Influences of Geographic Environment Part 46

[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 quant.i.ties, 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 spa.r.s.ely scattered isles, like Ascension, St. Helena, the Canaries and Hawaii, a.s.sumed 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 Pa.s.sage, and forming the first objective of vessels bound from Europe to Panama, it became a great s.h.i.+p rendezvous, and a.s.sumed 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 pa.s.sage 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: Thala.s.sic islands as goals of expansion.]

Islands located in enclosed seas display the transitional character of border districts. They are outposts of the surrounding sh.o.r.es, 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 sh.o.r.es. 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 pa.s.sed in turn to a.s.syrians, 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 shuttlec.o.c.k 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, j.a.panese 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 p.r.o.ne 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 Tsus.h.i.+ma in the Korean Strait was seized by the forces of Kublai Khan in 1280 as the base of their attack upon j.a.pan;[875] and when in 1857 the Russian bear tried to plant a foot on this island, j.a.pan saw danger in the movement and ordered him off.[876] Now we find j.a.pan 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 thala.s.sic 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 sh.o.r.es. 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 succ.u.mbing 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 crus.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sive.]

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 Ca.n.a.l 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 Ca.n.a.l 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 thala.s.sic location commanding approaches to a large region of only partially developed resources and to the interoceanic pa.s.sway across it, will pitch them into the dice-box on the occasion of every naval war between their sovereign powers.

The s.h.i.+fting 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 thala.s.sic 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-ma.s.ses, 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 j.a.pan, 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 j.a.pan 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 part.i.tion 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 pa.s.s 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 inst.i.tutions. The largest islands, like Borneo and Sumatra, have vast inland tracts still unexplored and devoted to savagery, thus ill.u.s.trating 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 r.e.t.a.r.ded native tribes encouraged its appropriation; but the natural autonomy which belongs to large area and detached location a.s.serted 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 r.e.t.a.r.dation.]

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 r.e.t.a.r.dation, 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-ma.s.s 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 ill.u.s.trates another limitation incident to the restricted fauna of islands, though this particular lack also r.e.t.a.r.ded 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 j.a.pan, 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, una.s.similated 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 ill.u.s.trates 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 surpa.s.sed 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 scholars.h.i.+p of the Irish monks and their enthusiastic love of learning for its own sake drew to their schools students of the n.o.blest 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 j.a.pan.]

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. j.a.pan, 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 j.a.pan 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 j.a.pan's population contained two continental elements, which seem to have held themselves in the relation of governing and governed cla.s.s, 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 j.a.pan, 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 owners.h.i.+p of the island not wholly one-sided, and was later favorable to amalgamation in England as in j.a.pan; 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 pa.s.sive, that of a civilized people like the English and modern j.a.panese 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. j.a.pan took refuge in its medieval period in a policy of seclusion suggested by its island habitat,[897] relying on the pa.s.sive 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 j.a.panese 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 sh.o.r.es 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 cla.s.s 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 ant.i.thesis in the black h.e.l.l 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, Semp.r.o.nius 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 cla.s.s. 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 s.h.i.+p 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 s.e.xes who escaped from a slave s.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.sic 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 cla.s.s are confined first in the Schlusselberg 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 cla.s.s. 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!