tus Caesar 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]

[Sidenote: 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