Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

Physical relationship between islands and peninsulas.

Character of insular flora and fauna.

Endemic forms.

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.

Conservative and radical tendencies.

The case of Japan.

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.

Islands as nurseries and disseminators of distinctive civilizations.

Ancient Cretan civilization.

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.

Sources of ethnic stock of islands.

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.

Differentiation of peoples and civilizations on islands.

Differentiation of language in islands.

Archaic forms of speech in islands.

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.

Remoter sources of island populations.

Double sources.

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.

Mixed population of island markets.

Significant location of island way stations.

Thalassic islands as goals of expansion.

Political detachability of islands.

Insular weakness due to small area.

Island remains of broken empires.

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.

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.

Historical effects of island isolation; primitive retardation.

Later stimulation of development.

Excessive isolation.

The case of Iceland.

Protection of an island environment.

Factor of protection in Ceylon and Japan.

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.

Islands as places of refuge.

Convict islands.

Penal colonies on uninhabited islands.

Island prisons for political offenders.

Islands as places of survival.

Insular survivals of manners and customs.

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.

Political dominion of small islands.

Economic limitations of their small area.

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.

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.

Density of population in Polynesia.

Various causes of this density.

Crowded and vacant islands.

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.

Oceanic climate as factor.

Relation of density to area.

Island resorts.

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

Density of population affected by focal location for trade.

Overflow of island population to the mainland.

Precocious development of island agriculture.

Melanesian agriculture.

Intensive tillage.

Japanese agriculture.

The case of England.

Emigration and colonization from islands.

Modern emigration from islands.

Maritime enterprise as outlet.

In England the exodus took the form of trading expeditions and the foundation of commercial colonies long before the food resources of the island had been even considerably developed. The accessible sea offered lines of least resistance, while the monopoly of the land by a privileged aristocracy and the fiercely defended corn laws made the limitations of a small area more oppressive. In Ireland, a landless peasantry in a grainless land, dulled by deprivation of opportunity, found in emigration an escape from insupportable evils.

Artificial checks to population.

Polyandry.

Infanticide.

Approved by the state.

Low valuation of human life.

Cannibalism in islands.

These are the darker effects of an island habitat, the vices of its virtues. That same excessive pressure of population which gives rise to infanticide also stimulates agriculture, industry and trade; it develops ingenuity in making the most of local resources, and finally leads to that widespread emigration and colonization which has made islanders the great distributors of culture, from Easter Isle to Java and from ancient Crete to modern England.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XIII