Note 945 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

This is one of the sharp contrasts in island life,—here density akin to congestion, there a few miles away a deserted reef or cone rising from the sea, tenanted only by sheep or goats or marine birds, its solitude broken only by the occasional crunching of a boat's keel upon its beach, as some visitant from a neighboring isle comes to shear wool, gather coco-nuts, catch birds or collect their eggs. All the 500 inhabitants of the Westman Isles off the southern coast of Iceland live in one village on Heimey, and support themselves almost entirely by fishing and fowling birds on the wild crags of the archipelago.945 An oceanic climate, free contact with the Gulf Stream, and remoteness from the widespread ice fields of Iceland give them an advantage over the vast island to the north. Only twenty-seven of the ninety islands composing the Orkney group are inhabited, and about forty smaller ones afford natural meadows for sheep on their old red sandstone soil;946 but Pomona, the largest Orkney has 17,000 inhabitants on its 207 square miles of territory or 85 to the square mile. The Shetlands tell the same story—29 out of 100 islands inhabited, some of the holms or smaller islets serving as pastures for the sturdy ponies and diminutive cattle, and Mainland, the largest of the group, showing 58 inhabitants to the square mile. This is a density far greater than is reached in the nearby regions of Scotland, where the county of Sutherland can boast only 13 to the square mile, and Invernesshire 20. Here again insularity and contracted area do their work of compressing population.