center of wealth and fashion in New Spain. Here was established the first university of the New World wherein Las Casas taught his pupils a century and more before the Mayflower sailed into Plymouth harbor. Here the great nations of Europe contended for control of the new-found lands, and here cruised the buccaneers, ever seeking their prizes. But to sail these waters and visit these isles in a modern steamship robs them of their greatest charm. Who can visualize gilded, purple-sailed galleons swinging to anchor when buff steel masts, huge funnels, and wireless aërials fill the foreground? Who can picture swashbuckling, roistering pirates when the streets they once trod swarm with jitneys? Who can imagine mail-clad men about to embark on some great adventure when the jetty bears a creaking, wheezing crane, and sweating negro stevedores bustle and crowd and swear? No, to find the romance of these islands, to visualize their past and appreciate their present, one must forego luxuries and leave the beaten path, and, like the voyagers of old, seek new scenes in a white-sailed craft whose motive power is the humming trade wind and whose crew is made up of natives who, in appearance at least, might well have stepped out of the past.