Azores,[937] but drops in the badly placed Cape Verde Island, exposed to tropical heat and the desiccating tradewinds blowing off the Sahara.  Spain’s average rises twenty-five per cent. in the Canary Islands, which she has colonized, and France’s nearly doubles in the French West Indies.  The British West Indies, also, with the exception of the broken coral bank constituting the Bahamas, show a similar surprising density of population, which in Bermuda and Barbadoes surpasses that of England, and approximates the teeming human life of the Channel Isles.

[Sidenote:  Density of population in Polynesia.]

This general tendency toward a close packing of the population in the smaller areas of land comes out just as distinctly in islands inhabited by natural peoples in the lower stages of development.  Despite the retarded economic methods peculiar to savagery and barbarism, the Polynesian islands, for instance, often show a density of population equal to that of Spain and Greece (100 to the square mile) and exceeding that of European Turkey and Russia.  “Over the whole extent of the South Sea,” says Robert Louis Stevenson, “from one tropic to another, we find traces of a bygone state of over-population, when the resources of even a tropical soil were taxed, and even the improvident Polynesian trembled for the future."[938] He calls the Gilbert atolls “warrens of men."[939] One of them, Drummond’s Island, with, an area of about twenty square miles, contained a population of 10,000 in 1840, and all the atolls were densely populated.[940] To-day they count 35,000 inhabitants in less than 200 square miles.  The neighboring Marshall group has 15,000 on its 158 square miles of area.  The Caroline and Pelew archipelagoes show a density of 69 to the square mile, the Tonga or Friendly group harbor about 60 and the French holdings of Futuma and Wallis (or Uea) the same.[941] So the Bismarck Archipelago, Solomon, Hawaiian, Samoan and Marianne islands have to-day populations by no means sparse, despite the blight that everywhere follows the contact of superior with primitive peoples.

[Sidenote:  Various causes of this density.]

In all these cases, if economic status be taken into account, we have a density bordering on congestion; but the situation assumes a new aspect if we realize that the crowded inhabitants of small islands often have the run of the coco plantations and fishing grounds of an entire archipelago.  The smaller, less desirable islands are retained as fish and coco-palm preserves to be visited only periodically.  Of a low, cramped, monotonous coral group, often only the largest and most productive is inhabited,[942] but that contains a population surprising in view of the small base, restricted resources and low cultural status of its inhabitants.  The population of the wide-strewn Paumota atolls was estimated as about 10,000 in 1840.  Of these fully one-half lived on Anaa or Chain Island, and one-fourth on Gambier, but they levied on the resources of the other islands for supplies.[943] The Tonga Islands at the same time were estimated to have 20,000 inhabitants, about half of whom were concentrated on Tongatabu, while Hapai and Varao held about 4,000 each.[944]