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]
Penal colonies on uninhabited islands.
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]
Island prisons for political offenders.
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!
Islands as places of survival.