Caribbean Sea
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Caribbean Sea. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an arm of the Atlantic, lying between the West Indies and the coasts of Central and South America . The Caribbean is larger than the Gulf of Mexico. Its basin comprises 750,000 square miles--one-fourth as large as the United States . The basin is a huge mountain cup. The coasts are not continuous, but they are everywhere mountainous, The water varies in depth from shallows to abysses. The floor of the sea is uneven. Bartlett Trough is described as a chasm a few miles wide but hundreds of miles in length and three miles deep. An equatorial current enters the Caribbean Sea through the passages of the Windward Islands and, continuing westward, sweeps through Yucatan Channel into the Gulf of Mexico. The trade winds bring tropical moisture that falls--literally falls--in sheets that the inhabitants of more temperate climes know not of. Destructive tempests are not infrequent. The temperature is "modified by the trade winds," but to the northern traveler the navigation of the Caribbean is associated with much torrid discomfort. The name is derived from the Caribs, an Indian family yet dwelling in places on the coasts and islands of this great sea.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the grandest inlet of the Western Hemisphere-corresponding in several respects to the Mediterranean in the Eastern-is separated from the Gulf of Mexico by Yucatan, and from the Atlantic Ocean by the great arch of the Antilles. It forms the turning-point in the vast cycle of waters known as the Gulf Stream. It pours its waters into the Gulf of Mexico on the W.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 figure of 750,000 square miles for the basin is well short of the modern reckoning of roughly 1.06 million square miles (about 2.75 million sq km), and its "Bartlett Trough" is now called the Cayman Trough, sounded at about 7,686 m (some 25,000 ft) at its deepest rather than three miles. The biggest single change came just before Collier's wrote in 1921: the Panama Canal opened in 1914, turning the Caribbean from a dead end into one of the busiest shipping corridors on earth, and a widened set of locks doubled its capacity in 2016. Since the 1960s the sea has been understood as sitting on its own tectonic plate, whose grinding edges explain the mountainous coasts and the earthquakes that levelled Port-au-Prince in 2010. The Caribs Aiton's says were "yet dwelling" on the coasts survive as the Kalinago, with a recognised territory in Dominica, while the "destructive tempests" are now tracked by satellite and named by the National Hurricane Center.
Written for this edition, 2026.