X marks the spot! Right here on the map. Jamaica. 18.1096° N, 77.2975° W. I don’t know what terminology our island’s first inhabitants, the Tainos, used to locate us on the map. The winds, sea currents and stars that would have been part of the guiding elements.
And then, with the arrival of Europeans, Jamaica became located on their maps. A Wikipedia page has pictures of a few of those early maps:

Benedetto Bordone, 1528

Tomaso Porcacchi, 1572
Old Maps Online also has links to pictures of a variety of maps of Jamaica, such as this one:

Colin Liddell, 1895
By the way, CaribbeanExams.com has a nice, simple series of maps showing how the parishes of Jamaica have changed over the centuries:

And every school child in Jamaica has had the task of learning the names of the parishes and their capitals…

These days, we can also access Jamaica via satellite maps online, as I did this morning:

And on Google Maps as well:

Finally, while you should have no difficulty locating Jamaica on this blank map of the Caribbean, how many other countries could you correctly identify? Click here to see how well you did.
