Bermuda comprises several hundred islands, islets, and barren rocks is the shape of a fishhook, tilted about forty degrees, and extended for twenty-two miles. The land mass is less than twenty square miles. Built upon the southeastern arc of a largely submerged plateau on top of an ancient volcano. It consists of windblown sand dunes, coral and limestone. Warmed by the Gulf Stream, the Islands were surrounded by the most northerly coral reefs in the Atlantic. Because of the reefs and shoals, the hurricanes and shipwrecks, Bermuda came to be known by sixteenth-century Spanish sailors as Demoniorum Insulam, the “Isle of Devils”.