atural position as way stations lent them preeminence so long as
navigation held to short "laps," and was restricted to enclosed seas. In
the wide expanse of the open ocean, similar sparsely scattered isles,
like Ascension, St. Helena, the Canaries and Hawaii, assumed importance
in proportion to their scarcity. Though never the centers of rife
intercourse like Delos and Gotland, those lying conspicuously in the
track of commerce have succeeded in drawing to themselves the typical
polyglot nodal population. Mauritius, located at the southwestern
entrance of the Indian Ocean about equally distant from Aden, Ceylon,
Bombay, Singapore and West Australia, and possessing the best harbor
within many hundred miles, has been held successively by Dutch, French
and English, and to-day has a dense population of French, English and
Hindus.[867] A situation at the northeast entrance to the Caribbean Sea,
keystone of the vast arch formed by the Greater and Lesser Antilles,
made the island of St. Thomas a natural distributing point for this
whole basin. Facing that much traveled Virgin Passage, and forming the
first objective of vessels bound from Europe to Panama, it became a
great ship rendezvous, and assumed strategic and commercial importance
from early times. We find the same political owners here as in Mauritius
and in the same order--Dutch, French and English, though in 1671 the
island was occupied by the Danes, then from 1807 to 1815 by the English
again, and finally secured by the Danes.[868] The history of the Falkland
Islands is a significant reflection of their location on the south
oceanic trade route, where they command the entrance to the Magellan
Straits and the passage round the Horn, Here on the outskirts of the
world, where they form the only break in the wide blank surface of the
South Atlantic, they have been coveted and held in turn by the chief
European powers having colonies in the Orient,--by France, Spain,
England, Spain again, England again, by Argentine in 1820, and finally
by England since 1833. Their possession was of especial advantage to
Great Britain, which had no other base in this part of the world
intermediate between England and New Zealand.

[Sidenote: Thalassic islands as goals of expansion.]

Islands located in enclosed seas display the transitional character of
border districts. They are outposts of the surrounding shores, and
become therefore the first objective of every expanding movement,
wh