VIII. COAST PEOPLES…

VIII. COAST PEOPLES

[Sidenote: The coast a zone of transition.]

Of all geographical boundaries, the most important is that between land and sea. The coast, in its physical nature, is a zone of transition between these two dominant forms of the earth's surface; it bears the mark of their contending forces, varying in its width with every stronger onslaught of the unresting sea, and with every degree of passive resistance made by granite or sandy shore. So too in an anthropo-geographical sense, it is a zone of transition. Now the life-supporting forces of the land are weak in it, and it becomes merely the rim of the sea; for its inhabitants the sea means food, clothes, shelter, fuel, commerce, highway, and opportunity. Now the coast is dominated by the exuberant forces of a productive soil, so that the ocean beyond is only a turbulent waste and a long-drawn barrier: the coast is the hem of the land. Neither influence can wholly exclude the other in this amphibian belt, for the coast remains the intermediary between the habitable expanse of the land and the international highway of the sea. The break of the waves and the dash of the spray draw the line beyond which human dwellings cannot spread; for these the shore is the outermost limit, as for ages also in the long infancy of the races, before the invention of boat and sail, it drew the absolute boundary to human expansion. In historical order, its first effect has been that of a barrier, and for the majority of peoples this it has remained; but with the development of navigation and the spread of human activities from the land over sea to other countries, it became the gateway both of land and sea--at once the outlet for exploration, colonization, and trade, and the open door through which a continent or island receives contributions of men or races or ideas from transoceanic shores. Barrier and threshold: these are the roles which coasts have always played in history. To-day we see them side by side. But in spite of the immense proportions assumed by transmarine intercourse, the fact remains that the greater part of the coasts of the earth are for their inhabitants only a barrier and not an outlet, or at best only a base for timorous ventures seaward that rarely lose sight of the shore.

[Sidenote: Width of coastal zones.]

As intermediary belt between land and sea, the coast becomes a peculiar habitat which leaves its mark upon its people. We speak of coast strips, coastal plains, "tidewater country," coast cities; of coast tribes, coast peoples, maritime colonies; and each word brings up a picture of a land or race or settlement permeated by the influences of the sea. The old term of "coastline" has no application to such an intermediary belt, for it is a zone of measurable width; and this width varies with the relief of the land, the articulation of the coast according as it is uniform or complex, with the successive stages of civilization and the development of navigation among the people who inhabit it.

Along highly articulated coasts, showing the interpenetration of sea and land in a broad band of capes and islands separated by tidal channels and inlets, or on shores deeply incised by river estuaries, or on low shelving beaches which screen brackish lagoons and salt marshes behind sand reefs and dune ramparts, and which thus form an indeterminate boundary of alternate land and water, the zone character of the coast in a physical sense becomes conspicuous. In an anthropological sense the zone character is clearly indicated by the different uses of its inner and outer edge made by man in different localities and in different periods of history.

[Sidenote: The inner edge.]

The old German maritime cities of the North Sea and the Baltic were located on rivers from 6 to 60 miles from the open sea, always on the inner edge of the coastal belt. Though primarily trading towns, linked together once in the sovereign confederacy of the Hanseatic League, they fixed their sites on the last spurs of firm ground running out into the soft, yielding alluvium, which was constantly exposed to inundation. Land high enough to be above the ever threatening flood of river and storm-driven tide on this flat coast, and solid enough to be built upon, could not be found immediately on the sea. The slight elevations of sandy "geest" or detrital spurs were limited in area and in time outgrown. Hence the older part of all these river towns, from Bremen to Koenigsberg, rests upon hills, while in every case the newer and lower part is built on piles or artificially raised ground on the alluvium.[412] So Utrecht, the Ultrajectum of the Romans, selected for its site a long raised spur running out from the solid ground of older and higher land into the water-soaked alluvium of the Netherlands. It was the most important town of all this region before the arts of civilization began the conquest by dike and ditch of the amphibian coastal belt which now comprises one-fourth of the area and holds one-half the population of the Netherlands.[413] So ancient London marked the solid ground at the inner edge of the tidal flats and desolate marshes which lined the Thames estuary, as the Roman Camulodunum and its successor Colchester on its steep rise or dun overlooked the marshes of the Stour inlet.[414] Farther north about the Wash, which in Roman days extended far inland over an area of fens and tidal channels, Cambridge on the River Cam, Huntingdon and Stamford on the Nen, and Lincoln on the Witham--all river seaports--defined the firm inner edge of this wide low coast. In the same way the landward rim of the tidal waters and salt marshes of the Humber inlet was described by a semicircle of British and Roman towns--Doncaster, Castleford, Todcaster, and York.[415] On the flat or rolling West African coastland, which lines the long shores of the Gulf of Guinea with a band 30 to 100 miles wide, the sandy, swampy tracts immediately on the sea are often left uninhabited; native population is distributed most frequently at the limit of deep water, and here at head of ship-navigation the trading towns are found.[416]

[Sidenote: Inner edge as head of sea navigation.]

While, on low coasts at any rate, the inner edge tends to mark the limit of settlement advancing from the interior, as the head of sea navigation on river and inlet it has also been the goal of immigrant settlers from oversea lands. The history of modern maritime colonization, especially in America, shows that the aim of regular colonists, as opposed to mere traders, has been to penetrate as far as possible into the land while retaining communication with the sea, and thereby with the mother country. The small boats in use till the introduction of steam navigation fixed this line far inland and gave the coastal zone a greater breadth than it has at present, and a more regular contour. In colonial America this inner edge coincided with the "fall-line" of the Atlantic rivers, which was indicated by a series of seaport towns; or with the inland limit of the tides, which on the St. Lawrence fell above Quebec, and on the Hudson just below Albany.

[Sidenote: Shifting of the inner edge.]

With the recent increase in the size of vessels, two contrary effects are noticed. In the vast majority of cases, the inner edge, as marked by ports, moves seaward into deeper water, and the zone narrows. The days when almost every tobacco plantation in tidewater Virginia had its own wharf are long since past, and the leaf is now exported by way of Norfolk and Baltimore. Seville has lost practically all its sea trade to Cadiz, Rouen to Havre, and Dordrecht to Rotterdam. In other cases the zone preserves its original width by the creation of secondary ports on or near the outer edge, reserved only for the largest vessels, while the inner harbor, by dredging its channel, improves its communication with the sea. Thus arises the phenomenon of twin ports like Bremen and Bremerhaven, Dantzig and Neufahrwasser, Stettin and Swinemuende, Bordeaux and Pauillac, London and Tilbury. Or the original harbor seeks to preserve its advantage by canalizing the shallow approach by river, lagoon, or bay, as St. Petersburg by the Pantiloff canal through the shallow reaches of Kronstadt Bay; or Koenigsberg by its ship canal, carried for 25 miles across the Frisches Haff to the Baltic;[417] or Nantes by the Loire ship canal, which in 1892 was built to regain for the old town the West Indian trade recently intercepted by the rising outer port of St. Nazaire, at the mouth of the Loire estuary.[418] In northern latitudes, however, the outer ports on enclosed sea basins like the Baltic become dominant in the winter, when the inner ports are ice-bound. Otherwise the outer port sinks with every improvement in the channel between the inner port and the sea. Hamburg has so constantly deepened the Elbe passage that its outport of Cuxhaven has had little chance to rise, and serves only as an emergency harbor; while on the Weser, maritime leadership has oscillated between Bremen and Bremerhaven.[419] So the whole German coast and the Russian Baltic have seen a more or less irregular shifting backward and forward of maritime importance between the inner and the outer edges.

[Sidenote: Artificial extension of inner edge.]

The width of the coast zone is not only prevented from contracting by dredging and canaling, but it is even increased. By deepening the channel, the chief port of the St. Lawrence River has been removed from Quebec 180 miles upstream to Montreal, and that of the Clyde from Port Glasgow 16 miles to Glasgow itself, so that now the largest ocean steamers come to dock where fifty years ago children waded across the stream at ebb tide. Such artificial modifications, however, are rare, for they are made only where peculiarly rich resources or superior lines of communication with the hinterland justify the expenditures; but they find their logical conclusion in still farther extensions of sea navigation into the interior by means of ship canals, where previously no waterway existed. Instances are found in the Manchester ship canal and the Welland, which, by means of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, makes Chicago accessible to ocean vessels. Though man distinguishes between sea and inland navigation in his definitions, in his practice he is bound by no formula and recognizes no fundamental difference where rivers, lakes, and canals are deep enough to admit his sea-going craft.

Such deep landward protrusions of the head of marine navigation at certain favored points, as opposed to its recent coastward trend in most inlets and rivers, increase the irregularity of the inner edge of the coast zone by the marked discrepancy between its maximum and minimum width. They are limited, however, to a few highly civilized countries, and to a few points in those countries. But their presence testifies to the fact that the evolution of the coast zone with the development of civilization shows the persistent importance of this inner edge.

[Sidenote: Outer edge in original settlement.]

The outer edge finds its greatest significance, which is for the most part ephemeral, in the earlier stages of navigation, maritime colonization, and in some cases of original settlement. But this importance persists only on steep coasts furnishing little or no level ground for cultivation and barred from interior hunting or grazing land; on many coral and volcanic islands of the Pacific Ocean whose outer rim has the most fertile soil and furnishes the most abundant growth of coco palms, and whose limited area only half suffices to support the population; and in polar and sub-polar districts, where harsh climatic conditions set a low limit to economic development. In all these regions the sea must provide most of the food of the inhabitants, who can therefore never lose contact with its waters. In mountainous Tierra del Fuego, whose impenetrably forested slopes rise directly from the sea, with only here and there a scanty stretch of stony beach, the natives of the southern and western coasts keep close to the shore. The straits and channels yield them all their food, and are the highways for all their restless, hungry wanderings.[420] The steep slopes and dense forests preclude travel by land, and force the wretched inhabitants to live as much in their canoes as in their huts. The Tlingit and Haida Indians of the mountainous coast of southern Alaska locate their villages on some smooth sheltered beach, with their houses in a single row facing the water, and the ever-ready canoe drawn up on shore in front. They select their sites with a view to food supply, and to protection in case of attack. On the treeless shores of Kadiak Island and of the long narrow Alaska Peninsula near by, the Eskimo choose their village location for an accumulation of driftwood, for proximity to their food supply, and a landing-place for their kayaks and bidarkas. Hence they prefer a point of land or gravel spit extending out into the sea, or a sand reef separating a salt-water lagoon from the open sea. The Aleutian Islanders regard only accessibility to the shell-fish on the beach and their pelagic hunting and fishing; and this consideration has influenced the Eskimo tribes of the wide Kuskokwin estuary to such an extent, that they place their huts only a few feet above ordinary high tide, where they are constantly exposed to overflow from the sea.[421] Only among the great tidal channels of the Yukon delta are they distributed over the whole wide coastal zone, even to its inner edge.

The coast Chukches of northeastern Siberia locate their tent villages on the sand ramparts between the Arctic Ocean and the freshwater lagoons which line this low tundra shore. Here they are conveniently situated for fishing and hunting marine animals, while protected against the summer inundations of the Arctic rivers.[422] The whole western side of Greenland, from far northern Upernivik south to Cape Farewell, shows both Eskimo and Danish settlements almost without exception on projecting points of peninsulas or islands, where the stronger effect of the warm ocean current, as well as proximity to the food supply, serve to fix their habitations; although the remains of the old Norse settlements in general are found in sheltered valleys with summer vegetation, striking off from the fiords some 20 miles back from the outer coast.[423] Caesar found that the ancient Veneti, an immigrant people of the southern coast of Brittany, built their towns on the points of capes and promontories, sites which gave them ready contact with the sea and protection against attack from the land side, because every rise of the tide submerged the intervening lowlands.[424] Here a sterile plateau hinterland drove them for part of their subsistence to the water, and the continuous intertribal warfare of small primitive states to the sea-girt asylums of the capes.

[Sidenote: Outer edge in early navigation.]

In the early history of navigation and exploration, striking features of this outer coast edge, like headlands and capes, became important sea marks. The promontory of Mount Athos, rising 6,400 feet above the sea between the Hellespont and the Thessalian coast, and casting its shadow as far as the market-place of Lemnos, was a guiding point for mariners in the whole northern Aegean.[425] For the ancient Greeks Cape Malia was long the boundary stone to the unknown wastes of the western Mediterranean, just as later the Pillars of Hercules marked the portals to the mare tenebrosum of the stormy Atlantic. So the Sacred Promontory (Cape St. Vincent) of the Iberian Peninsula defined for Greeks and Romans the southwestern limit of the habitable world.[426] Centuries later the Portuguese marked their advance down the west coast of Africa, first by Cape Non, which so long said "No!" to the struggling mariner, then by Cape Bojador, and finally by Cape Verde.

In coastwise navigation, minor headlands and inshore islands were points to steer by; and in that early maritime colonization, which had chiefly a commercial aim, they formed the favorite spots for trading stations. The Phoenicians in their home country fixed their settlements by preference on small capes, like Sidon and Berytus, or on inshore islets, like Tyre and Aradus,[427] and for their colonies and trading stations they chose similar sites, whether on the coast of Sicily,[428] Spain, or Morocco.[429] Carthage was located on a small hill-crowned cape projecting out into the Bay of Carthage. The two promontories embracing this inlet were edged with settlements, especially the northern arm, which held Utica and Hippo,[430] the latter on the site of the modern French naval station of Bizerta.

[Sidenote: Outer edge and piracy.]

In this early Hellenic world, when Greek sea-power was in its infancy, owing to the fear of piracy, cities were placed a few miles back from the coast; but with the partial cessation of this evil, sites on shore and peninsula were preferred as being more accessible to commerce,[431] and such of the older towns as were in comparatively easy reach of the seaboard established there each its own port. Thus we find the ancient urban pairs of Argos and Nauplia, Troezene and Pogon, Mycenae and Eiones, Corinth commanding its Aegean port of Cenchreae 8 miles away on the Saronic Gulf to catch the Asiatic trade, and connected by a walled thoroughfare a mile and a half long with Lechaeum, a second harbor on the Corinthian Gulf which served the Italian commerce.[432] In the same group belonged Athens and its Piraeus, Megara and Pegae, Pergamus and Elaae in western Asia Minor.[433] These ancient twin cities may be taken to mark the two borders of the coast zone. Like the modern ones which we have considered above, their historical development has shown an advance from the inner toward the outer edge, though owing to different causes. However, the retired location of the Baltic and North Sea towns of Germany served as a partial protection against the pirates who, in the Middle Ages, scoured these coasts.[434] Lubeck, originally located nearer the sea than at present, and frequently demolished by them, was finally rebuilt farther inland up the Trave River.[435] Later the port of Travemuende grew up at the mouth of the little estuary.

[Sidenote: Outer edge in colonization.]

The early history of maritime colonization shows in general two geographic phases: first, the appropriation of the islet and headland outskirts of the seaboard, and later--it may be much later--an advance toward the inner edge of the coast, or yet farther into the interior. Progress from the earlier to the maturer phase depends upon the social and economic development of the colonizers, as reflected in their valuation of territorial area. The first phase, the outcome of a low estimate of the value of land, is best represented by the Phoenician and earliest Greek colonies, whose purposes were chiefly commercial, and who sought merely such readily accessible coastal points as furnished the best trading stations on the highway of the Mediterranean and the adjacent seas. The earlier Greek colonies, like those of the Triopium promontory forming the south-western angle of Asia Minor, Chalcidice, the Thracian Chersonesus, Calchedon, Byzantium, the Pontic Heraclea, and Sinope, were situated on peninsulas or headlands, that would afford a convenient anchor ground; or, like Syracuse and Mitylene, on small inshore islets, which were soon outgrown, and from which the towns then spread to the mainland near by. The advantages of such sites lay in their accessibility to commerce, and in their natural protection against the attack of strange or hostile mainland tribes. For a nation of merchants, satisfied with the large returns but also with the ephemeral power of middlemen, these considerations sufficed. While the Phoenician trading posts in Africa dotted the outer rim of the coast, the inner edge of the zone was indicated by Libyan or Ethiopian towns, where the inhabitants of the interior bartered their ivory and skins for the products of Tyre.[436] So that commercial expansion of the Arabs down the east coast of Africa in the first and again in the tenth century seized upon the offshore islands of Zanzibar, Pemba, and Mafia, the small inshore islets like Mombasa and Lamu, and the whole outer rim of the coast from the equator southward to the Rovuma River.[437] The Sultan of Zanzibar, heir to this coastal strip, had not expanded it a decade ago, when he had to relinquish the long thread of his continental possessions.

[Sidenote: Inland advance of colonies.]

But when a people has advanced to a higher conception of colonization as an outlet for national as well as commercial expansion, and when it sees that the permanent prosperity of both race and trade in the new locality depends upon the occupation of larger tracts of territory and the development of local resources as a basis for exchanges, their settlements spread from the outer rim of the coasts to its inner edge and yet beyond, if alluvial plains and river highways are present to tempt inland expansion. Such was the history of many later colonies of the Greeks[438] and Carthaginians, and especially of most modern colonial movements, for these have been dominated by a higher estimate of the value of land.

After the long Atlantic journey, the outposts of the American coast were welcome resting-places to the early European voyagers, but, owing to their restricted area and therefore limited productivity, they were soon abandoned, or became mere bases for inland expansion. The little island of Cuttyhunk, off southern Massachusetts, was the site of Gosnold's abortive attempt at colonization in 1602, like Raleigh's attempt on Roanoke Island in 1585, and the later one of Popham on the eastern headland of Casco Bay. The Pilgrims paused at the extremity of Cape Cod, and again on Clark's Island, before fixing their settlement on Plymouth Bay. Monhegan Island, off the Maine coast, was the site of an early English trading post, which, however, lasted only from 1623 to 1626;[439] and the same dates fix the beginning and end of a fishing and trading station established on Cape Ann, and removed later to Salem harbor. The Swedes made their first settlement in America on Cape Henlopen, at the entrance of Delaware Bay; but their next, only seven years later, they located well up the estuary of the Delaware River. Thus for the modern colonist the outer edge of the coast is merely the gateway of the land. From it he passes rapidly to the settlement of the interior, wherever fertile soil and abundant resources promise a due return upon his labor.

[Sidenote: Interpenetration of land and sea.]

Since it is from the land, as the inhabited portion of the earth's surface, that all maritime movements emanate, and to the land that all oversea migrations are directed, the reciprocal relations between land and sea are largely determined by the degree of accessibility existing between the two. This depends primarily upon the articulation of a land-mass, whether it presents an unbroken contour like Africa and India, or whether, like Europe and Norway, it drops a fringe of peninsulas and a shower of islands into the bordering ocean. Mere distance from the sea bars a country from its vivifying contact; every protrusion of an ocean artery into the heart of a continent makes that heart feel the pulse of life on far-off, unseen shores. The Baltic inlet which makes a seaport of St. Petersburg 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) back from the western rim of Europe, brings Atlantic civilization to this half-Asiatic side of the continent. The solid front presented by the Iberian Peninsula and Africa to the Atlantic has a narrow crack at Gibraltar, whence the Mediterranean penetrates inland 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers), and converts the western foot of the Caucasus and the roots of the Lebanon Mountains into a seaboard. By means of the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean runs northward 1,300 miles (2,200 kilometers) from Cape Comorin to meet the Indus delta; and then turns westward 700 miles farther through the Oman and Persian gulfs to receive the boats from the Tigris and Euphrates. Such marine inlets create islands and peninsulas; which are characterized by proximity to the sea on all or many sides; and in the interior of the continents they produce every degree of nearness, shading off into inaccessible remoteness from the watery highway of the deep.

The success with which such indentations open up the interior of the continents depends upon the length of the inlets and the size of the land-mass in question. Africa's huge area and unbroken contour combine to hold the sea at arm's length, Europe's deep-running inlets open that small continent so effectively that Kazan, Russia's most eastern city of considerable size, is only 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) distant from the nearest White Sea, Baltic, and Azof ports. Asia, the largest of all the continents, despite a succession of big indentations that invade its periphery from Sinai peninsula to East Cape, has a vast inland area hopelessly far from the surrounding oceans.

[Sidenote: Ratio of shoreline to area.]

In order to determine the coast articulation of any country or continent, Carl Ritter and his followers divided area by shoreline, the latter a purely mathematical line representing the total contour length. By this method Europe's ratio is one linear mile of coast to 174 square miles of area, Australia's 1:224, Asia's 1:490, and Africa's 1:700. This means that Europe's proportion of coast is three times that of Asia and four times that of Africa; that a country like Norway, with a shoreline of 12,000 miles traced in and out along the fiords and around the larger islands,[440] has only 10 square miles of area for every mile of seaboard, while Germany, with every detail of its littoral included in the measurement, has only 1,515 miles of shoreline and a ratio of one mile of coast to every 159 square miles of area.

The criticism has been made against this method that it compares two unlike measures, square and linear, which moreover increase or decrease in markedly different degrees, according as larger or smaller units are used. But for the purposes of anthropo-geography the method is valid, inasmuch as it shows the amount of area dependent for its marine outline upon each mile of littoral. A coast, like every other boundary, performs the important function of intermediary in the intercourse of a land with its neighbors; hence the length of this sea boundary materially affects this function. Area and coastline are not dead mathematical quantities, but like organs of one body stand in close reciprocal activity, and can be understood only in the light of their persistent mutual relations. The division of the area of a land by the length of its coastline yields a quotient which to the anthropo-geographer is not a dry figure, but an index to the possible relations between seaboard and interior. A comparison of some of these ratios will illustrate this fact.

Germany's shoreline, traced in contour without including details, measures 787 miles; this is just one-fifth that of Italy and two-fifths that of France, so that it is short. But since Germany's area is nearly twice Italy's and a little larger than that of France, it has 267 square miles of territory for every mile of coast, while Italy has only 28 square miles, and France 106. Germany has towns that are 434 miles from the nearest seaboard, but in Italy the most inland point is only 148 miles from the Mediterranean.[441] If we turn now to the United States and adopt Mendenhall's estimate of its general or contour coastline as 5,705 miles, we find that our country has 530 square miles of area dependent for its outlet upon each mile of seaboard. This means that our coast has a heavy task imposed upon it, and that its commercial and political importance is correspondingly enhanced; that the extension of our Gulf of Mexico littoral by the purchase of Florida and the annexation of Texas were measures of self-preservation, and that the unbroken contour and mountain-walled face of our Pacific littoral is a serious national handicap.

[Sidenote: Criticism of this formula.]

But this method is open to the legitimate and fundamental criticism that, starting from the conception of a coast as a mere line instead of a zone, it ignores all those features which belong to every littoral as a strip of the earth's surface--location, geologic structure, relief, area, accessibility to the sea in front and to the land behind, all which vary from one part of the world's seaboard to another, and serve to differentiate the human history of every littoral. Moreover, of all parts of the earth's surface, the coast as the hem of the sea and land, combining the characters of each, is most complex. It is the coast as a human habitat that primarily concerns anthropo-geography. A careful analysis of the multifarious influences modifying one another in this mingled environment of land and water reveals an intricate interplay of geographic forces, varying from inland basin to marginal sea, from marginal sea to open ocean, and changing from one historical period to another--an interplay so mercurial that it could find only a most inadequate expression in the rigid mathematical formula of Carl Ritter.

[Sidenote: Accessibility of coasts from hinterland.]

As the coast, then, is the border zone between the solid, inhabited land and the mobile, untenanted deep, two important factors in its history are the accessibility of its back country on the one hand, and the accessibility of the sea on the other. A littoral population barred from its hinterland by mountain range or steep plateau escarpment or desert tract feels little influence from the land; level or fertile soil is too limited in amount to draw inland the growing people, intercourse is too difficult and infrequent, transportation too slow and costly. Hence the inhabitants of such a coast are forced to look seaward for their racial and commercial expansion, even if a paucity of good harbors limits the accessibility of the sea; they must lead a somewhat detached and independent existence, so far as the territory behind them is concerned. Here the coast, as a peripheral organ of the interior, as the outlet for its products, the market for its foreign exchanges, and the medium for intercourse with its maritime neighbors, sees its special function impaired. But it takes advantage of its isolation and the protection of a long sea boundary to detach itself politically from its hinterland, as the histories of Phoenicia, the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, Dalmatia, the republics of Amalfi, Venice, and Genoa, the county of Barcelona, and Portugal abundantly prove. At the same time it profits by its seaboard location to utilize the more varied fields of maritime enterprise before it, in lieu of the more or less forbidden territory behind it. The height and width of the landward barrier, the number and practicability of the passways across it, and especially the value of the hinterland's products in relation to their bulk, determine the amount of intercourse between that hinterland and its mountain or desert barred littoral.

[Sidenote: Mountain-barred hinterlands.]

The interior is most effectively cut off from the periphery, where a mountain range or a plateau escarpment traces the inner line of the coastland, as in the province of Liguria in northern Italy, Dalmatia, the western or Malabar coast of India, most parts of Africa, and long stretches of the Pacific littoral of the Americas. The highland that backs the Norwegian coast is crossed by only one railroad, that passing through the Trondhjem depression; and this barrier has served to keep Norway's historical connection with Sweden far less intimate than with Denmark. The long inlet of the Adriatic, bringing the sea well into the heart of Southern Europe, has seen nevertheless a relatively small maritime development, owing to the wall of mountains that everywhere shuts out the hinterland of its coasts. The greatness of Venice was intimately connected with the Brenner Pass over the Alps on the one hand, and the trade of the eastern Mediterranean on the other. Despite Austro-Hungary's crucial interest in the northeast corner of the Adriatic as a maritime outlet for this vast inland empire, and its herculean efforts at Trieste and Fiume to create harbors and to connect them by transmontane railroads with the valley of the Danube, the maritime development of this coast is still restricted, and much of Austria's trade goes out northward by German ports.[442] Farther south along the Dalmatian and Albanian coasts, the deep and sheltered bays between the half-submerged roots of the Dinaric Alps have developed only local importance, because they lack practicable connection with the interior. This was their history too in early Greek and Roman days, for they found only scant support in the few caravans that crossed by the Roman road to Dyrrachium to exchange the merchandise of the Aegean for the products of the Ionian Isles. Spain has always suffered from the fact that her bare, arid, and unproductive tableland almost everywhere rises steeply from her fertile and densely populated coasts; and therefore that the two have been unable to cooeperate either for the production of a large maritime commerce or for national political unity. Here the diverse conditions of the littoral and the wall of the great central terrace of the country have emphasized that tendency to defection that belongs to every periphery, and therefore necessitated a strong centralized government to consolidate the restive maritime provinces with their diverse Galician, Basque, Catalonian, and Andalusian folk into one nation with the Castilians of the plateau.[443]

[Sidenote: Accessible hinterlands.]

Where mountain systems run out endwise into the sea, the longitudinal valleys with their drainage streams open natural highways from the interior to the coast. This structure has made the Atlantic side of the Iberian Peninsula far more open than its Mediterranean front, and therefore contributed to its leadership in maritime affairs since 1450. So from the shores of Thrace to the southern point of the Peloponnesus, all the valleys of Greece open out on the eastern or Asiatic side. Here every mountain-flanked bay has had its own small hinterland to draw upon, and every such interior has been accessible to the civilization of the Aegean; here was concentrated the maritime and cultural life of Hellas.[444] The northern half of Andean Colombia, by way of the parallel Atrato, Rio Cauco, and Magdalena valleys, has supported the activities of its Caribbean littoral, and through these avenues has received such foreign influences as might penetrate to inland Bogota. In like manner, the mountain-ridged peninsula of Farther India keeps its interior in touch with its leading ports through its intermontane valleys of the Irawadi, Salwin, Menam, and Mekong rivers.

Low coasts rising by easy gradients to wide plains, like those of northern France, Germany, southern Russia, and the Gulf seaboard of the United States, profit by an accessible and extensive hinterland. Occasionally, however, this advantage is curtailed by a political boundary reinforced by a high protective tariff, as Holland, Belgium, and East Prussia[445] know to their sorrow.

These low hems of the land, however, often meet physical obstructions to ready communications with the interior in the silted inlets, shallow lagoons, marshes, or mangrove swamps of the littoral itself. Here the larger drainage streams give access across this amphibian belt to the solid land behind. Where they flow into a tide-swept bay like the North Sea or the English Channel, they scour out their beds and preserve the connection between sea and land;[446] but debouchment into a tideless basin like the Caspian or the Gulf of Mexico, even for such mighty streams as the Volga and the Mississippi, sees the slow silting up of their mouths and the restriction of their agency in opening up the hinterland. Thus the character of the bordering sea may help to determine the accessibility of the coast from the land side.

[Sidenote: Accessibility of coasts from the sea.]

Its accessibility from the sea depends primarily upon its degree of articulation; and this articulation depends upon whether the littoral belt has suffered elevation or subsidence. When the inshore sea rests upon an uplifted bottom, the contour of the coast is smooth and unbroken, because most of the irregularities of surface have been overlaid by a deposit of waste from the land; so it offers no harbor except here and there a silted river mouth, while it shelves off through a broad amphibian belt of tidal marsh, lagoon, and sand reef to a shallow sea. Such is the coast of New Jersey, most of the Gulf seaboard of the United States and Mexico, the Coromandel coast of India, and the long, low littoral of Upper Guinea. Such coasts harbor a population of fishermen living along the strands of their placid lagoons,[447] and stimulate a timid inshore navigation which sometimes develops to extensive coastwise intercourse, where a network of lagoons and deltaic channels forms a long inshore passage, as in Upper Guinea, but which fears the break of the surf outside.[448]

The rivers draining these low uplifted lands are deflected from their straight path to the sea by coastwise deposits, and idly trail along for miles just inside the outer beach; or they are split up into numerous offshoots among the silt beds of a delta, to find their way by shallow, tortuous channels to the ocean, so that they abate their value as highways between sea and land. The silted mouths of the Nile excluded the larger vessels even of Augustus Caesar's time and admitted only their lighters,[449] just as to-day the lower Rufigi River loses much of its value to German East Africa because of its scant hospitality to vessels coming from the sea.

[Sidenote: Embayed coasts.]

The effect of subsidence, even on a low coastal plain, is to increase accessibility from the sea by flooding the previous river valleys and transforming them into a succession of long shallow inlets, alternating with low or hilly tongues of land. Such embayed coasts form our Atlantic seaboard from Delaware Bay, through Chesapeake Bay to Pamlico Sound, the North Sea face of England, the funnel-shaped "foerden" or firths on the eastern side of Jutland and Schleswig-Holstein, and the ragged sounds or "Bodden" that indent the Baltic shore of Germany from the Bay of Lubeck to the mouth of the Oder River.[450] Although the shallowness of the bordering sea and the sand-bars and sand reefs which characterize all flat coasts here also exclude the largest vessels, such coasts have nevertheless ample contact with both land and sea. They tend to develop, therefore, the activities appropriate to both. A fertile soil and abundant local resources, as in tidewater Maryland and Virginia, make the land more attractive than the sea; the inhabitants become farmers rather than sailors. On the other hand, an embayed coastland promising little return to the labor of tillage, but with abundant fisheries and a superior location for maritime trade, is sure to profit by the accessible sea, and achieve the predominant maritime activity which characterized the mediaeval Hanse Towns of northern Germany and colonial New England.

[Sidenote: Maritime activity on steep embayed coasts.]

Subsidence that brings the beat of the surf against the bolder reliefs of the land produces a ragged, indented coast, deep-water inlets penetrating far into the country, hilly or mountainous tongues of land running far out into the sea and breaking up into a swarm of islands and rocks, whose outer limits indicate approximately the old prediluvial line of shore.[451] Such are the fiord regions of Norway, southern Alaska, British Columbia, Greenland, and southern Chile; the Rias or submerged river valley coast of northwestern Spain; and the deeply sunken mountain flank of Dalmatia, whose every lateral valley has become a bay or a strait between mainland and island. All these coasts are characterized by a close succession of inlets, a limited amount of level country for settlement or cultivation, and in their rear a steep slope impeding communication with their hinterland. Inaccessibility from the land, a high degree of accessibility from the sea, and a paucity of local resources unite to thrust the inhabitants of such coasts out upon the deep, to make of them fishermen, seamen, and ocean carriers. The same result follows where no barrier on the land side exists, but where a granitic or glaciated soil in the interior discourages agriculture and landward expansion, as in Brittany, Maine, and Newfoundland. In all these the land repels and the sea attracts. Brittany furnishes one-fifth of all the sailors in France's merchant marine,[452] and its pelagic fishermen sweep the seas from Newfoundland to Iceland. Three-fifths of the maritime activity of the whole Austrian Empire is confined to the ragged coast of Dalmatia, which furnishes to-day most of the sailors for the imperial marine, just as in Roman days it manned the Adriatic fleet of the Caesars.[453] The Haida, Tsimshean, and Tlingit Indians of the ragged western coast of British Columbia and southern Alaska spread their villages on the narrow tide-swept hem of the land, and subsist chiefly by the generosity of the deep. They are poor landsmen, but excellent boat-makers and seamen, venturing sometimes twenty-five miles out to sea to gather birds' eggs from the outermost fringe of rocks.

[Sidenote: Contrasted coastal belts.]

As areas of elevation or subsidence are, as a rule, extensive, it follows that coasts usually present long stretches of smooth simple shoreline, or a long succession of alternating inlet and headland. Therefore different littoral belts show marked contrasts in their degree of accessibility to the sea, and their harbors appear in extensive groups of one type--fiords, river estuaries, sand or coral reef lagoons, and embayed mountain roots. A sudden change in relief or in geologic history sees one of these types immediately succeeded by a long-drawn group of a different type. Such a contrast is found between the Baltic and North Sea ports of Denmark and Germany, the eastern and southern seaboards of England, the eastern and western sides of Scotland, and the Pacific littoral of North America north and south of Juan de Fuca Strait, attended by a contrasted history.

A common morphological history, marked by mountain uplift, glaciation, and subsidence, has given an historical development similar in not a few respects to the fiord coasts of New England, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, the Alaskan "panhandle," and southern Chile. Large subsidence areas on the Mediterranean coasts from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Bosporus have in essential features duplicated each other's histories, just as the low infertile shores of the Baltic from Finland to the Skager Rack have had much in common in their past development.

Where, however, a purely local subsidence, as in Kamerun Bay and Old Calabar on the elsewhere low monotonous stretch of the Upper Guinea coast,[454] or a single great river estuary, as in the La Plata and the Columbia, affords a protected anchorage on an otherwise portless shore, such inlets assume increased importance. In the long unbroken reach of our Pacific seaboard, San Francisco Bay and the Columbia estuary are of inestimable value; while, by the treaty of 1848 with Mexico, the international boundary line was made to bend slightly south of west from the mouth of the Gila River to the coast, in order to include in the United States territory the excellent harbor of San Diego. The mere nicks in the rim of Southwest Africa constituting Walfish Bay and Angra Pequena assume considerable value as trading stations and places of refuge along that 1,200-mile reach of inhospitable coast extending from Cape Town north to Great Fish Bay.[455] It is worthy of notice in passing that, though both of these small inlets lie within the territory of German Southwest Africa, Walfish Bay with 20 miles of coast on either side is a British possession, and that two tiny islets which commands the entrance to the harbor of Angra Pequena, also belong to Great Britain. On the uniform coast of East Africa, the single considerable indentation formed by Delagoa Bay assumes immense importance, which, however, is due in part to the mineral wealth of its Transvaal hinterland. From this point northward for 35 degrees of latitude, a river mouth, like that fixing the site of Beira, or an inshore islet affording protected harborage, like that of Mombasa, serves as the single ocean gateway of a vast territory, and forms the terminus of a railroad--proof of its importance.

[Sidenote: Evolution of ports.]

The maritime evolution of all amply embayed coasts, except in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions inimical to all historical development, shows in its highest stage the gradual elimination of minor ports, and the concentration of maritime activity in a few favored ones, which have the deepest and most capacious harbors and the best river, canal, or railroad connection with the interior. The earlier stages are marked by a multiplicity of ports, showing in general activity nearly similar in amount and in kind. England's merchant marine in the fourteenth century was distributed in a large group of small but important ports on the southern coast, all which, owing to their favorable location, were engaged in the French and Flemish trade; and in another group on the east coast, reaching from Hull to Colchester, which participated in the Flemish, Norwegian, and Baltic trade.[456] Most of these have now declined before the overpowering competition of a few such seaboard marts as London, Hull, and Southampton. The introduction of steam trawlers into the fishing fleets has in like manner led to the concentration of the fishermen in a few large ports with good railroad facilities, such as Aberdeen and Grimsby, while the fishing villages that fringed the whole eastern and southern coasts have been gradually depopulated.[457] So in colonial days, when New England was little more than a cordon of settlements along that rock-bound littoral, almost every inlet had its port actively engaged in coastwise and foreign commerce in the West Indies and the Guinea Coast, in cod and mackerel fisheries, in whaling and shipbuilding, and this with only slight local variations. This widespread homogeneity of maritime activity has been succeeded by strict localization and differentiation, and reduction from many to few ports. So, for the whole Atlantic seaboard of the United States, evolution of seaports has been marked by increase of size attended by decrease of numbers.

[Sidenote: Offshore islands.]

A well dissected coast, giving ample contact with the sea, often fails nevertheless to achieve historical importance, unless outlying islands are present to ease the transition from inshore to pelagic navigation, and to tempt to wider maritime enterprise. The long sweep of the European coast from northern Norway to Brittany has played out a significant part of its history in that procession of islands formed by Iceland, the Faroes, Shetland, Orkneys, Great Britain, Ireland and the Channel Isles, whether it was the navigator of ancient Armorica steering his leather-sailed boat to the shores of Caesar's Britain, or the modern Breton fisherman pulling in his nets off the coasts of distant Iceland. The dim outline of mountainous Cyprus, seen against a far-away horizon from the slopes of Lebanon, beckoned the Phoenician ship-master thither to trade and to colonize, just as the early Etruscan merchants passed from their busy ironworks on the island of Elba over the narrow strait to visible Corsica.[458] It was on the eastern side of Greece, with its deep embayments, its valleys opening out to the Aegean, with its 483 islands scattered thickly as stars in the sky, and its Milky Way of the Cyclades leading to the deep, rich soils of the Asia Minor coast, with its sea-made contact with all the stimulating influences and dangers emanating from the Asiatic littoral, that Hellenic history played its impressive drama. Here was developed the spirit of enterprise that carried colonies to far western Sicily and Italy, while the western or rear side had a confined succession of local events, scarce worthy the name of history. Neither mountain-walled Epirus nor Corcyra had an Hellenic settlement in 735 B.C., at a date when the eastern Greeks had reached the Ionian coast of the Aegean and had set up a lonely group of colonies even on the Bay of Naples. Turning to America, we find that the Antilles received their population from the only two tribes, first the Arawaks and later the Caribs, who ever reached the indented northern coast of South America between the Isthmus of Panama and the mouth of the Orinoco. Here the small islands of the Venezuelan coast, often in sight, lured these peoples of river and shore to open-sea navigation, and drew them first to the Windward Isles, then northward step by step or island by island, to Hayti and Cuba.[459]

[Sidenote: Offshore islands as vestibules of the mainland.]

In all these instances, offshore islands tempt to expansion and thereby add to the historical importance of the nearby coast. Frequently, however, they achieve the same result by offering advantageous footholds to enterprising voyagers from remote lands, and become the medium for infusing life into hitherto dead coasts. The long monotonous littoral of East Africa from Cape Guadafui to the Cape of Good Hope, before the planting here of Portuguese way-stations on the road to India in the sixteenth century, was destitute of historical significance, except that stretch opposite the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, which Arab merchants in the tenth century appropriated as the basis for their slave and ivory trade. The East Indies and Ceylon have been so many offshore stations whence, first through the Portuguese, and later through the Dutch and English, European influences percolated into southeastern Asia. Asia, with its island-strewn shores, has diffused its influences over a broad zone of the western Pacific, and through the agency of its active restless Malays, even halfway across that ocean. In contrast, the western coast of the Americas, a stretch nearly 10,000 miles from Tierra del Fuego to the Aleutian chain, has seen its aboriginal inhabitants barred from seaward expansion by the lack of offshore islands, and its entrance upon the historical stage delayed till recent times.

In general it can be said that islandless seas attain a later historical development than those whose expanse is rendered less forbidding by hospitable fragments of land. This factor, as well as its location remote from the old and stimulating civilization of Syria and Asia Minor, operated to retard the development of the western Mediterranean long after the eastern basin had reached its zenith.

[Sidenote: Previous habitat of coast-dwellers.]

Coast-dwelling peoples exhibit every degree of intimacy with the water, from the amphibian life of many Malay tribes who love the wash of the waves beneath their pile-built villages, to the Nama Bushmen who inhabit the dune-walled coast of Southwest Africa, and know nothing of the sea. In the resulting nautical development the natural talents and habits of the people are of immense influence; but these in turn have been largely determined by the geographical environment of their previous habitat, whether inland or coastal, and by the duration in time, as well as the degree and necessity, of their contact with the sea. The Phoenicians, who, according to their traditions as variously interpreted, came to the coast of Lebanon either from the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea,[460] brought to their favorable maritime location a different endowment from that of the land-trading Philistines, who moved up from the south to occupy the sand-choked shores of Palestine,[461] or from that of the Jews, bred to the grasslands of Mesopotamia and the gardens of Judea, who only at rare periods in their history forced their way to the sea.[462] The unindented coast stretching from Cape Carmel south to the Nile delta never produced a maritime people and never achieved maritime importance, till a race of experienced mariners like the Greeks planted their colonies and built their harbor moles on the shores of Sharon and Philistia.[463] So on the west face of Africa, from the Senegal southward along the whole Guinea Coast to Benguela, all evidences of kinship and tradition among the local tribes point to an origin on the interior plains and a recent migration seaward,[464] so that no previous schooling enabled them to exploit the numerous harbors along this littoral, as did later the sea-bred Portuguese and English.

[Sidenote: Habitability of coasts as factor in maritime development.]

Not only the accessibility of the coast from the sea, but also its habitability enters as a factor into its historical importance. A sandy desert coast, like that of Southwest Africa and much of the Peruvian littoral, or a sterile mountain face, like that of Lower California, excludes the people of the country from the sea. Saldanha Bay, the one good natural harbor on the west coast of Cape Colony, is worthless even to the enterprising English, because it has no supply of fresh water.[465] The slowness of the ancient Egyptians to take the short step forward from river to marine navigation can undoubtedly be traced to the fact that the sour swamps, barren sand-dunes, and pestilential marshes on the seaward side of the Nile delta must have always been sparsely populated as they are to-day,[466] and that a broad stretch of sandy waste formed their Red Sea littoral.

On the other hand, where the hem of the continents is fertile enough to support a dense population, a large number of people are brought into contact with the sea, even where no elaborate articulation lengthens the shoreline. When this teeming humanity of a garden littoral is barred from landward expansion by desert or mountain, or by the already overcrowded population of its own hinterland, it wells over the brim of its home country, no matter how large, and overflows to other lands across the seas. The congested population of the fertile and indented coast of southern China, though not strictly speaking a sea-faring people, found an outlet for their redundant humanity and their commerce in the tropical Sunda Islands. By the sixth century their trading junks were doing an active business in the harbors of Java, Sumatra, and Malacca; they had even reached Ceylon and the Persian Gulf, and a little later were visiting the great focal market of Aden at the entrance of the Red Sea.[467] A strong infusion of Chinese blood improved the Malay stock in the Sunda Islands, and later in North Borneo and certain of the Philippines, whither their traders and emigrants turned in the fourteenth century, when they found their opportunities curtailed in the archipelago to the south by the spread of Islam.[468] Now the "yellow peril" threatens the whole circle of these islands from Luzon to Sumatra.

Similarly India, first from its eastern, later from its western coast, sent a stream of traders, Buddhist priests, and colonists to the Sunda Islands, and especially to Java, as early as the fifth century of our era, whence Indian civilization, religion, and elements of the Sanskrit tongue spread to Borneo, Sumatra, Bali, Lombok, and even to some smaller islands among the Molucca group.[469] The Hindus became the dominant commercial nation of the Indian Ocean long before the great development of Arabian sea power, and later shared the trade of the East African coast with the merchants of Oman and Yemen.[470] To-day they form a considerable mercantile class in the ports of Mascat, Aden, Zanzibar, Pemba, and Natal.

[Sidenote: Geographic conditions for brilliant maritime development.]

On the coasts of large fertile areas like China and India, however, maritime activity comes not as an early, but as an eventual development, assumes not a dominant, but an incidental historical importance. The coastlands appearing early on the maritime stage of history, and playing a brilliant part in the drama of the sea, have been habitable, but their tillable fields have been limited either in fertility, as in New England, or in amount, as in Greece, or in both respects, as in Norway. But if blessed with advantageous location for international trade and many or even a few fairly good harbors, such coasts tend to develop wide maritime dominion and colonial expansion.[471]

Great fertility in a narrow coastal belt barred from the interior serves to concentrate and energize the maritime activities of the nation. The 20-mile wide plain stretching along the foot of the Lebanon range from Antioch to Cape Carmel is even now the garden of Syria.[472] In ancient Phoenician days its abundant crops and vines supported luxuriant cities and a teeming population, which sailed and traded and colonized to the Atlantic outskirts of Europe and Africa. Moreover, their maritime ventures had a wide sweep as early as 1100 B. C. Quite similar to the Phoenician littoral and almost duplicating its history, is the Oman seaboard of eastern Arabia. Here again a fertile coastal plain sprinkled with its "hundred villages," edged with a few tolerable harbors, and backed by a high mountain wall with an expanse of desert beyond, produced a race of bold and skilful navigators,[473] who in the Middle Ages used their location between the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea to make themselves the dominant maritime power of the Indian ocean. With them maritime expansion was typically wide in its sweep and rapid in its development. Even before Mohammed's time they had reached India; but under the energizing influences of Islam, by 758 they had established a flourishing trade with China, for which they set up way stations or staple-points in Canton and the Sunda Islands.[474] First as voyagers and merchants, then as colonists, they came, bringing their wares and their religion to these distant shores. Marco Polo, visiting Sumatra in 1260, tells us the coast population was "Saracen," but this was probably more in religion than in blood.[475] Oman ventures, seconded by those of Yemen, reached as far south as east. The trading stations of Madisha and Barawa were established on the Somali coast of East Africa in 908, and Kilwa 750 miles further south in 925. In the seventeenth century the Oman Arabs dislodged the intruding Portuguese from all this coast belt down to the present northern boundary of Portuguese East Africa. Even so late as 1850 their capital, Mascat, sent out fine merchantmen that did an extensive carrying trade, and might be seen loading in the ports of British India, in Singapore, Java, and Mauritius.

[Sidenote: Soil of coastlands as factor.]

Brittany's active part in the maritime history of France is due not only to its ragged contour, its inshore and offshore islands, its forward location on the Atlantic which brought it near to the fisheries of Newfoundland and the trade of the West Indies, but also to the fact that the "Golden Belt," which, with but few interruptions, forms a band of fertility along the coast, has supported a denser population than the sterile granitic soils of the interior,[476] while the sea near by varied and enriched the diet of the inhabitants by its abundance of fish, and in its limy seaweed yielded a valuable fertilizer for their gardens.[477] The small but countless alluvial deposits at the fiord heads in Norway, aided by the products of the sea, are able to support a considerable number of people. Hence the narrow coastal rim of that country shows always a density of population double or quadruple that of the next density belt toward the mountainous interior, and contains seventeen out of Norway's nineteen towns having more than 5,000 inhabitants.[478] It is this relative fertility of the coastal regions, as opposed to the sterile interior, that has brought so large a part of Norway's people in contact with the Atlantic and helped give them a prominent place in maritime history.

[Sidenote: Barren coast of fertile hinterland.]

Occasionally an infertile and sparsely inhabited littoral bordering a limited zone of singular productivity, especially if favorably located for international trade, will develop marked maritime activity, both in trade and commercial colonization. Such was Arabian Yemen, the home of the ancient Sabaeans on the Red Sea, stretching from the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb north-westward for 500 miles. Here a mountain range, rising to 10,000 feet and bordering the plateau desert of central Arabia, condenses the vapors of the summer monsoon and creates a long-drawn oasis, where terraced coffee gardens and orchards blossom in the irrigated soil; but the arid coastal strip at its feet, harboring a sparse population only along its tricking streams, developed a series of considerable ports as outlets for the abundant products and crowded population of the highlands.[479] A location on the busy sea lane leading from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, near the meeting place of three continents, made the merchants of the Yemen coast, like the Oman Arabs to the north, middlemen in the trade of Europe with eastern Africa and India.[480] Therefore, even in the second century these Sabaeans had their trading stations scattered along the east coast of Africa as far south as Zanzibar.[481] In 1502 Vasco da Gama found Arabs, either of Oman or Yemen, yet farther south in Sofala, the port for the ivory and gold trade. Some of them he employed as pilots to steer his course to India.[482]

History makes one fact very plain: a people who dwell by the sea, and to whom nature applies some lash to drive them out upon the deep, command opportunity for practically unlimited expansion. In this way small and apparently ill-favored strips of the earth's surface have become the seats of wide maritime supremacy and colonial empire. The scattered but extensive seaboard possession of little Venice and Genoa in the latter centuries of the Middle Ages are paralleled in modern times by the large oversea dominions of the English and Dutch.

Seaward expansions of peoples are always of great moment and generally of vast extent, whether they are the coastward movements of inland peoples to get a foothold upon the great oceanic highway of trade and civilization, as has been the case with the Russians notably since the early eighteenth century, and with numerous interior tribes of West Africa since the opening of the slave trade; or whether they represent the more rapid and extensive coastwise and oversea expansions of maritime nations like the English, Dutch, and Portuguese. In either event they give rise to widespread displacements of peoples and a bizarre arrangement of race elements along the coast. When these two contrary movements meet, the shock of battle follows, as the recent history of the Russians and Japanese in Manchuria and Korea illustrates, the wars of Swedes and Russians for the possession of the eastern Baltic littoral, and the numerous minor conflicts that have occurred in Upper Guinea between European commercial powers and the would-be trading tribes of the bordering hinterland.

[Sidenote: Ethnic contrast between coast and interior peoples.]

A coast region is a peculiar habitat, inasmuch as it is more or less dominated by the sea. It is exposed to inundation by tidal wave and to occupation by immigrant fleets. It may be the base for out-going maritime enterprise or the goal of some oversea movement, the dispenser or the recipient of colonists. The contrast between coast-dwellers and the nearby inland people which exists so widely can be traced not only to a difference of environment, but often to a fundamental difference of race or tribe caused by immigration to accessible shores. The Greeks, crowded in their narrow peninsula of limited fertility, wove an Hellenic border on the skirts of the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean lands, just as the Carthaginians added a fringe of aliens to North Africa, where the Punic people of the coast presented a marked contrast to the Berbers of the interior. [See map page 251.]

An ethnographical map of Russia to-day shows a narrow but almost continuous rim of Germans stretching from the River Niemen north through the Baltic coast of Courland, Livland, and Esthland, as far as Revel; and again, a similar band of Swedes along the seaboard of Finland, from a point east of Helsingfors on the south around to Uleaborg on the north,[483] dating from the time when Finland was a political dependency of Sweden, and influenced by the fact that the frozen Gulf of Bothnia every winter makes a bridge of ice between the two shores. [See map page 225.]

[Sidenote: Ethnic contrasts in the Pacific islands.]

Everywhere in the Melanesian archipelago, where Papuans and Malays dwell side by side, the latter as the new-comers are always found in possession of the coast, while the darker aborigines have withdrawn into the interior. So in the Philippines, the aboriginal Negritos, pure or more often mixed with Malayan blood, as in the Mangyan tribe of central Mindoro, are found crowded back into the interior by the successive invasions of Malays who have encircled the coasts. [See map page 147.] The Zamboanga peninsula of Mindanao has an inland pagan population of primitive Malayan race called Subanon, who have been displaced from the littoral by the seafaring Samal Moros, Mohammedanized Malays from the east shores of Sumatra and the adjacent islands, who spread northward about 1300 under the energizing impulse of their new religion.[484] Even at so late a date as the arrival of Magellan, the Subanon seem to have still occupied some points of the coast,[485] just as the savage Ainos of the Island of Yezo touched the sea about Sapporo only forty years ago, though they are now surrounded by a seaboard rim of Japanese.[486]

[Sidenote: Ethnic contrasts in the Americas.]

If we turn to South America, we find that warlike Tupi, at the time of the discovery, occupied the whole Brazilian coast from the southern tropic north to eastern Guiana, while the highlands of eastern Brazil immediately in their rear were populated by tribes of Ges, who had been displaced by the coastwise expansion of the Tupi canoemen.[487] [See map page 101.] And to-day this same belt of coastland has been appropriated by a foreign population of Europeans and Negroes, while the vast interior of Brazil shows a predominance of native Indian stocks, only broken here and there by a lonely enclave of Portuguese settlement. The early English and French territories in America presented this same contrast of coast and inland people--the colonists planting themselves on the hem of the continent to preserve maritime connection with the home countries, the aborigines forced back beyond reach of the tide.

Wherever an energetic seafaring people with marked commercial or colonizing bent make a highway of the deep, they give rise to this distinction of coast and inland people on whatever shores they touch. The expanding Angles and Saxons did it in the North Sea and the Channel, where they stretched their litus Saxonicum faintly along the coast of the continent to the apex of Brittany, and firmly along the hem of England from Southampton Water to the Firth of Forth;[488] the sea-bred Scandinavians did it farther north in the Teutonic fringe of settlements which they placed on the shores of Celtic Scotland and Ireland.[489]

[Sidenote: Older ethnic stock in coastlands.]

As a rule it is the new-comers who hold the coast, but occasionally the coast-dwellers represent the older ethnic stock. In the Balkan Peninsula to-day the descendants of the ancient Hellenes are, with few exceptions, confined to the coast. The reason is to be found in the fact that the Slavs and other northern races who have intruded by successive invasions from the plains of southern Russia are primarily inland peoples, and therefore have occupied the core of the peninsula, forcing the original Greek population before them to the edge of the sea.[490] This is the same anthropo-geographical process which makes so many peninsulas the last halting-place of a dislodged earlier race. But the Greeks who line the northern and western shores of Asiatic Turkey are such only in language and religion, because their prevailing broad head-form shows them to be Turks and Armenians in race stock.[491]

Sometimes the distinction of race between coast and interior is obliterated so far as language and civilization are concerned, but survives less conspicuously in head-form and pigmentation. The outermost fringe of the Norwegian coast, from the extreme south to the latitude of Trondhjem in the north, is occupied by a broad-headed, round-faced, rather dark people of only medium height, who show decided affinities with the Alpine race of Central Europe, and who present a marked contrast to the tall narrow-headed blondes of pure Teutonic type, constituting the prevailing population from the inner edge of the coast eastward into Sweden. This brachycephalic, un-Germanic stock of the Norwegian seaboard seems to represent the last stand made by that once wide-spread Alpine race, which here has been shoved along to the rocky capes and islands of the outer edge by a later Teutonic immigration coming from Sweden.[492] So the largest continuous area of Negrito stock in the Philippines is found in the Sierra Madre mountains defining the eastern coast of northern Luzon.[493] Facing the neighborless wastes of the Pacific, whence no new settler could come, turned away from the sources of Malay immigration to the southwest, its location made it a retreat, rather than a gateway to incoming races. [See map page 147.]

[Sidenote: Ethnic amalgamations in coastlands.]

Where an immigrant population from oversea lands occupies the coastal hem of a country, rarely do they preserve the purity of their race. Coming at first with marauding or trading intent, they bring no women with them, but institute their trading stations or colonies by marriage with the women of the country. The ethnic character of the resultant population depends upon the proportion of the two constituent elements, the nearness or remoteness of their previous kinship, and the degree of innate race antagonism. The ancient Greek elements which crossed the Aegean from different sections of the peninsula to colonize the Ionian coast of Asia Minor mingled with the native Carian, Cretan, Lydian, Pelasgian, and Phoenician populations which they found there.[494] On all the barbarian shores where the Greeks established themselves, there arose a mixed race--in Celtic Massilia, in Libyan Barca, and in Scythian Crimea--but always a race Hellenized, born interpreters and mercantile agents.[495]

A maritime people, engrossed chiefly with the idea of trade, moves in small groups and intermittently; hence it modifies the original coastal population less than does a genuine colonizing nation, especially as it prefers the smallest possible territorial base for its operations. The Arab element in the coast population of East Africa is strongly represented, but not so strongly as one might expect after a thousand years of intercourse, because it was scattered in detached seaboard points, only a few of which were really stable. The native population of Zanzibar and Pemba and the fringe of coast tribes on the mainland opposite are clearly tinged with Arab blood. These Swahili, as they are called, are a highly mixed race, as their negro element has been derived not only from the local coast peoples, but also from the slaves who for centuries have been halting here on their seaward journey from the interior of Africa.[496] [See map page 105.]

[Sidenote: Multiplicity of race elements on coasts.]

Coast peoples tend to show something more than the hybridism resulting from the mingling of two stocks. So soon as the art of navigation developed beyond its initial phase of mere coastwise travel, and began to strike out across the deep, all coast peoples bordered upon each other, and the sea became a common waste boundary between. Unlike a land boundary, which is in general accessible from only two sides and tends to show, therefore, only two constituent elements in its border population, a sea boundary is accessible from many directions with almost equal ease; it therefore draws from many lands, and gives its population a variety of ethnic elements and a cosmopolitan stamp. This, however, is most marked in great seaports, but from them it penetrates into the surrounding country. The whole southern and eastern coast population of England, from Cornwall to the Wash, received during Elizabeth's reign valuable accessions of industrious Flemings and Huguenots, refugees from Catholic persecution in the Netherlands and France.[497] Our North Atlantic States, whose population is more than half (50.9 per cent.) made up of aliens and natives born of foreign parents,[498] have drawn these elements from almost the whole circle of Atlantic shores, from Norway to Argentine and from Argentine to Newfoundland. Even the Southern States, so long unattractive to immigrants on account of the low status of labor, show a fringe of various foreign elements along the Gulf coast, the deeper tint of which on the census maps fades off rapidly toward the interior. The same phenomenon appears with Asiatic and Australian elements in our Pacific seaboard states.[499] The cosmopolitan population of New York, with its "Chinatown," its "Little Italy," its Russian and Hungarian quarters, has its counterpart in the mixed population of Mascat, peopled by Hindu, Arabs, Persians, Kurds, Afghans, and Baluchis, settled here for purposes of trade; or in the equally mongrel inhabitants of Aden and Zanzibar, of Marseilles, Constantinople, Alexandria, Port Said, and other Mediterranean ports.

[Sidenote: Lingua franca of coasts.]

The cosmopolitanism and the commercial activity that characterize so many seaboards are reflected in the fact that, with rare exceptions, it is the coast regions of the world that give rise to a lingua franca or lingua geral. The original lingua franca arose on the coast of the Levant during the period of Italian commercial supremacy there. It consisted of an Italian stock, on which were grafted Greek, Arabic, and Turkish words, and was the regular language of trade for French, Spanish, and Italians.[500] It is still spoken in many Mediterranean ports, especially in Smyrna, and in the early part of the nineteenth century was in use from Madagascar to the Philippines.[501] From the coastal strip of the Zanzibar Arabs, recently transferred to German East Africa, the speech of the Swahili has become a means of communication over a great part of East Africa, from the coast to the Congo and the sources of the Nile. It is a Bantu dialect permeated with Arabic and Hindu terms, and sparsely sprinkled even with English and German words.[502] "Pidgin English" (business English) performs the function of a lingua franca in the ports of China and the Far East. It is a jargon of corrupted English with a slight mixture of Chinese, Malay, and Portuguese words, arranged according to the Chinese idiom. Another mongrel English does service on the coast of New Guinea. The "Nigger English" of the West African trade is a regular dialect among the natives of the Sierra Leone coast. Farther east, along the Upper Guinea littoral, the Eboe family of tribes who extend across the Niger delta from Lagos to Old Calabar have furnished a language of trade in one of their dialects.[503] The Tupi speech of the Brazilian coast Indians, with whom the explorers first came into contact, became, in the mouth of Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries, the lingua geral or medium of communication between the whites and the various Indian tribes throughout Brazil.[504] The Chinook Indians, located on our Pacific coast north and south of the Columbia River, have furnished a jargon of Indian, French, and English words which serves as a language of trade throughout a long stretch of the northwest Pacific coast, not only between whites and Indians, but also between Indians of different linguistic stocks.[505]

[Sidenote: Coast-dwellers as middlemen.]

The coast is the natural habitat of the middleman. One strip of seaboard produces a middleman people, and then sends them out to appropriate other littorals, if geographic conditions are favorable; otherwise it is content with the transit trade of its own locality. It breeds essentially a race of merchants, shunning varied production, nursing monopoly by secrecy and every method to crush competition. The profits of trade attract all the free citizens, and the laboring class is small or slave. Expansion landward has no attraction in comparison with the seaward expansion of commerce. The result is often a relative dearth of local land-grown food stuffs. King Hiram of Tyre, in his letter to King Solomon, promised to send him trees of cedar and cypress, made into rafts and conveyed to the coast of Philistia, and asked in return for grain, "which we stand in need of because we inhabit an island." The pay came in the form of wheat, oil, and wine. But Solomon furnished a considerable part of the laborers--30,000 of them--who were sent, 10,000 at a time, to Mount Lebanon to cut the timber, apparently under the direction of the more skilful Sidonian foresters.[506] A type of true coast traders is found in the Duallas of the German Kamerun, at the inner angle of the Gulf of Guinea. Located along the lower course and delta of the Mungo River where it flows into the Kamerun estuary, they command a good route through a mountainous country into the interior. This they guard jealously, excluding all competition, monopolizing the trade, and imposing a transit duty on all articles going to and from the interior. They avoid agriculture so far as possible. Their women and slaves produce an inadequate supply of bananas and yams, but crops needing much labor are wholly neglected, so that their coasts have a reputation for dearness of provisions.[507]

Along the 4,500 miles of West African coast between the Senegal and the Kunene rivers the negro's natural talent for trade has developed special tribes, who act as intermediaries between the interior and the European stations on the seaboard. Among these we find the Bihenos and Banda of Portuguese Benguela, who fit out whole caravans for the back country; the Portuguese of Loanda rely on the Ambaquistas and the Mbunda middlemen. The slave trade particularly brought a sinister and abnormal activity to these seaboard tribes,[508] just as it did to the East Coast tribes, and stimulated both in the exploitation of their geographic position as middlemen.[509]

[Sidenote: Monopoly of trade with the hinterland.]

The Alaskan coast shows the same development. The Kinik Indians at the head of Cook's Inlet buy skins of land animals from the inland Athapascans at the sources of the Copper River, and then make a good profit by selling them to the American traders of the coast. These same Athapascans for a long time found a similar body of middlemen in the Ugalentz at the mouth of the Copper River, till the Americans there encouraged the inland hunters to bring their skins to the fur station on the coast.[510] The Chilcats at the head of Lynn Canal long monopolized the fur trade with the Athapascan Indians about Chilkoot Pass; these they would meet on the divide and buy their skins, which they would carry to the Hudson Bay Company agents on the coast. They guarded their monopoly jealously, and for fifty years were able to exclude all traders and miners from the passes leading to the Yukon.[511]

The same policy of monopoly and exclusion has been pursued by the Moro coast dwellers of Mindanao in relation to the pagan tribes of the interior. They buy at low prices the forest and agriculture products of the inland Malays, whom they do not permit to approach either rivers or seaboard, for fear they may come into contact with the Chinese merchants along the coast. So fiercely is their monopoly guarded by this middleman race, that the American Government in the Philippines will be able to break it only by military interference.[512]

[Sidenote: Differentiation of coast from inland people.]

Differences of occupation, of food supply, and of climate often further operate to differentiate the coast from the inland people near by, and to emphasize the ethnic difference which is almost invariably present, either inconspicuously from a slight infusion of alien blood, or plainly as in an immigrant race. Sometimes the contrast is in physique. In Finisterre province of western Brittany, the people along the more fertile coastal strip are on the average an inch taller than the inhabitants of the barren, granitic interior. Their more generous food supply, further enriched by the abundant fisheries at their doors, would account for this increased stature; but this must also be attributed in part to intermixture of the local Celts with a tall Teutonic stock which brushed along these shores, but did not penetrate into the unattractive interior.[513] So the negroes of the Guinea Coast, though not immune from fevers, are better nourished on the alluvial lowlands near the abundant fish of the lagoons, and hence are often stronger and better looking than the plateau interior tribes near by. But here, again, an advantageous blending of races can not be excluded as a contributing cause.[514] Sometimes the advantage in physique falls to the inland people, especially in tropical countries when a highland interior is contrasted with a low coast belt. The wild Igorotes, inhabiting the mountainous interior of northern Luzon, enjoy a cooler climate than the lowlands, and this has resulted in developing in them a decidedly better physique and more industrious habits than are found in the civilized people of the coasts encircling them.[515]

[Sidenote: Early civilization of coasts.]

Where a coast people is an immigrant stock from some remote oversea point, it brings to its new home a surplus of energy which was perhaps the basis of selection in the exodus from the mother country. Such a people is therefore characterized by greater initiative, enterprise, and endurance than the sedentary population which it left behind or that to which it comes; and these qualities are often further stimulated by the transfer to a new environment rich in opportunities. Sea-born in their origin, sea-borne in their migration, they cling to the zone of littoral, because here they find the conditions which they best know how to exploit. Dwelling on the highway of the ocean, living in easy intercourse with distant countries, which would have been far more difficult of access by land-travel over territories inhabited by hostile races, exchanging with these both commodities and ideas, food-stuffs and religions, they become the children of civilization, and their sun-burned seamen the sturdy apostles of progress. Therefore it may be laid down as a general proposition, that the coasts of a country are the first part of it to develop, not an indigenous or local civilization, but a cosmopolitan culture, which later spreads inland from the seaboard.

[Sidenote: Retarded coastal peoples.]

Exceptions to this rule are found in barren or inaccessible coasts like the Pacific littoral of Peru and Mexico, and on shores like those of California, western Africa and eastern Luzon, which occupy an adverse geographic location facing a neighborless expanse of ocean and remote from the world's earlier foci of civilization. Therefore the descent from the equatorial plateau of Africa down to the Atlantic littoral means a drop in culture also, because the various elements of civilization which for ages have uninterruptedly filtered into Sudan from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, have rarely penetrated to the western rim of the highland, and hence never reached the coast. Moreover, this steaming lowland, from the Senegal River to the Kamerun Mountains, has been a last asylum for dislodged tribes who have been driven out by expanding peoples of the plateau. They have descended in their flight upon the original coast dwellers, adding to the general condition of political disruption, multiplying the number of small weak tribes, increasing the occasions for intertribal wars, and furthering the prevailing degradation. The seaboard lowlands of Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Ivory Coast have all suffered thus In historic times.[516] All this region was the original home of the low, typical "Guinea Nigger" of the Southern plantation. The coasts of Oregon and California showed a parallel to this in their fragmentary native tribes of retarded development, whose level of culture, low at best, sank rapidly from the interior toward the seaboard. They seem to have been intruders from the central highlands, who further deteriorated in their weakness and isolation after reaching the coast. They bore every mark of degradation in their short stature, linguistic and tribal dismemberment, their low morals and culture, which ranked them little above the brutes. In contrast, all the large and superior Indian groups of North America belonged to the interior of the continent.[517]

[Sidenote: Cultural contrast of coast and interior.]

The long, indented coast of the Mediterranean has in all ages up to modern times presented the contrast of a littoral more advanced in civilization than the inland districts. The only exception was ancient Egypt before Psammeticus began to exploit his mud-choked seaboard. This contrast was apparent, not only wherever Phoenicians or Greeks had appropriated the remote coast of an alien and retarded people, but even in near-by Thrace the savage habits of the interior tribes were softened only where these dwelt in close proximity to the Ionian colonies along the coast, a fact as noticeable in the time of Tacitus as in that of Herodotus five hundred years before.[518] The ancient philosophers of Greece were awake to the deep-rooted differences between an inland and a maritime city, especially in respect to receptivity of ideas, activity of intellect, and affinity for culture.[519]

If we turn to the Philippines, we find that 65 per cent. of the Christian or civilized population of the islands live on or near the coast; and of the remaining 35 per cent. dwelling inland, by far the greater part represents simply the landward extension of the area of Christian civilization which had Manila Bay for a nucleus.[520] Otherwise, all the interior districts are occupied by wild or pagan tribes. Mohammedanism, too, a religion of civilization, rims the southernmost islands which face the eastern distributing point of the faith in Java; it is confined to the coasts, except for its one inland area of expansion along the lake and river system of the Rio Grande of Mindanao, which afforded an inland extension of sea navigation for the small Moro boat. Even the Fiji Islands show different shades of savagery between coasts and interior.[521]

[Sidenote: Progress from thalassic to oceanic coasts.]

Coasts are areas of out-going and in-coming maritime influences. The nature and amount of these influences depend upon the sea or ocean whose rim the coast in question helps to form, and the relations of that coast to its other tide-washed shores. Our land-made point of view dominates us so completely, that we are prone to consider a coast as margin of its land, and not also as margin of its sea, whence, moreover, it receives the most important contributions to its development. The geographic location of a coast as part of a thalassic or of an oceanic rim is a basic factor in its history; more potent than local conditions of fertility, irregular contour, or accessibility from sea and hinterland. Everything that can be said about the different degrees of historical importance attaching to inland seas and open oceans in successive ages applies equally to the countries and peoples along their shores; and everything that enhances or diminishes the cultural possibilities of a sea--its size, zonal location, its relation to the oceans and continents--finds its expression in the life along its coasts.

The anthropo-geographical evolution which has passed from small to large states and from small to large seas as fields of maritime activity has been attended by a continuous change in the value of coasts, according as these were located on enclosed basins like the Mediterranean, Red, and Baltic; on marginal ones like the China and North seas; or on the open ocean. In the earlier periods of the world's history, a location on a relatively small enclosed sea gave a maritime horizon wide enough to lure, but not so wide as to intimidate; and by its seclusion led to a concentration and intensification of historical development, which in many of its phases left models for subsequent ages to wonder at and imitate. This formative period and formative environment outgrown, historical development was transferred to locations on the open oceans, according to the law of human advance from small to large areas. The historical importance of the Mediterranean and the Baltic shores was transitory, a prelude to the larger importance of the Atlantic littoral of Europe, just as this in turn was to attain its full significance only when the circumnavigation of Africa and South America linked the Atlantic to the World Ocean. Thus that gradual expansion of the geographic horizon which has accompanied the progress of history has seen a slow evolution in the value of seaboard locations, the transfer of maritime leadership from small to large basins, from thalassic to oceanic ports, from Lubeck to Hamburg, from Venice to Genoa, as earlier from the Piraeus to Ostia, and later from England's little Cinque Ports to Liverpool and the Clyde.

[Sidenote: Geographic location of coasts.]

Though the articulations of a coast determine the ease with which maritime influences are communicated to the land, nevertheless history shows repeated instances where an exceptional location, combined with restricted area, has raised a poorly indented seaboard to maritime and cultural preeminence. Phoenicia's brilliant history rose superior to the limitation of indifferent harbors, owing to a position on the Arabian isthmus between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean at the meeting place of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Moreover, the advantages of this particular location have in various times and in various degrees brought into prominence all parts of the Syrian and Egyptian coasts from Antioch to Alexandria. So the whole stretch of coast around the head of the Adriatic, marking the conjunction of a busy sea-route with various land-routes over the encircling mountains from Central Europe, has seen during the ages a long succession of thriving maritime cities, in spite of fast-silting harbors and impeded connection with the hinterland. Here in turn have ruled with maritime sway Spina, Ravenna, Aquileia,[522] Venice, and Trieste. On the other side of the Italian peninsula, the location on the northernmost inlet of the western Mediterranean and at the seaward base of the Ligurian Apennines, just where this range opens two passes of only 1,800 feet elevation to the upper Po Valley, made an active maritime town of Genoa from Strabo's day to the present. In its incipiency it relied upon one mediocre harbor on an otherwise harborless coast, a local supply of timber for its ships, and a road northward across the mountains.[523] The maritime ascendency in the Middle Ages of Genoa, Pisa, Venice, and Barcelona proves that no long indented coast is necessary, but only one tolerable harbor coupled with an advantageous location.

[Sidenote: Intermediate location between contrasted coasts.]

Owing to the ease and cheapness of water transportation, a seaboard position between two other coasts of contrasted products due to a difference either of zonal location or of economic development or of both combined, insures commercial exchanges and the inevitable activities of the middleman. The position of Carthage near the center of the Mediterranean enabled her to fatten on the trade between the highly developed eastern basin and the retarded western one. Midway between the teeming industrial towns of medieval Flanders, Holland, and western Germany, and the new unexploited districts of retarded Russia, Poland, and Scandinavia, lay the long line of the German Hanseatic towns--Kiel, Lubeck, Wiemar, Rostock, Stralsund, Greifswald, Anclam, Stettin, and Colberg, the civitates maritimae. For three centuries or more they made themselves the dominant commercial and maritime power of the Baltic by exchanging Flemish fabrics, German hardware, and Spanish wines for the furs and wax of Russian forests, tallow and hides from Polish pastures, and crude metals from Swedish mines.[524] So Portugal by its geographical location became a staple place where the tropical products from the East Indies were transferred to the vessels of Dutch merchants, and by them distributed to northern Europe. Later New England, by a parallel location, became the middleman in the exchanges of the tropical products of the West Indies, the tobacco of Virginia, and the wheat of Maryland for the manufactured wares of England and the fish of Newfoundland.

[Sidenote: Historical decline of certain coasts.]

Primitive or early maritime commerce has always been characterized by the short beat, a succession of middlemen coasts, and a close series of staple-places, such as served the early Indian Ocean trade in Oman, Malabar Coast, Ceylon, Coromandel Coast, Malacca, and Java. Therefore, many a littoral admirably situated for middleman trade loses this advantage so soon as commerce matures enough to extend the sweep of its voyages, and to bring into direct contact the two nations for which that coast was intermediary. This is only another aspect of the anthropo-geographic evolution from small to large areas. The decline of the Mediterranean coasts followed close upon the discovery of the sea-route to India; nor was their local importance restored by the Suez Canal. Portugal declined when the Dutch, excluded from the Tagus mouth on the union of Portugal with Spain, found their way to the Spice Isles. Ceylon, though still the chief port of call in the Indian Ocean, has lost its preeminence as chief market for all the lands between Africa and China, which it enjoyed in the sixth century, owing to the "long haul" of modern oceanic commerce.

[Sidenote: Political factors in this decline.]

Not only that far-reaching readjustment of maritime ascendency which in the sixteenth century followed the advance from thalassic to oceanic fields of commerce, but also purely local political events may for a time produce striking changes in the use or importance of coasts. The Piraeus, which had been the heart of ancient Athens, almost wholly lost its value in the checkered political history of the country during the Middle Ages, when naval power and merchant marine almost vanished; but with the restoration of Grecian independence in 1832, much of its pristine activity was restored. Up to the beginning of the seventeenth century, Japan had exploited her advantageous location and her richly indented coast to develop a maritime trade which extended from Kamchatka to India; but in 1624 an imperial order withdrew every Japanese vessel from the high seas, and for over two hundred years robbed her busy littoral of all its historical significance. The real life of the Pacific coast of the United States began only with its incorporation into the territory of the Republic, but it failed to attain its full importance until our acquisition of Alaska, Hawaii, and the Philippines. So the coast of the Persian Gulf has had periods of activity alternating with periods of deathlike quiet. Its conquest by the Saracens in the seventh century inaugurated an era of intense maritime enterprise along its drowsy shores. What new awakening may it experience, if it should one day become a Russian littoral!

[Sidenote: Physical causes of decline.]

Sometimes the decline in historical importance is due to physical modifications in the coast itself, especially when, the mud transported by a great river to the sea is constantly pushing forward the outer shoreline. The control of the Adriatic passed in turn from Spina to Adria, Ravenna, Aquileia, Venice, and Trieste, owing to a steady silting up of the coast.[525] Strabo records that Spina, originally a port, was in his time 90 stadia, or 10 miles, from the sea.[526] Bruges, once the great entrepot of the Hanseatic League, was originally on an arm of the sea, with which it was later connected by canal, and which has been silted up since 1432, so that its commerce, disturbed too by local wars, was transferred to Antwerp on the Scheldt.[527] Many early English ports on the coast of Kent and on the old solid rim of the Fenland marshes now lie miles inland from the Channel and the Wash.

A people never utilizes all parts of its coast with equal intensity, or any part with equal intensity in all periods of its development; but, according to the law of differentiation, it gradually concentrates its energies in a few favored ports, whose maritime business tends to become specialized. Then every extension of the subsidiary territory and intensification of production with advancing civilization increases the mass of men and wares passing through these ocean gateways. The shores of New York, Delaware, and Chesapeake bays are more important to the country now than they were in early colonial days, when their back country extended only to the watershed of the Appalachian system. Our Gulf coast has gained in activity with the South's economic advance from slave to free labor, and from almost exclusive cotton planting to diversified production combined with industries; and it will come into its own, in a maritime sense, when the opening of the Panama Canal will divert from the Atlantic outlets those products of the Mississippi basin which will be seeking Trans-Pacific markets.

[Sidenote: Interplay of geographic factors in coastlands.]

A careful analysis of the life of coast peoples in relation to all the factors of their land and sea environment shows that these are multiform, and that none are negligible; it takes into consideration the extent, fertility, and relief of the littoral, its accessibility from the land as well as from the sea, and its location in regard to outlying islands and to opposite shores, whether near or far; it holds in view not only the small articulations that give the littoral ready contact with the sea, but the relation of the seaboard to the larger continental articulations, whether it lies on an outrunning spur of a continental mass, like the Malacca, Yemen, or Peloponnesian coast, or upon a retiring inlet that brings it far into the heart of a continent, and provides it with an extensive hinterland; and, finally, it never ignores the nature of the bordering sea, which furnishes the school of seamanship and fixes the scope of maritime enterprise.

All these various elements of coastal environment are further differentiated in their use and their influence according to the purposes of those who come to tenant such tide-washed rims of the land. Pirates seek intricate channels and hidden inlets for their lairs; a merchant people select populous harbors and navigable river mouths; would-be colonists settle upon fertile valleys opening into quiet bays, till their fields, and use their coasts for placid maritime trade with the mother country; interior peoples, pushed or pushing out to the tidal periphery of their continent, with no maritime history behind them, build their fishing villages on protected lagoons, and, unless the shadowy form of some outlying island lure them farther, there they tarry, deaf to the siren song of the sea.

NOTES TO CHAPTER VIII

[412] Rudolph Reinhard, Die Wichtigsten Deutschen Seehandelstaedte, pp. 24, 25. Stuttgart, 1901. Joseph Partsch, Central Europe, p. 291. London, 1903.Return to passage

[413] Ibid, p. 301.Return to passage

[414] John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, pp. 51-54; maps, pp. 36 and 54. London, 1904.Return to passage

[415] Ibid, Vol. I, pp. 12, 63; maps pp. xxii and 54.Return to passage

[416] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 98, 139. London, 1896-1898.Return to passage

[417] Joseph Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 284-288. London, 1903.Return to passage

[418] H.B. Mill, International Geography, p. 251. New York, 1902.Return to passage

[419] Rudolph Reinhard, Die Wichtigsten Deutschen Seehandelstaedte, pp. 21-22. Stuttgart, 1901.Return to passage

[420] Fitz-Roy and Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, Vol. II, pp. 140, 178; Vol. III, pp. 231-236. London, 1839.Return to passage

[421] Eleventh Census, Population and Resources of Alaska, pp. 166-171. Washington, 1893.Return to passage

[422] Nordenskiold, The Voyage of the Vega, pp. 327, 334, 335, 365, 366, 412, 416, 459, 467. New York, 1882.Return to passage

[423] G. Frederick Wright, Greenland Icefields, pp. 68-70, 100, 105. New York, 1896. For Eskimo of Hudson Bay and Baffin Land, see F. Boas, The Central Eskimo, pp. 419, 420, 460-462. Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. Washington, 1888.Return to passage

[424] Bella Gallico, Book III, chap. 12.Return to passage

[425] Ernst Curtius, History of Greece, Vol. I, p, 15. New York.Return to passage

[426] Strabo's Geography, Book II, chap. V, 4. Book III, chap. I, 4.Return to passage

[427] Grote, History of Greece, Vol. III, pp. 266-267. New York, 1857.Return to passage

[428] Thucydides, Book VI, 2.Return to passage

[429] Grote, History of Greece, Vol. III, p. 273. New York, 1857.Return to passage

[430] Strabo's Geography, Book XVII, chap. III, 13, 14.Return to passage

[431] Thucydides, Book I, 5, 7, 8.Return to passage

[432] Strabo, Book VIII, chap. VI, 2, 4, 13, 14, 22.Return to passage

[433] Grote, History of Greece, Vol. III, pp. 4, 191. New York, 1857.Return to passage

[434] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 291. London, 1903.Return to passage

[435] Rudolph Reinhard, Die Wichtigsten Deutschen Seehandelstaedte, p. 23. Stuttgart, 1901.Return to passage

[436] Grote, History of Greece, Vol. III, p. 273. New York, 1857.Return to passage

[437] Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, Vol. II, pp. 452-454, 610. London, 1883. Duarte Barbosa, East Africa and Malabar Coasts in the Sixteenth Century, p. 3-16. Hakluyt Society, London, 1866.Return to passage

[438] Ernst Curtius, History of Greece, Vol. I, pp. 433-434. New York.Return to passage

[439] W.B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, Vol. I, p. 93. Boston, 1899.Return to passage

[440] Norway, Official Publication, p. 1. Christiania, 1900.Return to passage

[441] Ratzel, Deutschland, pp. 150-151. Leipzig, 1898.Return to passage

[442] J. Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 227-230. London, 1903.Return to passage

[443] Elisee Reclus, The Earth and Its Inhabitants; Europe, Vol. 1, pp. 370-372. New York, 1886.Return to passage

[444] Ernst Curtius, History of Greece, Vol. I, pp. 15-20. New York.Return to passage

[445] Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, Vol. 1, p. 215. Leipzig, 1897.Return to passage

[446] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 35, 40. London, 1902.Return to passage

[447] William Morris Davis, Physical Geography, pp. 115-122. Boston, 1899.Return to passage

[448] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 95. London, 1896-1898.Return to passage

[449] Strabo, Book XVII, chap. I, 18. Diodorus Siculus, Book I, chap. III, p. 36. London, 1814.Return to passage

[450] J. Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 96-98. London, 1903. Ratzel, Deutschland, pp. 143-144. Leipzig, 1898.Return to passage

[451] For geomorphology of coasts, see William Morris Davis, Physical Geography, pp. 112-136, 347-383. Boston, 1899.Return to passage

[452] Elisee Reclus, Europe, Vol. II, p, 252. New York, 1886.Return to passage

[453] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 231. London, 1903.Return to passage

[454] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 44, 446. London, 1904.Return to passage

[455] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 1012. New York, 1902. Hereford George, Historical Geography of the British Empire, pp. 278-279. London, 1904.Return to passage

[456] J.E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages, pp. 123-124. New York, 1884.Return to passage

[457] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 148. New York, 1902.Return to passage

[458] Diodorus Siculus, Book V, chap. I, p. 304. London, 1814. Strabo, Book V, chap. VI, 6, 7.Return to passage

[459] Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 188-189, 193-195. New York, 1902-1906.Return to passage

[460] Strabo, Book XVI, chap. III, 4, 27. Herodotus, Book I, chap. I; Book VII, chap. 89. J.T. Brent, The Bahrein Islands of the Persian Gulf, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, Vol. XII, pp. 13-16. London, 1890.Return to passage

[461] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 169-170. New York, 1897.Return to passage

[462] Ibid., pp. 179, 185, 286.Return to passage

[463] Ibid., pp. 127-131.Return to passage

[464] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 100-102, 132-145. London, 1896-1898.Return to passage

[465] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 985. New York, 1902.Return to passage

[466] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, pp. 84, 166. London, 1902.Return to passage

[467] J. Naken, Die Provinz Kwangtung und ihre Bevoelkerung, Petermanns Geographische Mittheilungen, Vol. 24, pp. 409, 420. 1878. Ferdinand von Richthofen, China, Vol. I, pp. 568-569. Berlin, 1877. Cathay and the Way Thither, Vol. I, p. lxxviii. Hakluyt Society, London, 1866.Return to passage

[468] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 397. London, 1896-1898. Philippine Census, Vol. I, pp. 438, 481-491. Washington, 1905.Return to passage

[469] Stanford's Australasia, Vol. II, pp. 103, 121, 126-135, 196. London, 1894. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, p. 547. New York, 1902-1906.Return to passage

[470] Ibid., Vol. III, pp. 431, 434. Vol. II, p. 603.Return to passage

[471] Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Handels und Gewerbefleisses, pp. 78-79, 99-100. Stuttgart, 1899. Capt. A.T. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, pp. 26-28. Boston, 1902.Return to passage

[472] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, pp. 111-112, 152. London, 1902.Return to passage

[473] Ibid., pp. 73-74, 139, 267.Return to passage

[474] Cathay and the Way Thither, Vol. I, p. LXXX. Hakluyt Society. London, 1866. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, p. 548. New York, 1902-1906.Return to passage

[475] The Book of Ser Marco Polo, edited by Sir Henry Yule, Vol. II, Book III, pp. 284, 288, 303. New York, 1903.Return to passage

[476] P. Vidal de la Blache, Geographie de la France, pp. 335-337. Paris, 1903.Return to passage

[477] Elisee Reclus, Europe, Vol. II, p. 252. New York, 1882.Return to passage

[478] Norway, Official Publication, pp. 89-91, map p. 4. Christiania, 1900.Return to passage

[479] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, pp. 114, 140, 163-164, 202, 267. London, 1902.Return to passage

[480] H.F. Tozer, History of Ancient Geography, pp. 276-280. Cambridge, 1897. Strabo, Book XVI, chap. IV, 2, 19.Return to passage

[481] Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. III, p. 433. New York, 1902-1906.Return to passage

[482] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, pp. 78-82, 99. New York, 1897.Return to passage

[483] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, map p. 80. New York, 1893.Return to passage

[484] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 412-413, 481, 464, 562., Washington, 1905.Return to passage

[485] Ibid., Vol. I, p. 416.Return to passage

[486] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 449. London, 1896-1898.Return to passage

[487] P. Ehrenreich, Die Eintheilung und Verbreitung der Voelkerstaemme Brasiliens, Petermanns Mittheilungen, Vol. 37, pp. 88-89. Gotha, 1891. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, p. 185, map p. 189. New York, 1902-1906.Return to passage

[488] John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, chap. I. London, 1904.Return to passage

[489] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, p. 189. London, 1904. W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 312-315, map. New York, 1899.Return to passage

[490] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, p. 152. London, 1902. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 402, 404, map. New York, 1899.Return to passage

[491] Ibid., pp. 117, 404-405, 409-419.Return to passage

[492] Ibid., pp. 206-208, 210-212. Norway, Official Publication, pp. 80-81. Christiania, 1900.Return to passage

[493] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. II, p. 52, map p. 50. Washington, 1905.Return to passage

[494] Grote, History of Greece, Vol. III, pp. 175-176, 186-189. New York, 1857.Return to passage

[495] Ernst Curtius, History of Greece, Vol. I, pp. 492-493. New York.Return to passage

[496] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp. 530-533. London, 1896-1898.Return to passage

[497] H.D. Trail, Social England, Vol. III, pp. 367-368. London and New York, 1895.Return to passage

[498] Twelfth Census, Bulletin No. 103, table 23. Washington, 1902.Return to passage

[499] E.C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic Conditions, pp. 314-328. Boston, 1903.Return to passage

[500] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 58. London, 1904.Return to passage

[501] Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Handels und Gewerbefleisses, p. 85, Note 18. Stuttgart, 1899.Return to passage

[502] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, p. 533. London, 1896-1898.Return to passage

[503] Ibid., Vol. III, pp. 139, 145.Return to passage

[504] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 869. New York, 1902.Return to passage

[505] D.G. Brinton, The American Race, p. 107. Philadelphia, 1901. H.H. Bancroft, The Native Races, p. 239, footnote p. 274. San Francisco, 1886.Return to passage

[506] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Book VIII, chap. II, 6, 7, 9.Return to passage

[507] J. Scott Keltie, The Partition of Africa, p. 327. London, 1895. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 121-122. London, 1896-1898.Return to passage

[508] Ibid., Vol. III, pp. 121, 132-133.Return to passage

[509] Ibid., Vol. II, p. 239.Return to passage

[510] Eleventh Census, Report on Alaska, p. 70. Washington, 1893.Return to passage

[511] Ibid., p. 156. E.R. Scidmore, Guidebook to Alaska, p. 94. New; York, 1897.Return to passage

[512] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 556-561, 575, 581-583. Washington, 1905.Return to passage

[513] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 85-86, 99-101, map pp. 151-152. New York, 1899.Return to passage

[514] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 97, 106. New York, 1896-1898.Return to passage

[515] Henry Gannett, The Peoples of the Philippines, in Report of the Eighth International Geographic Congress, p. 673. Washington, 1904.Return to passage

[516] A.H. Keane, Africa, Stanford's Compendium, pp. 372-376, 385-388. London, 1895. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. III, pp. 402, 456-457, 462. New York, 1902-1906.Return to passage

[517] H.H. Bancroft, The Native Races, Vol. I, pp. 440-441; Vol. III, pp. 325, 362. San Francisco, 1886. McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 37-38, 78, 88-89, 95-98. Vol. XIX of History of North America. Philadelphia, 1905.Return to passage

[518] Grote, History of Greece, Vol. IV, p. 22. New York, 1857.Return to passage

[519] Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 225, 226.Return to passage

[520] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. II, pp. 34, 35. Washington, 1905.Return to passage

[521] Williams and Calvert, Fiji and the Fijians, pp. 81-82. New York, 1859.Return to passage

[522] Strabo, Book V, chap. I, 7, 8.Return to passage

[523] Strabo, Book IV, chap. VI, 1, 2; Book V, chap. I, 11.Return to passage

[524] Dietrich Schaefer, Die Hansestaedte und Koenig Waldemar von Daenemark, pp. 184, 189. Jena, 1879.Return to passage

[525] W. Deecke, Italy, pp. 89-91. London, 1904.Return to passage

[526] Strabo, Book III, chap. I, 2.Return to passage

[527] Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Handels und Gewerbefleisses, p. 93, Note 1. Stuttgart, 1899.Return to passage

IX. OCEANS AND ENCLOSED SEAS

The water of the earth's surface, viewed from the standpoint of anthropo-geography, is one, whether it appears as atmospheric moisture, spring, river, lake, brackish lagoon, enclosed sea-basin or open ocean. Its universal circulation, from the falling of the dews to the vast sweep of ocean current, causes this inviolable unity. Variations in the geographical forms of water are superficial and constantly changing; they pass into one another by almost imperceptible gradations, shift their unstable outlines at the bidding of the mobile, restless element. In contrast to the land, which is marked by diversity of geologic structure and geographic form, the world of water is everywhere approximately the same, excepting only the difference in the mineral composition of sea water as opposed to that of spring and stream. Therefore, whenever man has touched it, it has moulded him in much the same way, given the same direction to his activities, dictated the use of the same implements and methods of navigation. As maritime trader or colonist, he has sailed to remote, unknown, yet familiar coasts, and found himself as much at home as on his native shores. He has built up maritime empires, the centre of whose dominion, race and commerce, falls somewhere in the dividing yet uniting sea.

[Sidenote: The water a factor in man's mobility.]

Man must be grouped with the air and water as part of the mobile envelope of the earth's surface. The mobility which maintains the unity of air and water has caused the unity of the human race. Abundant facilities of dispersal often give animal forms a wide or cosmopolitan distribution. Man, by appropriating the mobile forces in the air and water to increase his own powers of locomotion, has become a cosmopolitan being, and made the human race reflect the unity of atmosphere and hydrosphere.

Always the eternal unrest of the moving waters has knocked at the door of human inertia to arouse the sleeper within; always the flow of stream and the ebb of tide have sooner or later stirred the curiosity of the land-born barbarian about the unseen destination of these marching waters. Rivers by the mere force of gravity have carried him to the shores of their common ocean, and placed him on this highway of the world. Then from his sea-girt home, whether island or continent, he has timidly or involuntarily followed the track which headland-dotted coast, or ocean current, or monsoon, or trade wind marked out for him across the pathless waters, so that at the gray dawn of history he appears as a cosmopolite, occupying every part of the habitable earth.

These sporadic oversea wanderings, with intervals of centuries or milleniums between, opened to his occupancy strange and remote lands, in whose isolation and new environment he developed fresh variations of mind, body and cultural achievements, to arm him with new weapons in the struggle for existence. The sea which brought him bars him for a few ages from his old home, till the tradition of his coming even is lost. Then with higher nautical development, the sea loses its barrier nature; movements of people, and trade recross its surface to unite those who have been long severed and much differentiated in their mutual remoteness. The ensuing friction and mingling weed out the less fit variations of each, and combine in the new race the qualities able to fortify a higher type of man. Not only seas and oceans, but also mountains and deserts serve to isolate the migrant people who once has crossed them; but wastes of water raise up the most effective barriers.

[Sidenote: Oceans and seas in universal history.]

The transformation of the ocean into a highway by the development of navigation is a late occurrence in the history of man and is perhaps the highest phase of his adaptation to environment, because an adaptation which has placed at his disposal that vast water area constituting three-fourths of the earth's surface from which he had previously been excluded. Moreover, it was adaptation to an alien and hostile element, whose violent displays of power recurrently stimulated the human adjustment between attack and defense.

Because adaptation to the sea has been vastly more difficult than to the land, commensurate with the harder struggle it has brought greater intellectual and material rewards. This conquest of the sea is entitled to a peculiarly high place in history, because it has contributed to the union of the various peoples of the world, has formed a significant part of the history of man, whether that history is economic, social, political or intellectual. Hence history has always staged its most dramatic acts upon the margin of seas and oceans; here always the plot thickens and gives promise of striking development. Rome of the seven hills pales before England of the "Seven Seas."

[Sidenote: The sea in universal history.]

Universal history loses half its import, remains an aggregate of parts, fails to yield its significance as a whole, if it does not continually take into account the unifying factor of the seas. Indeed, no history is entitled to the name of universal unless it includes a record of human movements and activities on the ocean, side by side with those on the land. Our school text-books in geography present a deplorable hiatus, because they fail to make a definite study of the oceans over which man explores and colonizes and trades, as well as the land on which he plants and builds and sleeps.

The striking fact about the great World Ocean to-day is the manifold relations which it has established between the dwellers on its various coasts. Marine cables, steamer and sailing routes combine to form a network of paths across the vast commons of the deep. Over these the commercial, political, intellectual, or even purely migrant activities of human life move from continent to continent. The distinctive value of the sea is that it promotes many-sided relations as opposed to the one-sided relation of the land. France on her eastern frontier comes into contact with people of kindred stock, living under similar conditions of climate and soil to her own; on her maritime border she is open to intermittent intercourse with all continents and climes and races of the world. To this sea border must be ascribed the share that France has taken in the history of North and South America, the West Indies, North and Equatorial Africa, India, China and the South Seas. So we find the great maritime peoples of the world, from the Phoenicians to the English, each figuring in the history of the world of its day, and helping weave into a web of universal history the stories of its various parts.

[Sidenote: Origin of navigation.]

Man's normal contact with the sea is registered in his nautical achievements. The invention of the first primitive means of navigation, suggested by a floating log or bloated body of a dead animal, must have been an early achievement, of a great many peoples who lived near the water, or who in the course of their wanderings found their progress obstructed by rivers; it belongs to a large class of similar discoveries which answer urgent and constantly recurring needs. It was, in all probability, often made and as often lost again, until a growing habit of venturing beyond shore or river bank in search of better fishing, or of using the easy open waterways through the thick tangle of a primeval forest to reach fresh hunting grounds, established it as a permanent acquisition.

[Sidenote: Primitive forms.]

The first devices were simply floats or rafts, made of light wood, reeds, or the hollow stems of plants woven together and often buoyed up by the inflated skins of animals. Floats of this character still survive among various peoples, especially in poorly timbered lands. The skin rafts which for ages have been the chief means of downstream traffic on the rivers of Mesopotamia, consist of a square frame-work of interwoven reeds and branches, supported by the inflated skins of sheep and goats;[528] they are guided by oars and poles down or across the current. These were the primitive means by which Layard transported his winged bull from the ruins of Nineveh down to the Persian Gulf, and they were the same which he found on the bas-reliefs of the ancient capital, showing the methods of navigation three thousand years ago.[529] Similar skin rafts serve as ferry boats on the Sutlej, Shajok and other head streams of the Indus.[530] They reappear in Africa as the only form of ferry used by the Moors on the River Morbeya in Morocco; on the Nile, where the inflated skins are supplanted by earthen pots;[531] and on the Yo River of semi-arid Sudan, where the platform is made of reeds and is buoyed up by calabashes fastened beneath.[532]

[Sidenote: Primitive craft in arid lands.]

In treeless lands, reeds growing on the margins of streams and lakes are utilized for the construction of boats. The Buduma islanders of Lake Chad use clumsy skiffs eighteen feet long, made of hollow reeds tied into bundles and then lashed together in a way to form a slight cavity on top.[533] In the earliest period of Egyptian history this type of boat with slight variations was used in the papyrus marshes of the Nile,[534] and it reappears as the ambatch boat which Schweinfurth observed on the upper White Nile.[535] It is in use far away among the Sayads or Fowlers, who inhabit the reed-grown rim of the Sistan Lake in arid Persia.[536] As the Peruvian balsa, it has been the regular means of water travel on Lake Titicaca since the time of the Incas, and in more primitive form it appears among the Shoshone Indians of the Snake River Valley of Idaho, who used this device in their treeless land to cross the streams, when the water was too cold for swimming.[537] Still cruder rafts of reeds, without approach to boat form, were the sole vehicles of navigation among the backward Indians of San Francisco Bay, and were the prevailing craft among the coast Indians farther south and about the Gulf of Lower California.[538] Trees abounded; but these remnant tribes of low intelligence, probably recent arrivals on the coast from the interior, equipped only with instruments of bone and stone, found the difficulty of working with wood prohibitive.

The second step in the elaboration of water conveyance was made when mere flotation was succeeded by various devices to secure displacement. The evolution is obvious. The primitive raftsman of the Mesopotamian rivers wove his willow boughs and osiers into a large, round basket form, covered it with closely sewn skins to render it water-tight, and in it floated with his merchandise down the swift current from Armenia to Babylon. These were the boats which Herodotus saw on the Euphrates,[539] and which survive to-day.[540] According to Pliny, the ancient Britons used a similar craft, framed of wicker-work and covered with hide, in which they crossed the English and Irish channels to visit their kinsfolk on the opposite shores. This skin boat or coracle or currach still survives on the rivers of Wales and the west coast of Ireland, where it is used by the fishermen and considered the safest craft for stormy weather.[541] It recalls the "bull-skin boat" used in pioneer days on the rivers of our western plains, and the skiffs serving as passenger ferries to-day on the rivers of eastern Tibet.[542] It reappears among the Arikara Indians of the upper Missouri,[543] and the South American tribes of the Gran Chaco.[544] The first wooden boat was made of a tree trunk, hollowed out either by fire or axe. The wide geographical distribution of the dug-out and its survival in isolated regions of highly civilized lands point it out as one of those necessary and obvious inventions that must have been made independently in various parts of the world.

[Sidenote: Relation of the river to marine navigation.]

The quieter water of rivers and lakes offered the most favorable conditions for the feeble beginnings of navigation, but the step from inland to marine navigation was not always taken. The Egyptians, who had well-constructed river and marine boats, resigned their maritime commerce to Phoenicians and Greeks, probably, as has been shown, because the silted channels and swamps of the outer Nile delta held them at arm's length from the sea. Similarly the equatorial lakes of Central Africa have proved fair schools of navigation, where the art has passed the initial stages of development. The kingdom of Uganda on Victoria Nyanza, at the time of Stanley's visit, could muster a war fleet of 325 boats, a hundred of them measuring from fifty to seventy feet in length; the largest were manned by a crew of sixty-four paddlers and could carry as many more fighting men.[545] The long plateau course of the mighty Congo has bred a race of river navigators, issuing from their riparian villages to attack the traveler in big flotillas of canoes ranging from fifty to eighty-five feet in length, the largest of them driven through the water by eighty paddlers and steered by eight more paddles in the stern.[546] But the Congo and lake boats are barred from the coast by a series of cataracts, which mark the passage of the drainage streams down the escarpment of the plateau.

[Sidenote: Retarded navigation.]

There are peoples without boats or rafts of any description. Among this class are the Central Australians, Bushmen, navigation. Hottentots and Kaffirs of arid South Africa,[547] and with few exceptions also the Damaras. Even the coast members of these tribes only wade out into the shallow water on the beach to spear fish. The traveler moving northward from Cape Town through South Africa, across its few scant rivers, goes all the way to Ngami Lake before he sees anything resembling a canoe, and then only a rude dugout. Still greater is the number of people who, though inhabiting well indented coasts, make little use of contact with the sea. Navigation, unknown to many Australian coast tribes, is limited to miserable rafts of mangrove branches on the northwest seaboard, and to imperfect bark canoes with short paddles on the south; only in the north where Malayan influences are apparent does the hollowed tree-stem with outrigger appear.[548] This retardation is not due to fear, because the South Australian native, like the Fuegian, ventures several miles out to sea in his frail canoe; it is due to that deep-seated inertia which characterizes all primitive races, and for which the remote, outlying location of peninsular South America, Southern Africa and Australia, before the arrival of the Europeans, afforded no antidote in the form of stimulating contact with other peoples. But the Irish, who started abreast of the other northern Celts in nautical efficiency, who had advantages of proximity to other shores, and in the early centuries of their history sailed to the far-away Faroes and even to Iceland, peopled southern Scotland by an oversea emigration, made piratical descents upon the English coast, and in turn received colonies of bold Scandinavian mariners, suffered an arrested development in navigation, and failed to become a sea-faring folk.

[Sidenote: Regions of advanced navigation.]

Turning from these regions of merely rudimentary navigation and inquiring where the highest efficiency in the art was obtained before the spread of Mediterranean and European civilization, we find that this distinction belongs to the great island world of the Pacific and to the neighboring lands of the Indian Ocean. Sailing vessels and outrigger boats of native design and construction characterize the whole sea-washed area of Indo-Malaysian civilization from Malacca to the outermost isles of the Pacific. The eastern rim of Asia, also, belongs to this wide domain of nautical efficiency, and the coast Indians of southern Alaska and British Columbia may possibly represent an eastern spur of the same,[549] thrown out in very remote times and maintained by the advantageous geographic conditions of that indented, mountainous coast. Adjoining this area on the north is the long-drawn Arctic seaboard of the Eskimo, who unaided have developed in their sealskin kayak and bidarka sea-going craft unsurpassed for the purposes of marine hunting and fishing, and who display a fearlessness and endurance born of long and enforced intimacy with the deep. Driven by the frozen deserts of his home to seek his food chiefly in the water, the Eskimo, nevertheless, finds his access to the sea barred for long months of winter by the jagged ice-pack along the shore.

[Sidenote: Geographic conditions in Polynesia.]

The highest degree of intimacy is developed in that vast island-strewn stretch of the Pacific constituting Oceanica.[550] Here where a mild climate enables the boatman race to make a companion of the deep, where every landscape is a seascape, where every diplomatic visit or war campaign, every trading journey or search for new coco-palm plantation means a voyage beyond the narrow confines of the home island, there dwells a race whose splendid chest and arm muscles were developed in the gymnasium of the sea; who, living on a paltry 515,000 square miles (1,320,300 square kilometers) of scattered fragments of land, but roaming over an ocean area of twenty-five million square miles, are not more at home in their palm-wreathed islets than on the encompassing deep. Migrations, voluntary and involuntary, make up their history. Their trained sense of locality, enabling them to make voyages several hundred miles from home, has been mentioned by various explorers in Polynesia. The Marshall Islanders set down their geographical knowledge in maps which are fairly correct as to bearings but not as to distances. The Ralick Islanders of this group make charts which include islands, routes and currents.[551] Captain Cook was impressed by the geographical knowledge of the people of the South Seas. A native Tahitian made for him a chart containing seventy-four islands, and gave an account of nearly sixty more.[552] Information and directions supplied by natives have aided white explorers to many discoveries in these waters. Quiros, visiting the Duff Islands in 1606, learned the location of Ticopia, one of the New Hebrides group, three hundred miles away. Not only the excellent seamanship and the related pelagic fishing of the Polynesians bear the stamp of their predominant water environment; their mythology, their conception of a future state, the germs of their astronomical science, are all born of the sea.

Though the people living on the uttermost boundaries of this island world are 6,000 miles (or 10,000 kilometers) apart, and might be expected to be differentiated by the isolation of their island habitats, nevertheless they all have the same fundamental characteristics of physique, language and culture from Guam to Easter Isle, reflecting in their unity the oneness of the encompassing ocean over which they circulate.[553]

[Sidenote: Mediterranean versus Atlantic seamanship.]

Midway between these semi-aquatic Polynesians and those Arctic tribes who are forced out upon the deep, to struggle with it rather than associate with it, we find the inhabitants of the Mediterranean islands and peninsulas, who are favored by the mild climate and the tideless, fogless, stormless character of their sea. While such a body of water invites intimacy, it does not breed a hardy or bold race of navigators; it is a nursery, scarcely a training school. Therefore, except for the far-famed Dalmatian sailors, who for centuries have faced the storms sweeping down from the Dinaric Alps over the turbulent surface of the Adriatic, Mediterranean seamanship does not command general confidence on the high seas. Therefore it is the German, English and Dutch steamship lines that are to-day the chief ocean carriers from Italian ports to East Africa, Asia, Australia, North and South America, despite the presence of native lines running from Genoa to Buenos Ayres. Montevideo and New York; just as it was the Atlantic states of Europe, and only these and all of these, except Germany, who, trained to venture out into the fogs and storms and unmarked paths of the mare tenebrosum, participated in the early voyages to the Americas. One after the other they came--Norwegians, Spaniards, Portuguese, English, French, Dutch, Swedes and Danes. The anthropo-geographical principle is not invalidated by the fact that Spain and England were guided in their initial trans-Atlantic voyages by Italian navigators, like Columbus, Cabot and Amerigo Vespucci. The long maritime experience of Italy and its commercial relations with the Orient, reaching back into ancient times, furnished abundant material for the researches and speculations of such practical theorists; but Italy's location fixed the shores of the Mediterranean as her natural horizon, narrowed her vision to its shorter radius. Her obvious interest in the preservation of the old routes to the Orient made her turn a deaf ear to plans aiming to divert European commerce to trans-Atlantic routes. Italy's entrance upon the high seas was, therefore, reluctant and late, retarded by the necessity of outgrowing the old circumscribed outlook of the enclosed basin before adopting the wider vision of the open ocean. Venice and Genoa were crippled not only by the discovery of the sea route to India, but also by their adherence to old thalassic means and methods of navigation inadequate for the high seas.[554] However, these Mediterranean sea folk are being gradually drawn out of their seclusion, as is proved by the increase of Italian oceanic lines and the recent installation of an Hellenic steamship line between Piraeus and New York.

[Sidenote: Three geographic stages of maritime development.]

The size of a sea or ocean is a definite factor in its power to attract or repel maritime ventures, especially in the earlier stages of nautical development. A broken, indented coast means not only a longer and broader zone of contact between the inhabitants and the sea; it means also the breaking up of the adjacent expanse of water into so many alcoves, in which fisherman, trader and colonist may become at home, and prepare for maritime ventures farther afield. The enclosed or marginal sea tempts earlier because it can be compassed by coastwise navigation; then by the proximity of its opposite shores and its usual generous equipment with islands, the next step to crosswise navigation is encouraged. For the earliest stages of maritime development, only the smaller articulations of the coast and the inshore fringe of sea inlets count. This is shown in the primitive voyages of the Greeks, before they had ventured into the Euxine or west of the forbidding Cape Malia; and in the "inside passage" navigation of the Indians of southern Alaska, British Columbia, and Chile, who have never stretched their nautical ventures beyond the outermost rocks of their skerry-walled coast.

[Sidenote: Influence of enclosed seas upon navigation.]

A second stage is reached when an enclosed basin is at, hand to widen the maritime horizon, and when this larger field is exploited in all its commercial, colonial and industrial possibilities, as was done by the Phoenicians and Greeks in the Mediterranean, the Hanse Towns in the Baltic, the Dutch and English in the North Sea. The third and final stage is reached when the nursery of the inshore estuary or gulf and the elementary school of the enclosed basin are in turn outgrown, and the larger maritime spirit moves on to the open ocean for its field of operation. It is a significant fact that the Norse, bred to the water in their fiords and channels behind their protecting "skerry-wall," then trained in the stormy basins of the North and Irish Seas, were naturally the first people of Europe to cross the Atlantic, because the Atlantic of their shores, narrowing like all oceans and seas toward the north, assumes almost the character of an enclosed basin. The distance from Norway to Greenland is only 1,800 miles, little more than that across the Arabian Sea between Africa and India. We trace, therefore, a certain analogy between the physical subdivisions of the world of water into inlet, marginal sea and ocean, and the anthropo-geographical gradations in maritime development.

The enclosed or marginal sea seems a necessary condition for the advance beyond coastwise navigation and the much later step to the open ocean. Continents without them, like Africa, except for its frontage upon the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, have shown no native initiative in maritime enterprise. Africa was further cursed by the mockery of desert coasts along most of her scant thalassic shores. In the Americas, we find the native races compassing a wide maritime field only in the Arctic, where the fragmentary character of the continent breaks up the ocean into Hudson's Bay, Davis Strait, Baffin Bay, Gulf of Boothia, Melville Sound and Bering Sea; and in the American Mediterranean of the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. The excellent seamanship developed in the archipelagoes of southern Alaska and Chile remained abortive for maritime expansion, despite a paucity of local resources and the spur of hunger, owing to the lack of a marginal sea; but in the Caribbean basin, the Arawaks and later the Caribs spread from the southern mainland as far as Cuba.[555] [See map page 101.]

[Sidenote: Enclosed seas as areas of ethnic and cultural assimilation.]

Enclosed or marginal seas were historically the most important sections of the ocean prior to 1492. Apart from the widening of the maritime horizon which they give to their bordering people, each has the further advantage of constituting an area of close vicinal grouping and constant interchange of cultural achievements, by which the civilization of the whole basin tends to become elevated and unified. This unification frequently extends to race also, owing to the rapidity of maritime expansion and the tendency to ethnic amalgamation characteristic of all coast regions. We recognize an area of Mediterranean civilization from the Isthmus of Suez to the Sacred Promontory of Portugal, and in this area a long-headed, brunette Mediterranean race, clearly unified as to stock, despite local differentiations of culture, languages and nations in the various islands, peninsulas and other segregated coastal regions of this sea.[556] The basin appears therefore as an historical whole; for in it a certain group of peoples concentrated their common efforts, which crossed and criss-crossed from shore to shore. Phoenicia's trade ranged westward to the outer coasts of Spain, and later Barcelona's maritime enterprises reached east to the Levant. Greece's commercial and colonial relations embraced the Crimea and the mouth of the Rhone, and Genoa's extended east to the Crimea again. The Saracens, on reaching the Mediterranean edge of the Arabian peninsula, swept the southern coasts and islands, swung up the western rim of the basin to the foot of the Pyrenees, and taught the sluggish Spaniards the art of irrigation practiced on the garden slopes of Yemen. The ships of the Crusaders from Venice, Genoa and Marseilles anchored in the ports of Mohammedanized Syria, brought the symbol of the cross back to its birthplace In Jerusalem, but carried away with them countless suggestions from the finished industries of the East. Here was give and take, expansion and counter-expansion, conquest and expulsion, all together making up a great sum of reciprocal relations embracing the whole basin, the outcome of that close geographical connection which every sharply defined sea establishes between the coasts which it washes.

[Sidenote: North Sea and Baltic basins.]

The same thing has come to pass in the North Sea. Originally Celtic on its western or British side, as opposed to its eastern or Germanic coast, it has been wholly Teutonized on that flank also from the Strait of Dover to the Firth of Tay, and sprinkled with Scandinavian settlers from the Firth of Tay northward to Caithness.[557] The eleventh century saw this ethnic unification achieved, and the end of the Middle Ages witnessed the diffusion of the elements of a common civilization through the agency of commerce from Bruges to Bergen. The Baltic, originally Teutonic only on its northern and western shores, has in historical times become almost wholly Teutonic, including even the seaboard of Finland and much of the coast provinces of Russia.[558] Unification of civilization attended this unification of race. In its period of greatest historical significance from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, the Baltic played the role of a northern Mediterranean.[559] The countless shuttles of the Hanse ships wove a web of commercial intercourse between its remotest shores. Novgorod and Aboe were in constant communication with Luebeck and Stralsund;[560] and Wisby, on the island of Gotland at the great crossroads of the Baltic,[561] had the focal significance of the Piraeus in ancient Aegean trade.

[Sidenote: Bering Sea.]

If we turn to Asia, we find that even the unfavorable Arctic location of Bering Sea has been unable to rob it entirely of historical significance. This is the one spot where a native American race has transplanted itself by its natural expansion to Asiatic shores. The circular rim and island-dotted surface have guided Eskimo emigrants to the coast of the Chukchian Peninsula, where they have become partly assimilated in dress and language to the local Chukches.[562] The same conditions also facilitated the passage of a few Chukches across Bering Strait to the Alaskan side. At Pak (or Peck) on East Cape and on Diomed Island, situated in the narrowest part of Bering Strait, are the great intercontinental markets of the polar tribes. Here American furs have for many decades been exchanged for the reindeer skins of northern Siberia and Russian goods from far-away Moscow.[563] Only the enclosed character of the sea, reported by the Danish explorer Vitus Bering, tempted the land-bred Russians, who reached the northeastern coast of Siberia at the middle of the eighteenth century, to launch their leaky boats of unseasoned timber, push across to the American continent, and make this whole Bering basin a Russian sea;[564] just as a few decades before, when land exploration of Kamchatka had revealed the enclosed character of the Sea of Okhotsk, the Russian pioneers took a straight course across the water to their Pacific outpost of Petropavlovsk near the southern end of the peninsula. But even before the coming of the Slavs to its shores, the Sea of Okhotsk seems to have been an area of native commercial and ethnic intercourse from the Amur River in Siberia in a half circle to the east, through Sakhalin, Yezo, the Kurile Islands and southern Kamchatka,[565] noticeably where the rim of the basin presented the scantiest supply of land and where, therefore, its meager resources had to be eked out by fisheries and trade on the sea.

[Sidenote: Red Sea basin.]

On the southwest margin of Asia, the Red Sea, despite its desert shores, has maintained the influence of its intercontinental location and linked the neighboring elements of Africa and Asia. Identity of climatic conditions on both sides of this long rift valley has facilitated ethnic exchanges, and made it the center of what Ratzel calls the "Red Sea group of peoples," related in race and culture.[566] The great ethnic solvent here has been Semitic. Under the spur of Islam, the Arabs by 1514 had made the Red Sea an Arabian and Mohammedan sea. They had their towns or trading stations at Zeila on the African side of the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, at Dalaqua, the port of Abyssinia, at Massowa, Suakin, and other towns, so that this coast too was called Arabia Felix.[567]

[Sidenote: Assimilation facilitated by ethnic kinship.]

Vicinal location about an enclosed basin produces more rapidly a unification of race and culture, when some ethnic relationship and affinity already exists among the peoples inhabiting its shores. As in the ancient and medieval Mediterranean, so in the Yellow Sea of Asia, the working of this principle is apparent. The presence along its coasts of divergent but kindred peoples like the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese, allowed these to be easily assimilated to a Yellow Sea race and to absorb quickly any later infusion, like that of the Tatars and Manchus. China, by reason of its larger area, long-drawn coast, massive population, and early civilization, was the dominant factor in this basin; Korea and Japan were its culture colonies-a fact that justifies the phrase calling "China the Rome of the Far East." Historical Japan began on the island of Kiu-sui, facing the Yellow Sea. Like Korea, it derived its writing, its fantastic medical notions, its industrial methods, some features of its government administration, its Buddhism and its religion of Confucius from the people about the lower Hoangho.[568] Three centuries ago Japan had its colony on Korean soil at Fusan, the Calais of the East.[569] For purposes of piracy and smuggling Japanese penetrated far up the rivers of China. Korea has kept in touch with China by an active trade and diplomatic relations through the centuries.

But to-day China is going to school to Japan. Since Japan renounced her policy of seclusion in 1868 along with her antiquated form of government, and since Korea has been forced out of her hermit life, the potency of vicinal location around this enclosed sea has been suddenly restored. The enforced opening of the treaty ports of Japan, Korea and China simply prepared the way for this basin to reassert its power to unite, and to unite now more closely and effectively than ever before, under the law of increasing territorial areas. The stimulus was first communicated to the basin from without, from the trading nations of the Occident and that new-born Orient rising from the sea on the California shores. Japan has responded most promptly and most actively to these over-sea stimuli, just as England has, of all Europe, felt most strongly the reflex influences from trans-Atlantic lands. The awakening of this basin has started, therefore, from its seaward rim; its star has risen in the east. It is in the small countries of the world that such stars rise. The compressed energies of Japan, stirred by over-sea contact and an improved government at home, have overleaped the old barriers and are following the lines of slight resistance which this land-bound sea affords. Helped by the bonds of geographical conditions and of race, she has begun to convert China and Korea into her culture colonies. The on-looking world feels that the ultimate welfare of China and Korea can be best nurtured by Japan, which will thus pay its old debt to the Middle Kingdom.

[Sidenote: Chinese expansion seaward.]

Despite the fact that China's history has always had a decidedly inland character, that its political expansion has been landward, that it has practiced most extensively and successively internal colonization, and that its policy of exclusion has tended to deaden its outlook toward the Pacific, nevertheless China's direct intercourse with the west and its westward-directed influence have never, in point of significance, been comparable with that toward the east and south. Here a succession of marginal seas offered easy water-paths, dotted with way stations, to their outermost rim in Japan, the Philippines and remote Australia. About the South China Sea, the Gulf of Siam, the Sulu, Celebes, and Java Seas, the coastal regions of the outlying islands have for centuries received Chinese goods and culture, and a blend of that obstinately assertive Chinese blood.

The strength of these influences has decreased with every increase of distance from the indented coasts and teeming, seafaring population of South China, and with every decrease in race affinity. They have left only faint traces on the alien shores of far-away Australia. The divergent ethnic stock of the widespread Malay world has been little susceptible to these influences, which are therefore weak in the remoter islands, but clearly discernible on the coasts of the Philippines,[570] Borneo, the nearer Sunda Islands, and the peninsula of Malacca, where the Chinese have had trading colonies for centuries.[571] But in the eastern half of Farther India, which is grouped with China by land as well as by sea, and whose race stock is largely if not purely Mongolian, these influences are very marked, so that the whole continental rim of the South China Sea, from Formosa to the Isthmus of Malacca, is strongly assimilated in race and culture. Tongking, exposed to those modifying influences which characterize all land frontiers, as well as to coastwise intercourse, is in its people and civilization merely a transcript of China. The coast districts and islands of Annam are occupied by Chinese as far as the hills of Cambodia, and the name of Cochin China points to the origin of its predominant population. One-sixth of the inhabitants of Siam are Chinese, some of whom have filtered through the northern border; Bangkok, the capital, has a large Chinese quarter. The whole economic life and no small part of the intellectual life of the eastern face of Farther India south to Singapore is centered in the activity of the Chinese.[572]

[Sidenote: Importance of zonal and continental location.]

The historical significance of an enclosed sea basin depends upon its zonal location and its position in relation to the surrounding lands. We observe a steady decrease of historical importance from south to north through the connected series of the Yellow, Japan, Okhotsk, Bering Seas and the Arctic basin, miscalled ocean. The far-northern location of the Baltic, with its long winters of ice-bound ports and its glaciated lands, retarded its inclusion in the field of history, curtailed its important historical period, and reduced the intensity of its historical life, despite the brave, eager activity of the Hanseatic League. The Mediterranean had the advantage, not only of a more favorable zonal situation, but of a location at the meeting place of three continents and on the line of maritime traffic across the eastern hemisphere from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

[Sidenote: Thalassic character of the Indian Ocean.]

These advantages it shares in some degree with the Indian Ocean, which, as Ratzel justly argues, is not a true ocean, at best only half an ocean. North of the equator, where it is narrowed and enclosed like an inland sea, it loses the hydrospheric and atmospheric characteristics of a genuine ocean. Currents and winds are disorganized by the close-hugging lands. Here the steady northeast trade wind is replaced by the alternating air currents of the northeast and southwest monsoons, which at a very early date[573] enabled merchant vessels to break away from their previous slow, coastwise path, and to strike a straight course on their voyage between Arabia or the east coast of Africa and India.[574] Moreover, this northern half of the Indian Ocean looks like a larger Mediterranean with its southern coast removed. It has the same east and west series of peninsulas harboring differentiated nationalities, the same northward running recesses, but all on a larger scale. It has linked together the history of Asia and Africa; and by the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, it has drawn Europe and the Mediterranean into its sphere of influence. At the western corner of the Indian Ocean a Semitic people, the Arabs of Oman and Yemen, here first developed brilliant maritime activity, like their Phoenician kinsmen of the Lebanon seaboard. Similar geographic conditions in their home lands and a nearly similar intercontinental location combined to make them the middlemen of three continents. Just as the Phoenicians, by way of the Mediterranean, reached and roused slumberous North Africa into historical activity and became the medium for the distribution of Egypt's culture, so these Semites of the Arabian shores knocked at the long-closed doors of East Africa facing on the Indian basin, and drew this region into the history of southern Asia. Thus the Africa of the enclosed seas was awakened to some measure of historical life, while the Africa of the wide Atlantic slept on.

[Sidenote: The sea route to the Orient.]

From the dawn of history the northern Indian Ocean was a thoroughfare. Alexander the Great's rediscovery of the old sea route to the Orient sounds like a modern event in relation to the gray ages behind it. Along this thoroughfare Indian colonists, traders, and priests carried the elements of Indian civilization to the easternmost Sunda Isles; and Oriental wares, sciences and religions moved westward to the margin of Europe and Africa. The Indian Ocean produced a civilization of its own, with which it colored a vast semi-circle of land reaching from Java to Abyssinia, and more faintly, owing to the wider divergence of race, the further stretch from Abyssinia to Mozambique.

Thus the northern Indian Ocean, owing to its form, its location in the angle between Asia and Africa and the latitude where, round the whole earth, "the zone of greatest historical density" begins, and especially its location just southeast of the Mediterranean as the eastern extension of that maritime track of ancient and modern times between Europe and China, has been involved in a long series of historical events. From the historical standpoint, prior to 1492 it takes a far higher place than the Atlantic and Pacific, owing to its nature as an enclosed sea.[575] But like all such basins, this northern Indian Ocean attained its zenith of historical importance in early times. In the sixteenth century it suffered a partial eclipse, which passed only with the opening of the Suez Canal. During this interval, however, the Portuguese. Dutch and English had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and entered this basin on its open or oceanic side. By their trading stations, which soon traced the outlines of its coasts from Sofala in South Africa around to Java, they made this ocean an alcove of the Atlantic, and embodied its events in the Atlantic period of history. It is this open or oceanic side which differentiates the Indian Ocean physically, and therefore historically, from a genuine enclosed sea.

[Sidenote: Limitation of small area in enclosed seas.]

The limitation of every enclosed or marginal sea lies in its small area and in the relatively restricted circle of its bordering lands. Only small peninsulas and islands can break its surface, and short stretches of coast combine to form its shores. It affords, therefore, only limited territories as goals for expansion, restricted resources and populations to furnish the supply and demand of trade. What lands could the Mediterranean present to the colonial outlook of the Greeks comparable to the North America of the expanding English or the Brazil of the Portuguese? Yet the Mediterranean as a colonial field had great advantages in point of size over the Baltic, which is only one-sixth as large (2,509,500 and 431,000 square kilometers respectively), and especially over the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, whose effective areas were greatly reduced by the aridity of their surrounding lands. But the precocious development and early cessation of growth marking all Mediterranean national life have given to this basin a variegated history; and in every period and every geographical region of it, from ancient Phoenicia to modern Spain and Italy, the early exhaustion of resources and dwarfing of political ideals which characterize most small areas become increasingly conspicuous. The history of Sweden, Denmark, and the Hanse Towns in the Baltic tells the same story, the story of a hothouse plant, forced in germination and growth, then stifled in the close air.

[Sidenote: Successive maritime periods in history.]

Growth demands space. Therefore, the progress of history has been attended by an advance from smaller to larger marine areas, with a constant increase in those manifold relations between peoples and lands which the water is able to establish. Every great epoch of history has had its own sea, and every succeeding epoch has enlarged its maritime field. The Greek had the Aegean, the Roman the whole Mediterranean, to which the Middle Ages made an addition in the North Sea and Baltic. The modern period has had the Atlantic, and the twentieth century is now entering upon the final epoch of the World Ocean. The gradual inclusion of this World Ocean in the widened scope of history has been due to the expansion of European peoples, who, for the past twenty centuries, have been the most far-reaching agents in the making of universal history. Owing to the location and structure of their continent, they have always found the larger outlet in a western sea. In the south the field widened from the Phoenician Sea to the Aegean, then to the Mediterranean, on to the Atlantic, and across it to its western shores; in the north it moved from the quiet Baltic to the tide-swept North Sea and across the North Atlantic. Only the South Atlantic brought European ships to the great world highway of the South Seas, and gave them the choice of an eastern or western route to the Pacific. Every new voyage in the age of discovery expanded the historical horizon; and every improvement in the technique of navigation has helped to eliminate distance and reduced intercourse on the World Ocean to the time-scale of the ancient Mediterranean.

It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the larger oceanic horizon has meant a corresponding increase in the relative content and importance of history for the known world of each period. Such an intense, concentrated national life as occurred in those little Mediterranean countries in ancient times is not duplicated now, unless we find a parallel in Japan's recent career in the Yellow Sea basin. There was something as cosmic in the colonial ventures of the Greeks to the wind-swept shores of the Crimea or barbarous wilds of Massilia, as in the establishment of English settlements on the brimming rivers of Virginia or the torrid coast of Malacca. Alexander's conquest of the Asiatic rim of the Mediterranean and Rome's political unification of the basin had a significance for ancient times comparable with the Russification of northern Asia and the establishment of the British Empire for our day.

The ocean has always performed one function in the evolution of history; it has provided the outlet for the exercise of redundant national powers. The abundance of opportunity which it presents to these disengaged energies depends upon the size, location and other geographic conditions of the bordering lands. These opportunities are limited in an enclosed basin, larger in the oceans, and largest in the northern halves of the oceans, owing to the widening of all land-masses towards the north and the consequent contraction of the oceans and seas in the same latitudes.

[Sidenote: Contrasted historical roles of northern and southern hemispheres.]

A result of this grouping is the abundance of land in the northern hemisphere, and the vast predominance of water in the southern, by reason of which these two hemispheres have each assumed a distinct role in history. The northern hemisphere offers the largest advantages for the habitation of man, and significantly enough, contains a population five times that of the southern hemisphere. The latter, on the other hand, with its vast, unbroken water areas, has been the great oceanic highway for circum-mundane exploration and trade. This great water girdle of the South Seas had to be discovered before the spherical form of the earth could be proven. In the wide territory of the northern hemisphere civilization has experienced an uninterrupted development, first in the Old World, because this offered in its large area north of the equator the fundamental conditions for rapid evolution; then it was transplanted with greatest success to North America. The northern hemisphere contains, therefore, "the zone of greatest historical density," from which the track of the South Seas is inconveniently remote. Hence we find in recent decades a reversion to the old east-west path along the southern rim of Eurasia, now perfected by the Suez Canal, and to be extended in the near future around the world by the union of the Pacific with the Caribbean Sea at Panama; so that finally the northern hemisphere will have its own circum-mundane waterway, along the line of greatest intercontinental intercourse.

[Sidenote: Size of the oceans]

The size of the ocean as a whole is so enormous, and yet its various subdivisions are so uniform in their physical aspect, that their differences of size produce less conspicuous historical effects than their diversity of area would lead one to expect. A voyage across the 177,000 square miles (453,500 square kilometers) of the Black Sea does not differ materially from one across the 979,000 square miles (2,509,500 square kilometers) of the Mediterranean; or a voyage across the 213,000 square miles (547,600 square kilometers) of the North Sea, from one across the three-hundredfold larger area of the Pacific. The ocean does not, like the land, wear upon its surface the evidences and effects of its size; it wraps itself in the same garment of blue waves or sullen swell, wherever it appears; but the outward cloak of the land varies from zone to zone. The significant anthropo-geographical influence of the size of the oceans, as opposed to that of the smaller seas, comes from the larger circle of lands which the former open to maritime enterprise. For primitive navigation, when the sailor crept from headland to headland and from island to island, the small enclosed basin with its close-hugging shores did indeed offer the best conditions. To-day, only the great tonnage of ocean-going vessels may reflect in some degree the vast areas they traverse between continent and continent. Coasting craft and ships designed for local traffic in enclosed seas are in general smaller, as in the Baltic, though the enormous commerce of the Great Lakes, which constitute in effect an inland sea, demands immense vessels.

[Sidenote: Neutrality of the seas, its evolution.]

The vast size of the oceans has been the basis of their neutrality. The neutrality of the seas is a recent idea in political history. The principle arose in connection with the oceans, and from them was extended to the smaller basins, which previously tended to be regarded as private political domains. Their limited area, which enabled them to be compassed, enabled them also to be appropriated, controlled and policed. The Greek excluded the Phoenician from the Aegean and made it an Hellenic sea. Carthage and Tarentum tried to draw the dead line for Roman merchantmen at the Lacinian Cape, the doorway into the Ionian Sea, and thereby involved themselves in the famous Punic Wars. The whole Mediterranean became a Roman sea, the mare nostrum. Pompey's fleet was able to police it effectively and to exterminate the pirates in a few months, as Cicero tells us in his oration for the Manilian Law. Venice, by the conquest of the Dalmatian pirates in 991 prepared to make herself dominatrix Adriatici maris, as she was later called. By the thirteenth century she had secured full command of the sea, spoke of it as "the Gulf," in her desire to stamp it as a mare clausum, maintained in it a powerful patrol fleet under a Capitan in Golfo, whose duty it was to police the sea for pirates and to seize all ships laden with contraband goods. She claimed and enforced the right of search of foreign vessels, and compelled them to discharge two-thirds of their cargo at Venice, which thus became the clearing house of the whole Adriatic. She even appealed to the Pope for confirmation of her dominion over the sea.[576] Sweden and Denmark strove for a dominum maris Baltici; but the Hanse Towns of northern Germany secured the maritime supremacy in the basin, kept a toll-gate at its entrance, and levied toll or excluded merchant ships at their pleasure, a right which after the fall of the Hanseatic power was assumed by Denmark and maintained till 1857. "The Narrow Seas" over which England claimed sovereignty from 1299 to 1805, and on which she exacted a salute from every foreign vessel, included the North Sea as far as Stadland Cape in Norway, the English Channel, and the Bay of Biscay down to Cape Finisterre in northern Spain.[577]

At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Indian Ocean was a Portuguese sea. Spain was trying to monopolize the Caribbean and even the Pacific Ocean. But the immense areas of these pelagic fields of enterprise, and the rapid intrusion into them of other colonial powers soon rendered obsolete in practice the principle of the mare clausum, and introduced that of the mare liberum. The political theory of the freedom of the seas seems to have needed vigorous support even toward the end of the seventeenth century. At this time we find writers like Salmasius and Hugo Grotius invoking it to combat Portuguese monopoly of the Indian Ocean as a mare clausum. Grotius in a lengthy dissertation upholds the thesis that "Jure gentium quibusvis ad quosvis liberam esse navigationem," and supports it by an elaborate argument and quotations from the ancient poets, philosophers, orators and historians.[578] This principle was not finally acknowledged by England as applicable to "The Narrow Seas" till 1805. Now, by international agreement, political domain extends only to one marine league from shore or within cannon range. The rest of the vast water area remains the unobstructed highway of the world.

NOTES TO CHAPTER IX

[528] S.M. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, p. 135. New York, 1900.Return to passage

[529] A.H. Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains, Vol. I, p. 277; Vol. II, 79-81. New York, 1849.Return to passage

[530] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 257, 261. London, 1897.Return to passage

[531] Col. Lane Fox, Early Modes of Navigation, Journal of Anthropological Institute, Vol. IV, p. 423.Return to passage

[532] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. I, p. 167. London; 1907.Return to passage

[533] Ibid., Vol. I, p. 324.Return to passage

[534] James H. Breasted, History of Egypt, pp. 89, 91, 97. New York, 1905. Col. Lane Fox, Early Modes of Navigation, Journal of Anthropological Institute, Vol. IV, pp. 414-417.Return to passage

[535] G. Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa, Vol. I, p. 77. London, 1873.Return to passage

[536] E. Huntington, The Depression of Sistan in Eastern Persia, Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, Vol. 37, No. 5. 1905.Return to passage

[537] Schoolcraft, The Indian Tribes of the United States, Vol. I, p. 214. Philadelphia, 1853.Return to passage

[538] H.H. Bancroft, The Native Races, Vol. I, pp. 382-383, 408, 564. San Francisco, 1886. D. G. Brinton, The American Race, pp. 110, 112. Philadelphia, 1901.Return to passage

[539] Herodotus, Book 1, Chap. 194.Return to passage

[540] S.M. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, p. 135. New York, 1900.Return to passage

[541] Cotterill and Little, Ships and Sailors, pp. ix-x, 38, London, 1868.Return to passage

[542] M. Hue, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China in 1846, Vol. II, p. 251. Chicago, 1898.Return to passage

[543] Elliott Coues, History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Vol. I, p. 159. New York, 1893.Return to passage

[544] Col. Lane Fox, Early Modes of Navigation, Journal of Anthropological Institute, Vol. IV, pp. 423-425.Return to passage

[545] H.M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, Vol. I, pp. 313-314. New York, 1879.Return to passage

[546] Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 184, 219-220, 270-272, 300.Return to passage

[547] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, p. 288. London, 1896-1898.Return to passage

[548] Ibid., Vol I, pp. 358-359. Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 679-680. London, 1904.Return to passage

[549] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, pp. 153-154; Vol. II, pp. 91, 100. London, 1896-1898.Return to passage

[550] Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 166-170.Return to passage

[551] Captain Winkler, Sea Charts Formerly Used in the Marshall Islands, Smithsonian Report for 1899, translated from the Marine Rundschau. Berlin, 1898.Return to passage

[552] Captain James Cook, Journal of First Voyage Round the World, pp. 70, 105, 119, 221, 230. Edited by W.J.L. Wharton. London, 1893.Return to passage

[553] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, pp. 161, 174. London, 1896-1898.Return to passage

[554] The Commercial and Fiscal Policy of the Venetian Republic, Edinburgh Review, Vol. 200, pp. 352-353. 1904.Return to passage

[555] H. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 188-189, 193-195. New York, 1902-1906.Return to passage

[556] G. Sergi, The Mediterranean Race, pp. 29-37. New York, 1901. W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 128-130, 270-273, 387-390, 407, 444, 448. New York, 1899.Return to passage

[557] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 189-190. London, 1904.Return to passage

[558] Sydow-Wagner Schul-Atlas, Voelker und Sprachenkarten, No. 13. Gotha, 1905. A. Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, map p. 80. New York, 1897.Return to passage

[559] Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. VI, pp. 5-17. New York, 1902-1906.Return to passage

[560] E.C. Semple, The Development of the Hanse Towns in Relation to their Geographical Environment, Bulletin American Geographical Society, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, 1899.Return to passage

[561] Helen Zimmern, The Hansa Towns, pp. 24-25, 54-55. New York, 1895.Return to passage

[562] Nordenskiold, The Voyage of the Vega, pp. 365, 588, 591. New York, 1882.Return to passage

[563] Ibid., pp. 375, 403, 405, 487, 563.Return to passage

[564] Agnes Laut, The Vikings of the Pacific, pp. 62-105. New York, 1905.Return to passage

[565] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 446, 449-450. London, 1896-1898.Return to passage

[566] Ibid., Vol. III, pp. 180-195.Return to passage

[567] Duarte Barbosa, The Coasts of East Africa and Malabar, pp. 17-18. Hakluyt Society Publications. London, 1866.Return to passage

[568] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 443-444. London, 1896-1898.Return to passage

[569] Angus Hamilton, Korea, pp. 130-135. New York, 1904.Return to passage

[570] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 318-320, 478, 481-495. Washington, 1903.Return to passage

[571] Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, pp. 544-545. New York, 1902-1906.Return to passage

[572] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 407-412. London, 1896-1898.Return to passage

[573] Pliny, Natural History, Book VI, chap. 26.Return to passage

[574] Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, Vol. II, pp. 351, 417-418, 470, 471. London, 1883.Return to passage

[575] For full discussion of Indian Ocean, see Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, pp. 580-584, 602-610. New York, 1902-1906. Duarte Barbosa, The Coasts of East Africa and Malabar, pp. 26-28, 41-42, 59-60, 67, 75, 79-80, 83, 166, 170, 174, 179, 184, 191-194, Hakluyt Society. London, 1866.Return to passage

[576] Pompeo Molmenti, Venice in the Middle Ages, Vol. I, pp. 117, 121-123, 130. Chicago, 1906. The Commercial and Fiscal Policy of the Venetian Republic, Edinburgh Review, Vol. 200, pp. 341-344, 347. 1904.Return to passage

[577] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, p. 24, note. London, 1904.Return to passage

[578] Hugonis Grotii, Mare Liberum sive de jure quod Batavis competit ad Indicana commercia dissertatio, contained in his De Jure Belli et Pacis. Hagae Comitis, 1680.Return to passage

X. MAN'S RELATION TO THE WATER

Despite the extensive use which man makes of the water highways of the world, they remain to him highways, places for his passing and repassing, not for his abiding. Essentially a terrestrial animal, he makes his sojourn upon the deep only temporary, even when as a fisherman he is kept upon the sea for months during the long season of the catch, or when, as whaler, year-long voyages are necessitated by the remoteness and expanse of his field of operations. Yet even this rule has its exceptions. The Moro Bajan are sea gypsies of the southern Philippines and the Sulu archipelago, of whom Gannett says "their home is in their boats from the cradle to the grave, and they know no art but that of fishing." Subsisting almost exclusively on sea food, they wander about from shore to shore, one family to a boat, in little fleets of half a dozen sail; every floating community has its own headman called the Captain Bajan, who embodies all their slender political organization. When occasionally they abandon their rude boats for a time, they do not abandon the sea, but raise their huts on piles above the water on some shelving beach. Like the ancient lake-dwellers of Switzerland and Italy, only in death do they acknowledge their ultimate connection with the solid land. They never bury their dead at sea, but always on a particular island, to which the funeral cortege of rude outrigged boats moves to the music of the paddle's dip.[579]

[Sidenote: Protection of a water frontier.]

The margin of river, lake and sea has always attracted the first settlements of man because it offered a ready food supply in its animal life and an easy highway for communication. Moreover, a water front made a comparatively safe frontier for the small, isolated communities which constituted primitive societies. The motive of protection, dominant in the savage when selecting sites for his villages, led him to place them on the pear-shaped peninsula formed by a river loop, or on an island in the stream or off the coast; or to sever his connection with the solid land, whence attack might come, and provide himself with a boundary waste of water by raising his hut on piles above the surface of lake, river or sheltered seacoast, within easy reach of the shore. In this location the occupant of the pile dwelling has found all his needs answered--fishing grounds beneath and about his hut, fields a few hundred feet away on shore, easily reached by his dug-out canoe, and a place of retreat from a land enemy, whether man or wild beast.

[Sidenote: Ancient pile villages.]

Such pile dwellings, answering the primary need of protection, have had wide distribution, especially in the Tropics, and persist into our own times among retarded peoples living in small, isolated groups too weak for effective defence. They were numerous in the lakes of Switzerland[580] and northern Italy down to the first century of our era, and existed later in slightly modified form in Ireland, Scotland, England and southern Wales.[581] In ancient Ireland they were constructed on artificial islands, raised in shallow spots of lakes or morasses by means of fascines weighted down with gravel and clay, and moored to the bottom by stakes driven through the mass. Such groups of dwellings were called Crannogs; they existed in Ireland from the earliest historical period and continued in use down to the time of Queen Elizabeth. In the turbulent twelfth century, the warring lords of the soil adopted them as places of refuge and residence.[582] Herodotus describes a pile village of the ancient Thracians in Lake Prasias near the Hellespont, built quite after the Swiss type, with trap doors in the floor for fishing or throwing out refuse. Its inhabitants escaped conquest by the Persians under King Darius, and avoided the fate of their fellow tribesmen on land, who were subdued and removed as colonists to Asia.[583]

[Sidenote: Present distribution.]

Among Europeans such pile villages belong to primitive stages of development, chiefly to the Stone, Bronze, and early Iron Ages. They are widely distributed in modern times among retarded peoples, who in this way seek compensation for their social and economic weakness. In South America, the small timid tribe of the native Warraus till quite recently built their dwellings on platforms over the water in the river network of the Orinoco delta and along the swamp coast as far as the Essequibo. These pile villages, "fondata sopra l'acqua come Venezia," as Vespuccius says, suggested to him the name of Venezuela or little Venice for this coast.[584] A pile village in Jull Lake, a lacustrine expansion in a tributary of the upper Salwin River, is inhabited by the Inthas, apparently an alien colony in Burma. They have added a detail in their floating gardens, rafts covered with soil, on which they raise tomatoes, watermelons and gourds.[585]

In little Lake Mohrya, located near the upper Lualaba River, a southern headstream of the Congo, Cameron found numerous pile dwellings, whose owners moved about in dug-out canoes and cultivated fields on land,[586] as did their Swiss confreres of twenty centuries ago. Livingstone, in descending from Lake Nyassa by the Shire River, found in the lakelet of Pamalombe, into which the stream widened, similar water huts inhabited by a number of Manganja families, who had been driven from their homes by slave raiders. The slender reeds of the papyrus thicket, lining the shore in a broad band, served as piles, number compensating for the lack of strength; the reeds, bent downward and fastened together into a mat, did indeed support their light dwellings, but heaved like thin ice when the savages moved from hut to hut. The dense forest of papyrus left standing between village and shore effectually screened their retreat, and the abundant fish in the lake provided them with food.[587]

[Sidenote: Malayan pile dwellings.]

In the vast island world of Indonesia, where constant contact with the sea has bred the amphibian Malay race, we are not surprised to find that the typical Malay house is built on piles above the water; and that when the coast Malay is driven inland by new-comers of his own stock and forced to abandon his favorite occupations of trade, piracy and fishing, he takes to agriculture but still retains his sea-born architecture and raises his hut on poles above the ground, beyond the reach of an enemy's spear-thrust. The Moro Samal Laut of the southern Sulu Archipelago avoid the large volcanic islands of the group, and place their big villages over the sea on low coral reefs. The sandy beaches of the shore hold their coco-palms, whose nuts by their milk eke out the scanty supply of drinking water, and whose fronds shade the tombs of the dead.[588] The sea-faring Malays of the Sunda Islands, in thickly populated points of the coast, often dwell in permanently inhabited rafts moored near the pile dwellings. Palembang on the lower swampy course of the River Musi has a floating suburb of this sort. It is called the "Venice of Sumatra," just as Banjarmasin, a vast complex of pile and raft dwellings, is called the "Venice of Borneo," and Brunei to the north is the "Venice of the East."[589] Both these towns are the chief commercial centers of their respective islands. The little town of Kilwaru, situated on a sandbank off the eastern end of Ceram, seems to float on the sea, so completely has it surrounded and enveloped with pile-built houses the few acres of dry land which form its nucleus. It is a place of busy traffic, the emporium for commerce between the Malay Archipelago and New Guinea.[590]

[Sidenote: In Melanesia.]

Farther east in Melanesia, whose coast regions are more or less permeated by Malayan stock and influences, pile dwellings, both over water and on land form a characteristic feature of the scenery. The village of Sowek in Geelvink Bay, on the northern coast of Dutch New Guinea, consists of thirty houses raised on piles above the water, connected with each other by tree trunks but having only boat connection with the shore. Similar villages are found hovering over the lapping waves of Humboldt Bay, all of them recalling with surprising fidelity the prehistoric lake-dwellings of Switzerland.[591] The Papuan part of Port Moresby, on the southern coast of British New Guinea, covers the whole water-front of the town with pile dwellings. In the vicinity are similar native pile villages, such as Tanobada, Hanuabada, Elevara and Hula, the latter consisting of pile dwellings scattered about over the water in a circuit of several miles and containing about a thousand inhabitants. Here, too, the motive is protection against the attacks of inland mountain tribes, with whom the coast people are in constant war.[592]

The Malay fisherman, trader and pirate, with the love of the sea in his blood, by these pile dwellings combines security from his foe and proximity to his familiar field of activity. The same objects are achieved by white traders on the west coast of Africa by setting up their dwellings and warehouses on the old hulks of dismasted vessels, which are anchored for this purpose in the river mouths. They afford some protection against both fever and hostile native, and at the same time occupy the natural focus of local trade seeking foreign exchanges.

[Sidenote: River dwellers in populous lands.]

When advancing civilization has eliminated the need for this form of protection, water-dwellers may survive or reappear in old and relatively over-populated countries, as we find them universally on the rivers of China and less often in Farther India. Here they present the phenomenon of human life overflowing from the land to the streams of the country; because these, as highways of commerce, afford a means of livelihood, even apart from the food supply in their fish, and offer an unclaimed bit of the earth's surface for a floating home. Canton has 250,000 inhabitants living on boats and rafts moored in the river, and finding occupation in the vast inland navigation of the Empire, or in the trade which it brings to this port of the Si-kiang. Some of the boats accommodate large families, together with modest poultry farms, crowded together under their low bamboo sheds. Others are handsome wooden residences ornamented with plants, and yet others are pleasure resorts with their professional singing girls.[593] In the lakes and swamp-bordered rivers of southern Shantung, a considerable fishing population is found living in boats, while the land shows few inhabitants. This population enjoys freedom from taxation and unrestricted use of the rivers and fisheries. To vary their scant and monotonous diet, they construct floating gardens on rafts of bamboo covered with earth, on which they plant onions and garlic and which they tow behind their boats. They also raise hundreds of ducks, which are trained to go into the water to feed and return at a signal,[594] thus expanding the resources of their river life. Bangkok has all its business district afloat on the Menam River--shops, lumber yards, eating-houses and merchants' dwellings. Even the street vendor's cart is a small boat, paddled in and out among the larger junks.[595]

A far more modern type of river-dwellers is found in the "shanty-boat" people of the western rivers of the United States. They are the gypsies of our streams, nomads who float downstream with the current, tying up at intervals along the bank of some wooded island or city waterfront, then paying a tug to draw their house-boat upstream. The river furnishes them with fish for their table and driftwood for their cooking-stove, and above all is the highway for the gratification of their nomad instincts. There is no question here of trade and overpopulation.

[Sidenote: Reclamation of land from the sea.]

Pile dwellings and house-boats are a paltry form of encroachment upon the water in comparison with that extensive reclamation of river swamps and coastal marshes which in certain parts of the world has so increased the area available for human habitation. The water which is a necessity to man may become his enemy unless it is controlled. The alluvium which a river deposits in its flood-plain, whether in some flat stretch of its middle course or near the retarding level of the sea, attracts settlement because of its fertility and proximity to a natural highway; but it must be protected by dikes against the very element which created it. Such deposits are most extensive on low coasts at or near the river's mouth, just where the junction of an inland and oceanic waterway offers the best conditions for commerce. Here then is a location destined to attract and support a large population, for which place can be made only by steady encroachment upon the water of both river and sea. Diking is necessitated not only by the demand for more land for the growing population, but also by the constant silting up of the drainage outfalls, which increases the danger of inundation while at the same time contributing to the upbuilding of the land. Conditions here institute an incessant struggle between man and nature;[596] but the rewards of victory are too great to count the cost. The construction of sea-walls, embankment of rivers, reclamation of marshes, the cutting of canals for drains and passways in a water-soaked land, the conversion of lakes into meadow, the rectification of tortuous streams for the greater economy of this silt-made soil, all together constitute the greatest geographical transformation that man has brought about on the earth's surface.[597]

[Sidenote: The struggle with the water.]

Though the North Sea lowland of Europe has suffered from the serious encroachment of the sea from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, when the Zuyder Zee, the Dollart and Jade Bay were formed, nevertheless the counter encroachment of the land upon the water, accomplished through the energy and intelligence of the inhabitants, has more than made good the loss. Between the Elbe and Scheldt more than 2,000 square miles (5,000 square kilometers) have been reclaimed from river and sea in the past three hundred years. Holland's success in draining her large inland waters, like the Haarlem Meer (70 square miles or 180 square kilometers) and the Lake of Ij, has inspired an attempt to recover 800 square miles (2,050 square kilometers) of fertile soil from the borders of the Zuyder Zee and reduce that basin to nearly one-third of its present size.[598] One-fourth of the Netherlands lies below the average of high tides, and in 1844 necessitated 9,000 windmills to pump the waste water into the drainage canals.[599]

The Netherlands, with all its external features of man's war against the water, has its smaller counterpart in the 1,200 square miles of reclaimed soil about the head of the Wash, which constitute the Fenland of England. Here too are successive lines of sea-wall, the earliest of them attributed to the Romans, straightened and embanked rivers, drainage canals, windmills and steam pumps, dikes serving as roads, lines of willows and low moist pastures dotted with grazing cattle. No feature of the Netherlands is omitted. The low southern part of Lincolnshire is even called Holland, and Dutch prisoners from a naval battle of 1652 were employed there on the work of reclamation, which was begun on a large scale about this time.[600] In the medieval period, the increase of population necessitated measures to improve the drainage and extend the acreage; but there was little co-operation among the land owners, and the maintenance of river dikes and sea-walls was neglected, till a succession of disasters from flooding streams and invading tides in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries led to severe measures against defaulters. One culprit was placed alive in a breach which his own neglect or criminal cutting had caused, and was built in, by way of educating the Fenlanders to a sense of common responsibility.[601]

The fight against the water on the coast begins later than that against rivers and swamps in the interior of the land; it demands greater enterprise and courage, because it combats two enemies instead of one; but its rewards are correspondingly greater. The Netherlands by their struggle have acquired not only territory for an additional half million population, but have secured to themselves a strategic position in the maritime trade of the world.

[Sidenote: Mound villages in river flood-plains.]

The abundant fertility of river flood-plains inevitably attracts population and necessitates some kind of artificial protection against inundation. The most primitive form of this protection is obvious and widespread, restricted in neither locality nor race. When the flood season converts the flat plain of the White Nile below Gondokora (7 deg. N. Lat.) into an extensive marsh, countless hills of the white ant emerge over the waters. During the dry season, the ants build up their hills to about ten feet, and then live in safety in the upper section during the flood. They greatly surpass in intelligence and constructive ability the human occupants of the valley, the low and wretched Kytch tribe of the Dinka Negroes, who like the ants are attracted by the natural vegetation of the flood-plain, and who use the ant-hills as refuge stations for themselves and their cattle during the flood.[602] Elsewhere in Africa the natives are more intelligent, for flood-plain villages built on artificial mounds have existed from the earliest times. Diodorus Siculus tells us that those of ancient Egypt, when the Nile was high, looked like the Cyclades Islands.[603] Similar ones are constructed by the Barotse tribe on the upper Zambesi.[604] The Niger River, rising in the Foota Jallon and Kong Mountains which form a region of heavy rainfall from February to July, inundates a plain of several thousand square miles for a distance of 250 miles above Timbuctoo. Here again the villages of the agricultural Song-hoi duplicate those of Egypt, built on the same clay mounds, wreathed in the same feathery palms, and communicating with one another only by small boats.[605] The same picture is presented by the Yangtze Kiang plain during the summer overflow--low artificial hills rising from the expanse of muddy water and topped with trees and villages, while sampans moored to their base show the means of communication.[606] In the broad flood-plain of the lower Mississippi River, the chronicles of the De Soto expedition state that the Indian villages visited stood "on mounds made by art." The Yazoo River Indians, at the commencement of the eighteenth century, had their cabins dispersed over the low deltaic land on earthen mounds made by their own hands. There is also strong evidence that some of the works of the Mound-builders in the "bottoms" of the middle and lower Mississippi served as protected sites for the dwellings of their chiefs.[607]

[Sidenote: Diking of rivers.]

Such meager provisions against inundation suffice for the sparse population characterizing the lower stages of civilization, but they must be supplemented for the increasing density of higher stages by the embankment of the stream, to protect also the adjacent fields. Hence the process of confining rivers within dikes goes back into gray antiquity. Those of the Po and its tributaries were begun before the political history of the Lombardy plains commenced. Strabo mentions the canals and dikes of Venetia, whereby a part of the country was drained and rendered tillable.[608] The main Po has been embanked for centuries as far up as Cremona, a distance of 600 miles, and the Adige to Verona.[609] But the most gigantic dike system in the world is that of the Hoangho, by which a territory the size of England is won from the water for cultivation.[610] The cost of protecting the far spread crops against the autumn floods has been a large annual expenditure and unceasing watchfulness; and this the Chinese have paid for two thousand years, but have not always purchased immunity. Year by year the Yellow River mounts higher and higher on its silted bed above the surrounding lowlands, increasing the strain on the banks and the area of destruction, when its fury is uncaged. The flood of 1887 covered an area estimated at 50,000 square miles, wiped out of existence a million people, and left a greater number a prey to famine.[611] So the fertile Chengtu plain of the Min River, supporting four millions of people on its 2,500 square miles of area, owes its prosperity to the embanking and irrigating works of the engineer heroes, Li Ping and his son, who lived before the Christian era. On the temple in their honor in the city of Kuan Hsien is Li Ping's motto, incised in gold: "Dig the bed deep, keep the banks low." For twenty-one centuries these instructions have been carried out. The stone dikes are kept low to permit a judicious amount of flooding for fertilization, and every year five to six feet of silt are removed from the artificial channel of the Min. To this work the whole population of the Chengtu plain contributes.[612] [See map page 8.]

[Sidenote: Social gain by control of the water.]

In such organized struggles to reduce the domain of the water and extend that of the dry land, the material gain is not all: more significant by far is the power to co-operate that is developed in a people by a prolonged war against overwhelming sea or river. A common natural danger, constantly and even regularly recurring, necessitates for its resistance a strong and sustained union, that draws men out of the barren individualism of a primitive people, and forces them without halt along the path of civilization. It brings a realizing sense of the superiority of common interests over individual preferences, strengthens the national bond, and encourages voluntary subservience to law.

This is the social or political gain; but this is not all. The danger emanating from natural phenomena has its discoverable laws, and therefore leads to a first empirical study of winds, currents, seasonal rainfall and the whole science of hydraulics. With deep national insight, the Greeks embodied in their mythology the story of Perseus and his destruction of the sea monster who ravaged the coast, and Hercules' killing of the many-headed serpent who issued from the Lernean Marshes to lay waste the country of Argos. Even so early a writer as Strabo states that yet earlier authorities interpreted Hercules' victory over the river god of the Achelous as the embankment of that stream and the draining of its inundated delta tract by the national benefactor.[613] So the Chinese, whose land abounds in swamps and devastating rivers, have a long list of engineer heroes who embanked and drained for the salvation and benefit of mankind. It is highly probable that the communal work involved in the construction of dikes and canals for the control of the Hoangho floods cemented the Chinese nationality of that vast lowland plain, and supplied the cohesive force that developed here at a very remote period a regularly organized state and an advancing civilization.

[Sidenote: Control of water as factor in early civilizations of arid lands.]

The history of Egypt shows a similar effect of the yearly inundation of the Nile Valley. Here, as in all rainless countries where irrigation must be practiced, the water becomes a potent factor of political union and civilization. Its scarcity necessitates common effort in the construction and maintenance of irrigation works, and a central control to secure fair distribution of the water to the fields of the inhabitants. A stimulus to progress is found in the presence of a problem, perennial as the yearly threatenings of the Hoangho, which demands the application of human intelligence and concerted labor for its solution. Additional arable land for the growing population can be secured only by the wider distribution of the fructifying water; this in turn depends upon corporate effort wisely directed and ably controlled. Every lapse in governmental efficiency means an encroachment of the desert upon the alluvial fields and finally to the river bank, as to-day in Mesopotamia.

The fact that the earliest civilizations have originated in the sub-tropical rainless districts of the world has been ascribed solely to the regular and abundant returns to tillage under irrigation, as opposed to the uncertain crops under variable meteorological conditions; to the consequent accumulation of wealth, and the emancipation of man for other and higher activities, which follows his escape from the agricultural vicissitudes of an uncertain climate. When Draper says: "Civilization depends on climate and agriculture," and "the civilization of Egypt depended for its commencement on the sameness and stability of the African climate," and again, "agriculture is certain in Egypt and there man first became civilized,"[614] he seizes upon the conspicuous fact of a stable food supply as the basis of progress, failing to detect those potent underlying social effects of the inundations--social and political union to secure the most effective distribution of the Nile's blessings and to augment by human devices the area accessible to them, the development of an intelligent water economy, which ultimately produced a long series of intellectual achievements.[615]

[Sidenote: Cultural areas in primitive America.]

This unifying and stimulating national task of utilizing and controlling the water was the same task which in various forms prompted the early civilization of the Hoangho and Yangtze basins, India, Mesopotamia, Persia, Peru, Mexico, and that impressive region of prehistoric irrigation canals found in the Salt, Gila River, and upper Rio Grande valleys.[616] Here the arid plateaus of the Cordilleras between the Pueblo district and Central America had no forests in which game might be found; so that the Indian hunter had to turn to agriculture and a sedentary life beside his narrow irrigated fields. Here native civilization reached its highest grade in North America. Here desert agriculture achieved something more than a reliable food supply. It laid the foundation of the first steady integration of wandering Indian hordes into a stable, permanently organized society. Elsewhere throughout the North American continent, we see only shifting groups of hunter and fisher folk, practising here and there a half nomadic agriculture to supplement the chase.

The primitive American civilization that arose among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Arizona, the only strictly sedentary tribes relying exclusively on agriculture north of the Mexican plateau, was primarily a result of the pressure put upon these people by a restricted water supply.[617] Though chiefly offshoots of the wild Indians of the northern plains, they have been markedly differentiated from their wandering Shoshone and Kiowa kindred by local environment.[618] Scarcity of water in those arid highlands and paucity of arable land forced them to a carefully organized community life, made them invest their labor in irrigation ditches, terraced gardens and walled orchards, whereby they were as firmly rooted in their scant but fertile fields as were their cotton plants and melon vines;[619] while the towering mesas protected their homes against marauding Ute, Navajo and Apache.[620] This thread of a deep underlying connection between civilization and the control of water can be traced through all prehistoric America, as well as through the earliest cultural achievements in North Africa and Asia.

[Sidenote: Economy of the water: fisheries.]

The economy of the water is not confined to its artificial distribution over arid fields, but includes also the exploitation of the mineral and animal resources of the vast world of waters, whether the production of salt from the sea, salt lakes and brine springs, the cultivation of oyster beds, or the whole range of pelagic fisheries. The animal life of the water is important to man owing not only to its great abundance, but also to its distribution over the coldest regions of the globe. It furnishes the chief food supply of polar and sub-polar peoples, and therefore is accountable for the far-northern expansion of the habitable world. Even the reindeer tribes of Arctic Eurasia could hardly subsist without the sea food they get by barter from the fishermen of the coast. Norway, where civilization has achieved its utmost in exploiting the limited means of subsistence, shows a steady increase from south to north in the proportion of the population dependent upon the harvest of the deep. Thus the fisheries engross 44 per cent. of the rural population in Nordland province, which is bisected by the Arctic Circle; over 50 per cent. in Tromso, and about 70 per cent. in Finmarken. If the towns also be included, the percentages rise, because here fishing interests are especially prominent.[621] Proximity to the generous larder of the ocean has determined the selection of village sites, as we have seen among the coast Indians of British Columbia and southern Alaska, among all the Eskimo, and numerous other peoples of Arctic lands. [See map page 153.]

[Sidenote: Fisheries as factors in maritime expansion.]

Not only in polar but also in temperate regions, the presence of abundant fishing grounds draws the people of the nearest coast to their wholesale exploitation, especially if the land resources are scant. Fisheries then become the starting point or permanent basis of a subsequent wide maritime development, by expanding the geographical horizon. It was the search for the purple-yielding murex that first familiarized the Phoenicians with the commercial and colonial possibilities of the eastern Mediterranean coasts.[622] The royal dye of this marine product has through all the ages seemed to color with sumptuous magnificence the sordid dealings of those Tyrian traders, and constituted them an aristocracy of merchants. The shoals of tunny fish, arriving every spring in the Bosporus, from the north, drew the early Greeks and Phoenicians after them into the cold and misty Euxine, and furnished the original impulse to both these peoples for the establishment of fishing and trading stations on its uncongenial shores.[623] To the fisheries of the Baltic and especially to the summer catch of the migratory herring, which in vast numbers visited the shores of Pomerania and southern Sweden to spawn, the Hanse Towns of Germany owed much of their prosperity. Salt herring, even in the twelfth century, was the chief single article of their exchanges with Catholic Europe, which made a strong demand for the fish, owing to the numerous fast days. When, in 1425, by one of those unexplained vagaries of animal life, the herring abandoned the Baltic and selected the North Sea for its summer destination, a new support was given to the wealth of the Netherlands.[624] There is a considerable amount of truth in the saying that Amsterdam was built on herrings. New England, with an unproductive soil at home, but near by in the sea a long line of piscine feeding grounds in the submarine banks stretching from Cape Cod to Cape Race and beyond, found her fisheries the starting point and base of her long round of exchanges, a constant factor in her commercial and industrial evolution.[625]

[Sidenote: Fisheries as nurseries of seamen.]

Fisheries have always been the nurseries of seamen, and hence have been encouraged and protected by governments as providing an important element of national strength. The Newfoundland Banks were the training school which supplied the merchant marine and later the Revolutionary navy of colonial New England;[626] ever since the establishment of the Republic, they have been forced into prominence in our international negotiations with the United Kingdom, with the object of securing special privileges, because the government has recognized them as a factor in the American navy. The causal connection between fisheries and naval efficiency was recognized in England in the early years of Elizabeth's reign, by an act aiming to encourage fisheries by the remission of custom duties to native fishermen, by the imposition of a high tariff on the importation of foreign fish in foreign vessels, and finally by a legislative enforcement of fasts to increase the demand for fish, although any belief in the religious efficacy of fasts was frankly disclaimed. Thus an artificial demand for fish was created, with the result that a report on the success of the Fishery Acts stated that a thousand additional men had been attracted to the fishing trade, and were consequently "ready to serve in Her Majesty's ships."[627]

The fishing of the North Sea, especially on the Dogger Bank, is participated in by all the bordering countries, England, the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium; and is valued equally on account of the food supply which it yields and as a school of seamen.[628] The Pomors or "coasters" of Arctic Russia, who dwell along the shores of the White Sea and live wholly by fisheries, have all their taxes remitted and receive free wood from the crown forests for the construction of their ships, on the condition that they serve on call in the imperial navy.[629] The history of Japan affords the most striking illustration of the power of fisheries alone to maintain maritime efficiency; for when by the seclusion act of 1624 all merchant vessels were destroyed, the marine restricted to small fishing and coasting vessels, and intercourse confined to Japan's narrow island world, the fisheries nevertheless kept alive that intimacy with the sea and preserved the nautical efficiency that was destined to be a decisive factor in the development of awakened Japan.

[Sidenote: Anthropo-geographic importance of navigation.]

The resources of the sea first tempted man to trust himself to its dangerous surface; but their rewards were slight in comparison with the wealth of experiences and influences to which he fell heir, after he learned to convert the barrier of the untrod waste into a highway for his sail-borne keel. It is therefore true, as many anthropologists maintain, that after the discovery of fire the next most important step in the progress of the human race was the invention of the boat. No other has had such far-reaching results. Since water covers three-fourths of the earth's surface and permits the land-masses to rise only as islands here and there, it presents to man for his nautical ventures three times the area that he commands for his terrestrial habitat. On every side, the break of the waves and the swell of the tides block his wanderings, unless he has learned to make the water carry him to his distant goal. Spacially, therefore, the problem and the task of navigation is the most widespread and persistent in the history of mankind. The numerous coaling-stations which England has scattered over the world are mute witnesses to this spacial supremacy of the water, to the length of ocean voyages, and the power of the ocean to divide and unite. But had the proportion of land and water been reversed, the world would have been poorer, deprived of all these possibilities of segregation and differentiation, of stimulus to exchange and far-reaching intercourse, and of ingenious inventions which the isolating ocean has caused. Without this ramifying barrier between the different branches of the human family, these would have resembled each other more closely, but at the cost of development. The mere multiplicity of races and sub-races has sharpened the struggle for existence and endowed the survivors with higher qualities. But it was navigation that released primitive man from the seclusion of his own island or continent, stimulated and facilitated the intercourse of peoples, and enabled the human race to establish itself in every habitable part of the world.

NOTES TO CHAPTER X

[579] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 465, 563-567, 573. Washington, 1905.Return to passage

[580] Sir John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, pp. 173-223. New York, 1872.Return to passage

[581] Ferdinand Keller, Lake Dwellings, Vol. I, pp. 2-7, 576. London, 1876. English Lake Dwellings, Westminster Review, pp. 337-347. 1887.Return to passage

[582] P.W. Joyce, A Social History of Ancient Ireland, Vol. II, pp. 65-66. London, 1903.Return to passage

[583] Herodotus, V. 16.Return to passage

[584] Alexander von Humboldt, Aspects of Nature, pp. 148-149. Translated by Mrs. Sabine, Philadelphia, 1849. E.F. im Thurn, Among the Indians of Guiana, p. 203. London, 1883.Return to passage

[585] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, p. 184. London, 1905.Return to passage

[586] Verney L. Cameron, Across Africa, pp. 332-334. London, 1885.Return to passage

[587] David and Charles Livingstone, Narrative of Expedition to the Zambezi, p. 414. New York, 1866.Return to passage

[588] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 464-466, 565. Washington, 1905.Return to passage

[589] Stanford's Australasia, Vol. II, pp. 256-257. London, 1894.Return to passage

[590] A.R. Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, pp. 368, 381. New York, 1869.Return to passage

[591] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, pp. 262-263, 344. London, 1896-1898.Return to passage

[592] Richard Semon, In the Australian Bush, pp. 340-342, 347. London, 1899.Return to passage

[593] John L. Stoddard, Lectures, Vol. III, p. 311. Boston, 1903.Return to passage

[594] John Barrows, Travels in China, pp. 377-379. Philadelphia, 1805.Return to passage

[595] William M. Wood, Fankwei, pp. 169-174. New York, 1859.Return to passage

[596] Edmondo de Amicis, Holland and Its People, pp. 4-13. New York, 1890.Return to passage

[597] G.P. Marsh, The Earth as Modified by Human Action, chap. IV, pp. 330-352. New York, 1871.Return to passage

[598] J. Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 106-108. London, 1903.Return to passage

[599] Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 127, Note 1. Stuttgart, 1888.Return to passage

[600] Elisee Reclus, Europe, Vol. IV, pp. 222-223. New York, 1886. Miller and Skertchley, The Fenland, Past and Present, pp. 7-9. London, 1878.Return to passage

[601] Ibid., pp. 145-147.Return to passage

[602] Sir Samuel W. Baker, The Albert Nyanza, Great Basin of the Nile, pp. 49-50. London and Philadelphia, 1866.Return to passage

[603] Diodorus Siculus, Book I, chap. III, p. 41. Translated by G. Booth. London, 1814.Return to passage

[604] David Livingstone, Missionary Travels in Africa, pp. 234-236, 239, 272. New York, 1858.Return to passage

[605] Felix Dubois, Timbuctoo, pp. 51-55, 145. New York, 1896.Return to passage

[606] Isabella B. Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond., Vol. I, pp. 8, 10, 97. London and New York, 1900.Return to passage

[607] Cyrus Thomas, Mound Explorations, pp. 626, 650-653. Twelfth Annual Report Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, 1894.Return to passage

[608] Strabo, Book V, chap. I, 4.Return to passage

[609] W. Deecke, Italy, pp. 88-89. London, 1904.Return to passage

[610] John Barrows, Travels in China, p. 349. Philadelphia, 1805.Return to passage

[611] Meredith Townsend, Asia and Europe, pp. 278-284. New York, 1904.Return to passage

[612] Isabella B. Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. II, pp. 72-73 76-81. New York and London, 1900. For the future of land reclamation, see N.S. Shaler, Man and the Earth, chap. V. New York, 1906.Return to passage

[613] Strabo, Book X, chap. II, 19.Return to passage

[614] John W. Draper, Intellectual Development of Europe, Vol. I, pp. 84-86. New York, 1876.Return to passage

[615] Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, pp. 9-17. Eighth Edition, New York.Return to passage

[616] Irrigation, Thirteenth Report of the U.S. Geological Survey, Part III, pp. 133-135. Washington, 1895. J.W. Powell, Twenty-third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, pp. XII, XIII. Washington, 1904. Cosmos Mindeleff, Aboriginal Remains in the Verde Valley, Arizona, pp. 187, 192-194, 238-245. Thirteenth Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology. Washington, 1896. V. Mindeleff, Pueblo Architecture, pp. 80, 216-217. Eighth Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology. Washington, 1891. F. W. Hodge, Prehistoric Irrigation in Arizona, American Anthropologist, July, 1893.Return to passage

[617] McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 105-106, 113, 118, 120-144, 478. Philadelphia, 1905.Return to passage

[618] Eleventh Census, Report on the Indians, pp. 49, 161, 415. Washington, 1894. D.G. Brinton, The American Race, pp. 116-117. Philadelphia, 1901.Return to passage

[619] Ibid., pp. 161, 181, 182, 188, 191, 193, 198, 410, 441-445. M.C. Stevenson, The Zuni Indians, pp. 351-354. Twenty-third Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, 1904.Return to passage

[620] Ibid., pp. 13-14. H.H. Bancroft, The Native Races, Vol. I, pp. 539-547. San Francisco, 1886.Return to passage

[621] Norway, Official Publication, pp. 99-100. Christiania, 1900.Return to passage

[622] Ernst Curtius, History of Greece, Vol. I, pp. 49-50. New York.Return to passage

[623] Ibid., Vol. I, p. 440.Return to passage

[624] Dietrich Schaefer, Die Hansestaedte und Koenig Waldemar von Daenemark, pp. 255-257. Jena, 1879. Helen Zimmern, Story of the Hansa Towns, pp. 26-27. New York, 1895.Return to passage

[625] W.B. Weeden, Social and Economic History of New England, Vol. I, pp. 17, 18, 90, 91, 128-135, 139. Boston, 1899.Return to passage

[626] Ibid., Vol. I, p. 245.Return to passage

[627] H.D. Traill, Social England, Vol. III, pp. 363-364, 540. London and New York, 1895.Return to passage

[628] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 311. London, 1903.Return to passage

[629] Alexander P. Engelhardt, A Russian Province of the North, pp. 54-71. From the Russian. London, 1899.Return to passage