Definition of "archipelago"

For many years past the whaleship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed.

1851 November 14, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers; London: Richard Bentley

[I]n his imagination he had settled his route, through Holland and France to Sicily, which he had long wished to see, and from thence to the Archipelago […] .

1791, Charlotte Smith, Celestina, Broadview, published 2004, page 413

As the seas level, as the seas / Swept into ripples by the breeze, / And archipelagoed by trees, / Majestic spreading oaks, that rise / Like island walls against the skies.

1912, Samuel John Alexander, “The Regions Which Are Holy Land”, in The Inverted Torch, and Other Poems, San Francisco, C.A.: A. M. Robertson, page 183

There is no debating that there is a Gardener whose gardens are spontaneous as a sunup, no crimson and purple clouds archipelagoing the morning skies.

1924, William A[lfred] Quayle, Out-of-Doors with Jesus, New York, N.Y., Cincinnati, O.H.: Abingdon Press, page 196

Crevasse! The word which describes the frightful chasm into which nature's mighty stresses break glaciers, the people of the Lower Mississippi applied to the river when its destruction burst upon the land. It meant a rush of water which might be fifteen feet high and a hundred feet wide the first hour, four hundred the next, and half a mile the next day; and which hurled itself upon towns and plantations, to gouge vast cavities and carry destruction fifty miles a day; the current sweeping away everything in its immediate path, but losing its violence farther away in the placidity of a vast sea archipelagoed by tree tops and house roofs and beaconed by factory chimneys.

1944, Thomas Ewing Dabney, One Hundred Great Years: The Story of the Times-Picayune From Its Founding to 1940, Baton Rouge, L.A.: Louisiana State University Press, page 432

For a long time he had kept a pet crow called Topsy; it ate gobbets of cheese from his hand and archipelagoed the floor of his hut with droppings.

1987, Jeremy Reed, Blue Rock, London: Jonathan Cape, page 53