Influences of Geographic Environment by Ellen Churchill Semple (i love reading books .TXT) 📖
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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
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.
Many of these penal islands seem chosen with a view to their severe or unhealthy climate, which would forever repel free immigration and therefore render them useless for any other purpose. This is true of the French Isles du Salut off the Guiana coast, of Spanish Fernando Po in the Gulf of Guinea, of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, notoriously unhealthy, which receive the criminals of British India,911 and of numerous others. A bleak climate and unproductive soil have added to the horror of exile life in Sakhalin, as they overshadowed existence in the Falkland Islands, when these were a penal colony of Spain and later of Argentine.912
In the case of political offenders and incorrigibles, the island prison is as remote and inaccessible as possible. The classic example is Napoleon's consignment to Elba and subsequently to St. Helena, whence escape was impossible. Spain has sent its rebellious subjects, even university professors of independent views, to Fernando Po in the Gulf of Guinea and Teneriffe in the Canaries.913 Russian political offenders of the most dangerous class are confined first in the Schlüsselberg prison, situated on a small island in Lake Ladoga near the effluence of the Neva. There they languish in solitary confinement or are transferred to far-off Sakhalin, whose very name is taboo in St. Petersburg.914 During our Civil War, one of the Dry Tortugas, lying a hundred miles west of the southern point of Florida and at that time the most isolated island belonging to the American government, was used as a prison for dangerous Confederates; and here later three conspirators in the assassination of President Lincoln were incarcerated.915 Far away to the southeast, off the coast of South America, are the Isles du Salut, a French penal station for criminals of the worst class. The Isle du Diable, ominous of name, lies farthest out to sea. This was for five years the prison of Dreyfus. Its other inhabitants are lepers. Isles of the cursed indeed!
What islands have they tend to hold, to segregate, secrete from meddling hands, preserve untouched and unaltered. Owing to this power to protect, islands show a large percentage of rare archaic forms of animal and plant life. The insular fauna of Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea and Madagascar display a succession of strange, ancestral forms going back to the biological infancy of the world. The Canaries in the Atlantic and Celebes In the Pacific are museums of living antiquities, some of them dating probably from Miocene times.916 Such survivals are found elsewhere only in high mountains, whose inaccessible slopes also offer protection against excessive competition. Hence some of the antiquated species of insular Celebes, Formosa, Japan and Hainon occur again on the Asiatic mainland only in the Himalayas.917
For man, too, islands and their sister areas of isolation, mountains, are areas of survivals. The shrinking remnants of that half-dwarf Negrito stock which may have formed the aboriginal population of southern Asia are found to-day only in the mountains of peninsular India and in island groups like the Andaman and the Philippines. But even in the Philippines, they are confined either to the mountainous interiors of the larger islands, or to little coastal islets like Polillo, Alabat, Jomalig, and others.918 [See map page 147.] Yezo, Sakhalin and the Kurile Isles harbor the last feeble remnants of the Ainos, a primitive people who formerly occupied a long stretch of the Asiatic coast south of the Amur mouth. The protected environment of these islands has postponed the doom of extinction toward which the Ainos are hastening.919 With insular conservatism they dress, live and seek their food on the sea to-day, just as depicted in Japanese art and literature at the dawn of history.920 [See map page 103.]
It is chiefly on islands of harsh climatic conditions, like Sakhalin, or of peculiarly restricted resources and area, like the Andaman, or of remote, side-tracked location, like Iceland, Sardinia and Cape Breton, that the stamp of the primitive or antiquated is strongest. Even when not apparent in race stock, owing to the ubiquitous colonization of maritime peoples, it marks the language and customs of even these late-coming occupants, because an island environment asserts always some power to isolate. This is due not only to the encircling moat of sea, but also to the restricted insular area, too small to attract to itself the great currents of human activity which infuse cosmopolitan ideas and innovations, and too poor to buy the material improvements which progress offers. If the tourist in Sicily finds the women of Taormina or Girgenti spinning with a hand spindle, and the express trains moving only twelve miles an hour, he can take these two facts as the product of a small, detached area, although this island lies at the crossroads of the Mediterranean. Corsica and Sardinia, lying off the main routes of travel in this basin, are two of the most primitive and isolated spots of Europe. Here the old wooden plow of Roman days is still in common use as it is in Crete, and feudal institutions of the Middle Ages still prevail to some extent921 ,—a fact which recalls the long survival of feudalism in Japan. The little Isle of Man, almost in sight of the English coast, has retained an old Norse form of government. Here survives the primitive custom of orally proclaiming every new law from the Tynwald Hill before it can take effect,922 and the other ancient usage of holding the court of justice on the same hill under the open sky. The Faroe Islands and Iceland are museums of Norse antiquities. The stamp of isolation and therefore conservatism is most marked in the remoter, northern islands. Surnames are rare in Iceland, and such as exist are mostly of foreign origin. In their place, Christian names followed by the patronymic prevail; but in the Faroes, these patronymics have in a great many cases become recognized as surnames. So again, while the Faroese women still use a rude spinning-wheel introduced from Scotland in 1671, in Iceland this spinning-wheel was still an innovation in 1800, and even to-day competes with spindles. Hand-querns for grinding wheat, stone hammers for pounding fish and roots, the wooden weighing-beam of the ancient Northmen, and quaint marriage customs give the final touch of aloofness and antiquity to life on these remote islands.923
As all island life bears more or less the mark of isolation, so it betrays the narrow area that has served at its base. Though islands show a wide variation in size from the 301,000 square miles (771,900 square kilometers) of New Guinea or the 291,000 square miles (745,950 square kilometers) of Borneo to the private
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