The smaller these island marts and the wider their circle of trade, the more mixed is their population.  Thursday Isle, an English coaling-station in Torres Strait, is a port of call for all steamers bound from Europe or China for east Australian ports, besides being a center of a big local trade in pearl shell and tripang.  Hence its population of 526 souls comprises 270 Europeans of various nationalities, including British, Germans, Scandinavians, Danes, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Australians of European origin, besides 256 South Sea Islanders, Papuans, Africans, Philippines, Chinese and other Asiatics.[861]

[Sidenote:  Mixed population of island markets.]

Antiquity shows the same thing on a smaller scale, which grew, however, with the expansion of the circle of commerce.  Ancient Aegina in the Saronic Gulf received inhabitants from Crete, Argos, Epidaurus in eastern Argolis and Athens; it became a central maritime market and its people sea-traders, whose goods of a certain small kind became known as “Aegina wares."[862] Delos at the crossroads of the Aegean was the center of longer radii.  It became the inn for travelers and merchants sailing from Asia and Egypt to Italy and Greece, and hence drew to itself the trade and people of the whole Mediterranean basin.[863] The northwestern Indian Ocean had a similar emporium in the ancient Dioscoridis, (Sokotra) which focused on itself the trade between Arabia and eastern Africa.[864]

Ceylon’s location made it in ancient and medieval times the common meeting place for Arab traders from the west and Chinese merchants from the east; it thus became the Sicily of the semi-enclosed North Indian Ocean.  To-day its capital Colombo is “the Clapham Junction of the Eastern Seas,” where passengers change steamers for China, India and Australia; a port of call for vessels passing from the Straits of Malacca to the Persian Gulf or Mediterranean.  Hence Ceylon’s solid nucleus of Singhalese and Tamil population, protected against absorption by the large area of the island (25,365 square miles) is interspersed in the coastal districts with Arabs, Portuguese, Eurasians dating from the old Portuguese occupation, and some ten thousand Europeans.[865] The island of Gotland, located at the crossroads of the Baltic, was early adopted by the Hanseatic merchants as their maritime base for the exploitation of Swedish, Finnish, and Russian trade.  Here were “peoples of divers tongues,” so the old chronicles say, while the archeological finds of Byzantine, Cufic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon and German coins testify to the wide circle of trade whose radii focused at this nodal point of the Baltic.[866]

[Sidenote:  Significant location of island way stations.]