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Banda Islands

(Encyclopedia)Banda Islands, group of 10 volcanic islands, c.70 sq mi (180 sq km), E Indonesia, in the Banda Sea, in the Moluccas. The capital and commercial center is Bandanaira, a seaport on Bandanaira island. Th...

Orkney Islands

(Encyclopedia)Orkney Islands, archipelago and council area (1991 pop. 19,650), 376 sq mi (974 sq km), N Scotland, consisting of about 70 islands in the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea, N of Scottish mainland acros...

Vesterålen Islands

(Encyclopedia)Vesterålen Islands, Norway: see Lofoten. ...

Virgin Islands

(Encyclopedia)CE5 Virgin Islands, group of about 100 small islands, West Indies, E of Puerto Rico. The islands are divided politically between the United States and Great Britain. Although constituting the weste...

Visayan Islands

(Encyclopedia)Visayan Islands vĭsīˈən [key], large island group (1990 pop. 13,794,991), c.24,000 sq mi (62,160 sq km), in and around the Visayan Sea, central Philippines. The group includes Bohol, Cebu, Leyte, ...

island

(Encyclopedia)island, relatively small body of land surrounded entirely by water. (As the oceans form a continuous mass of water on the earth's surface, all continents are islands in the strict sense of the word.) ...

Shelekhov, Grigori Ivanovich

(Encyclopedia)Shelekhov, Grigori Ivanovich grĭgôˈrē ēväˈnəvĭch shĕˈlyĭkhəf [key], 1747–95, Russian fur trader in North America, b. Rylsk, Ukraine. He had built up a large fur business in Siberia when...

Russian American Company

(Encyclopedia)Russian American Company, colonial trading company, chartered by Czar Paul I in 1799. The charter granted the merchant-dominated company monopoly trading privileges in Russian America, which included ...

Aleut

(Encyclopedia)Aleut əlo͞otˈ, ălˈēo͞otˌ [key], native inhabitant of the Aleutian Islands and W Alaska. Like the Eskimo, the Aleuts are racially similar to Siberian peoples. Their language is a member of the ...

Bering Sea

(Encyclopedia)Bering Sea, c.878,000 sq mi (2,274,020 sq km), northward extension of the Pacific Ocean between Siberia and Alaska. It is screened from the Pacific proper by the Aleutian Islands. The Bering Strait co...