Note 900 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

Islands, as naturally protected districts, are often sought places of refuge by the weak or vanquished, and thus are drawn into the field of historical movement. We find this principle operating also in the animal world. The fur seals of the North Pacific have fled from the American coasts and found an asylum on the Pribiloff Islands of Bering Sea, where their concentration and isolation have enabled them to become wards of the United States government, though this result they did not foresee. The last Rhytina or Arctic sea-cow was found on an island in Bering Strait.900 So the Veneti of Northern Italy in the fifth century sought an asylum from the desolating Huns and, a century later, from the Lombards, in the deposit islands at the head of the Adriatic, and there found the geographic conditions for a brilliant commercial and cultural development. Formosa got its first contingent of Chinese settlers in the thirteenth century in refugees seeking a place of safety from Kublai Khan's armies; and its second in 1644 in a Chinese chief and his followers who had refused to submit to the victorious Manchus. In 1637 Formosa was an asylum also for Japanese Christians, who escaped thither from the persecutions attending the discovery of Jesuit conspiracies against the government.901 The Azores, soon after their rediscovery in 1431, were colonized largely by Flemish refugees,902 just as Iceland was peopled by rebellious Norwegians. To such voluntary exiles the dividing sea gives a peculiar sense of security, this by a psychological law. Hence England owing to its insular location, and also to its free government, has always been an asylum for the oppressed. The large body of Huguenot refugees who sought her shores after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes added a valuable element to her population.