The great importance of such islands has been due solely to their location.  Their size and resources are negligible quantities, but their natural 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, whether commercial or political, setting out from the adjacent coasts.  Such islands are swept by successive waves of conquest or colonization, and they carry in their people and language evidences of the wrack left behind on their shores.  This has been the history of Aegina, Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, Malta, Corfu, Sicily and Sardinia.  That of Cyprus is typical.  It was the first island base for the ancient Tyrian