Note 938 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

This general tendency toward a close packing of the population in the smaller areas of land comes out just as distinctly in islands inhabited by natural peoples in the lower stages of development. Despite the retarded economic methods peculiar to savagery and barbarism, the Polynesian islands, for instance, often show a density of population equal to that of Spain and Greece (100 to the square mile) and exceeding that of European Turkey and Russia. "Over the whole extent of the South Sea," says Robert Louis Stevenson, "from one tropic to another, we find traces of a bygone state of over-population, when the resources of even a tropical soil were taxed, and even the improvident Polynesian trembled for the future."938 He calls the Gilbert atolls "warrens of men."939 One of them, Drummond's Island, with, an area of about twenty square miles, contained a population of 10,000 in 1840, and all the atolls were densely populated.940 To-day they count 35,000 inhabitants in less than 200 square miles. The neighboring Marshall group has 15,000 on its 158 square miles of area. The Caroline and Pelew archipelagoes show a density of 69 to the square mile, the Tonga or Friendly group harbor about 60 and the French holdings of Futuma and Wallis (or Uea) the same.941 So the Bismarck Archipelago, Solomon, Hawaiian, Samoan and Marianne islands have to-day populations by no means sparse, despite the blight that everywhere follows the contact of superior with primitive peoples.