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Island
La Gonave, an island in Haiti
120,000 of Haiti's residents live on a small island off the coast of the capital called La Gonave. Only ten by thirty miles, the island is accessible by a 40 minute boat ride from Port-au-Prince. Its detachment from the mainland made it a propitious place years ago for Haiti to send those viewed as 'undesirable'. The list of those banished there included criminals, the old and the sick.
La Gonave island, Haiti
La Gonave, the largest of the satellite islands of Hispaniola, includes the Pointe-à-Raquette and Anse-à-Galets communes, and resides in the Ouest Department. It is a hilly, rocky island that receives up to 1,600 mm of rainfall yearly. In its past, La Gonave was a pirate base, and was later the place where criminals and other undesirables were sent. From the census a decade before, the population was estimated to be over 75,000.
L'Ile de la Tortue - Tortuga Island in Haiti
Given the stories that have survived through time about the infamous Tortuga pirates, it is little wonder the site is still stereotypically known for that period. In the early period, before piracy and Tortuga became almost one in the same, a French governor brought over 1600 prostitutes to the island in a bid to bring more harmony to the rowdy band of pirates.
La Navase Island Nature Reserve
Sitting off the Haitian peninsula, 30 miles due west, is La Navase Island. Made of inhospitable rocky terrain, it eventually became a guano mining operation in the mid-1800s.
Guano mining stopped in 1898. The abandoned island remained so until 1914 because of a light house constructed there.
Following World War II, La Navase stood bereft of life again. By 1999, the U.S.Department of the Interior sold the island to Fish and Wildlife Service to be used as a nature reserve.
Navassa or Lanavase Island Lighthouse
Lying in the Caribbean Sea, two-square mile Navassa Island rests 30 miles off Cape Tiburon, Haiti.
Its rocky landscape permits no human life there, its only use for guano mining, which ceased post the 1898 Spanish-American War.
Navassa became active again in 1914, when a light house was installed there. At the close of World War II, the island stood empty once more.
Fish and Wildlife Service received a deed to Navassa to use as a wildlife refuge in 1999.
La Navase, small Haitian Island but also claimed by the United States
La navase also spelled La Navaze is a Haitian Island locate about 25 miles southwest of the city of Jeremie and 37 miles from Haiti's western-most peninsula. It is a 1,300-acre land with no fresh water. La Navase is uninhabited but Haitians have fished its coasts regularly
In 1856, The United States Congress passed the Guano Islands Act, given authority to any US citizen to seize any uninhabited island. One year later, in 1857, Captain Peter Duncan and Edward Cooper invaded La Navase,
The island of La Navase is reach in guano, a mixture of nitrate and phosphate that could used as fertilizer and powder in armament.
Boman a true island in Haiti
One thing that is very distinct to the island of Boman is that the entire island is made exclusively of sea shells.
One of teh most important structures in the Isle of Boman is its Lighthouse. The lighthouse is being powered by solar energy.
Other than this, everything else in the island is natural