Influences of Geographic Environment Part 45

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 s.p.a.ce 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 quant.i.ty, 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-cla.s.s; its human life, at the time of the discovery, was restricted to one r.e.t.a.r.ded negroid race, showing in every part of the island a monotonous, early Stone Age development. The spa.r.s.ely 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 r.e.t.a.r.dation 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 a.s.sume 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 pa.s.sing those sh.o.r.es. 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 p.r.o.nounced 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, unsurpa.s.sed 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 gra.s.slands 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 j.a.pan.]

In j.a.pan, 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. j.a.pan has always borrowed freely from neighboring Asiatic countries and recently from the whole world; yet everything in j.a.pan 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 j.a.panized by being grafted on to the local stock of religious ideas, so that j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese standards of duty and ritual. Modern j.a.panese converts to Christianity wish themselves to conduct the local missions and teach a national version of the new faith.[821] But all the while, j.a.panese 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 compet.i.tion. Here is insular conservatism.

j.a.pan'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 j.a.pan's present receptivity of new ideas and her outwardly indiscriminate adoption of western civilization is to be detected the deep primal stamp of the j.a.panese 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 a.s.signed to islands in all times a great historical role. Rarely do these wholly originate the elements of civilization. For that their area is too small. But whatever seed ripen in the wide fields of the continents the islands transplant to their own forcing houses; there they transform and perfect the flower. j.a.pan 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. j.a.panese ideals are leavening the whole Orient from Manchuria to Ceylon. English civilization is the standard of Europe.

"The Russian in his snows is aiming to be English," says Emerson.

"England has inoculated all nations with her civilization, intelligence and tastes."[822]

[Sidenote: Ancient Cretan civilization.]

The recent discoveries in Crete show beyond doubt that the school of Aegean civilization was in that island. Ancient Phoenicia, Argos, even Mycenae and Tiryns put off their mask of age and appear as rosy boys learning none too aptly of their great and elderly master. Borrowing the seeds of culture from Asia and Egypt,[823] Crete nursed and tended them through the Neolithic and Bronze Age, transformed them completely, much as scientific tillage has converted the cotton tree into a low shrub.

The precocity of this civilization is clear. At early as 3000 B.C. it included an impressive style of architecture and a decorative art naturalistic and beautiful in treatment as that of modern j.a.pan.[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 thala.s.sic 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 p.r.o.nounced 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-h.e.l.lenic career, and thence it spread to the Greek mainland and other Aegean sh.o.r.es.[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 j.a.pan 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 h.e.l.lenic world.

The same story of early but short lived preeminence comes from other Aegean islands. Before the rise of Athens, Samos under the great despot Polykrates became "the first of all cities, h.e.l.lenic or barbaric," a center of Ionian manners, luxury, art, science and culture, the seat of the first great thala.s.socracy 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 surpa.s.s 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 w.a.n.geroog, is inhabited by the same Frisian folk which occupies the nearby sh.o.r.e. The people of the Channel Isles, though long subject to England, belong to the Franco-Gallic stock and the _langue d'ol_ 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 p.r.o.nounced, 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 j.a.panese, 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 j.a.panese are located much nearer together and are in the same stage of civilization. The Eskimo, who form one of the most h.o.m.ogeneous 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 gra.s.s-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'ol_.[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 j.a.pan. j.a.panese 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 pa.s.sed 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 r.e.t.a.r.dation. 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 succ.u.mbing 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 cla.s.sic 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 Tersch.e.l.ling through Helgoland to Sylt, as also on the neighboring sh.o.r.es 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 a.s.similated. 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 a.s.similated, 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] j.a.pan 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 a.s.similated, 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 sh.o.r.e, 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 sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.es 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 s.p.a.ces 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] f.u.kien 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 pa.s.sways for the sea-faring Malays, who were the first to people the island, and the j.a.panese 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 sh.o.r.es. 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 a.s.sume control of the island.

[Sidenote: Mixed population of small thala.s.sic isles.]

Small thala.s.sic 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 sh.o.r.es. 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 thala.s.sic 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 sh.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sengers change steamers for China, India and Australia; a port of call for vessels pa.s.sing 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]