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 coöperate 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 Cæsar'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 "förden" 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 mediæval 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 Cæsars.[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 Cæsar'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 Sabæans 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 Sabæans 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 Piræus 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 maritimæ_. 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 preëminence 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

Piræus, 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 _entrepôt_ 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 Seehandelstädte_, pp.

24, 25. Stuttgart, 1901. Joseph Partsch, Central Europe, p. 291. London,

1903.

[413] _Ibid_, p. 301.

[414] John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, pp. 51-54;

maps, pp. 36 and 54. London, 1904.

[415] _Ibid_, Vol. I, pp. 12, 63; maps pp. xxii and 54.

[416] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 98, 139. London,

1896-1898.

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

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

[419] Rudolph Reinhard, _Die Wichtigsten Deutschen Seehandelstädte_, pp.

21-22. Stuttgart, 1901.

[420] Fitz-Roy and Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, Vol. II, pp. 140, 178;

Vol. III, pp. 231-236. London, 1839.

[421] Eleventh Census, Population and Resources of Alaska, pp. 166-171.

Washington, 1893.

[422] Nordenskiold, The Voyage of the Vega, pp. 327, 334, 335, 365, 366,

412, 416, 459, 467. New York, 1882.

[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.

[424] _Bella Gallico_, Book III, chap. 12.

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

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

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

[428] Thucydides, Book VI, 2.

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

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

[431] Thucydides, Book I, 5, 7, 8.

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

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

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

[435] Rudolph Reinhard, _Die Wichtigsten Deutschen Seehandelstädte_, p.

23. Stuttgart, 1901.

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

[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.

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

[439] W.B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, Vol. I,

p. 93. Boston, 1899.

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

[441] Ratzel, _Deutschland_, pp. 150-151. Leipzig, 1898.

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

[443] Elisée Reclus, The Earth and Its Inhabitants; Europe, Vol. 1, pp.

370-372. New York, 1886.

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

[445] Heinrich von Treitschke, _Politik_, Vol. 1, p. 215. Leipzig, 1897.

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

1902.

[447] William Morris Davis, Physical Geography, pp. 115-122. Boston,

1899.

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

[449] Strabo, Book XVII, chap. I, 18. Diodorus Siculus, Book I, chap.

III, p. 36. London, 1814.

[450] J. Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 96-98. London, 1903. Ratzel,

_Deutschland_, pp. 143-144. Leipzig, 1898.

[451] For geomorphology of coasts, see William Morris Davis, Physical

Geography, pp. 112-136, 347-383. Boston, 1899.

[452] Elisée Reclus, Europe, Vol. II, p, 252. New York, 1886.

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

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

[455] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 1012. New York, 1902.

Hereford George, Historical Geography of the British Empire, pp.

278-279. London, 1904.

[456] J.E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages, pp. 123-124.

New York, 1884.

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

[458] Diodorus Siculus, Book V, chap. I, p. 304. London, 1814. Strabo,

Book V, chap. VI, 6, 7.

[459] Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 188-189, 193-195. New

York, 1902-1906.

[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.

[461] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp.

169-170. New York, 1897.

[462] _Ibid._, pp. 179, 185, 286.

[463] _Ibid._, pp. 127-131.

[464] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 100-102, 132-145.

London, 1896-1898.

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

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

[467] J. Naken, _Die Provinz Kwangtung und ihre Bevölkerung, 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.

[468] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 397. London, 1896-1898.

Philippine Census, Vol. I, pp. 438, 481-491. Washington, 1905.

[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.

[470] _Ibid._, Vol. III, pp. 431, 434. Vol. II, p. 603.

[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.

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

[473] _Ibid._, pp. 73-74, 139, 267.

[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.

[475] The Book of Ser Marco Polo, edited by Sir Henry Yule, Vol. II,

Book III, pp. 284, 288, 303. New York, 1903.

[476] P. Vidal de la Blache, _Géographie de la France_, pp. 335-337.

Paris, 1903.

[477] Elisée Reclus, Europe, Vol. II, p. 252. New York, 1882.

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

1900.

[479] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, pp. 114, 140, 163-164, 202, 267.

London, 1902.

[480] H.F. Tozer, History of Ancient Geography, pp. 276-280. Cambridge,

1897. Strabo, Book XVI, chap. IV, 2, 19.

[481] Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. III, p. 433. New York,

1902-1906.

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

1897.

[483] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, map p.

80. New York, 1893.

[484] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 412-413, 481, 464,

562., Washington, 1905.

[485] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 416.

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

[487] P. Ehrenreich, _Die Eintheilung und Verbreitung der Völkerstämme

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.

[488] John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, chap. I.

London, 1904.

[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.

[490] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, p. 152. London, 1902. W. Z.

Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 402, 404, map. New York, 1899.

[491] _Ibid._, pp. 117, 404-405, 409-419.

[492] _Ibid._, pp. 206-208, 210-212. Norway, Official Publication, pp.

80-81. Christiania, 1900.

[493] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. II, p. 52, map p. 50.

Washington, 1905.

[494] Grote, History of Greece, Vol. III, pp. 175-176, 186-189. New

York, 1857.

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

[496] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp. 530-533. London,

1896-1898.

[497] H.D. Trail, Social England, Vol. III, pp. 367-368. London and New

York, 1895.

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

[499] E.C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic Conditions, pp.

314-328. Boston, 1903.

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

[501] Roscher, _National-Oekonomik des Handels und Gewerbefleisses_, p.

85, Note 18. Stuttgart, 1899.

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

[503] _Ibid._, Vol. III, pp. 139, 145.

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

[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.

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

[507] J. Scott Keltie, The Partition of Africa, p. 327. London, 1895.

Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 121-122. London, 1896-1898.

[508] _Ibid._, Vol. III, pp. 121, 132-133.

[509] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 239.

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

[511] _Ibid._, p. 156. E.R. Scidmore, Guidebook to Alaska, p. 94. New;

York, 1897.

[512] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 556-561, 575,

581-583. Washington, 1905.

[513] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 85-86, 99-101, map pp. 151-152.

New York, 1899.

[514] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 97, 106. New York,

1896-1898.

[515] Henry Gannett, The Peoples of the Philippines, in Report of the

Eighth International Geographic Congress, p. 673. Washington, 1904.

[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.

[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.

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

[519] _Ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 225, 226.

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

1905.

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

1859.

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

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

[524] Dietrich Schäfer, _Die Hansestädte und König Waldemar von

Dänemark_, pp. 184, 189. Jena, 1879.

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

[526] Strabo, Book III, chap. I, 2.

[527] Roscher, _National-Oekonomik des Handels und Gewerbefleisses_, p.

93, Note 1. Stuttgart, 1899.

CHAPTER 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 Piræus 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.]