Britain and the British seas

Front matter

^Ippktons tDortb fttxus

THE REGIONS OF THE WORLD

EDITED BY

Preface

The idea of this book was first suggested to me by the needs of some foreign students visiting Britain, but when my publishers proposed a description of the world, my scheme was expanded to twelve volumes by different authors. The aim of each is to present a picture of the physical features and condition of a great natural region, and to trace their influence upon human societies.

Of the twelve selected divisions, Britain is the smallest, and is known in such detail that it has been possible to attempt a complete geographical synthesis. The phenomena of topographical distribution relating to many classes of fact have been treated, but from a single standpoint and on a uniform method.

It is obvious that in a work involving the accurate statement of data so various, some amount of help from students in kindred subjects is essential. Two of my colleagues at Oxford and Reading, Mr. H. N. Dickson and Dr. T. T. Groom, have very kindly read the proof, - the one of Chapters III., IV., X., and XL, the other of Chapters VI., VII., and VIII. They have made several important contributions, but have no responsibility whatever for any errors into which I may have fallen. To Mr. J. L. Myres and to Major P. G. Craigie I am indebted for sources of information pertinent to Chapters XII. and XIX. respectively. My gratitude is also due to my Wife and to my friend, Mr. W. M. Childs, for correcting portions of the proof.

Most of the diagrams in the text have been executed viii

PREFACE by the Diagram Company — some by Mr. B. B. Dickinson, but a majority by Mr. A. W. Andrews. A few, however, were designed by Mr. B. V. Darbishire. The coloured maps have been drawn specially for this book by Mr. G. J. Bartholomew. I wish to thank all of these gentlemen for the pains they have taken.

The notes on authorities at the ends of the chapters are intended merely to remind students of some accessible books dealing at large with topics here touched upon. Only in the case of a few statements has it been felt necessary to refer to original papers.

H. J. M.

October 1901.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. The Position of Britain ..... i

II. The British Seas 14

Chapter I

THE POSITION OF BRITAIN " England . . . that utmost corner of the West." — King John, ii. i.

Before the great geographical discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the known lands lay almost wholly in the Northern Hemisphere and spread in a single continent from the shores of Spain to those of Cathay. Britain was then at the end of the world — almost out of the world. At one point her white cliffs might be seen from the mainland, and from this she stretched, northward and westward, away from the life of Europe, to the dark rocks and bird-haunted skerries where the Celt listened to the waves rolling in from the unknown. No philosophy of British history can be entirely true which does not take account of this fact. During two thousand years Britain was at the margin, not in the centre, of the theatre of politics, and for most practical purposes her position was accurately shown in the maps of the Greek geographers (Figs. 2, 8) and in the fantastic charts of the mediaeval monks (Figs. 1, 8a).

The historical meaning of the Columbian discoveries can best be realised by turning a terrestrial globe so that Britain may be at the point nearest to the eye (Fig. 3). Europe, Asia, Africa, and the two Americas are thus included within the visible hemisphere ; but the chief feature even of the land-half of the globe is a great arm of mediterranean ocean, Atlantic and Arctic, winding northward through the midst of the lands to encircle the pole, and to end beyond on the shores of Alaska and Siberia. There, across the narrow and shallow Bering Strait, the

Fig. i. — Thirteenth Century Map preserved in Hereford Cathedral, showingthe terminal position of Britain in the then known world. A key to the map is given on p. 13. The names Africa and Europe are transposed in the original, but have been corrected in the key.

mountains of America are visible from the Asiatic coast and the ocean-end is almost land-girt. The southern entry, from the water hemisphere, is an ocean-bay between Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope, which narrows

Fig. 2. — The World according to Eratosthenes, showing the terminal position of Britain. — After Bunbury.

somewhat towards the Equator, and is there half-closed by the western wing of Africa. A wide passage is left, some fifteen hundred miles in breadth, which leads into the triangular basin of the North Atlantic, essentially only the vastest of lakes. Two of the sides are the coasts of South and North America, where they recede 4gto the West Indian Gulf ; the third is the edge of Europe and Africa northward and southward of the Strait of Gibraltar. No flat chart can give a correct impression of the form of the North Atlantic. Only a globe can suggest its vast bulging centre, and the relative insignificance of its Arctic, Mediterranean, and Caribbean recesses (Fig 4). A broad channel, with parallel shores trending north-eastward, connects the North Atlantic with the Polar Sea. Iceland stands in the midst of this entry ; Greenland defines it on the one hand, and Britain and Scandinavia on the other. Practically, however, this, like Davis Strait, is a mere gulf of the North Atlantic, extending only to the edge of the ice-pack. For most purposes, therefore, the North Atlantic is a rounded basin, with eastward, northward, and westward gulfs, and a southern exit. But the five historic parts of the world are accessible from its waters, and for the generations that followed Columbus history centred increasingly round its shores. Thus Britain gradually became the central, rather than the terminal, land of the world.

Two natural ways seem, therefore, to be indicated from the Old World to the New, and it appears remarkable that the change in the relations of Britain should have been so long deferred. On the one hand, by following

FlG. 3. — The Land Hemisphere, showing the Mediterranean Ocean and the central position of Britain.

the coasts of Europe and Africa southward, a way appears to open diagonally across the Equator to the eastern angle of South America — a way actually followed in the second Portuguese voyage round the Cape to the Indies. On the other hand, a course is marked out from Britain to Greenland, by the Faroe Islands and Iceland, and thence by Labrador to the eastern angle of North America : a course, as the Icelandic Sagas tell us, followed nine hundred years ago by the Norse Vikings. The map alone, the mere lie of the coasts, cannot explain why the southern road was not found until after the longer westward voyage of Columbus ; and why the Norsemen so far failed to utilise their discovery of the northern road, that the very record of it was almost forgotten. The causes which limited human enterprise were, in the main, climatic.

In the ninth century the Viking Othere, as he told

Fig. 4. — Photograph of a globe showing the true form of the North Atlantic.

King Alfred,1 had already found the open waterway past the mouths of the Norwegian fiords into the region of the midnight sun, and round the North Cape into the seas of the walrus. Even in the depth of the mid-winter night no iceberg approaches the Scandinavian coasts ; for a great bay of relatively warm air and water passes by Britain from the North Atlantic, between Iceland and Norway,

1 For a convenient translation of Othere's narrative, together with notes, see Nordenskiold, " The Voyage of the Vega," chap. i.

to the coasts of Spitsbergen and Nova Zembla (Fig. 5). Between these islands is the edge of the northern pack, advancing in some seasons southward, and in others receding, but always leaving a broad lane of open water off Norway and Lapland. To the west of Spitsbergen there is a narrower lane by which the steam yachts of to-day occasionally penetrate to within ten degrees of the pole ; but to westward of this again is the edge of the pack,

Fig. 5. — The entry to the Arctic Sea, showing the minimum extent of ice-impeded water off Greenland.

spreading without break to the front of ice-clad Greenland. Here is the outflow from the Arctic Basin, through which, as was shown by the voyage of Nansen, an endless supply of convergent floes is drawn, even from the far coasts of America and Asia. In slow procession they pass southward along the East Greenland coast, reinforced by great bergs from the neighbouring glaciers, through Denmark Strait, across twenty degrees of latitude, to turn Cape

Farewell under the parallel of the Shetland Islands. Two facts give some indication of the character and efficacy of the ice-barrier which shielded America from Europe precisely where the passage from the one to the other is shortest. In 1869 a German exploring ship, the Hansay was caught in the ice under north latitude 740 and sunk. Her crew took refuge on a floe, and in eight months were carried southward eight hundred miles, and finally made their way to the Danish settlements on the west coast. On the nth of June, 1888, Nansen sighted the highlands of Greenland under latitude 650, at a distance of about sixty miles. He battled with the ice for seven weeks, effecting a landing only on the 29th of July, under latitude 620, having been within sight of land the whole time — often not more than ten or twelve miles away — while he was carried to leeward, down the stream, nearly two hundred miles.1 The ice-stream pours on for some distance along the west coast of Greenland, then bends southward and, having received a tributary from Baffin Bay, passes by the Labrador coast, across the entry to the Strait of Belle Isle, and leaves its stranded bergs on the shores of Newfoundland. The cold water mingles finally with the warm amid the fogs of the Great Bank, and in the spring and early summer — when the ice burden is heaviest and stray bergs reach their most southern latitude— the great liners which work the ferry between Liverpool and New York deflect their course southward to avoid the risks of collision. It was this ice-stream which was the physical boundary of mediaeval Europe.

The passage south-westward from Africa- to South America was closed to the early coasters by very different causes. In the sub-tropical regions, which lie south of the Mediterranean latitudes, there is a belt of some twenty degrees where the trade-winds blow steadily from the northeast (Fig. 6). This belt swings somewhat northward and southward in harmony with the seasons ; but there is ;a breadth of ten degrees, known as the " heart of the trades,"

1 For an account of the long series of efforts to penetrate the ice off East Greenland, see Nansen, "The First Crossing of Greenland," chap. x.

within which the north-east winds never fail. The trade-winds are dry, and the moisture they drink from the land is only sparingly returned in rare storms. Beneath them the great desert of Sahara stretches from shore to shore of Northern Africa, and divides the black men from the white. Spreading almost to America, to the westward, is an invisible extension of the Sahara — a belt within

Fig. 6. — Diagram of the North Atlantic and Northern Africa.

C V=Cape Verde. , . , Qn Land = Desert.

J£ = Trade Wind. [Laifil } Qn Sea= Exceptionally salt surface.

which the surface of the sea is a little Salter than elsewhere— an oceanic desert, where the trade-winds take fresh water from the salt sea, and shed no compensating rain. Three months were needed to cross the Sahara on camel-back ; the high seas were counted impassable ; while the clumsy coaster, incapable of sailing near the wind, could not venture southward on a current which would never veer to bring her home. For a thousand miles the brown edge of the desert offered neither water nor food, and the name "Cape Verde " stands for all time to mark the joy of the Portuguese explorers when they first saw the vegetation of the south. The trade-wind and its deserts were the true southern boundary of mediaeval Europe. Columbus, by brilliant inspiration, committed himself to the trade-wind on his outward voyage, but shaped his return on the prevalent westerly breezes of a more northern latitude, thus breaking the secular spell which had closed the ocean-path.

In pre-Columbian times, then, Britain lay off the western shore of the world, almost precisely midway between the North Cape and the coast of Barbary, the northern and southern limits of the known. Northward and westward was the ice ; south-westward lay a waste of waters ; southward, beyond the Mediterranean, was the great desert. Only eastward and south-eastward did the world of men spread far through the known into the halfknown, and only in those directions was Britain related to opposing coasts. But, as though in compensation, those very coasts had an almost unique character, facilitating to a remarkable degree intercourse between the continent and the island. The fiords of Norway, the Baltic gulfs, the great series of navigable rivers from the Neva to the Tagus, and all the intricacy of the Mediterranean — extending almost to Indian seas — gave inevitably a maritime aspect to European civilisation ; and though Britain was insular, yet Europe was at least peninsular, and the English belonged naturally to the European group of nations. Madagascar, on the other hand, off the unbroken coast of Bantu Africa, was controlled — until France intervened— by Malayan Hovas, and belonged, for many purposes, rather to remote Australasia than to the neighbouring continent.

How important for Britain was the coastal intricacy of Europe is indicated by the fact that the shipping of the Middle Ages belonged for the most part not to the English, despite their immigrant history, but to the inhabitants of the mainland. For many centuries the English were a race of shepherds rather than mariners, and the most significant feature of British geography was not the limitless ocean, but the approach of the south-eastern corner of the islands to within sight of the continent. Kent was the window by which England looked into the great world, and the foreground of that world, visible from Dover Castle, had no ordinary character. Immedi-

Fig. 7.— Western Europe, showing the Linguistic Frontier between the Teutonic and Romance Peoples.

ately to the east of Calais is the end of the linguistic frontier which, crossing Europe from south to north, divides the two great races, Romance and Teutonic, whose interaction has made European history (Fig. 7). From Calais eastward, in succession, were nations of Germanic seamen,— Flemings, Hollanders, Frieslanders, Hansards, and Vikings. Westward was the Frenchman, and behind him the Spaniard and the Italian. To the Teutons — " Easterlings " and " Norsemen " — England owes her civil institutions and her language ; to the peoples of the west and south, her Christianity and her scholarship. Two distinct streams of ethical and artistic influence converged upon the island from the Rhine delta and from the estuary of the Seine; and the balanced English character has therefore a physical counterpart in the symmetry of the eastern and southern shores pivoted on the Kentish forelands.

Behind Europe, and seen through Europe as through a coloured glass, lay the imagined wealth of the Indies ; and it is not without significance that the lie of the physical features — gulfs, rivers, and peninsulas — drew the great roads from the Indies north-westward through Persia, Mesopotamia, and Egypt — by the Danube, the Adriatic, and the Rhone — to Flanders and Paris, and so to Kent and to London.

Seen thus in relation to earlier and to later history, Britain is possessed of two geographical qualities, complementary rather than antagonistic : insularity and universality. Before Columbus, the insularity was more evident than the universality. Within closed coasts, impregnable when valiantly held, but in sight of the world and open to stimulus — Teutonic, Romantic, and Oriental — her people were able to advance with Europe, and yet, protected from military necessities, to avoid tyranny and to retain the legacy of freedom bequeathed in the German forests. Ordered liberty, fitted to the complex conditions of modern civilisation, needed centuries of slow experimental growth, and was naturally cradled in a land insulated yet not isolated.

After Columbus, value began to attach to the oceanhighway, which is in its nature universal. Even the great continents are only vast islands and discontinuous ; but every part of the ocean is accessible from every other part. In the second century of the Christian era Ptolemy, an Alexandrine Greek, wrote a book which was the classic of geography a thousand years later. He pictured the land as continuous and the sea as divided into vast but separate lakes, Atlantic and Indian (Fig. 8). In such a world general maritime empire would have been impossible. The unity of the ocean is the simple physical fact underlying the dominant value of sea-power in the modern globe-wide world. Britain — of Europe, yet not in Europe — was free to devote resources, drawn ultimately from the continent, to the expansion of civilisation beyond the ocean. The sea preserved liberty, and allowed of a fertility of private initiative which was incompatible with supreme military organisation. The same sea, by reducing the reserve of men and material needed for the protection

Fig. 8. — The World according to Ptolemy, showing separate Eastern and Western Oceans. — After Bunbury.

of the island home, has permitted the devotion of British initiative and energy to trade and rule abroad. Great consequences lie in the simple statements that Britain is an island group, set in the ocean, but off the shores of the great continent ; that the opposing shores are indented ; and that the domains of two historic races come down to the sea precisely at the narrowest strait between the mainland and the island.

Note on the word "world!' — The word "world" has been used throughout this chapter in a more or less technical sense, as equivalent to the Greek " CEcumene " and the Latin " Mundus." Five centuries before the Christian Era, Greek philosophers were aware of the globular form of the earth ; they none the less confined the " Habitable World " to a definite area, situated wholly in the Northern Hemiisphere and limited eastward and westward by the ocean. It was, in fact, the known continent with its off-set islands. Whether or not there were other "worlds" on the globe, amid the western waters or in the Southern Hemisphere, was a matter of speculation. Christian Fathers denounced the idea of the Antipodes as heretical, but Dante put his Purgatory within the Southern Ocean. The new world of America was not, therefore, a chance expression descriptive of mere vastness, but a definite reference to a controversy of long standing.

From another point of view, discoveries have constantly extended the limits of the world, until it has become nearly equivalent to the surface of the globe ; hence the popular confusion of the terms "world " and "globe." The map of the "world" according to Eratosthenes (Fig. 2) simply ignored the globe, although, as a fact, its author measured the size of the globe by sound methods and, considering his lack of instruments, with remarkable accuracy. Very naturally, therefore, ignorant people, using such charts or others still more conventional (Fig. 1), concluded that the world was flat.

Itt is necessary to bear these facts in mind in order to appreciate the contrast between " Britain at the end of the world " and " Britain in the midst of the (globe-wide) world." For a discussion of the word and concept " CEcumene," see Bunbuiy, " History of Ancient Geography," vol. i. chap, xvi., also Ratzel, " Anthropogeographie," vol. ii. chap. i.

Fig. 8a.— Key to Fig. 1.

Chapter II

The clue to many contrasts in British geography is to be found in the opposition of the south-eastern and north-western — the inner and outer faces of the land. Eastward and southward, between the islands and the continent, are the waters known to history as the Narrow Seas 1 ; northward and westward is the Ocean. From the forelands of Kent the coasts which face the mainland run with few breaks, and fewer islets, on the one hand northward and somewhat westward for nearly six hundred miles to Caithness, Pentland Firth, and the Orkneys, on the other hand westward and somewhat southward for more than three hundred to Cornwall, the Lizard and Land's End, and the Scilly Isles. Beyond, on the oceanic side, between the Scilly Isles and the Orkneys, is a great curve of jagged coastline, broken into promontories and islands. More than five thousand out of the five thousand five hundred islets said to be contained in the British archipelago are set along its north-western border. The contrast suggests that presented by the islandless, merely embayed Atlantic coast of Patagonia and the fiorded Pacific coast, guarded by innumerable islands.

The south-eastern coasts of Britain are relatively flat, and the occasional cliffs are for the most part merely the cut edges of low table-lands, such as constitute the chalk Wolds and Downs. Lofty cliffs predominate on the oceanic border — cliffs, moreover, which are the scarped ends of slopes rising inland to mountain summits. There is a similar contrast even below the level of the sea,

1 See note on the Narrow Seas at p. 24. *4 for on the continental side the sea-bed merely undulates, whereas among the islets of the west are deep pits and sudden slopes, in some degree negative equivalents of the mountains on the neighbouring land, s

Two of the larger channels which penetrate the oceanic edge of Britain bend inward and join, detaching the great fragment of land which constitutes Ireland. The seas dividing Ireland from Great Britain not only break the continuity of what would otherwise be a single compact British land, but also reduce the greater island to a long, comparatively narrow strip, whose farthest points were so remote in days when travel was costly and slow, that two nations — Scottish and English — arose in the two ends of the land, of like mixture of blood, but of distinct characteristics and often hostile. The British peoples owe much to the narrow seas which have divided them from the continent ; it is, however, not infrequently suggested that they have lost by the seas which have held them apart from one another and impeded fusion. But as liberty is the natural privilege of an island people, so wealth of initiative is characteristic of a divided people. Provinces which are insular or peninsular breed an obstinate provincialism unknown in the merely historical or administrative divisions of a great plain ; and this rooted provincialism, rather than finished cosmopolitanism, is a source of the varied initiative without which liberty would lose half its significance.

The Narrow Seas are the North Sea and the English Channel connected by the Strait of Dover ; but a more important distinction might be drawn between the Narrow and the Narrower Seas (Fig. 9). On either side of the strait, for a distance of more than a hundred miles, the British and the continental coasts are relatively near to each other ; but beyond Holland on the one side, and beyond Normandy on the other, the continent retreats abruptly, leaving space for broader waters, more particularly on the east.

The North Sea is a great rectangle set into the land south-south-eastward between the roughly parallel shores of i6

Britain and Scandinavia (Plate I.). Midway along itseastern edge the Skager Rak gives entry to the series o inland waters known as the Baltic. Along the southern border, formed by East Anglia in Britain and by Friesland. on the Continent, is a second entry, as large as the Skajer Rak, but without distinctive name, which curves southward and westward between England and the Netherlands ending

Fig. 9.— The Narrower Seas and the Ferry-towns.

funnel-like in the Strait of Dover. The wide estuary of the Thames imparts to this arm a bifurcate appearance on the chart, while the mouths of the far greater Rhine hardly break its eastern outline.

From Dover Strait the continental coast sweeps again southward and then westward to the estuary of the Seine, giving to the eastern portion of the English Channel a form complementary to that of the nameless arm of the North Sea, and a nearly similar area (Fig. 9). Beyond the Seine the coast of France projects abruptly in the Cotentin peninsula, west of which the outer Channel, with a double breadth, merges with the ocean where the promontories of Cornwall and Brittany stand out, pierlike, into the wider waters.

The Narrow Seas are the strong natural frontier of Britain, but at all times they have been freely traversed, and the islanders have been neighboured by the peoples

Fig. 10. — South Eastern England and the Sogne Fiord of Norway, drawn to the same scale.

of the opposite shores. For some purposes, at any rate, those opposite shores are the true frontiers of Britain, and no account of the island realm would be complete which ignored their characteristics.

To the north-east is the high table-land of Norway, snow-capped, though washed by an iceless sea (Plate I.). Narrow fiords penetrate far up the valleys, which are deeply scored into the surface of the plateau (Fig. 10). Here and there a sill gives space for a meadow and the home of a Norseman — half farmer, half fisherman — whose only road is by boat on the fiord. He is a Vik-ing, a son-»f -a - ^uvi jS THE BRITISH SEAS

of the fiord or wick — in earlier times a restless and piratic neighbour for the tenants of Britain.

South of Norway, across the Skager Rak, the land is low and sandy, clothed with heath and forest, and beset with marshes and intricate tidal channels (Fig. 1 1). It

is fronted for nearly a thousand miles by a belt of dunes, which range from the northern point of Jutland southward past the old Anglia — now Schleswig and Holstein — to the mouth of the great river Elbe. Beyond the Elbe they are continued westward past the old Saxony — now Hanover — and past Friesland, Holland, Zeeland, and Flanders, to end only west of Calais, where the chalk cliffs of Picardy leave no room for dunes and give a new character to the coastline. Where the mouths of the Rhine break the dune-belt, the marsh-lands broaden into a delta, part of which has been drained and embanked to make the modern Holland, while the remainder has become a lagoon, the so-called Zuider Zee or South Sea of the Hollanders. Elsewhere a tidal passage, parallel to the coast, detaches the dunes from the mainland, converting them into Fig. ii.— The Dune Coasts a chain of islands. Though the of the North Sea. ]and behind the dunes is the be-

ginning of the great plain of Northern and Eastern Europe, and differs, therefore, markedly from the highlands of Norway, yet it has produced similar amphibious races — Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Frieslanders, Hollanders, and Zeelanders— herdsmen who under stress of circumstance could put to sea and found new homes, as did the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, and as the Hollanders threatened to do in Java when pressed by Louis the Fourteenth.

Just westward of Calais, Europe stands forward in a great shoulder, whose substance is a chalk table-land — cliff-edged, the counterpart in structure of the smaller and more slender promontory of Kent. Here the Teutonic Fleming yields to the Latinised Gaul of Picardy, essentially a landsman, and the firm soil is notched only by a few small harbours and has no border of marsh and tidal lagoon. Britain has had to suffer no serious invasion from Picardy and Flanders.

Picardy is followed by Normandy, where the mouth of the Seine, corresponding to Southampton Water on the English side, offered to the wandering Vikings a way leading far inland towards Paris, and where the Cotentin peninsula and the Channel Islands — counterparts in some sort of the Isle of Wight and the so-called Isles of Purbeck and Portland — gave to them a secure and sea-girt basis for attack upon Britain.

Last of all is Brittany, a pastoral land, with rocks which form a broken, dangerous coast, though one full of harbours. It is a peninsula analogous to the opposite Cornwall, but more massive in outline, and is peopled by the same Celtic race, driven to bay at the land's end. Alike physically and ethnographically, it has merited its name of Little Britain.

Brittany, Cornwall, the south of Ireland, the southern peninsula of Wales, even the northern and smaller Welsh peninsula, form a group of promontories thrust oceanward — westward and southward — along somewhat convergent lines (Fig. 12). Between them the ocean penetrates on the one hand through the English Channel into the Narrow Seas, on the other hand, in rear of Ireland, through the St. George's Channel into the Irish Sea. Just as the Thames estuary branches from the nameless arm of the North Sea, giving to it a bifurcate character and defining Kent, so the Bristol Channel branches from the St. George's Channel, dividing Wales from Cornwall, or, as it used to be called, West Wales. The ocean-ways from all the world, except North-eastern Europe, converge from west and south upon the sea-area off the mouths of the Channels. Here, therefore, to south of Ireland and to