Note 881 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

Island fragments of broken empires are found everywhere. They figure conspicuously in that scattered location indicative of declining power. Little St. Pierre and Miquelon are the last geographical evidences of France's former dominion in Canada. The English Bermudas and Bahamas point back to the time when Great Britain held the long-drawn opposite coast. The British, French, Dutch, Danish, as once even Swedish, holdings in the Lesser Antilles are island monuments to lost continental domains, as recently were Cuba and Porto Rico to Spain's once vast American empire. Of Portugal's widespread dominion in the Orient there remain to her only the island fragments of Timor, Kambing, Macao and Diu, besides two coastal points on the western face of peninsular India. All the former continental holdings of the Sultan of Zanzibar have been absorbed into the neighboring German and British territories, and only the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba remain to him by the temporary indulgence of his strong neighbors. The Sheik of the Bahrein Islands originally held also the large kingdom of El Hasa on the nearby Persian Gulf littoral of Arabia; but he lost this to the Turks in 1840, and now retains the Bahrein Islands as the residuum of his former territories.881