Note 832 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

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