[800] Henry Dyer, Dai Nippon, pp. 59, 69. New York, 1904.

[801] E.A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, p. 558. London, 1882.

[802] Ibid., pp. 559, 561. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. V, p. 248. New York, 1858.



CHAPTER XIII

ISLAND PEOPLES

[Sidenote: Physical relationship between islands and peninsulas.]

The characteristics which mark peninsulas, namely, ample contact with the sea, small area as compared with that of the continents, peripheral location, more or less complete isolation, combined, however, with the function of bridge or passway to yet remoter lands, are all accentuated in islands. A list of the chief peninsulas of the world, as compared with the greatest islands, shows a far larger scale of areas for the former, even if the latter be made to include the vast ice-capped land-mass of Greenland (2,170,000 square kilometers or 846,000 square miles). New Guinea, the largest habitable island, has only one-fourth the area of Arabia, the largest of the peninsulas.[803] Therefore, both the advantages and disadvantages incident to a restricted area may be expected to appear in an intensified degree in islands.

Peninsulas are morphologically transition forms between mainland and islands; by slight geological changes one is converted into the other. Great Britain was a peninsula at the end of the Tertiary period, before subsidence and the erosion of Dover Channel combined to sever it from the continent. It bears to-day in its flora and fauna the evidence of its former broad connection with the mainland.[804] In Pliocene times, Sicily and Sardinia were united by a land bridge with the Tunisian projection of North Africa; and they too, in their animal and plant life, reveal the old connection with the southern continent.[805] Sometimes man himself for his own purposes converts a peninsula into an island. Often he constructs a canal, like that at Kiel or Corinth, to remove an isthmian obstruction to navigation; but occasionally he transforms his peninsula into an island for the sake of greater protection. William of Rubruquis tells us that in 1253 he found the neck of the Crimea cut through by a ditch from sea to sea by the native Comanians, who had taken refuge in the peninsula from the Tartar invaders, and in this way had sought to make their asylum more secure.[806]

The reverse process in nature is quite as common. The Shangtung Peninsula rises like a mountainous island from the sea-like level of alluvial plains about it, suggesting that remote time when the plains were not yet deposited and an arm of the Yellow Sea covered the space between Shangtung and the highlands of Shansi.[807] The deposition of silt, aided often by slight local elevation of the coast, is constantly tying continental islands to the mainland. The Echinades Archipelago off the southwest coast of ancient Acarnania, opposite the mouth of the Achelous River, Strabo tells us, was formerly farther from shore than in his time, and was gradually being cemented to the mainland by Achelous silt. Some islets had already been absorbed in the advancing shoreline, and the same fate awaited others.[808] Farther up this western coast of Greece, the island of Leukas has been converted into a peninsula by a sickle-shaped sandbar extending across the narrow channel.[809] Nature is working in its leisurely way to attach Sakhalin to the Siberian coast. The strong marine current which sets southward from the Okhotsk Sea through the Strait of Tartary carries silt from the mouth of the heavy laden Amur River, and deposits it in the "narrows" of the strait between Capes Luzarev and Pogobi, building up sandbars that come dangerously near the surface in mid channel.[810] Here the water is so shallow that occasionally after long prevailing winds, the ground is left exposed and the island natives can walk over to Asia.[811] The close proximity of Sakhalin to the mainland and the ice bridge covering the strait in winter rob the island of much of its insular character and caused it to pass as a peninsula until 1852. Yet that five-mile wide stretch of sea on its western coast determined its selection as the great penal station of the Russian Empire. The fact that peninsular India accords in so many points of flora, fauna and even primitive ethnic stock with Madagascar and South Africa, indicates its former island nature, which has been geographically cloaked by its union with the continent of Asia.

[Sidenote: Character of insular flora and fauna.]

Islands, because of their relatively limited area and their clearly defined boundaries, are excellent fields for the study of floral, faunal, and ethnic distribution. Small area and isolation cause in them poverty of animal and plant forms and fewer species than are found in an equal continental area. This is the curse of restricted space which we have met before. The large island group of New Zealand, with its highly diversified relief and long zonal stretch, has only a moderate list of flowering plants, in comparison with the numerous species that adorn equal areas in South Africa and southwestern Australia.[812] Ascension possessed originally less than six flowering plants. The four islands of the Greater Antilles form together a considerable area and have all possible advantages of climate and soil; but there are probably no continental areas equally big and equally favored by nature which are so poor in all the more highly organized groups of animals.[813] Islands tend to lop off the best branches. Darwin found not a single indubitable case of terrestrial mammals native to islands situated more than three hundred miles from the mainland.[814] The impoverishment extends therefore to quality as well as quantity, to man as well as to brute. In the island continent of Australia, the native mammalia, excepting some bats, a few rodents, and a wild dog, all belong to the primitive marsupial sub-class; its human life, at the time of the discovery, was restricted to one retarded negroid race, showing in every part of the island a monotonous, early Stone Age development. The sparsely scattered oceanic islands of the Atlantic, owing to excessive isolation, were all, except the near-lying Canaries, uninhabited at the time of their discovery; and the Canary Islanders showed great retardation as compared with their parent stock of northern Africa. [See map page 105.]

[Sidenote: Endemic forms.]

Despite this general poverty of species, island life is distinguished by a great proportion of peculiar or endemic forms, and a tendency toward divergence, which is the effect of isolation and which becomes marked in proportion to the duration and effectiveness of isolation. Isolation, by reducing or preventing the intercrossing which holds the individual true to the normal type of the species, tends to produce divergences.[815] Hence island life is more or less differentiated from that of the nearest mainland, according to the degree of isolation. Continental islands, lying near the coast, possess generally a flora and fauna to a large extent identical with that of the mainland, and show few endemic species and genera; whereas remote oceanic islands, which isolation has claimed for its own, are marked by intense specialization and a high percentage of species and even genera found nowhere else.[816] Even a narrow belt of dividing sea suffices to loosen the bonds of kinship. Recent as are the British Isles and near the Continent, they show some biological diversity from the mainland and from each other.[817]

[Sidenote: Paradoxical influences of island habitats upon man.]

The influence of an island habitat upon its human occupants resembles that upon its flora and fauna, but is less marked. The reason for this is twofold. The plant and animal life are always the older and therefore have longer felt the effects of isolation; hence they bear its stamp in an intensified degree. Man, as a later comer, shows closer affinity to his kin in the great cosmopolitan areas of the continents. More than this, by reason of his inventiveness and his increasing skill in navigation, he finds his sea boundary less strictly drawn, and therefore evades the full influence of his detached environment, though never able wholly to counteract it. For man in lowest stages of civilization, as for plants and animals, the isolating influence is supreme; but with higher development and advancing nautical efficiency, islands assume great accessibility because of their location on the common highway of the ocean. They become points of departure and destination of maritime navigation, at once center of dispersal and goal, the breeding place of expansive national forces seeking an outlet, and a place of hospitality for wanderers passing those shores. Yet all the while, that other tendency of islands to segregate their people, and in this aloofness to give them a peculiar and indelible national stamp, much as it differentiates its plant and animal forms, is persistently operative.

[Sidenote: Conservative and radical tendencies.]

These two antagonistic influences of an island environment may be seen working simultaneously in the same people, now one, now the other being dominant; or a period of undisturbed seclusion or exclusion may suddenly be followed by one of extensive intercourse, receptivity or expansion. Recall the contrast in the early and later history of the Canaries, Azores, Malta, England, Mauritius and Hawaii, now a lonely, half-inhabited waste, now a busy mart or teeming way-station. Consider the pronounced insular mind of the globe-trotting Englishman, the deep-seated local conservatism characterizing that world-colonizing nation, at once the most provincial and cosmopolitan on earth. Emerson says with truth, "Every one of these islanders is an island himself, safe, tranquil, incommunicable."[818] Hating innovation, glorifying their habitudes, always searching for a precedent to justify and countenance each forward step, they have nevertheless led the world's march of progress. Scattered by their colonial and commercial enterprises over every zone, in every clime, subjected to the widest range of modifying environments, they show in their ideals the dominant influence of the home country. The trail of the Oxford education can be followed over the Empire, east to New Zealand and west to Vancouver. Highschool students of Jamaica take Oxford examinations in botany which are based upon English plant life and ignore the Caribbean flora! School children in Ceylon are compelled to study a long and unfamiliar list of errors in English speech current only in the London streets, in order to identify and correct them on the Oxford papers, distributed with Olympian impartiality to all parts of the Empire. Such insularity of mind seems to justify Bernard Shaw's description of Britain as an island whose natives regard its manners and customs as laws of nature. Yet these are the people who in the Nile Valley have become masters of irrigation, unsurpassed even by the ancient Egyptians; who, in the snow-wrapped forests of Hudson Bay, are trappers and hunters unequalled by the Indians; who, in the arid grasslands of Australia, pasture their herds like nomad shepherd or American cowboy, and in the Tropics loll like the natives, but somehow manage to do a white man's stint of work.

[Sidenote: The case of Japan.]

In Japan, isolation has excluded or reduced to controllable measure every foreign force that might break the continuity of the national development or invade the integrity of the national ideal. Japan has always borrowed freely from neighboring Asiatic countries and recently from the whole world; yet everything in Japan bears the stamp of the indigenous. The introduction of foreign culture into the Empire has been a process of selection and profound modification to accord with the national ideals and needs.[819] Buddhism, coming from the continent, was Japanized by being grafted on to the local stock of religious ideas, so that Japanese Buddhism is strongly differentiated from the continental forms of that religion.[820] The seventeenth century Catholicism of the Jesuits, before it was hospitably received, had to be adapted to Japanese standards of duty and ritual. Modern Japanese converts to Christianity wish themselves to conduct the local missions and teach a national version of the new faith.[821] But all the while, Japanese religion has experienced no real change of heart. The core of the national faith is the indigenous Shinto cult, which no later interloper has been permitted to dislodge or seriously to transform; and this has survived, wrapped in the national consciousness, wedded to the national patriotism, lifted above competition. Here is insular conservatism.

Japan's sudden and complete abandonment of a policy of seclusion which had been rigidly maintained for two hundred and fifty years, and her entrance upon a career of widespread intercourse synchronously with one of territorial expansion and extensive emigration, form one of those apparently irreconcilable contradictions constantly springing from the isolation and world-wide accessibility of an island environment; yet underlying Japan's present receptivity of new ideas and her outwardly indiscriminate adoption of western civilization is to be detected the deep primal stamp of the Japanese character, and an instinctive determination to preserve the core of that character intact.

[Sidenote: Islands as nurseries and disseminators of distinctive civilizations.]

It is this marked national individuality, developed by isolation and accompanied often by a precocious civilization, in combination with the opposite fact of the imminent possibility of an expansive unfolding, a brilliant efflorescence followed by a wide dispersal of its seeds of culture and of empire, which has assigned to islands in all times a great historical role. Rarely do these wholly originate the elements of civilization. For that their area is too small. But whatever seed ripen in the wide fields of the continents the islands transplant to their own forcing houses; there they transform and perfect the flower. Japan borrowed freely from China and Korea, as England did from continental Europe; but these two island realms have brought Asiatic and European civilization to their highest stage of development. Now the borrowers are making return with generous hand. The islands are reacting upon the continents. Japanese ideals are leavening the whole Orient from Manchuria to Ceylon. English civilization is the standard of Europe. "The Russian in his snows is aiming to be English," says Emerson. "England has inoculated all nations with her civilization, intelligence and tastes."[822]

[Sidenote: Ancient Cretan civilization.]

The recent discoveries in Crete show beyond doubt that the school of Aegean civilization was in that island. Ancient Phoenicia, Argos, even Mycenae and Tiryns put off their mask of age and appear as rosy boys learning none too aptly of their great and elderly master. Borrowing the seeds of culture from Asia and Egypt,[823] Crete nursed and tended them through the Neolithic and Bronze Age, transformed them completely, much as scientific tillage has converted the cotton tree into a low shrub. The precocity of this civilization is clear. At early as 3000 B.C. it included an impressive style of architecture and a decorative art naturalistic and beautiful in treatment as that of modern Japan.[824] From this date till the zenith of its development in 1450 B.C., Crete became a great artistic manufacturing and distributing center for stone carving, frescoes, pottery, delicate porcelain, metal work, and gems.[825] By 1800 B. C., seven centuries before Phoenician writing is heard of, the island had matured a linear script out of an earlier pictographic form.[826] This script, partly indigenous, partly borrowed from Libya and Egypt, gives Crete the distinction of having invented the first system of writing ever practised in Europe.[827]

Yet all this wealth of achievement bore the stamp of the indigenous; nearly every trace of its remote Asiatic or Egyptian origin was obliterated. Here the isolation of an island environment did thoroughly its work of differentiation, even on this thalassic isle which maintained constant intercourse with Egypt, the Cyclades, the Troad and the Greek peninsula.[828] Minoan art has a freshness, vivacity, and modernity that distinguishes it fundamentally from the formal products of its neighbors. "Many of the favorite subjects, like the crocus and wild goat, are native to the islands.... Even where a motive was borrowed from Egyptian life, it was treated in a distinctive way," made tender, dramatic, vital. "In religion, as in art generally, Crete translated its loans into indigenous terms, and contributed as much as it received."[829] The curator of Egyptian antiquities in the New York Metropolitan Art Museum examined five hundred illustrations of second and third millenium antiquities from Gournia and Vasiliki in Crete, made by Mrs. Harriet Boyd Hawes during her superintendence of the excavations there, and pronounced them distinctly un-Egyptian, except one vase, probably an importation.[830] All this was achieved by a small insular segment of the Mediterranean race, in their Neolithic and Bronze Age, before the advent of those northern conquerors who brought in an Aryan speech and the gift of iron. It was in Crete, therefore, that Aegean civilization arose. On this island it had a long and brilliant pre-Hellenic career, and thence it spread to the Greek mainland and other Aegean shores.[831]

[Sidenote: Limitation of small area in insular history.]

A small cup soon overflows. Islands may not keep; they are forced to give, live by giving. Here lies their historical significance. They dispense their gifts of culture in levying upon the resources of other lands. But finally more often than not, the limitation of too small a home area steps in to arrest the national development, which then fades and decays. To this rule Great Britain and Japan are notable exceptions, owing partly to the unusual size of their insular territory, partly to a highly advantageous location. Minoan Crete, in that gray antiquity when Homeric history was still unborn, gave out of its abundance in art, government, laws and maritime knowledge to the eastern Mediterranean world, till the springs of inspiration in its own small land were exhausted, and its small population was unable to resist the flood of northern invasion. Then the dispenser of gifts had to become an alms-taker from the younger, larger, more resourceful Hellenic world.

The same story of early but short lived preeminence comes from other Aegean islands. Before the rise of Athens, Samos under the great despot Polykrates became "the first of all cities, Hellenic or barbaric," a center of Ionian manners, luxury, art, science and culture, the seat of the first great thalassocracy or sea-power after that of Cretan Minos, a distributing point for commerce and colonies.[832] Much the same history and distinction attached to the island of Rhodes long before the first Olympiad,[833] and to the little island of Aegina.[834] If we turn to the native races of America, we find that the Haida Indians of the Queen Charlotte Archipelago are markedly superior to their Tlingit and Tsimshean kinsmen of the nearby Alaskan and British Columbian coast. In their many and varied arts they have freely borrowed from their neighbors; but they have developed these loans with such marvelous skill and independence that they greatly surpass their early masters, and are accredited with possessing the creative genius of all this coast.[835] Far away, on the remote southeastern outskirts of the island world of the Pacific, a parallel is presented by little Easter Isle. Once it was densely populated and completely tilled by a people who had achieved singular progress in agriculture, religion, masonry, sculpture in stone and wood carving, even with obsidian tools, and who alone of all the Polynesians had devised a form of hieroglyphical writing.[836] Easter Isle to-day shows only abandoned fields, the silent monuments of its huge stone idols, and the shrunken remnant of a deteriorated people.[837]

[Sidenote: Sources of ethnic stock of islands.]

Isolation and accessibility are recorded in the ethnic stock of every island. Like its flora and fauna, its aboriginal population shows an affinity to that of the nearest mainland, and this generally in proportion to geographical proximity. The long line of deposit islands, built of the off-scourings of the land, and fringing the German and Netherland coast from Texel to Wangeroog, is inhabited by the same Frisian folk which occupies the nearby shore. The people of the Channel Isles, though long subject to England, belong to the Franco-Gallic stock and the langue d'oil linguistic family of northern France. The native Canary Islanders, though giving no evidence of previous communication with any continental land at the time of their discovery, could be traced, through their physical features, speech, customs and utensils, to a remote origin in Egypt and the Berber regions of North Africa prior to the Mohammedan conquest.[838] Sakhalin harbors to-day, besides the immigrant Russians, five different peoples—Ainos, Gilyaks, Orochons, Tunguse, and Yakuts, all of them offshoots of tribes now or formerly found on the Siberian mainland a few miles away.[839]

[Sidenote: Ethnic divergence with increased isolation.]

Where the isolation of the island is more pronounced, owing either to a broader and more dangerous channel, as in the case of Madagascar and Formosa, or to the nautical incapacity of the neighboring coast peoples, as in the case of Tasmania and the Canary Islands, the ethnic influence of the mainland is weak, and the ethnic divergence of the insular population therefore more marked, even to the point of total difference in race. But this is generally a case of survival of a primitive stock in the protection of an unattractive island offering to a superior people few allurements to conquest, as illustrated by the ethnic history of the Andaman and Kurile Isles.

[Sidenote: Differentiation of peoples and civilizations on islands.]

The sea forms the sharpest and broadest boundary; it makes in the island which it surrounds the conditions for differentiation. Thus while an insular population is allied in race and civilization to that of the nearest continent, it nevertheless differs from the same more than the several sub-groups of its continental kindred differ from each other. In other words, isolation makes ethnic and cultural divergence more marked on islands than on continents. The English people, despite their close kinship and constant communication with the Teutonic peoples of the European mainland, deviate from them more than any of these Germanic nations deviate from each other. The Celts of Great Britain and Ireland are sharply distinguished from the whole body of continental Celts in physical features, temperament, and cultural development. In Ireland the primitive Catholic Church underwent a distinctive development. It was closely bound up in the tribal organization of the Irish people, lacked the system, order and magnificence of the Latinized Church, had its peculiar tonsure for monks, and its own date for celebrating Easter for nearly three hundred years after the coming of St. Patrick.[840] The Japanese, in their physical and mental characteristics, as in their whole national spirit, are more strikingly differentiated from the Chinese than the agricultural Chinese from the nomadic Buriat shepherds living east of Lake Baikal, though Chinese and Japanese are located much nearer together and are in the same stage of civilization. The Eskimo, who form one of the most homogeneous stocks, and display the greatest uniformity in language and cultural achievements of all the native American groups, have only one differentiated offshoot, the Aleutian Islanders. These, under the protection and isolation of their insular habitat from a very remote period, have developed to a greater extent than their Eskimo brethren of the mainland. The difference is evident in their language, religious ceremonies, and in details of their handiwork, such as embroidery and grass-fiber weaving.[841] The Haidas of the Queen Charlotte Archipelago show such a divergence in physique and culture from the related tribes of the mainland, that they have been accredited with a distinct origin from the other coast Indians.[842]

[Sidenote: Differentiation of language in islands.]

The differentiating influence is conspicuous in the speech of island people, which tends to form a distinct language or dialect or, in an archipelago, a group of dialects. The Channel Isles, along with their distinctive breeds of cattle, has each its own variant of the langue d'oil.[843] According to Boccaccio's narrative of a Portuguese voyage to the Canaries in 1341, the natives of one island could not understand those from another, so different were their languages. The statement was repeated by a later authority in 1455 in regard to the inhabitants of Lancerote, Fuerteventura, Gomera and Ferro, who had then been Christianized. A partial explanation is supplied by the earlier visitors, who found the Canary Guanches with no means of communication between the several islands except by swimming.[844] In the Visayan group of the Philippines, inhabited exclusively by the civilized Visayan tribes except for the Negritos in the mountainous interior, the people of Cebu can not understand their brethren in the adjacent islands; in Cuyos and Calmanianes, dialects of the Visayan are spoken.[845] [See map page 147.]

The differentiation of language from the nearby continental speech may be due to a higher development, especially on large islands affording very advantageous conditions, such as Great Britain and Japan. Japanese speech has some affinity with the great Altaic linguistic family, but no close resemblance to any sub-group.[846] It presents marked contrasts to the Chinese because it has passed beyond the agglutinative stage of development, just as English has sloughed off more of its inflectional forms than the continental Teutonic languages.

[Sidenote: Archaic forms of speech in islands.]

More often the difference is due to the survival of archaic forms of speech. This is especially the case on very small or remote islands, whose limited area or extreme isolation or both factors in conjunction present conditions for retardation. The speech of the Sardinians has a strong resemblance to the ancient Latin, retains many inflectional forms now obsolete in the continental Romance languages; but it has also been enlivened by an infusion of Catalan words, which came in by the bridge of the Balearic Islands during the centuries of Spanish rule in Sardinia.[847] Again, it is in Minorca and Majorca that this Catalan speech is found in its greatest purity to-day. On its native soil in eastern Spain, especially in Barcelona, it is gradually succumbing to the official Castilian, and probably in a few centuries will be found surviving only in the protected environment of the Balearic Isles. Icelandic and the kindred dialects of the Shetland and Faroe Islands had their origin in the classic Norse of the ninth century, and are divergent forms of the speech of the Viking explorers.[848] The old Frisian tongue of Holland, sister speech to Anglo-Saxon, survives to-day only in West Friesland beyond the great marshlands, and in the long-drawn belt of coastal islands from Terschelling through Helgoland to Sylt, as also on the neighboring shores of Schleswig-Holstein.[849] This region of linguistic survival, insulated partially by the marshes or completely by the shallow "Wattenmeer" of this lowland coast, reminds us of the protracted life of the archaic Lithuanian speech within a circle of sea and swamp in Baltic Russia, and the survival of the Celtic tongue in peninsular Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, in Ireland, and the Highlands and islands of Scotland.

[Sidenote: Unification of race in islands.]

Islanders are always coast dwellers with a limited hinterland. Hence their stock may be differentiated from the mainland race in part for the same reason that all coastal folk in regions of maritime development are differentiated from the people of the back country, namely, because contact with the sea allows an intermittent influx of various foreign strains, which are gradually assimilated. This occasional ethnic intercrossing can be proved in greater or less degree of all island people. Here is accessibility operating against the underlying isolation of an island habitat. The English to-day represent a mixture of Celts with various distinct Teutonic elements, which had already diverged from one another in their separate habitats—Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Norse and Norman French. The subsequent detachment of these immigrant stocks by the English Channel and North Sea from their home people, and their arrival in necessarily small bands enabled them to be readily assimilated, a process which was stimulated further by the rapid increase of population, the intimate interactive life and unification of culture which characterizes all restricted areas. Hence islands, like peninsulas, despite ethnic admixtures, tend to show a surprising unification of race; they hold their people aloof from others and hold them in a close embrace, shut them off and shut them in, tend to force the amalgamation of race, culture and speech. Moreover, their relatively small area precludes effective segregation within their own borders, except where a mountainous or jungle district affords a temporary refuge for a displaced and antagonized tribe. Hence there arises a preponderance of the geographic over the ethnic and linguistic factors in the historical equation.

The uniformity in cranial type prevailing all over the British Isles is amazing; it is greater than in either Spain or Scandinavia. The cephalic indices range chiefly between 77 and 79, a restricted variation as compared with the ten points which represents the usual range for Central Europe, and the thirteen between the extremes of 75 and 88 found in France and Italy.[850] Japan stands in much the same ethnic relation to Asia as Britain to Europe. She has absorbed Aino, Mongolian, Malay and perhaps Polynesian elements, but by reason of her isolation has been left free to digest these at her leisure, so that her population is fairly well assimilated, though evidences of the old mixture can be discerned.[851] In Corsica and Sardinia a particularly low cephalic index, dropping in some communes to 73, and a particularly short stature point to a rare purity of the Mediterranean race,[852] and indicate the maintenance here of one ethnic type, despite the intermittent intrusion of various less pure stocks from the Italian mainland, Africa, Phoenicia, Arabia, and Spain. The location of the islands off the main routes of the basin, their remoteness from shore, and the strong spirit of exclusiveness native to the people,[853] bred doubtless from their isolation, have combined to reduce the amount of foreign intermixture.

[Sidenote: Remoter sources of island populations.]

Islands do not necessarily derive their population from the land that lies nearest to them. A comparatively narrow strait may effectively isolate, if the opposite shore is inhabited by a nautically inefficient race; whereas a wide stretch of ocean may fail to bar the immigration of a seafaring people. Here we find a parallel to the imperfect isolation of oceanic islands for life forms endowed with superior means of dispersal, such as marine birds, bats and insects.[854] Iceland, though relatively near Greenland, was nevertheless peopled by far away Scandinavians. These bold sailors planted their settlements even in Greenland nearly two centuries before the Eskimo. England received the numerically dominant element of its population from across the wide expanse of the North Sea, from the bare but seaman-breeding coasts of Germany, Denmark and Norway, rather than from the nearer shores of Gaul. So the Madeira and Cape Verde Isles had to wait for the coming of the nautical Portuguese to supply them with a population; and only later, owing to the demand for slave labor, did they draw upon the human stock of nearby Africa, but even then by means of Portuguese ships.

[Sidenote: Double sources.]

Owing to the power of navigation to bridge the intervening spaces of water and hence to emphasize the accessibility rather than the isolation of these outlying fragments of land, we often find islands facing two or three ways, as it were, tenanted on different sides by different races, and this regardless of the width of the intervening seas, where the remote neighbors excel in nautical skill. Formosa is divided between its wild Malay aborigines, found on the eastern, mountainous side of the island, and Chinese settlers who cultivate the wide alluvial plain on the western side.[855] Fukien Strait, though only eighty miles wide, sufficed to bar Formosa to the land-loving northern Chinese till 1644, when the island became an asylum for refugees from the Manchu invaders; but long before, the wider stretches of sea to the south and north were mere passways for the sea-faring Malays, who were the first to people the island, and the Japanese who planted considerable colonies on its northern coasts at the beginning of the fifteenth century. [See map page 103.]

In a similar way Madagascar is divided between the Malayan Hovas, who occupy the eastern and central part of the island, and the African Sakalavas who border the western coast. [See map page 105.] This distribution of the ethnic elements corresponds to that of the insect life, which is more African on the western side and more Indo-Malayan on the eastern.[856] Though the population shows every physical type between Negro and Malayan, and ethnic diversity still predominates over ethnic unity in this vast island, nevertheless the close intercourse of an island habitat has even in Madagascar produced unification of language. Malayan speech of an ancient form prevails everywhere, and though diversified into dialects, is everywhere so much alike that all Malagasies can manage to understand one another.[857] The first inhabitants were probably African; but the wide Mozambique Current (230 miles), with its strong southward flow, was a serious barrier to fresh accessions from the mainland, especially as the nautical development of the African tribes was always low. Meanwhile, however, successive relays of sea-bred Malay-Polynesians crossed the broad stretch of the Indian Ocean, occupied the island, and finally predominated over the original Negro stock.[858] Then in historic times came Arabs, Swahilis, and East Indians to infuse an Asiatic element into the population of the coasts, while Portuguese, English, Dutch, and French set up short-lived colonies on its shores. But despite this intermittent foreign immigration, the fundamental isolation of Madagascar, combined with its large area, enabled it to go its own slow historical gait, with a minimum of interference from outside, till France in 1895 began to assume control of the island.

[Sidenote: Mixed population of small thalassic isles.]

Small thalassic islands, at an early date in their history, lose their ethnic unity and present a highly mixed population. The reasons for this are two. The early maritime development characterizing enclosed seas covers them with a network of marine routes, on which such islands serve as way stations and mid-sea markets for the surrounding shores. Sailors and traders, colonists and conquerors flock to them from every side. Such a nodal location on commercial routes insures to islands a cosmopolitanism of race, as opposed to the ethnic differentiation and unity which follows an outlying or oceanic situation. Here the factor of many-sided accessibility predominates over isolation.

The prevailing small area of such thalassic islands, moreover, involves a population so small that it is highly susceptible to the effects of intercrossing. Too restricted to absorb the constant influx of foreign elements, the inhabitants tend to become a highly mixed, polyglot breed. This they continue to be by the constant addition of foreign strains, so long as the islands remain foci of trade or strategic points for the control of the marine highways. Diomede Island in Bering Strait is the great market place of the polar tribes. Here Siberian Chukches and Alaskan Eskimos make their exchanges. The Eskimo of St. Lawrence Island in Bering Sea, from long intercourse, have adopted certain articles of dress, the boats and part of the vocabulary of the Chukches.[859] Kilwauru, located on a sand-bank at the eastern end of Ceram, on the border between Malayan and Papuan island districts, is the metropolis of native traders in the Far East. Here gather the praus of the sea-faring Bugis bringing manufactured goods from Singapore, and boats laden with the natural products of New Guinea.[860] The smaller these island marts and the wider their circle of trade, the more mixed is their population. Thursday Isle, an English coaling-station in Torres Strait, is a port of call for all steamers bound from Europe or China for east Australian ports, besides being a center of a big local trade in pearl shell and tripang. Hence its population of 526 souls comprises 270 Europeans of various nationalities, including British, Germans, Scandinavians, Danes, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Australians of European origin, besides 256 South Sea Islanders, Papuans, Africans, Philippines, Chinese and other Asiatics.[861]

[Sidenote: Mixed population of island markets.]

Antiquity shows the same thing on a smaller scale, which grew, however, with the expansion of the circle of commerce. Ancient Aegina in the Saronic Gulf received inhabitants from Crete, Argos, Epidaurus in eastern Argolis and Athens; it became a central maritime market and its people sea-traders, whose goods of a certain small kind became known as "Aegina wares."[862] Delos at the crossroads of the Aegean was the center of longer radii. It became the inn for travelers and merchants sailing from Asia and Egypt to Italy and Greece, and hence drew to itself the trade and people of the whole Mediterranean basin.[863] The northwestern Indian Ocean had a similar emporium in the ancient Dioscoridis, (Sokotra) which focused on itself the trade between Arabia and eastern Africa.[864]

Ceylon's location made it in ancient and medieval times the common meeting place for Arab traders from the west and Chinese merchants from the east; it thus became the Sicily of the semi-enclosed North Indian Ocean. To-day its capital Colombo is "the Clapham Junction of the Eastern Seas," where passengers change steamers for China, India and Australia; a port of call for vessels passing from the Straits of Malacca to the Persian Gulf or Mediterranean. Hence Ceylon's solid nucleus of Singhalese and Tamil population, protected against absorption by the large area of the island (25,365 square miles) is interspersed in the coastal districts with Arabs, Portuguese, Eurasians dating from the old Portuguese occupation, and some ten thousand Europeans.[865] The island of Gotland, located at the crossroads of the Baltic, was early adopted by the Hanseatic merchants as their maritime base for the exploitation of Swedish, Finnish, and Russian trade. Here were "peoples of divers tongues," so the old chronicles say, while the archeological finds of Byzantine, Cufic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon and German coins testify to the wide circle of trade whose radii focused at this nodal point of the Baltic.[866]

[Sidenote: Significant location of island way stations.]

The great importance of such islands has been due solely to their location. Their size and resources are negligible quantities, but their natural position as way stations lent them preeminence so long as navigation held to short "laps," and was restricted to enclosed seas. In the wide expanse of the open ocean, similar sparsely scattered isles, like Ascension, St. Helena, the Canaries and Hawaii, assumed importance in proportion to their scarcity. Though never the centers of rife intercourse like Delos and Gotland, those lying conspicuously in the track of commerce have succeeded in drawing to themselves the typical polyglot nodal population. Mauritius, located at the southwestern entrance of the Indian Ocean about equally distant from Aden, Ceylon, Bombay, Singapore and West Australia, and possessing the best harbor within many hundred miles, has been held successively by Dutch, French and English, and to-day has a dense population of French, English and Hindus.[867] A situation at the northeast entrance to the Caribbean Sea, keystone of the vast arch formed by the Greater and Lesser Antilles, made the island of St. Thomas a natural distributing point for this whole basin. Facing that much traveled Virgin Passage, and forming the first objective of vessels bound from Europe to Panama, it became a great ship rendezvous, and assumed strategic and commercial importance from early times. We find the same political owners here as in Mauritius and in the same order—Dutch, French and English, though in 1671 the island was occupied by the Danes, then from 1807 to 1815 by the English again, and finally secured by the Danes.[868] The history of the Falkland Islands is a significant reflection of their location on the south oceanic trade route, where they command the entrance to the Magellan Straits and the passage round the Horn, Here on the outskirts of the world, where they form the only break in the wide blank surface of the South Atlantic, they have been coveted and held in turn by the chief European powers having colonies in the Orient,—by France, Spain, England, Spain again, England again, by Argentine in 1820, and finally by England since 1833. Their possession was of especial advantage to Great Britain, which had no other base in this part of the world intermediate between England and New Zealand.

[Sidenote: Thalassic islands as goals of expansion.]

Islands located in enclosed seas display the transitional character of border districts. They are outposts of the surrounding shores, and become therefore the first objective of every expanding movement, whether commercial or political, setting out from the adjacent coasts. Such islands are swept by successive waves of conquest or colonization, and they carry in their people and language evidences of the wrack left behind on their shores. This has been the history of Aegina, Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, Malta, Corfu, Sicily and Sardinia. That of Cyprus is typical. It was the first island base for the ancient Tyrian fleets, and had its Phoenician settlements in 1045 B. C. From that time it was one of the many prizes in the Mediterranean grab-bag for the surrounding nations. After the decline of Tyre, it was occupied by Greeks, then passed in turn to Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, Romans, Saracens, Byzantines, and in 1191 was seized by the Crusaders. Later it fell to Egypt again; but in 1373 was taken by Genoa, in 1463 by Venice, in 1571 by the Turks, and finally in 1878 was consigned to England.[869] All these successive occupants have left their mark upon its people, speech, culture and architecture. In the same way Sicily, located at the waist of the Mediterranean, has received the imprint of Greeks, Carthagenians, Romans, Saracens, Normans, Spaniards and Italians.[870] Its architectural remains bear the stamp of these successive occupants in every degree of purity and blending. The Sicilians of to-day are a mixture of all these intrusive stocks and speak a form of Italian corrupted by the infusion of Arabic words.[871] In 1071 when the Normans laid siege to Palermo, five languages were spoken on the island,—Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic and vulgar Sicilian, evidence enough that it was the meeting ground of the nations of Europe, Asia and North Africa.[872] Polyglot Malta to-day tells the same story of successive conquests, the same shuttlecock history.[873] Almost every language of Europe is spoken here; but the native Maltese speech is a corrupt form of Arabic mixed with modern Italian and ancient Phoenician words.[874] The whole island is ethnographically a border hybrid of Europe and North Africa. The Channel Isles are to-day the only spot in Europe where French and English survive side by side as official and commercial languages. French and Italian meet on equal terms in Corsica. Chinese, Japanese and Malays have traded and warred and treated on the debatable land of Formosa. The Aru, Ke, and other small archipelagoes of the Banda Sea link together the pure Malay and the pure Papuan districts, between which they lie.

From the border character of many islands there follow often far-reaching historical effects. Like all border regions they are natural battlegrounds. Their historical episodes are small, often slow and insidious in their movement, but large in their final content; for they are prone to end in a sudden dramatic denouement that draws the startled gaze of all the neighboring world. It was the destiny of Sicily to make and unmake the fortunes of ancient Carthage. Ceylon, from the dawn of history, lured traders who enriched and conquerors who oppressed peninsular India. The advance of Spain to the Canary Isles was the drowsy prologue to the brilliant drama of American discovery. The island of Tsushima in the Korean Strait was seized by the forces of Kublai Khan in 1280 as the base of their attack upon Japan;[875] and when in 1857 the Russian bear tried to plant a foot on this island, Japan saw danger in the movement and ordered him off.[876] Now we find Japan newly established in Sakhalin, the Elliot Islands and Formosa, by means of which and her own archipelago she blankets the coast of Asia for twenty-two hundred miles. This geographical situation may be productive of history.

[Sidenote: Political detachability of islands.]

Islands are detached areas physically and readily detached politically. Though insularity gives them some measure of protection, their relatively small size and consequently small populations make them easy victims for a conquering sea power, and easy to hold in subjection. The security of an island habitat against aggression therefore, increases with its size, its efficiency in naval warfare, and its degree of isolation, the last of which factors depends in turn upon its location as thalassic or oceanic. Islands of enclosed seas, necessarily small and never far from the close encircling lands, are engulfed by every tide of conquest emanating from the nearby shores. Oesel and Dago have been held in succession by every Baltic power, by the Teutonic Orders, Denmark, Sweden and Russia. Gotland has acknowledged allegiance to the Hanseatic League, to Denmark and Sweden. Sardinia, occupying the center of the western Mediterranean, has figured in a varied series of political combinations,—with ancient Carthage, Rome, the Saracens of North Africa, with Sicily, Pisa, Aragon, Piedmont, and finally now with united Italy.[877] To the land-bred Teutonic hordes which swept over western Europe in the early centuries of our era, a narrow strip of sea was some protection for Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, Malta and the Balearic Isles. Hence we find these islands slow in succumbing to their non-maritime conquerors, and readily regained by the energetic Justinian. Later they fell victim to the sea-wise Saracens, but again gravitated back to their closer and more natural European connections.

[Sidenote: Insular weakness due to small area.]

More often the small area of an island facilitates its retention in bondage, when the large and less isolated continental districts have thrown off an unwelcome yoke. Athens, with her strong navy, found it an easy task to whip back into the ranks of the Delian Confederacy her recalcitrant island subjects like Naxos, Samos and Thasos; but her mutinous cities in peninsular Chalcidice and isthmian Megara, incited to revolt and aided by their neighbors,[878] were less at her mercy. This principle was recognized by Thucydides,[879] and taken advantage of by the Lacedaemonians during the great war for Spartan supremacy. England has been able to hold Ireland in a vise. Of all her former French territory, she retains only the Channel Isles. Cuba and Porto Rico remained in the crushing grasp of Spain sixty-four years after Mexico and the continental states of Central and South America, by mutual help and encouragement, had secured independence. The islands found that the isolation which confers protection from outside aggression meant for them detachment from friendly sources of succor on the mainland. The desultory help of filibuster expeditions, easily checked at the port of departure or landing, availed little to supplement the inadequate forces of rebellion pent up on their relatively small areas. By contrast, Mexico's larger area and population, continually stirred by American example and encouragement, reinforced by American volunteers and even by United States army officers, found revolt from 1812 to 1824 a comparatively easy task.

Cuba suffered from its geographic aloofness. So did little Crete, which submitted to Turkish oppression sixty years after the continental Greeks had made good their claim to freedom. Nor was this the first time that Cretan liberty had suffered from the detachment of an island environment. Aristotle recognized the principle when he wrote: "The people of Crete have hitherto submitted to the rule of the leading families as Cosmi, because the insular situation of Crete cuts off the interference of strangers or foreigners which might stir up rebellion against the unjust or partial government." And then he adds that this insular exclusion of outside incitement long rendered the fidelity of the Perioeci or serf-like peasants of Crete a striking contrast to the uneasy spirit of the Spartan Helots, who were constantly stirred to revolt by the free farmers of Argos, Messinia and Arcadia.[880] Thus ancient like modern Crete missed those beneficient stimuli which penetrate a land frontier, but are cut off by the absolute boundary of the sea.

[Sidenote: Island remains of broken empires.]

Island fragments of broken empires are found everywhere. They figure conspicuously in that scattered location indicative of declining power. Little St. Pierre and Miquelon are the last geographical evidences of France's former dominion in Canada. The English Bermudas and Bahamas point back to the time when Great Britain held the long-drawn opposite coast. The British, French, Dutch, Danish, as once even Swedish, holdings in the Lesser Antilles are island monuments to lost continental domains, as recently were Cuba and Porto Rico to Spain's once vast American empire. Of Portugal's widespread dominion in the Orient there remain to her only the island fragments of Timor, Kambing, Macao and Diu, besides two coastal points on the western face of peninsular India. All the former continental holdings of the Sultan of Zanzibar have been absorbed into the neighboring German and British territories, and only the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba remain to him by the temporary indulgence of his strong neighbors. The Sheik of the Bahrein Islands originally held also the large kingdom of El Hasa on the nearby Persian Gulf littoral of Arabia; but he lost this to the Turks in 1840, and now retains the Bahrein Islands as the residuum of his former territories.[881]

[Sidenote: Security of such remnants merely passive.]

The insular remnants of empires are tolerated, because their small size, when unsupported by important location, usually renders them innocuous; and their geographic isolation removes them from international entanglements, unless some far-reaching anthropo-geographic readjustment lends them a new strategic or commercial importance. The construction of the Suez Canal gave England a motive for the acquisition of Cyprus in 1878, as a nearer base than Malta for the protection of Port Said, just as the present Panama Canal project led the United States to re-open negotiations for the purchase of the Danish Isles. One cannot get away from the impression that the law of political detachability will operate again to make some new distribution of the parti-colored political holdings in the Lesser Antilles. The small size of these islands, and their thalassic location commanding approaches to a large region of only partially developed resources and to the interoceanic passway across it, will pitch them into the dice-box on the occasion of every naval war between their sovereign powers.

The shifting fate of political detachability becomes moderated in islands of the open ocean, because of their remoteness from the colonizing or conquering movements emanating from the continents. In contrast to the changing political connections of thalassic isles, consider the calm or monotonous political history of outlying islands like the Shetland, Faroes, Iceland, Canaries, Madeira, Cape Verde, Azores, St. Helena, Ascension and Hawaii. The Norse colony of Iceland, as a republic, maintained loose connections with its mother country from 874 to 1264; then for nearly six centuries it followed the political fate of Norway till 1814, when an oversight left it in the hands of Denmark on the dissolution of the union of Denmark and Norway. The Azores have known no history except that which came to them from Portugal; even their discovery goes back to a Saracen navigator who, in 1147, sailed from the mouth of the Tagus a thousand miles straight into the sunset.[882] For two hundred years thereafter extreme isolation kept them outside the pale of history till their rediscovery by Prince Henry, the Navigator.

[Sidenote: Political autonomy of islands based upon area and location.]

Land-masses, as we have found, are independent by location or independent by size. Large islands, especially where they occupy an outskirt location, may long succeed in maintaining an independent national existence; but to render this permanent, they must supplement their area by the acquisition of continental lands, according to the law of increasing territorial aggregates. Great Britain and Japan, though ethnically and culturally appendages of the nearby mainland, were large enough, aided by the dividing sea, to maintain political autonomy. They absorbed all the insular fragments lying about them to extend their areas, and then each in turn entered upon a career of continental expansion. To Japan this movement as a determined policy came late, only when she faced the alternative of absorbing territory or being absorbed by all-devouring Russia. The isolation of Madagascar resulted in only slight community of race with Africa, and combined with large area, has kept the island to a great extent distinct from the political history of Africa. The impulses which swept the eastern coast of the continent reached the outlying island with abated force. Arab, Portuguese, Dutch and English only scratched its rim. The character of its western coasts, of its vigorous Malayan population, and of the intervening Mozambique Current rendered conquest difficult from the African shore. Its large size, with the promise of abundant resources, offered a bait to conquest, yet put a barrier in its way. Hence we find that not till 1895, when the partition of continental Africa was almost accomplished, did the French conquest of Madagascar occur.

By contrast, the closely grouped East Indies, long coveted for their tropical products, suffered a contagion of conquest. The large size of these islands, so far from granting them immunity, only enabled the epidemic of Portuguese and Dutch dominion to pass from one to the other more readily, and that even when the spice and pepper trade languished from a plethora of products. But even here the size of the islands, plus the sub-equatorial climate which bars genuine white colonization, has restricted the effective political dominion of Europeans to the coasts, and thus favored the survival of the natives undisturbed in the interior, with all their primitive institutions. The largest islands, like Borneo and Sumatra, have vast inland tracts still unexplored and devoted to savagery, thus illustrating the contrast between center and periphery. When Australia, the largest of all the Pacific island group, became an object of European expansion, its temperate and sub-tropical location adapted it for white colonization, and the easy task of conquering its weak and retarded native tribes encouraged its appropriation; but the natural autonomy which belongs to large area and detached location asserted itself in the history of British Australia. The island continent is now erected into a confederation of states, enjoying virtual independence. In New Zealand, we find the recent colonists taking advantage of their isolation to work out undisturbed certain unique social theories. Here, against a background of arrested aboriginal development, another race evinces a radical spirit of progress; and to these contrasted results equally the detached island environment has contributed its share.

[Sidenote: Historical effects of island isolation; primitive retardation.]

The historical development of island peoples bears always in greater or less degree the stamp of isolation; but this isolation may lead to opposite cultural results. It may mean in one case retardation, in another accelerated development. Its geographical advantages are distinctly relative, increasing rapidly with a rising scale of civilization. Therefore in an island habitat the race factor may operate with or against the geographic factor in producing a desirable historical result. If the isolation is almost complete, the cultural status of the inhabitants low, and therefore their need of stimulation from without very great, the lack of it will sink them deeper in barbarism than their kinsmen on the mainland. The negroes of Africa, taken as a whole, occupy a higher economic and cultural rank than the black races of Australia and Melanesia; and for this difference one cause at least is to be found in the difference of their habitats. The knowledge of iron, stock-raising, and many branches of agriculture were continental achievements, which belonged to the great eastern land-mass and spread from Egypt over Africa even to the Hottentot country; the lack of them among the Australians must be attributed to their insularity, which barred them from this knowledge, just as the ignorance of iron and other metals among the native Canary Islanders[883] can only be ascribed to a sea barrier fifty-two miles wide. The scant acquaintance of the Balearic Islanders with iron in Roman days[884] points to insular detachment. The lack of native domesticable animals in the Pacific archipelagoes illustrates another limitation incident to the restricted fauna of islands, though this particular lack also retarded the cultural development of primitive North America.

[Sidenote: Later stimulation of development.]

On the other hand, people who have already secured the fundamental elements of civilization find the partial seclusion of an island environment favorable to their further progress, because it permits their powers to unfold unhindered, protects them from the friction of border quarrels, from the disturbance and desolation of invading armies, to which continental peoples are constantly exposed. But even here the advantage lies in insulation but not in isolation,[885] in a location like that of England or Japan, near enough to a continent to draw thence culture, commerce and occasional new strains of blood, but detached by sea-girt boundaries broad enough to ward off overwhelming aggressions. Such a location insures enough segregation for protection, but also opportunity for universal contact over the vast commons of the sea.

[Sidenote: Excessive isolation.]

Excessive isolation may mean impoverishment in purse and progress even for an advanced race. Ireland has long suffered from its outskirt location. It lies too much in the shadow of England, and has been barred by the larger island from many warming rays of immigration, culture and commerce that would have vitalized its national existence. The "round barrow" men of the Bronze Age, the Romans, and the Normans never carried thither their respective contributions to civilization. The Scandinavians infused into its population only inconsiderable strains of their vigorous northern blood.[886] In consequence the Irish are to-day substantially the same race as in Caesar's time, except for the small, unassimilated group of antagonistic English and Lowland Scotch, both Teutonic, in Ulster.[887] Barred by Great Britain from direct contact with the Continent and all its stimulating influences, suffering from unfavorable conditions of climate and topography, Ireland's political evolution progressed at a snail's pace. It tarried in the tribal stage till after the English conquest, presenting a primitive social organization such as existed nowhere in continental Europe. Property was communal till the time of the Tudors, and all law was customary.[888] Over-protected by excessive isolation, it failed to learn the salutary lesson of political co-operation and centralization for defense, such as Scotland learned from England's aggressions, and England from her close continental neighbors. Great Britain, meanwhile, intercepted the best that the Continent had to give, both blows and blessings, and found an advantage in each. The steady prosecution of her continental wars demanded the gradual erection of a standing army, which weakened the power of feudalism; and the voting of funds for the conduct of these same wars put a whip into the hand of Parliament.

[Sidenote: The case of Iceland.]

The history of Iceland illustrates the advantage and subsequently the drawback of isolation. The energetic spirits who, at the end of the ninth century, resented the centralization of political power in Norway and escaped from the turmoil and oppression of the home country to the remote asylum offered by Iceland, maintained there till 1262 the only absolutely free republic in the world.[889] They had brought with them various seeds of culture and progress, which grew and flowered richly in this peaceful soil. Iceland became the center of brilliant maritime and colonial achievements, the home of a native literature which surpassed that of all its contemporaries except Dante's Italy.[890] But after the decay of the Greenland colonies converted Iceland from a focal into a remote terminal point, and after the progress of the world became based upon complex and far-reaching commercial relations, the blight of extreme isolation settled upon the island; peace became stagnation.

[Sidenote: Protection of an island environment.]

The concomitant of isolation is protection. Though this protection, if the result of extreme isolation, may mean an early cessation of development, history shows that in the lower stages of civilization, when the social organism is small and weak, and its germs of progress easily blighted, islands offer the sheltered environment in which imported flowers of culture not only survive but improve; in less protected fields they deteriorate or disappear. When learning and Christianity had been almost wiped out on the continent of Europe by the ravages of barbarian invasion between 450 and 800 A. D., in Ireland they grew and flourished. In the seventh and eighth centuries, the high scholarship of the Irish monks and their enthusiastic love of learning for its own sake drew to their schools students of the noblest rank from both England and France.[891] It was from Irish teachers that the Picts of Scotland and the Angles of northern England received their first lessons in Christianity. These fixed their mission stations again on islands, on Iona off southwestern Scotland and on Lindisfarne or Holy Isle near the east coast of Northumbria.[892] It was in the protected environment of the medieval Iceland that Scandinavian literature reached its highest development.

Insular protection was undoubtedly a factor in the brilliant cultural development of Crete. The progress of the early civilization from the late Stone Age through the Bronze Age was continuous; it bears no trace of any strong outside influence or sudden transition, no evidence of disturbance like an invasion or conquest by an alien people till 1200 B. C. when the latest stage of Minoan art was crushed by barbarian incursion from the north.[893]

[Sidenote: Factor of protection in Ceylon and Japan.]

The early history of the Singhalese monarchy in Ceylon from 250 B. C. to 416 A. D., when even the narrow moat of Palk Strait discouraged Tamil invasions from the mainland, shows the brilliant development possible under even a slight degree of protection.[894] However, in the case of these Ceylon Aryans, as in that of the Icelandic Norse, we must keep in mind the fact that the bearers of this culture were picked men, as are early maritime colonists the world over. The sea selects and then protects its island folk. But the seclusion of Ceylon was more favorable to progress than the mainland of India, with its incessant political and religious upheavals. Japan, in contrast to China's long list of invasions, shows the peace of an insular location. She never suffered any overwhelming influx of alien races or any foreign conquest. The armada sent by Kublai Khan in 1281 to subdue the islands paralleled the experience of the famous Spanish fleet three centuries later in English waters. This is the only attempt to invade Japan that recorded history shows.[895] In the original peopling of the island by Mongolian stock at the cost of the Aino aborigines, there is evidence of two distinct and perhaps widely separated immigrations from the mainland, one from Korea and another from more northern Asia. Thus Japan's population contained two continental elements, which seem to have held themselves in the relation of governing and governed class, much as Norman and Saxon did in England, while the Ainos lingered in the geographical background of mountain fastness and outlying islands, as the primitive Celts did in the British Isles.[896] In the case both of England and Japan, the island location made the occupation by continental races a fitful, piecemeal process, not an inundation, because only small parties could land from time to time. The result was gradual or partial amalgamation of the various stocks, but nowhere annihilation.

[Sidenote: Character of the invaders as factor.]

But island location was not the sole factor in the equation. Similarity of race and relative parity of civilization between the successive immigrants and the original population, as well as the small numbers of the Invaders, made the struggle for the ownership of the island not wholly one-sided, and was later favorable to amalgamation in England as in Japan; whereas very small bands of far-coming Spaniards in the Canaries, Cuba, and Porto Rico resulted in the extinction of the original inhabitants, by the process operating now in New Zealand and Australia. Prior to the arrival of the Europeans in the Antilles, the conquest of these islands by South American Caribs had resulted in race intermixture. These sea-marauders brought no women with them in their small boats from the distant mainland, so they killed off the men and married the Arawak women of the islands. Here again insular location plus similarity of race and culture produced amalgamation, as opposed to extermination of the vanquished by over-sea invaders.

While the insular security of a primitive folk like the Tasmanians, Hawaiians and Malagasies is only passive, that of a civilized people like the English and modern Japanese is active, consciously utilized and reinforced. It is therefore more effective, and productive of more varied political and cultural results. Such people can allow themselves extensive contact with other nations, because they know it is in their power to control or check such contact at will. Japan took refuge in its medieval period in a policy of seclusion suggested by its island habitat,[897] relying on the passive protection of isolation. England, on the other hand, from the time of King Alfred, built up a navy to resist invasion. The effect, after the political unification of Great Britain, was a guarantee of protection against foreign attack, the concentration of the national defenses in a navy,[898] the elimination of the standing army which despotic monarchs might have used to crush the people, the consequent release of a large working force from military service, and the application of these to the development of English Industry.[899]

[Sidenote: Islands as places of refuge.]

Islands, as naturally protected districts, are often sought places of refuge by the weak or vanquished, and thus are drawn into the field of historical movement. We find this principle operating also in the animal world. The fur seals of the North Pacific have fled from the American coasts and found an asylum on the Pribiloff Islands of Bering Sea, where their concentration and isolation have enabled them to become wards of the United States government, though this result they did not foresee. The last Rhytina or Arctic sea-cow was found on an island in Bering Strait.[900] So the Veneti of Northern Italy in the fifth century sought an asylum from the desolating Huns and, a century later, from the Lombards, in the deposit islands at the head of the Adriatic, and there found the geographic conditions for a brilliant commercial and cultural development. Formosa got its first contingent of Chinese settlers in the thirteenth century in refugees seeking a place of safety from Kublai Khan's armies; and its second in 1644 in a Chinese chief and his followers who had refused to submit to the victorious Manchus. In 1637 Formosa was an asylum also for Japanese Christians, who escaped thither from the persecutions attending the discovery of Jesuit conspiracies against the government.[901] The Azores, soon after their rediscovery in 1431, were colonized largely by Flemish refugees,[902] just as Iceland was peopled by rebellious Norwegians. To such voluntary exiles the dividing sea gives a peculiar sense of security, this by a psychological law. Hence England owing to its insular location, and also to its free government, has always been an asylum for the oppressed. The large body of Huguenot refugees who sought her shores after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes added a valuable element to her population.

[Sidenote: Convict islands.]

Islands find their populations enriched by the immigration of this select class who refuse to acquiesce in oppression and injustice. But the geographic conditions which make islands natural asylums make them also obvious places of detention for undesirable members of society; these conditions render segregation complete, escape difficult or impossible, and control easy. Hence we find that almost all the nations of the world owning islands have utilized them as penal stations. From the gray dawn of history the Isles of the Blessed have been balanced by the isles of the cursed. The radiant Garden of Hesperides has found its antithesis in the black hell of Norfolk Isle, peopled by the "doubly condemned" criminals whom not even the depraved convict citizens of Botany Bay could tolerate.[903] There is scarcely an island of the Mediterranean without this sinister vein in its history. The archipelagoes of the ancient Aegean were constantly receiving political exiles from continental Greece. Augustus Caesar confined his degenerate daughter Julia, the wife of Tiberius, on the island of Pandateria, one of the Ponza group; and banished her paramour, Sempronius Gracchus, to Cercina in the Syrtis Minor off the African coast.[904] Other Roman matrons of high degree but low morals and corrupt officials were exiled to Corsica, Sardinia, Seriphos, Amorgos and other of the Cyclades.[905] To-day Italy has prisons or penal stations in Ischia, the Ponza group, Procida, Nisida, Elba, Pantellaria, Lampedusa, Ustica, and especially in the Lipari Isles, where the convicts are employed in mining sulphur, alum and pumice from the volcanic cones.[906]

[Sidenote: Penal colonies on uninhabited islands.]

In modern times many remote oceanic islands have gotten their first or only white settlers from this criminal class. Such are the citizens whom Chile has sent to Easter Isle twenty-five hundred miles away out in the Pacific.[907] The inhabitants of Fernando Noronha, 125 miles off the eastern point of South America, are convicts from Brazil, together with the warders and troops who guard them.[908] In 1832 Ecuador began to use the uninhabited Gallapagos Islands, lying 730 miles west of its coast, as a penal settlement.[909] The history of St. Helena is typical. Its first inhabitants were some Portuguese deserters who in punishment were marooned here from a Portuguese ship with a supply of seed and cattle. They proved industrious and had cultivated a good deal of the land when four years later they were removed to Portugal. The next inhabitants were a few slaves of both sexes who escaped from a slave ship that had stopped here for wood and water. These multiplied, worked and restored the overgrown plantations of their predecessors, till a Portuguese vessel about twenty years later was sent to exterminate them. A few escaped to the woods, however, and were found there in prosperity in 1588.[910] From 1815 till 1821 St. Helena was the prison of Napoleon.

Many of these penal islands seem chosen with a view to their severe or unhealthy climate, which would forever repel free immigration and therefore render them useless for any other purpose. This is true of the French Isles du Salut off the Guiana coast, of Spanish Fernando Po in the Gulf of Guinea, of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, notoriously unhealthy, which receive the criminals of British India,[911] and of numerous others. A bleak climate and unproductive soil have added to the horror of exile life in Sakhalin, as they overshadowed existence in the Falkland Islands, when these were a penal colony of Spain and later of Argentine.[912]

[Sidenote: Island prisons for political offenders.]

In the case of political offenders and incorrigibles, the island prison is as remote and inaccessible as possible. The classic example is Napoleon's consignment to Elba and subsequently to St. Helena, whence escape was impossible. Spain has sent its rebellious subjects, even university professors of independent views, to Fernando Po in the Gulf of Guinea and Teneriffe in the Canaries.[913] Russian political offenders of the most dangerous class are confined first in the Schluesselberg prison, situated on a small island in Lake Ladoga near the effluence of the Neva. There they languish in solitary confinement or are transferred to far-off Sakhalin, whose very name is taboo in St. Petersburg.[914] During our Civil War, one of the Dry Tortugas, lying a hundred miles west of the southern point of Florida and at that time the most isolated island belonging to the American government, was used as a prison for dangerous Confederates; and here later three conspirators in the assassination of President Lincoln were incarcerated.[915] Far away to the southeast, off the coast of South America, are the Isles du Salut, a French penal station for criminals of the worst class. The Isle du Diable, ominous of name, lies farthest out to sea. This was for five years the prison of Dreyfus. Its other inhabitants are lepers. Isles of the cursed indeed!

[Sidenote: Islands as places of survival.]

What islands have they tend to hold, to segregate, secrete from meddling hands, preserve untouched and unaltered. Owing to this power to protect, islands show a large percentage of rare archaic forms of animal and plant life. The insular fauna of Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea and Madagascar display a succession of strange, ancestral forms going back to the biological infancy of the world. The Canaries in the Atlantic and Celebes In the Pacific are museums of living antiquities, some of them dating probably from Miocene times.[916] Such survivals are found elsewhere only in high mountains, whose inaccessible slopes also offer protection against excessive competition. Hence some of the antiquated species of insular Celebes, Formosa, Japan and Hainon occur again on the Asiatic mainland only in the Himalayas.[917]

For man, too, islands and their sister areas of isolation, mountains, are areas of survivals. The shrinking remnants of that half-dwarf Negrito stock which may have formed the aboriginal population of southern Asia are found to-day only in the mountains of peninsular India and in island groups like the Andaman and the Philippines. But even in the Philippines, they are confined either to the mountainous interiors of the larger islands, or to little coastal islets like Polillo, Alabat, Jomalig, and others.[918] [See map page 147.] Yezo, Sakhalin and the Kurile Isles harbor the last feeble remnants of the Ainos, a primitive people who formerly occupied a long stretch of the Asiatic coast south of the Amur mouth. The protected environment of these islands has postponed the doom of extinction toward which the Ainos are hastening.[919] With insular conservatism they dress, live and seek their food on the sea to-day, just as depicted in Japanese art and literature at the dawn of history.[920] [See map page 103.]

[Sidenote: Insular survivals of manners and customs.]

It is chiefly on islands of harsh climatic conditions, like Sakhalin, or of peculiarly restricted resources and area, like the Andaman, or of remote, side-tracked location, like Iceland, Sardinia and Cape Breton, that the stamp of the primitive or antiquated is strongest. Even when not apparent in race stock, owing to the ubiquitous colonization of maritime peoples, it marks the language and customs of even these late-coming occupants, because an island environment asserts always some power to isolate. This is due not only to the encircling moat of sea, but also to the restricted insular area, too small to attract to itself the great currents of human activity which infuse cosmopolitan ideas and innovations, and too poor to buy the material improvements which progress offers. If the tourist in Sicily finds the women of Taormina or Girgenti spinning with a hand spindle, and the express trains moving only twelve miles an hour, he can take these two facts as the product of a small, detached area, although this island lies at the crossroads of the Mediterranean. Corsica and Sardinia, lying off the main routes of travel in this basin, are two of the most primitive and isolated spots of Europe. Here the old wooden plow of Roman days is still in common use as it is in Crete, and feudal institutions of the Middle Ages still prevail to some extent[921],—a fact which recalls the long survival of feudalism in Japan. The little Isle of Man, almost in sight of the English coast, has retained an old Norse form of government. Here survives the primitive custom of orally proclaiming every new law from the Tynwald Hill before it can take effect,[922] and the other ancient usage of holding the court of justice on the same hill under the open sky. The Faroe Islands and Iceland are museums of Norse antiquities. The stamp of isolation and therefore conservatism is most marked in the remoter, northern islands. Surnames are rare in Iceland, and such as exist are mostly of foreign origin. In their place, Christian names followed by the patronymic prevail; but in the Faroes, these patronymics have in a great many cases become recognized as surnames. So again, while the Faroese women still use a rude spinning-wheel introduced from Scotland in 1671, in Iceland this spinning-wheel was still an innovation in 1800, and even to-day competes with spindles. Hand-querns for grinding wheat, stone hammers for pounding fish and roots, the wooden weighing-beam of the ancient Northmen, and quaint marriage customs give the final touch of aloofness and antiquity to life on these remote islands.[923]

[Sidenote: Effects of small area in islands.]

As all island life bears more or less the mark of isolation, so it betrays the narrow area that has served at its base. Though islands show a wide variation in size from the 301,000 square miles (771,900 square kilometers) of New Guinea or the 291,000 square miles (745,950 square kilometers) of Borneo to the private estates like the Scilly Isles, Gardiner and Shelter islands off Long Island, or those small, sea-fenced pastures for sheep and goats near the New England coast and in the Aegean, yet small islands predominate; the large ones are very few. Islands comprise a scant seven per cent. of the total land area of the earth, and their number is very great,—nine hundred, for instance, in the Philippine group alone. Therefore small area is a conspicuous feature of islands generally. It produces in island people all those effects which are characteristic of small, naturally defined areas, especially early or precocious social, political and cultural development. The value of islands in this respect belongs to the youth of the world, as seen in the ancient Mediterranean, or in the adolescence of modern primitive races; it declines as the limitations rather than the advantages of restricted territory preponderate in later historical development.

[Sidenote: Political dominion of small islands.]

This early maturity, combined with the power to expend the concentrated national or tribal forces in any given direction, often results in the domination of a very small island over a large group. In the Society Islands, Cook found little Balabola ruling over Ulietea (Raitea) and Otaha, the former of these alone being over twice the size of Balabola, whose name commanded respect as far as Tahiti.[924] The Fiji Archipelago was ruled in pre-Christian days by the little islet of Mbau, scarcely a mile long, which lies like a pebble beside massive Viti Levu. It was the chief center of political power and its supremacy was owned by nearly all the group. The next important political center was Rewa, no larger than Mbau, which had for its subject big Mbengga.[925] In the same way, the Solomon group was ruled by Mongusaie and Simbo, just as tiny New Lauenberg lorded it over the larger islands of the Bismarck Archipelago.[926] When the Dutch in 1613 undertook the conquest of the coveted Spice Isles, they found there two rival sultans seated in the two minute islets of Ternate and Tidore off the west coast of Gilolo. Their collective possessions, which the Dutch took, comprised all the Moluccas, the Ke and Banda groups, the whole of northwestern New Guinea, and Mindanao of the Philippines.[927]

It was no unusual thing for classic Aegean isles to control and exploit goodly stretches of the nearest coast, or to exercise dominion over other islands. Aristotle tells us that Crete's location across the southern end of the Aegean Sea confirmed to it by nature the early naval empire of the Hellenic world. Minos conquered some of the islands, colonized others,[928] and, according to the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, laid Athens under tribute; but his suppression of piracy in these waters and his conspicuous leadership in the art of navigation point to a yet more significant supremacy. So insular Venice ruled and exploited large dependencies. The island of Zealand, strategically located at the entrance to the Baltic, has been the heart and head and strong right arm of the Danish dominion, through all its long history of fluctuating boundaries. England's insularity has been the strongest single factor in the growth of her vast colonial empire and in the maintenance of its loyal allegiance and solidarity. The widely strewn plantation of her colonies is the result of that teeming island seed-bed at home; while the very smallness of the mother country is the guarantee of its supremacy over its dependencies, because it is too small either to oppress them or to get along without them. Now an Asiatic variant of English history is promised us by growing Japan.

[Sidenote: Economic limitations of their small area.]

Though political supremacy is possible even to an island of insignificant size, both the advantages arid the grave disadvantages of small area are constantly asserting themselves. Some developments peculiar to large territory are here eliminated at the start. For instance, robbery and brigandage, which were so long a scourge in peninsular Greece, were unheard of on the small Aegean islands. Sheep-raising was at an early date safer in England than on the Continent, because wolves were earlier exterminated there. Bio-geography shows an increasing impoverishment in the flora and fauna, of small islands with distance from the mainland. In the Pacific Ocean, this progressive impoverishment from west to east has had great influence upon human life in the islands. In Polynesia, therefore, all influences of the chase and of pastoral life are wanting, while in Melanesia, with its larger islands and larger number of land animals, hunting still plays an important part, and is the chief source of subsistence for many New Guinea villages.[929] Therefore a corresponding decay of projectile weapons is to be traced west to east, and is conspicuous in those crumbs of land constituting Polynesia and Micronesia. The limit of the bow and arrow includes the northeastern portion of the Philippine group, cuts through the Malay Archipelago so as to include the Moluccas and Flores, includes Melanesia as far as Tonga or the Friendly Isles, but excludes Micronesia, Polynesia and Australia, Even in Melanesia, however, bows and arrows are not universal; they are lacking in peripheral islands like New Caledonia and New Ireland.[930]

The restriction of trees, also, with the exception of the coco-palm and pandanus, has had its effect upon boat making. This general impoverishment is unmistakably reflected in the whole civilization of the smaller islands of Polynesia and Micronesia, especially in the Paumota and Pelew groups. In the countless coralline islands which strew the Pacific, another restricting factor is found in their monotonous geological formation. Owing to the lack of hard stone, especially of flint, native utensils and weapons have to be fashioned out of wood, bones, shells, and sharks' teeth.[931]

[Sidenote: Poverty of alluvial lowlands in islands.]

Nor does the geographical limitation end here. Islands have proportionately a scanter allowance of fertile alluvial lowlands than have continents. This follows from their geological history, except in the case of those low deposit islands built up from the waste of the land. Most islands are summits of submerged mountain ranges, like Corsica and Sardinia, the Aegean archipelagoes, the Greater Antilles, Vancouver, and the countless fiord groups; or they are single or composite volcanic cones, like the Canaries, Azores, Lipari, Kurile, Fiji, Ascension, St. Helena and the Lesser Antilles; or they are a combination of highland subsidence and volcanic out-thrust, like Japan, the Philippines, the long Sunda chain and Iceland. Both geologic histories involve high reliefs, steep slopes, a deep surrounding sea, and hence rarely a shallow continental shelf for the accumulation of broad alluvial lowlands. Among the Aegean Isles only Naxos has a flood plain; all the rest have steep coasts, with few sand or gravel beaches, and only small deposit plains at the head of deep and precipitous embayments. Japan's area of arable soil is to-day only 15.7 per cent. of its total surface, even after the gentler slopes of its mountains have been terraced up two thousand feet. Some authorities put the figure lower, at 10 and 12 per cent.