their coasts, but from their hinterland, according to the length and
nature of their connection with the same. This determines the degree of
their isolation from the land-mass. If they hang from the continent by a
frayed string, as does the Peloponnesus, Crimea, Malacca, Indian
Gutjerat, and Nova Scotia, they are segregated from the life of the
mainland almost as completely as if they were islands. The same effects
follow where the base of a peninsula is defined by a high mountain
barrier, as in all the Mediterranean peninsulas, in the two Indias, and
in Korea; or by a desert like that which scantily links Arabia to Egypt,
Syria and Mesopotamia; or by a blur of swamps and lakes such as half
detaches Scandinavia, Courland, Estland and Finland from Russia.
Held to their continents by bonds that often fail to bind, subjected by
their outward-facing peripheral location to every centrifugal force,
feeling only slightly the pull of the great central mass behind,
peninsulas are often further detached economically and historically by
their own contrasted local conditions. A sharp transition in geological
formation and therefore in soil, a difference of climate, rainfall,
drainage system, of flora or fauna, serve greatly to emphasize the lack
of community of interests with the continental interior, and therefore
produce an inevitable diversity of historical development.[785] Hence,
many peninsulas insulate their people as completely as islands. It is
hard to say whether the Pyrenean peninsula or Sicily, Scandinavia or
Great Britain, has held itself more aloof from the political history of
remaining Europe; whether Korea is not more entitled to its name of the
Hermit Kingdom than island Japan could ever be; whether the Peloponnesus
or Euboea was more intimately associated with the radiant life of
ancient Hellas. These questions lead to another, namely, whether a high
mountain wall like the Pyrenees, or a narrow strait like that of Messina
is the more effective geographical boundary.
[Sidenote: Continental base a zone of transition.]
Peninsulas not infrequently gain in breadth as they approach the
continent; here they tend to abate their distinctive character as lobes
of the mainland, together with the ethnic and historical marks of
isolation. Here they form a doubtful boundary zone of mingled
continental and peninsular development. Such peninsulas fall naturally,
therefore, into a continental and a peninsular section, and reveal this
segmentation in the differentiated history of the two portions. That
great military geographer Napoleon distinguished the Italy of the Po
basin as _Italie continentale_, and the Apennine section as
_Presqu'ile_. Not only is the former broader, but, expanding like a tree
trunk near the ground, it sends its roots well back into the massive
interior of the continent; it is dominated more by the Alps than by the
Apennines; it contains a lowland and a river of continental proportions,
for which there is no space on the long, narrow spur of southern Italy.
If its geographical character approximates that of the mainland, so does
its ethnic and historical. The Po basin is a well defined area of race
characterization, in which influences have made for intermixture. South
of the crest of the Apennines the Italian language in its purity begins,
in contrast to the Gallo-Italian of the north. This mountain ridge has
also held apart the dark, short dolichocephalic stock of the
Mediterranean race from the fairer, taller, broad-headed Celts, who have
moved down into the Po basin from the Alps, and the Germans and
Illyrians who have entered it from the northeast.[786] Northern Italy is
therefore allied ethnically, as it has often been united politically, to
the neighboring countries abutting upon the Alps, so that it has
experienced only in a partial degree that detachment which has stamped
the history of the Apennine section.
[Sidenote: Historical contrast between base and extremity.]
The Balkan Peninsula tells much the same story of contrasted geographic
conditions and development in its continental and peninsular sections.
Greece proper, in ancient as in modern times, reached its northern
confines where the peninsula suddenly widens its base through Macedonia
and Thrace. In this narrow southern section to-day, especially in
isolated Peloponnesus, Attica, and the high-walled garden of Thessaly,
are found people of the pure, long-headed, Hellenic type, and here the
Greek language prevails.[787] But that broad and alien north, long
excluded from the Amphictyonic Council and a stranger to Aegean culture
in classical times, is occupied to-day by a congeries of Slavs, who form
a southwestern spur of the Slav stock covering eastern Europe. Its
political history shows how often it has been made a Danubian or
continental state, by Alexander of Macedon, by the Romans, Bulgarians,
and Ottoman Turks,[788] as it may be some day by Russia; and also how
often its large and compact form has enabled it to dominate the tapering
peninsular section to the south.
In the same way, the vast Ganges and Indus basins, which constitute the
continental portion of India, have received various Tibetan, Scythian,
Aryan, Pathan, and Mongol-Tartar ingredients from Central Asia; and by
reason of the dense populations supported by these fruitful river
plains, it has been able to dominate politically, religiously and
culturally the protruding triangle of the Deccan. [See maps pages 8 and
102.] The continental side of Arabia, the Mesopotamian valley which ties
the peninsula to the highlands of Persia and Armenia, has received into
its Semitic stock constant infiltrations of Turanian and Aryan peoples
from the core of Asia. This process has been going on from the ancient
Elamite and Persian conquests of Mesopotamia down to the Ottoman
invasion and the present periodic visits of Kurdish shepherds to the
pastures of the upper Tigris.[789] Here we have the same contrast of
geographic conditions as in Italy and India, a wide, populous alluvial
plain occupying the continental section of the peninsula, and a less
attractive highland or mountainous region in the outlying spur of land.
[Sidenote: Continental base a scene of invasion and war.]
These continental sections of peninsulas become therefore strongly
marked as areas of ethnic characterization and differentiated historical
development. Their threshold location, by reason of which they first
catch any outward migration from the core of the continent, and their
fertility, which serves as a perennial lure to new comers, whether
peaceful or warlike, combine to give them intense historical activity.
They catch the come and go between their wide hinterland and the
projection of land beyond, the stimulus of new arrivals and fresh blood.
But tragedy too is theirs. The Po Valley has been called "the cockpit of
Europe." Even the little Eider, which marks the base of Jutland, has
been the scene of war between Danes and Germans since the tenth
century.[790] The Indus Valley has again and again felt the shock of
conflict with invading hordes from the central highlands, and witnessed
the establishment of a succession of empires. Peace at the gates of the
Balkan Peninsula has never been of long duration, and the postern door
of Korea has been stormed often enough.
[Sidenote: Peninsular extremities as areas of isolation.]
In contrast to these continental sections which stand in contact with
the solid land-mass behind, the extremities of the peninsulas are areas
of isolation and therefore generally of ethnic unity. They often
represent the last stand of displaced people pressed outward into these
narrow quarters by expanding races in their rear. The vast triangle of
the Deccan, which forms the essentially peninsular part of India, is
occupied, except in the more exposed northwest corner, by the Dravidian
race which once occupied all India, and afterward was pushed southward
by the influx of more energetic peoples.[791] Here they have preserved
their speech and nationality unmixed and live in almost primitive
simplicity.[792] In the peninsular parts of Great Britain, in northern
Scotland. Wales and Cornwall, we find people of Celtic speech brought to
bay on these remote spurs of the land, affiliating little with the
varied folk which occupied the continental side of the island, and
resisting conquest to the last.[793] The mountainous peninsula of western
Connaught in Ireland has been the rocky nucleus of the largest
Celtic-speaking community in the island.[794] Brittany, with a similar
location, became the last refuge of Celtic speech on the mainland of
Europe,[795] the seat of resistance to Norman and later to English
conquest, finally the stronghold of conservatism in the French
Revolution.
[Sidenote: Ethnic unity of peninsulas.]
The northern wall of the Apennines and the outpost barrier of the Alps
have combined to protect peninsular Italy from extensive ethnic
infusions from the direction of the continent. This portion of the
country shows therefore, as the anthropological maps attest, a striking
uniformity of race. It has been a melting-pot in which foreign elements,
filtering through the breaches of the Apennines or along the southern
coast, have been fused into the general population under the isolating
and cohesive influences of a peninsular environment.[796] The population
of the Iberian Peninsula is even more unified, probably the most
homogeneous in Europe. Here the long-headed Mediterranean race is found
in the same purity as in island Corsica and Sardinia.[797] Spain's short
line of contact with France and its sharp separation by the unbroken
wall of the Pyrenees robs the peninsula of any distinctly continental
section, and consequently of any transitional area of race and culture;
hence the unity of Spain as opposed to that twofold balanced diversity
which we find in Italy and India. The Balkan Peninsula, on the other
hand, owing to the great predominance of its continental section and the
confused relief of the country, has not protected its distinctively
peninsular or Greek section from the southward migrations of Slavs,
Albanians, Wallachians, and other continental peoples.[798] It has been
like a big funnel with a small mouth; the pressure from above has been
very great. Hellas and even the Peloponnesus have had their
peninsularity impaired and their race mixed, owing to the predominant
continental section to the north.
[Sidenote: Peninsulas as intermediaries.]
Peninsulas, so far as they project from their continents, are areas of
isolation; but so far as they extend also toward some land beyond, they
become intermediaries. The isolating and intermediary aspects can be
traced in the anthropo-geographical effects of every peninsula, even
those which, like Brittany and Cornwall, project into the long uncharted
waste of the Atlantic. In the order of historical development, a
peninsula first isolates, until in its secluded environment it has
molded a mature, independent people; then, as that people outgrows its
narrow territory, the peninsula becomes a favorable base for maritime
expansion to distant lands, or becomes a natural avenue for numerous
reciprocal relations with neighboring lands beyond. Korea was the bridge
for Mongolian migration from continental Asia to the Japan islands, and
for the passage thither of Chinese culture, whether intellectual,
esthetic, industrial or religious.[799] It has been the one country
conspicuous in the foreign history of Japan. Conquered by the island
empire in 1592, it paid tribute for nearly three centuries and yielded
to its foreign master the southeastern port of Fusan, the Calais of
Korea.[800] Since the treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 made it subject to
Japan, it has become the avenue of Japanese expansion to the mainland
and the unwilling recipient of the modern civilization thrust upon it by
these English of the East. In like manner the Pyrenean peninsula has
always been the intermediary between Europe and northwest Africa. Its
population, as well as its flora and fauna, group with those of the
southern continent. It has served as transit land between north and
south for the Carthaginians, Vandals and Saracens; and in modern times
it has maintained its character as a link by the Portuguese occupation
of the Tangiers peninsula in the fifteenth century,[801] and the Spanish
possession of Ceuta and various other points along the Moroccan coast
from the year 709 A.D. to the present.[802]
[Sidenote: Peninsulas of intercontinental location.]
This rôle of intermediary is inevitably thrust upon all peninsulas
which, like Spain, Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, Arabia, Farther India,
Malacca, Chukchian Siberia, and Alaska, occupy an intercontinental
location. Arabia especially in its climate, flora, races and history
shows the haul and pull now of Asia, now of Africa. From it Asiatic
influences have spread over Africa to Morocco and the Niger River on the
west, and to Zanzibar on the south, permeated Abyssinia, and penetrated
to the great Equatorial Lakes, whether in the form of that Mecca-born
worship of Allah, or the creeping caravans and slave-gangs of Arab
trader. Of all such intercontinental peninsulas, Florida alone seems to
have had no rôle as an intermediary. Its native ethnic affinities were
wholly with its own continent. It has given nothing to South America and
received nothing thence. The northward expansion of Arawak and Carib
tribes from Venezuela in historic times ceased at Cuba and Hayti. The
Straits drew a dividing line. Local conditions in Florida itself
probably furnish the explanation of this anomaly. Extensive swamps made
the central and southern portion of the peninsula inhospitable to
colonization from either direction, transformed it from a link into a
barrier.
[Sidenote: Atlantic peninsulas of Europe]
Peninsulas which conspicuously lack an intercontinental location must
long await their intermediary phase of development, but do not escape
it. The Cornish, Breton and Iberian peninsulas were all prominent in the
trans-Atlantic enterprises of Europe from the end of the fifteenth
century. The first French sailors to reach the new world were Breton and
Norman fishermen. Plymouth, as the chief port of the Cornish peninsula,
figures prominently in the history of English exploration and settlement
in America. It seems scarcely accidental that most of Queen Elizabeth's
great sea captains were natives of this district--Sir Francis Drake, Sir
John Hawkins, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and Sir Walter Raleigh, the latter
holding the office of vice-admiral of Cornwall and Devon. It was the
peninsula-like projection of South America about Cape St. Roque, twenty
degrees farther east than Labrador, that welcomed the ships of Cabral
and Americus Vespucius, and secured to Portugal a foothold in the
Western Hemisphere.
NOTES TO CHAPTER XII
[747] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 336. London, 1896-1898.
[748] D.G. Brinton, The American Race, p. 41. Philadelphia, 1901.
[749] D.G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp. 239-240. Philadelphia, 1901.
Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 336. London, 1896-1898.
[750] A.E. Wallace, Island Life, p. 14. New York, 1892.
[751] A. Heilprin, Geographical Distribution of Animals, p. 69, map.
1887.
[752] _Ibid._, pp. 78, 82, 90, 100.
[753] Darwin, Origin of Species, Chap. XII. New York, 1895. A.R.
Wallace, Island Life, p. 6. New York, 1892.
[754] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, Map on p. 43. New York, 1899.
[755] _Ibid._, pp. 39, 50, 80. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp.
100-110. London, 1896-1898.
[756] A.H. Keane, Ethnology, pp. 231-232, 362. Cambridge, 1896.
[757] McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, p. 56, Vol. XIX of
History of North America. Philadelphia, 1905.
[758] Fiske, Discovery of America, Vol. I, p. 224. Boston, 1893.
[759] For various Asiatic and Oceanic elements, see Franz Boas, The
Indians of British Columbia, _Bull. of the Amer. Geog. Society_ Vol. 28,
p. 229. The Northwest Coast Tribes, Science, Vol. XII, pp. 194-196.
Niblack, The Indians of the Northwest Coast, p. 385, Washington. H.H.
Bancroft, The Native Races, Vol. I, pp. 177, 178, footnote; pp. 210,
225. San Francisco, 1886. W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, map p. 42. New
York, 1899.
[760] T.W. Higginson and William Macdonald, History of the United
States, p. 21. New York and London, 1905.
[761] Edward John Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol.
II, pp. 64-68, 74-77, 305, 388-389. Oxford, 1899.
[762] Justin Winsor, Narrative and Critical History, Vol. I, p. 60.
Boston, 1889.
[763] Cited by E.J. Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol.
II, p. 292, footnote p. 294. Oxford, 1899.
[764] Waldemar Jochelson, The Mythology of the Koryak, _The American
Anthropologist_, Vol. VI, pp. 415-416, 421-425. 1904.
[765] W.D. Dall, Masks, Labrets, and Certain Aboriginal Customs, Third
Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology, pp. 46-147. Washington, 1884.
[766] O.T. Mason, Migration and the Food Quest, pp. 275-292. Washington,
1894.
[767] McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 51, 58-82.
Philadelphia, 1905. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, pp. 5-7,
145-147, 153-154. London, 1896-1898.
[768] Ripley, Races of Europe, map p. 42, pp. 43-44. New York, 1899.
[769] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 7. London, 1896-1898.
[770] Tylor, Anthropology, pp. 86-87. New York, 1881.
[771] E.J. Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol. II, pp.
554-555. Oxford, 1899.
[772] Justus Perthes, _Taschen Atlas_, p. 17. Gotha, 1905.
[773] Carl Ritter, Comparative Geography, pp. 188-212. Translated by
W.L. Gage, Philadelphia, 1865. N.S. Shaler, Nature and Man in America,
pp. 11-18, 151-165. New York, 1896.
[774] Strabo, Book II, chap. V. 26.
[775] McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, p. 3, map.
Philadelphia, 1905.
[776] D.G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp. 248-249. Philadelphia, 1901.
[777] D.G. Brinton, The American Race, pp. 58, 103-104. Philadelphia,
1901. McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, p. 86.
Philadeladelphia, 1905 Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, pp. 5-7,
145-147, 153.
[778] _Ibid._, p. 293. E.J. Payne, History of the New World Called
America, Vol. II, p. 315. Oxford, 1899.
[779] _Ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 412-417. McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North
America, pp. 72-75. Philadelphia, 1905.
[780] W.H. Dall, Masks, Labrets, and Certain Aboriginal Customs, Third
Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology, pp. 146-147. Washington, 1884.
[781] Cyrus Thomas, Report of Mound Explorations, pp. 522-523, 722-728.
Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, 1894.
[782] E.J. Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol. II, pp.
382-383. Oxford, 1899.
[783] N.S. Shaler, Nature and Man in America, pp. 151, 168-173. New
York, 1891.
[784] Justus Perthes, _Taschen Atlas_, p. 9. Gotha, 1905.
[785] Carl Ritter, Comparative Geography, pp. 191-192. Translated by W.
L. Gage, Philadelphia, 1865.
[786] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 247-258. New York, 1899.
[787] _Ibid._, pp. 403-409.
[788] E.A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, Atlas, Maps, 34, 49.
London, 1882.
[789] For race elements in Mesopotamia, see D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer
East, Maps, pp. 173 and 176. London, 1903.
[790] E.A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, pp. 201-202,
506-508, 535-536, 541. London, 1882.
[791] Imperial Gazetteer of India, Vol. I, pp. 293-297. Oxford, 1907.
[792] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, Ethnographical map, p. 201, pp. 202,
213-216. London, 1905. B.H. Baden-Powell, The Indian Village Community,
pp. 111, 116, 119, 161. London, 1896.
[793] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 312-321. New York, 1899. E.
Reclus, Europe, Vol. IV, pp. 73, 83-84. New York, 1882.
[794] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, Ethnographic map, p.
184, and p. 306. London, 1904.
[795] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 22, 23, 150-151. New York, 1899.
[796] _Ibid._, pp. 248, 258, 272.
[797] _Ibid._, pp. 247, 273.
[798] _Ibid._, pp. 403-409, and map.
[799] F. Brinkley, Japan, Vol. I, pp. 38-42, 70, 75-80, 83-84, 126.
Boston and Tokyo, 1901. W.E. Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, Vol. I, pp.
73, 83. New York, 1903.
[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 rôle. 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
Mycenæ 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 preëminence 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'oïl_ 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'oïl_.[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 Lacedæmonians 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 Cæsar'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 Cæsar 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
Schlüsselberg 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.