Note 865 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

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