Note 855 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

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.]