Note 903 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

Islands find their populations enriched by the immigration of this select class who refuse to acquiesce in oppression and injustice. But the geographic conditions which make islands natural asylums make them also obvious places of detention for undesirable members of society; these conditions render segregation complete, escape difficult or impossible, and control easy. Hence we find that almost all the nations of the world owning islands have utilized them as penal stations. From the gray dawn of history the Isles of the Blessed have been balanced by the isles of the cursed. The radiant Garden of Hesperides has found its antithesis in the black hell of Norfolk Isle, peopled by the "doubly condemned" criminals whom not even the depraved convict citizens of Botany Bay could tolerate.903 There is scarcely an island of the Mediterranean without this sinister vein in its history. The archipelagoes of the ancient Aegean were constantly receiving political exiles from continental Greece. Augustus Cæsar confined his degenerate daughter Julia, the wife of Tiberius, on the island of Pandateria, one of the Ponza group; and banished her paramour, Sempronius Gracchus, to Cercina in the Syrtis Minor off the African coast.904 Other Roman matrons of high degree but low morals and corrupt officials were exiled to Corsica, Sardinia, Seriphos, Amorgos and other of the Cyclades. 905 To-day Italy has prisons or penal stations in Ischia, the Ponza group, Procida, Nisida, Elba, Pantellaria, Lampedusa, Ustica, and especially in the Lipari Isles, where the convicts are employed in mining sulphur, alum and pumice from the volcanic cones.906