Newfoundland, the West Indies, and the Falklands, and the chief oceanic islands are the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries, the Cape Verde Islands, Ascension, St Helena, Tristan da Cunha and Bouvet Island.
When it was known that Admiral Cervera, with a Spanish fleet, had left the Cape Verde Islands, Sampson withdrew a force from the blockade to cruise in the Windward Passage, and made an attack upon the forts at San Juan, Porto Rico.
On the west its limit is in the Cape Verde Islands, and it is partially represented in Abyssinia.
The North African Basin has several deeps with more than 3300 fathoms to the northwest and the south-west of the Cape Verde Islands, but the South African Basin is less deep. In the South Atlantic there is no connexion between the Central Rise and the Antarctic Shelf, for the Indo-Atlantic Antarctic Basin stretches from near the South Sandwich Islands towards Kerguelen with depths exceeding 2500 fathoms and reaching in places 3100.
The pope drew a line from north to south one hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, and gave the Spaniards the claim to all to the west (May 4, 1493).