Note 907 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

In modern times many remote oceanic islands have gotten their first or only white settlers from this criminal class. Such are the citizens whom Chile has sent to Easter Isle twenty-five hundred miles away out in the Pacific.907 The inhabitants of Fernando Noronha, 125 miles off the eastern point of South America, are convicts from Brazil, together with the warders and troops who guard them.908 In 1832 Ecuador began to use the uninhabited Gallapagos Islands, lying 730 miles west of its coast, as a penal settlement.909 The history of St. Helena is typical. Its first inhabitants were some Portuguese deserters who in punishment were marooned here from a Portuguese ship with a supply of seed and cattle. They proved industrious and had cultivated a good deal of the land when four years later they were removed to Portugal. The next inhabitants were a few slaves of both sexes who escaped from a slave ship that had stopped here for wood and water. These multiplied, worked and restored the overgrown plantations of their predecessors, till a Portuguese vessel about twenty years later was sent to exterminate them. A few escaped to the woods, however, and were found there in prosperity in 1588.910 From 1815 till 1821 St. Helena was the prison of Napoleon.