led them to become wards of
the United States government, though this result they did not foresee.
The last Rhytina or Arctic sea-cow was found on an island in Bering
Strait.[900] So the Veneti of Northern Italy in the fifth century sought
an asylum from the desolating Huns and, a century later, from the
Lombards, in the deposit islands at the head of the Adriatic, and there
found the geographic conditions for a brilliant commercial and cultural
development. Formosa got its first contingent of Chinese settlers in the
thirteenth century in refugees seeking a place of safety from Kublai
Khan's armies; and its second in 1644 in a Chinese chief and his
followers who had refused to submit to the victorious Manchus. In 1637
Formosa was an asylum also for Japanese Christians, who escaped thither
from the persecutions attending the discovery of Jesuit conspiracies
against the government.[901] The Azores, soon after their rediscovery in
1431, were colonized largely by Flemish refugees,[902] just as Iceland
was peopled by rebellious Norwegians. To such voluntary exiles the
dividing sea gives a peculiar sense of security, this by a psychological
law. Hence England owing to its insular location, and also to its free
government, has always been an asylum for the oppressed. The large body
of Huguenot refugees who sought her shores after the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes added a valuable element to her population.

[Sidenote: Convict islands.]

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. Augus