Chapter XIII: Island Peoples (2)

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.

[Sidenote: Dense populations of islands.]

Yet in spite of limited area and this paucity of local resources, islands constantly surprise us by their relatively dense populations. More often than not they show a density exceeding that of the nearest mainland having the same zonal location, often the same geologic structure and soil. Along with other small, naturally defined areas, they tend to a closer packing of the population. Yet side by side with this relative over-population, we find other islands uninhabited or tenanted only by sheep, goats and cattle.

In the wide Pacific world comprising Australia and Oceanica, islands take up fifteen per cent. of the total land area, but they contain forty-four per cent. of the population.[932] The insular empire of Japan, despite the paucity of its arable soil, has a density of population nearly twice that of China, nearly three times that of Korea, and exceeding that of any political subdivision of continental Asia; but Japan, in turn, is surpassed in congestion only by Java, with a density of 587 to the square mile,[933] which almost equals that of Belgium (643) and England (600). Great Britain has a density of population (453 to the square mile) only exceeded in continental Europe by that of Belgium, but surpassed nearly threefold by that of the little Channel Isles, which amounts to 1254 to the square mile.[934] If the average density of the United Kingdom is greatly diminished in Ireland, just as Italy's is in Sardinia and France's in Corsica, this fact is due primarily to a side-tracked or overshadowed location and adverse topography, combined with misgovernment.

If we compare countries which are partly insular, partly continental, the same truth emerges. The kingdom of Greece has fifteen per cent of its territory in islands. Here again population reaches its greatest compactness in Corfu and Zante, which are nearly thrice as thickly inhabited as the rest of Greece.[935] Similarly the islands which constitute so large a part of Denmark have an average density of 269 to the square mile as opposed to the 112 of Jutland. The figures rise to 215 to the square mile in the Danish West Indies, but drop low in the bleak, subarctic insular dependencies of Greenland, Iceland and the Faroes. Portugal's density is tripled in the Madeiras[936] and doubled in the Azores,[937] but drops in the badly placed Cape Verde Island, exposed to tropical heat and the desiccating tradewinds blowing off the Sahara. Spain's average rises twenty-five per cent. in the Canary Islands, which she has colonized, and France's nearly doubles in the French West Indies. The British West Indies, also, with the exception of the broken coral bank constituting the Bahamas, show a similar surprising density of population, which in Bermuda and Barbadoes surpasses that of England, and approximates the teeming human life of the Channel Isles.

[Sidenote: Density of population in Polynesia.]

This general tendency toward a close packing of the population in the smaller areas of land comes out just as distinctly in islands inhabited by natural peoples in the lower stages of development. Despite the retarded economic methods peculiar to savagery and barbarism, the Polynesian islands, for instance, often show a density of population equal to that of Spain and Greece (100 to the square mile) and exceeding that of European Turkey and Russia. "Over the whole extent of the South Sea," says Robert Louis Stevenson, "from one tropic to another, we find traces of a bygone state of over-population, when the resources of even a tropical soil were taxed, and even the improvident Polynesian trembled for the future."[938] He calls the Gilbert atolls "warrens of men."[939] One of them, Drummond's Island, with, an area of about twenty square miles, contained a population of 10,000 in 1840, and all the atolls were densely populated.[940] To-day they count 35,000 inhabitants in less than 200 square miles. The neighboring Marshall group has 15,000 on its 158 square miles of area. The Caroline and Pelew archipelagoes show a density of 69 to the square mile, the Tonga or Friendly group harbor about 60 and the French holdings of Futuma and Wallis (or Uea) the same.[941] So the Bismarck Archipelago, Solomon, Hawaiian, Samoan and Marianne islands have to-day populations by no means sparse, despite the blight that everywhere follows the contact of superior with primitive peoples.

[Sidenote: Various causes of this density.]

In all these cases, if economic status be taken into account, we have a density bordering on congestion; but the situation assumes a new aspect if we realize that the crowded inhabitants of small islands often have the run of the coco plantations and fishing grounds of an entire archipelago. The smaller, less desirable islands are retained as fish and coco-palm preserves to be visited only periodically. Of a low, cramped, monotonous coral group, often only the largest and most productive is inhabited,[942] but that contains a population surprising in view of the small base, restricted resources and low cultural status of its inhabitants. The population of the wide-strewn Paumota atolls was estimated as about 10,000 in 1840. Of these fully one-half lived on Anaa or Chain Island, and one-fourth on Gambier, but they levied on the resources of the other islands for supplies.[943] The Tonga Islands at the same time were estimated to have 20,000 inhabitants, about half of whom were concentrated on Tongatabu, while Hapai and Varao held about 4,000 each.[944]

[Sidenote: Crowded and vacant islands.]

This is one of the sharp contrasts in island life,--here density akin to congestion, there a few miles away a deserted reef or cone rising from the sea, tenanted only by sheep or goats or marine birds, its solitude broken only by the occasional crunching of a boat's keel upon its beach, as some visitant from a neighboring isle comes to shear wool, gather coco-nuts, catch birds or collect their eggs. All the 500 inhabitants of the Westman Isles off the southern coast of Iceland live in one village on Heimey, and support themselves almost entirely by fishing and fowling birds on the wild crags of the archipelago.[945] An oceanic climate, free contact with the Gulf Stream, and remoteness from the widespread ice fields of Iceland give them an advantage over the vast island to the north. Only twenty-seven of the ninety islands composing the Orkney group are inhabited, and about forty smaller ones afford natural meadows for sheep on their old red sandstone soil;[946] but Pomona, the largest Orkney has 17,000 inhabitants on its 207 square miles of territory or 85 to the square mile. The Shetlands tell the same story--29 out of 100 islands inhabited, some of the _holms_ or smaller islets serving as pastures for the sturdy ponies and diminutive cattle, and Mainland, the largest of the group, showing 58 inhabitants to the square mile. This is a density far greater than is reached in the nearby regions of Scotland, where the county of Sutherland can boast only 13 to the square mile, and Invernesshire 20. Here again insularity and contracted area do their work of compressing population.

The causes of this insular density of population are not far to seek. Islands can always rely on the double larder of land and sea. They are moreover prone to focus in themselves the fishing industry of a large continental area, owing to their ample contact with the sea. Shetland is now the chief seat of the Scotch herring fishery, a fact which contributes to its comparatively dense population. The concentration of the French export trade of Newfoundland fish in little St. Pierre and Miquelon accounts for the relatively teeming population (70 to the square mile) and the wealth of those scraps of islands. So the Lofoden Islands of Norway, like Iceland, Newfoundland and Sakhalin, balance a generous sea against an ungenerous soil, and thus support a population otherwise impossible.

[Sidenote: Oceanic climate as factor.]

For these far northern islands, the moderating effect of an oceanic climate has been a factor in making them relatively populous, just as it is on tropical isles by mitigating heat and drought. The prosperity and populousness of the Bermuda Islands are to be explained largely by the mild, equable climate which permits the raising of early vegetables and flowers for English and American markets. Like climatic conditions and a like industry account for the 2,000 souls living on the inhabited islands of the Scilly group. Here intensive horticulture supports a large force of workmen and yields a profit to the lord proprietor. Syros in the Cyclades fattens on its early spring vegetable trade with Athens and Constantinople.[947]

In the Mediterranean lands, where drought and excessive heat during the growing season offer adverse conditions for agriculture, the small islands, especially those of fertile volcanic soil, show the greatest productivity and hence marked density of population. Though the rainfall may be slight, except where a volcanic peak rises to condense moisture, heavy dews and the thick mists of spring quicken vegetation. This is the case in Malta, which boasts a population of 2,000 to the square mile, exclusive of the English garrison.[948] Little Limosa and Pantellaria, the merest fragments of land out in the mid-channel of the Mediterranean, have a population of 200 to the square mile.[949] The Lipari group north of Sicily average nearly 400 on every square mile of their fertile soil;[950] but this average rises in Salina to 500, and in Lipari itself, as also in Ponza of the Pontine group, to nearly 1300. Here fertile volcanic slopes of highly cultivated land lift vineyards, orchards of figs, and plantations of currants to the sunny air. But nearby Alicuri, almost uncultivated, has a sparse population of some five hundred shepherds and fishermen. Panaria and Filicuri are in about the same plight. Here again we find those sharp island contrasts.

[Sidenote: Relation of density to area.]

The insular region of the Indian Ocean, which is inhabited by peoples quite different in race and cultural status from those of the Mediterranean, yet again demonstrates the power of islands to attract, preserve, multiply and concentrate population. This is especially true of the smaller islands, which in every case show a density of population many times that of the neighboring mainland of Africa. Only vast Madagascar, continental in size, repeats the sparsity of the continent. An oceanic climate increases the humidity of the islands as compared with the mainland lying in the same desiccating tradewind belt. Moreover their small area has enabled them to be permeated by incoming Arab, English, and French influences, which have raised their status of civilization and therewith the average density of population. This culminates in English Mauritius, which shows 540 inhabitants to the square mile, occupied in the production of sugar, molasses, rum, vanilla, aloes, and copra. In Zanzibar this density is 220 to the square mile; in Reunion 230; in Mayotte, the Comores and Seychelles, the average varies from 100 to 145 to the square mile, though Mahe in the Seychelles group has one town of 20,000 inhabitants.[951]

In the Malay Archipelago, an oceanic climate and tropical location have combined to stimulate fertility to the greatest extent; but this local wealth has been exploited in the highest degree in the smaller islands having relatively the longest coastline and amplest contact with the sea. The great continent-like areas of Borneo, New Guinea and Sumatra show a correspondingly sparse population; Java, smaller than the smallest of these and coated with mud from its fertilizing volcanoes, supports 587 inhabitants to the square mile; but this exceptional average is due to rare local productivity. Java's little neighbors to the east, Bali and Lombok, each with an area of only about 2100 square miles, have a density respectively of 338 and 195 to the square mile. This density rises suddenly in small Amboina (area 264 square miles), the isle of the famous clove monopoly, to 1000,[952] drops in the other Moluccas, where Papuan influences are strong, even to 20, but rises again in the pure Malayan Philippines to 69. In the Philippines a distinct connection is to be traced between the density of population and smallness of area. The explanation lies in the attraction of the coast for the sea-faring Malay race, and the mathematical law of increase of shoreline with decrease of insular area. Since 65 per cent. of the whole Philippine population inhabits coastal municipalities, it is not surprising that the 73 islands from ten to a hundred square miles in area count 127 inhabitants to the square mile, and those of less than ten square miles, of which there are nearly a thousand, have a density of 238.[953]

This same insular density, supported by fertility, fisheries and trade, appears again in the West Indies, and also the contrast in density between large and small islands down to a certain limit of diminutiveness. The Greater Antilles increase in density from Cuba through smaller Haiti and Jamaica down to little Porto Rico, which boasts 264 inhabitants to the square mile. In the smaller area of the Danish Indies and Guadeloupe about this same density (215 and 274) reappears; but it mounts to 470 in Martinique and to 1160 in Barbadoes.[954]

[Sidenote: Island resorts.]

Climate advantages often encourage density of population on islands, by attracting to them visitors who make a local demand for the fruits of the soil and thereby swell the income of the islands. For instance, about the densely populated region of the Gulf of Naples, Procida has 14,000 inhabitants on its one and a half square miles of area, while fertile Ischia and Capri have 1400 to the square mile. Here a rich volcanic soil, peaks which attract rain by their altitude and visitors by their beauty, and a mild oceanic climate delightful in winter as in summer, all contribute to density of population. Sicily, Malta and Corfu also gain in the same way in winter. The Isle of Man owes some of its recent increase of population, now 238 to the square mile, to the fact that it has become the summer playground for the numerous factory workers of Lancashire in England.

[Sidenote: Density of population affected by focal location for trade.]

Sometimes climatic advantages are reinforced by a favorable focal point, which brings the profits of trade to supplement those of agriculture. This factor of distributing and exporting center has undoubtedly contributed to the prosperity and population of Reunion, Mahe, Mauritius and Zanzibar, as it did formerly to that of ancient Rhodes and modern St. Thomas at the angle of the Antilles. Barbadoes, by reason of its outpost location to the east of the Windward Isles, is the first to catch incoming vessels from England, and is therefore a focus of steamship lines and a distributing point for the southern archipelago, so that we find here the greatest density of any island in the West Indies.[955] The 9405 inhabitants of Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas and the 15,000 of Willemsted on Curacao give these also a characteristic insular density. Samos, blessed with good soil, an excellent position on Aegean maritime routes, and virtual autonomy, supports a population of 300 to the square mile.[956]

Focal location alone can often achieve this density. Syros, one of the smallest and by nature the most barren of the Cyclades, though well tilled is the great commercial and shipping center of the Aegean, and has in Hermupolis with its 17,700 population by far the largest town of the archipelago.[957] This development has come since Greece achieved its independence. It reminds us of the distinction and doubtless also population that belonged to Delos in ancient days. Advantageous commercial location and density of population characterize Kilwauru and Singapore at the east and west extremities of the Malay Archipelago. The Bahrein Islands, which England has acquired in the Persian Gulf, serve as an emporium of trade with eastern Arabia and have a local wealth in their pearl fisheries. These facts account for the 68,000 inhabitants dwelling on their 240 square miles (600 square kilometers) of sterile surface.[958]

[Sidenote: Overflow of island population to the mainland.]

The concentration of population in these favored spots of land with inelastic boundaries, and the tendency of that population to increase under the stimulating, interactive life make the restriction of area soon felt. For this reason, so many colonies which are started on inshore islets from motives of protection have to be transferred to the mainland to insure a food supply. A settlement of Huguenots, made in 1535 on an island in the harbor of Rio Janeiro, found its base too small for cultivation, but feared the attack of the hostile Indians and Portuguese on the mainland. After three years of a struggling existence, it fell a prey to the Portuguese,[959] De Monts' short-lived colony on an island in the mouth of the St. Croix River in 1604 had an excellent site for defence, but was cut off by the drifting ice in winter from mainland supplies of wood, water and game, while no cultivation was possible in the sandy soil.[960]

Such sites suffice for mere trading posts, but are inadequate for the larger social group of a real colony. The early Greek colonists, with their predilection for insular locations, recognized this limitation and offset it by the occupation of a strip of the nearest mainland, cultivated and defended by fortified posts, as an adjunct to the support of the islands. Such a subsidiary coastal hem was called a _Paraea_. The ancient Greek colonies on the islands of Thasos and Samothrace each possessed such a Paraea.[961] The Aeolian inhabitants of Tenedos held a strip of the opposite Troad coast north of Cape Lekton, while those of Lesbos appropriated the south coast of the Troad.[962] In the same way Tarentum and Syracuse, begun on inshore islands, soon overflowed on to the mainland. Sometimes the island site is abandoned altogether and the colony transferred to the mainland. The ancient Greek colony of Cyrene had an initial existence on the island of Platea just off the Libyan coast, but, not flourishing there, was moved after an interval of several years to the African mainland, where "the sky was perforated" by the mountains of Barca.[963] De Monts' colony was removed from its island to Port Royal in Nova Scotia.

[Sidenote: Precocious development of island agriculture.]

Where an island offers in its climate and soil conditions favorable to agriculture, tillage begins early to assume an intensive, scientific character, to supply the increasing demand for food. The land, fixed in the amount of area, must be made elastic in its productivity by the application of intelligence and industry. Hence in island habitats, an early development of agriculture, accompanied by a parallel skill in exploiting the food resources of the sea, is a prevailing feature. In Oceanica, agriculture is everywhere indigenous, but shows greatest progress in islands like Tonga and Fiji, where climate and soil are neither lavish nor niggardly in their gifts, but yield a due return for the labor of tillage. The Society[964] and Samoan Islands, where nature has been more prodigal, rank lower in agriculture, though George Forster found in Tahiti a relatively high degree of cultivation.[965] The small, rocky, coralline Paumotas rank lower still, but even here plantains, sugar-cane, sweet potatoes, yams, taro and solanum are raised. The crowded atolls of the Gilbert group show pains-taking tillage. Here we find coco-palms with their roots fertilized with powdered pumice, and taro cultivated in trenches excavated for the purpose and located near the lagoons, so that the water may percolate through the coral sand to the thirsty roots.[966] To lonely Easter Isle nature has applied a relentless lash. At the time of Cook's visit it was woodless and boatless except for one rickety canoe, and therefore was almost excluded from the food supplies of the sea. Hence its destitute natives, by means of careful and often ingenious tillage, made its parched and rocky slopes support excellent plantations of bananas and sugar-cane.[967]

The islands of Melanesia show generally fenced fields, terrace farming on mountain sides, irrigation canals, fertilized soils, well trimmed shade trees and beautiful flower gardens,[968] proof that the cultivation of the ground has advanced to the aesthetic stage, as it has in insular Japan. In Tonga the coco-palm plantations are weeded and manured. Here, after a devastating war, the victorious chief devotes his attention to the cultivation of the land, which soon assumes a beautiful and flourishing appearance.[969] In Tongatabu, which is described by the early visitors as one big garden, Cook found officials appointed to inspect all produce of the island and to enforce the cultivation of a certain quota of land by each householder.[970] Here agriculture is a national concern.

[Sidenote: Melanesian agriculture.]

In the minute land fragments which constitute Micronesia, fishing is the chief source of subsistence; agriculture, especially for the all important taro, is limited to the larger islands like the Pelews. In the vast islands of western Melanesia, agriculture is on the whole less advanced. New Guinea, where the chase yields support to many villages, has large sections still a wilderness, though some parts are cultivated like a garden. In the smaller Melanesian islands, such as New Hebrides, New Britain and the Solomon group, we find extensive plantations laid out on irrigated terraces, In New Hebrides and the Banks Islands every single village has its flowers and aromatic herbs.[971] But it is in Fiji that native island agriculture seems to culminate. Here a race of dark, frizzly haired savages, addicted to cannibalism, have in the art of tillage taken a spurt forward in civilization, till in this respect they stand abreast of the average European. The German asparagus bed is not cultivated more carefully than the yam plants of Fiji; these also are grown in mounds made of soil which has been previously pulverized by hand. The variety and excellence of their vegetable products are amazing, and find their reflection in an elaborate national cuisine, strangely at variance with the otherwise savage life.[972]

West of Melanesia, the Malay Archipelago shows a high average of tillage. The inhabitants of Java, Madura, Bali, Lombok and Sumbawa are skilled agriculturists and employ an elaborate system of irrigation,[973] but the natives of Timor, on the other hand, have made little progress. In the Philippines a rich and varied agriculture has been the chief source of wealth since the Spanish conquest early in the sixteenth century, proving a native aptitude which began to develop long before.[974]

[Sidenote: Intensive tillage.]