of the ocean prior to 1492. Apart from the widening of the maritime
horizon which they give to their bordering people, each has the further
advantage of constituting an area of close vicinal grouping and constant
interchange of cultural achievements, by which the civilization of the
whole basin tends to become elevated and unified. This unification
frequently extends to race also, owing to the rapidity of maritime
expansion and the tendency to ethnic amalgamation characteristic of all
coast regions. We recognize an area of Mediterranean civilization from
the Isthmus of Suez to the Sacred Promontory of Portugal, and in this
area a long-headed, brunette Mediterranean race, clearly unified as to
stock, despite local differentiations of culture, languages and nations
in the various islands, peninsulas and other segregated coastal regions
of this sea.[556] The basin appears therefore as an historical whole; for
in it a certain group of peoples concentrated their common efforts,
which crossed and criss-crossed from shore to shore. Phoenicia's trade
ranged westward to the outer coasts of Spain, and later Barcelona's
maritime enterprises reached east to the Levant. Greece's commercial and
colonial relations embraced the Crimea and the mouth of the Rhone, and
Genoa's extended east to the Crimea again. The Saracens, on reaching the
Mediterranean edge of the Arabian peninsula, swept the southern coasts
and islands, swung up the western rim of the basin to the foot of the
Pyrenees, and taught the sluggish Spaniards the art of irrigation
practiced on the garden slopes of Yemen. The ships of the Crusaders from
Venice, Genoa and Marseilles anchored in the ports of Mohammedanized
Syria, brought the symbol of the cross back to its birthplace In
Jerusalem, but carried away with them countless suggestions from the
finished industries of the East. Here was give and take, expansion and
counter-expansion, conquest and expulsion, all together making up a
great sum of reciprocal relations embracing the whole basin, the outcome
of that close geographical connection which every sharply defined sea
establishes between the coasts which it washes.
[Sidenote: North Sea and Baltic basins.]
The same thing has come to pass in the North Sea. Originally Celtic on
its western or British side, as opposed to its eastern or Germanic
coast, it has been wholly Teutonized on that flank also from the Strait
of Dover to the Firth of Tay, and sprinkled with Scandinavian settlers
from the Firth of Tay northward to Caithness.[557] The eleventh century
saw this ethnic unification achieved, and the end of the Middle Ages
witnessed the diffusion of the elements of a common civilization through
the agency of commerce from Bruges to Bergen. The Baltic, originally
Teutonic only on its northern and western shores, has in historical
times become almost wholly Teutonic, including even the seaboard of
Finland and much of the coast provinces of Russia.[558] Unification of
civilization attended this unification of race. In its period of
greatest historical significance from the twelfth to the seventeenth
century, the Baltic played the rôle of a northern Mediterranean.[559] The
countless shuttles of the Hanse ships wove a web of commercial
intercourse between its remotest shores. Novgorod and Abö were in
constant communication with Lübeck and Stralsund;[560] and Wisby, on the
island of Gotland at the great crossroads of the Baltic,[561] had the
focal significance of the Piræus in ancient Aegean trade.
[Sidenote: Bering Sea.]
If we turn to Asia, we find that even the unfavorable Arctic location of
Bering Sea has been unable to rob it entirely of historical
significance. This is the one spot where a native American race has
transplanted itself by its natural expansion to Asiatic shores. The
circular rim and island-dotted surface have guided Eskimo emigrants to
the coast of the Chukchian Peninsula, where they have become partly
assimilated in dress and language to the local Chukches.[562] The same
conditions also facilitated the passage of a few Chukches across Bering
Strait to the Alaskan side. At Pak (or Peck) on East Cape and on Diomed
Island, situated in the narrowest part of Bering Strait, are the great
intercontinental markets of the polar tribes. Here American furs have
for many decades been exchanged for the reindeer skins of northern
Siberia and Russian goods from far-away Moscow.[563] Only the enclosed
character of the sea, reported by the Danish explorer Vitus Bering,
tempted the land-bred Russians, who reached the northeastern coast of
Siberia at the middle of the eighteenth century, to launch their leaky
boats of unseasoned timber, push across to the American continent, and
make this whole Bering basin a Russian sea;[564] just as a few decades
before, when land exploration of Kamchatka had revealed the enclosed
character of the Sea of Okhotsk, the Russian pioneers took a straight
course across the water to their Pacific outpost of Petropavlovsk near
the southern end of the peninsula. But even before the coming of the
Slavs to its shores, the Sea of Okhotsk seems to have been an area of
native commercial and ethnic intercourse from the Amur River in Siberia
in a half circle to the east, through Sakhalin, Yezo, the Kurile Islands
and southern Kamchatka,[565] noticeably where the rim of the basin
presented the scantiest supply of land and where, therefore, its meager
resources had to be eked out by fisheries and trade on the sea.
[Sidenote: Red Sea basin.]
On the southwest margin of Asia, the Red Sea, despite its desert shores,
has maintained the influence of its intercontinental location and linked
the neighboring elements of Africa and Asia. Identity of climatic
conditions on both sides of this long rift valley has facilitated ethnic
exchanges, and made it the center of what Ratzel calls the "Red Sea
group of peoples," related in race and culture.[566] The great ethnic
solvent here has been Semitic. Under the spur of Islam, the Arabs by
1514 had made the Red Sea an Arabian and Mohammedan sea. They had their
towns or trading stations at Zeila on the African side of the Strait of
Bab-el-Mandeb, at Dalaqua, the port of Abyssinia, at Massowa, Suakin,
and other towns, so that this coast too was called Arabia Felix.[567]
[Sidenote: Assimilation facilitated by ethnic kinship.]
Vicinal location about an enclosed basin produces more rapidly a
unification of race and culture, when some ethnic relationship and
affinity already exists among the peoples inhabiting its shores. As in
the ancient and medieval Mediterranean, so in the Yellow Sea of Asia,
the working of this principle is apparent. The presence along its coasts
of divergent but kindred peoples like the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese,
allowed these to be easily assimilated to a Yellow Sea race and to
absorb quickly any later infusion, like that of the Tatars and Manchus.
China, by reason of its larger area, long-drawn coast, massive
population, and early civilization, was the dominant factor in this
basin; Korea and Japan were its culture colonies-a fact that justifies
the phrase calling "China the Rome of the Far East." Historical Japan
began on the island of Kiu-sui, facing the Yellow Sea. Like Korea, it
derived its writing, its fantastic medical notions, its industrial
methods, some features of its government administration, its Buddhism
and its religion of Confucius from the people about the lower
Hoangho.[568] Three centuries ago Japan had its colony on Korean soil at
Fusan, the Calais of the East.[569] For purposes of piracy and smuggling
Japanese penetrated far up the rivers of China. Korea has kept in touch
with China by an active trade and diplomatic relations through the
centuries.
But to-day China is going to school to Japan. Since Japan renounced
her policy of seclusion in 1868 along with her antiquated form of
government, and since Korea has been forced out of her hermit life,
the potency of vicinal location around this enclosed sea has been
suddenly restored. The enforced opening of the treaty ports of Japan,
Korea and China simply prepared the way for this basin to reassert its
power to unite, and to unite now more closely and effectively than
ever before, under the law of increasing territorial areas. The
stimulus was first communicated to the basin from without, from the
trading nations of the Occident and that new-born Orient rising from
the sea on the California shores. Japan has responded most promptly
and most actively to these over-sea stimuli, just as England has, of
all Europe, felt most strongly the reflex influences from
trans-Atlantic lands. The awakening of this basin has started,
therefore, from its seaward rim; its star has risen in the east. It is
in the small countries of the world that such stars rise. The
compressed energies of Japan, stirred by over-sea contact and an
improved government at home, have overleaped the old barriers and are
following the lines of slight resistance which this land-bound sea
affords. Helped by the bonds of geographical conditions and of race,
she has begun to convert China and Korea into her culture colonies.
The on-looking world feels that the ultimate welfare of China and
Korea can be best nurtured by Japan, which will thus pay its old debt
to the Middle Kingdom.
[Sidenote: Chinese expansion seaward.]
Despite the fact that China's history has always had a decidedly inland
character, that its political expansion has been landward, that it has
practiced most extensively and successively internal colonization, and
that its policy of exclusion has tended to deaden its outlook toward the
Pacific, nevertheless China's direct intercourse with the west and its
westward-directed influence have never, in point of significance, been
comparable with that toward the east and south. Here a succession of
marginal seas offered easy water-paths, dotted with way stations, to
their outermost rim in Japan, the Philippines and remote Australia.
About the South China Sea, the Gulf of Siam, the Sulu, Celebes, and Java
Seas, the coastal regions of the outlying islands have for centuries
received Chinese goods and culture, and a blend of that obstinately
assertive Chinese blood.
The strength of these influences has decreased with every increase of
distance from the indented coasts and teeming, seafaring population of
South China, and with every decrease in race affinity. They have left
only faint traces on the alien shores of far-away Australia. The
divergent ethnic stock of the widespread Malay world has been little
susceptible to these influences, which are therefore weak in the remoter
islands, but clearly discernible on the coasts of the Philippines,[570]
Borneo, the nearer Sunda Islands, and the peninsula of Malacca, where
the Chinese have had trading colonies for centuries.[571] But in the
eastern half of Farther India, which is grouped with China by land as
well as by sea, and whose race stock is largely if not purely Mongolian,
these influences are very marked, so that the whole continental rim of
the South China Sea, from Formosa to the Isthmus of Malacca, is strongly
assimilated in race and culture. Tongking, exposed to those modifying
influences which characterize all land frontiers, as well as to
coastwise intercourse, is in its people and civilization merely a
transcript of China. The coast districts and islands of Annam are
occupied by Chinese as far as the hills of Cambodia, and the name of
Cochin China points to the origin of its predominant population.
One-sixth of the inhabitants of Siam are Chinese, some of whom have
filtered through the northern border; Bangkok, the capital, has a large
Chinese quarter. The whole economic life and no small part of the
intellectual life of the eastern face of Farther India south to
Singapore is centered in the activity of the Chinese.[572]
[Sidenote: Importance of zonal and continental location.]
The historical significance of an enclosed sea basin depends upon its
zonal location and its position in relation to the surrounding lands. We
observe a steady decrease of historical importance from south to north
through the connected series of the Yellow, Japan, Okhotsk, Bering Seas
and the Arctic basin, miscalled ocean. The far-northern location of the
Baltic, with its long winters of ice-bound ports and its glaciated
lands, retarded its inclusion in the field of history, curtailed its
important historical period, and reduced the intensity of its historical
life, despite the brave, eager activity of the Hanseatic League. The
Mediterranean had the advantage, not only of a more favorable zonal
situation, but of a location at the meeting place of three continents
and on the line of maritime traffic across the eastern hemisphere from
the Atlantic to the Pacific.
[Sidenote: Thalassic character of the Indian Ocean.]
These advantages it shares in some degree with the Indian Ocean, which,
as Ratzel justly argues, is not a true ocean, at best only half an
ocean. North of the equator, where it is narrowed and enclosed like an
inland sea, it loses the hydrospheric and atmospheric characteristics of
a genuine ocean. Currents and winds are disorganized by the
close-hugging lands. Here the steady northeast trade wind is replaced by
the alternating air currents of the northeast and southwest monsoons,
which at a very early date[573] enabled merchant vessels to break away
from their previous slow, coastwise path, and to strike a straight
course on their voyage between Arabia or the east coast of Africa and
India.[574] Moreover, this northern half of the Indian Ocean looks like a
larger Mediterranean with its southern coast removed. It has the same
east and west series of peninsulas harboring differentiated
nationalities, the same northward running recesses, but all on a larger
scale. It has linked together the history of Asia and Africa; and by the
Red Sea and Persian Gulf, it has drawn Europe and the Mediterranean
into its sphere of influence. At the western corner of the Indian Ocean
a Semitic people, the Arabs of Oman and Yemen, here first developed
brilliant maritime activity, like their Phoenician kinsmen of the
Lebanon seaboard. Similar geographic conditions in their home lands and
a nearly similar intercontinental location combined to make them the
middlemen of three continents. Just as the Phoenicians, by way of the
Mediterranean, reached and roused slumberous North Africa into
historical activity and became the medium for the distribution of
Egypt's culture, so these Semites of the Arabian shores knocked at the
long-closed doors of East Africa facing on the Indian basin, and drew
this region into the history of southern Asia. Thus the Africa of the
enclosed seas was awakened to some measure of historical life, while the
Africa of the wide Atlantic slept on.
[Sidenote: The sea route to the Orient.]
From the dawn of history the northern Indian Ocean was a thoroughfare.
Alexander the Great's rediscovery of the old sea route to the Orient
sounds like a modern event in relation to the gray ages behind it. Along
this thoroughfare Indian colonists, traders, and priests carried the
elements of Indian civilization to the easternmost Sunda Isles; and
Oriental wares, sciences and religions moved westward to the margin of
Europe and Africa. The Indian Ocean produced a civilization of its own,
with which it colored a vast semi-circle of land reaching from Java to
Abyssinia, and more faintly, owing to the wider divergence of race, the
further stretch from Abyssinia to Mozambique.
Thus the northern Indian Ocean, owing to its form, its location in the
angle between Asia and Africa and the latitude where, round the whole
earth, "the zone of greatest historical density" begins, and especially
its location just southeast of the Mediterranean as the eastern
extension of that maritime track of ancient and modern times between
Europe and China, has been involved in a long series of historical
events. From the historical standpoint, prior to 1492 it takes a far
higher place than the Atlantic and Pacific, owing to its nature as an
enclosed sea.[575] But like all such basins, this northern Indian Ocean
attained its zenith of historical importance in early times. In the
sixteenth century it suffered a partial eclipse, which passed only with
the opening of the Suez Canal. During this interval, however, the
Portuguese. Dutch and English had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and
entered this basin on its open or oceanic side. By their trading
stations, which soon traced the outlines of its coasts from Sofala in
South Africa around to Java, they made this ocean an alcove of the
Atlantic, and embodied its events in the Atlantic period of history. It
is this open or oceanic side which differentiates the Indian Ocean
physically, and therefore historically, from a genuine enclosed sea.
[Sidenote: Limitation of small area in enclosed seas.]
The limitation of every enclosed or marginal sea lies in its small area
and in the relatively restricted circle of its bordering lands. Only
small peninsulas and islands can break its surface, and short stretches
of coast combine to form its shores. It affords, therefore, only limited
territories as goals for expansion, restricted resources and populations
to furnish the supply and demand of trade. What lands could the
Mediterranean present to the colonial outlook of the Greeks comparable
to the North America of the expanding English or the Brazil of the
Portuguese? Yet the Mediterranean as a colonial field had great
advantages in point of size over the Baltic, which is only one-sixth as
large (2,509,500 and 431,000 square kilometers respectively), and
especially over the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, whose effective areas were
greatly reduced by the aridity of their surrounding lands. But the
precocious development and early cessation of growth marking all
Mediterranean national life have given to this basin a variegated
history; and in every period and every geographical region of it, from
ancient Phoenicia to modern Spain and Italy, the early exhaustion of
resources and dwarfing of political ideals which characterize most small
areas become increasingly conspicuous. The history of Sweden, Denmark,
and the Hanse Towns in the Baltic tells the same story, the story of a
hothouse plant, forced in germination and growth, then stifled in the
close air.
[Sidenote: Successive maritime periods in history.]
Growth demands space. Therefore, the progress of history has been
attended by an advance from smaller to larger marine areas, with a
constant increase in those manifold relations between peoples and lands
which the water is able to establish. Every great epoch of history has
had its own sea, and every succeeding epoch has enlarged its maritime
field. The Greek had the Aegean, the Roman the whole Mediterranean, to
which the Middle Ages made an addition in the North Sea and Baltic. The
modern period has had the Atlantic, and the twentieth century is now
entering upon the final epoch of the World Ocean. The gradual inclusion
of this World Ocean in the widened scope of history has been due to the
expansion of European peoples, who, for the past twenty centuries, have
been the most far-reaching agents in the making of universal history.
Owing to the location and structure of their continent, they have always
found the larger outlet in a western sea. In the south the field widened
from the Phoenician Sea to the Aegean, then to the Mediterranean, on to
the Atlantic, and across it to its western shores; in the north it moved
from the quiet Baltic to the tide-swept North Sea and across the North
Atlantic. Only the South Atlantic brought European ships to the great
world highway of the South Seas, and gave them the choice of an eastern
or western route to the Pacific. Every new voyage in the age of
discovery expanded the historical horizon; and every improvement in the
technique of navigation has helped to eliminate distance and reduced
intercourse on the World Ocean to the time-scale of the ancient
Mediterranean.
It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the larger oceanic
horizon has meant a corresponding increase in the relative content and
importance of history for the known world of each period. Such an
intense, concentrated national life as occurred in those little
Mediterranean countries in ancient times is not duplicated now, unless
we find a parallel in Japan's recent career in the Yellow Sea basin.
There was something as cosmic in the colonial ventures of the Greeks to
the wind-swept shores of the Crimea or barbarous wilds of Massilia, as
in the establishment of English settlements on the brimming rivers of
Virginia or the torrid coast of Malacca. Alexander's conquest of the
Asiatic rim of the Mediterranean and Rome's political unification of the
basin had a significance for ancient times comparable with the
Russification of northern Asia and the establishment of the British
Empire for our day.
The ocean has always performed one function in the evolution of history;
it has provided the outlet for the exercise of redundant national
powers. The abundance of opportunity which it presents to these
disengaged energies depends upon the size, location and other geographic
conditions of the bordering lands. These opportunities are limited in an
enclosed basin, larger in the oceans, and largest in the northern halves
of the oceans, owing to the widening of all land-masses towards the
north and the consequent contraction of the oceans and seas in the same
latitudes.
[Sidenote: Contrasted historical rôles of northern and southern
hemispheres.]
A result of this grouping is the abundance of land in the northern
hemisphere, and the vast predominance of water in the southern, by
reason of which these two hemispheres have each assumed a distinct rôle
in history. The northern hemisphere offers the largest advantages for
the habitation of man, and significantly enough, contains a population
five times that of the southern hemisphere. The latter, on the other
hand, with its vast, unbroken water areas, has been the great oceanic
highway for circum-mundane exploration and trade. This great water
girdle of the South Seas had to be discovered before the spherical form
of the earth could be proven. In the wide territory of the northern
hemisphere civilization has experienced an uninterrupted development,
first in the Old World, because this offered in its large area north of
the equator the fundamental conditions for rapid evolution; then it was
transplanted with greatest success to North America. The northern
hemisphere contains, therefore, "the zone of greatest historical
density," from which the track of the South Seas is inconveniently
remote. Hence we find in recent decades a reversion to the old east-west
path along the southern rim of Eurasia, now perfected by the Suez Canal,
and to be extended in the near future around the world by the union of
the Pacific with the Caribbean Sea at Panama; so that finally the
northern hemisphere will have its own circum-mundane waterway, along the
line of greatest intercontinental intercourse.
[Sidenote: Size of the oceans]
The size of the ocean as a whole is so enormous, and yet its various
subdivisions are so uniform in their physical aspect, that their
differences of size produce less conspicuous historical effects than
their diversity of area would lead one to expect. A voyage across the
177,000 square miles (453,500 square kilometers) of the Black Sea does
not differ materially from one across the 979,000 square miles
(2,509,500 square kilometers) of the Mediterranean; or a voyage across
the 213,000 square miles (547,600 square kilometers) of the North Sea,
from one across the three-hundredfold larger area of the Pacific. The
ocean does not, like the land, wear upon its surface the evidences and
effects of its size; it wraps itself in the same garment of blue waves
or sullen swell, wherever it appears; but the outward cloak of the land
varies from zone to zone. The significant anthropo-geographical
influence of the size of the oceans, as opposed to that of the smaller
seas, comes from the larger circle of lands which the former open to
maritime enterprise. For primitive navigation, when the sailor crept
from headland to headland and from island to island, the small enclosed
basin with its close-hugging shores did indeed offer the best
conditions. To-day, only the great tonnage of ocean-going vessels may
reflect in some degree the vast areas they traverse between continent
and continent. Coasting craft and ships designed for local traffic in
enclosed seas are in general smaller, as in the Baltic, though the
enormous commerce of the Great Lakes, which constitute in effect an
inland sea, demands immense vessels.
[Sidenote: Neutrality of the seas, its evolution.]
The vast size of the oceans has been the basis of their neutrality. The
neutrality of the seas is a recent idea in political history. The
principle arose in connection with the oceans, and from them was
extended to the smaller basins, which previously tended to be regarded
as private political domains. Their limited area, which enabled them to
be compassed, enabled them also to be appropriated, controlled and
policed. The Greek excluded the Phoenician from the Aegean and made it
an Hellenic sea. Carthage and Tarentum tried to draw the dead line for
Roman merchantmen at the Lacinian Cape, the doorway into the Ionian
Sea, and thereby involved themselves in the famous Punic Wars. The whole
Mediterranean became a Roman sea, the _mare nostrum_. Pompey's fleet was
able to police it effectively and to exterminate the pirates in a few
months, as Cicero tells us in his oration for the Manilian Law. Venice,
by the conquest of the Dalmatian pirates in 991 prepared to make herself
_dominatrix Adriatici maris_, as she was later called. By the thirteenth
century she had secured full command of the sea, spoke of it as "the
Gulf," in her desire to stamp it as a _mare clausum_, maintained in it a
powerful patrol fleet under a _Capitan in Golfo_, whose duty it was to
police the sea for pirates and to seize all ships laden with contraband
goods. She claimed and enforced the right of search of foreign vessels,
and compelled them to discharge two-thirds of their cargo at Venice,
which thus became the clearing house of the whole Adriatic. She even
appealed to the Pope for confirmation of her dominion over the sea.[576]
Sweden and Denmark strove for a _dominum maris Baltici_; but the Hanse
Towns of northern Germany secured the maritime supremacy in the basin,
kept a toll-gate at its entrance, and levied toll or excluded merchant
ships at their pleasure, a right which after the fall of the Hanseatic
power was assumed by Denmark and maintained till 1857. "The Narrow Seas"
over which England claimed sovereignty from 1299 to 1805, and on which
she exacted a salute from every foreign vessel, included the North Sea
as far as Stadland Cape in Norway, the English Channel, and the Bay of
Biscay down to Cape Finisterre in northern Spain.[577]
At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Indian Ocean was a
Portuguese sea. Spain was trying to monopolize the Caribbean and even
the Pacific Ocean. But the immense areas of these pelagic fields of
enterprise, and the rapid intrusion into them of other colonial powers
soon rendered obsolete in practice the principle of the _mare clausum_,
and introduced that of the _mare liberum_. The political theory of the
freedom of the seas seems to have needed vigorous support even toward
the end of the seventeenth century. At this time we find writers like
Salmasius and Hugo Grotius invoking it to combat Portuguese monopoly of
the Indian Ocean as a _mare clausum_. Grotius in a lengthy dissertation
upholds the thesis that "_Jure gentium quibusvis ad quosvis liberam
esse navigationem_," and supports it by an elaborate argument and
quotations from the ancient poets, philosophers, orators and
historians.[578] This principle was not finally acknowledged by England
as applicable to "The Narrow Seas" till 1805. Now, by international
agreement, political domain extends only to one marine league from shore
or within cannon range. The rest of the vast water area remains the
unobstructed highway of the world.
NOTES TO CHAPTER IX
[528] S.M. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, p. 135. New York, 1900.
[529] A.H. Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains, Vol. I, p. 277; Vol. II,
79-81. New York, 1849.
[530] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 257, 261. London, 1897.
[531] Col. Lane Fox, Early Modes of Navigation, _Journal of
Anthropological Institute_, Vol. IV, p. 423.
[532] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. I, p. 167.
London; 1907.
[533] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 324.
[534] James H. Breasted, History of Egypt, pp. 89, 91, 97. New York,
1905. Col. Lane Fox, Early Modes of Navigation, _Journal of
Anthropological Institute_, Vol. IV, pp. 414-417.
[535] G. Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa, Vol. I, p. 77. London, 1873.
[536] E. Huntington, The Depression of Sistan in Eastern Persia,
_Bulletin of the American Geographical Society_, Vol. 37, No. 5. 1905.
[537] Schoolcraft, The Indian Tribes of the United States, Vol. I, p.
214. Philadelphia, 1853.
[538] H.H. Bancroft, The Native Races, Vol. I, pp. 382-383, 408, 564.
San Francisco, 1886. D. G. Brinton, The American Race, pp. 110, 112.
Philadelphia, 1901.
[539] Herodotus, Book 1, Chap. 194.
[540] S.M. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, p. 135. New York, 1900.
[541] Cotterill and Little, Ships and Sailors, pp. ix-x, 38, London,
1868.
[542] M. Hue, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China in 1846, Vol. II, p.
251. Chicago, 1898.
[543] Elliott Coues, History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Vol. I,
p. 159. New York, 1893.
[544] Col. Lane Fox, Early Modes of Navigation, _Journal of
Anthropological Institute_, Vol. IV, pp. 423-425.
[545] H.M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, Vol. I, pp. 313-314. New
York, 1879.
[546] _Ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 184, 219-220, 270-272, 300.
[547] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, p. 288. London, 1896-1898.
[548] _Ibid._, Vol I, pp. 358-359. Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes
of Central Australia, pp. 679-680. London, 1904.
[549] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, pp. 153-154; Vol. II, pp. 91,
100. London, 1896-1898.
[550] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 166-170.
[551] Captain Winkler, Sea Charts Formerly Used in the Marshall Islands,
Smithsonian Report for 1899, translated from the _Marine Rundschau_.
Berlin, 1898.
[552] Captain James Cook, Journal of First Voyage Round the World, pp.
70, 105, 119, 221, 230. Edited by W.J.L. Wharton. London, 1893.
[553] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, pp. 161, 174. London,
1896-1898.
[554] The Commercial and Fiscal Policy of the Venetian Republic,
_Edinburgh Review_, Vol. 200, pp. 352-353. 1904.
[555] H. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 188-189, 193-195.
New York, 1902-1906.
[556] G. Sergi, The Mediterranean Race, pp. 29-37. New York, 1901. W.Z.
Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 128-130, 270-273, 387-390, 407, 444, 448.
New York, 1899.
[557] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 189-190. London,
1904.
[558] Sydow-Wagner _Schul-Atlas, Völker und Sprachenkarten_, No. 13.
Gotha, 1905. A. Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, map p. 80. New
York, 1897.
[559] Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. VI, pp. 5-17. New York,
1902-1906.
[560] E.C. Semple, The Development of the Hanse Towns in Relation to
their Geographical Environment, _Bulletin American Geographical
Society_, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, 1899.
[561] Helen Zimmern, The Hansa Towns, pp. 24-25, 54-55. New York, 1895.
[562] Nordenskiold, The Voyage of the Vega, pp. 365, 588, 591. New York,
1882.
[563] _Ibid._, pp. 375, 403, 405, 487, 563.
[564] Agnes Laut, The Vikings of the Pacific, pp. 62-105. New York,
1905.
[565] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 446, 449-450. London,
1896-1898.
[566] _Ibid._, Vol. III, pp. 180-195.
[567] Duarte Barbosa, The Coasts of East Africa and Malabar, pp. 17-18.
Hakluyt Society Publications. London, 1866.
[568] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 443-444. London,
1896-1898.
[569] Angus Hamilton, Korea, pp. 130-135. New York, 1904.
[570] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 318-320, 478,
481-495. Washington, 1903.
[571] Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, pp. 544-545. New
York, 1902-1906.
[572] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 407-412. London,
1896-1898.
[573] Pliny, Natural History, Book VI, chap. 26.
[574] Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, Vol. II, pp. 351, 417-418,
470, 471. London, 1883.
[575] For full discussion of Indian Ocean, see Helmolt, History of the
World, Vol. II, pp. 580-584, 602-610. New York, 1902-1906. Duarte
Barbosa, The Coasts of East Africa and Malabar, pp. 26-28, 41-42, 59-60,
67, 75, 79-80, 83, 166, 170, 174, 179, 184, 191-194, Hakluyt Society.
London, 1866.
[576] Pompeo Molmenti, Venice in the Middle Ages, Vol. I, pp. 117,
121-123, 130. Chicago, 1906. The Commercial and Fiscal Policy of the
Venetian Republic, _Edinburgh Review_, Vol. 200, pp. 341-344, 347. 1904.
[577] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, p. 24, note. London,
1904.
[578] Hugonis Grotii, _Mare Liberum sive de jure quod Batavis competit
ad Indicana commercia dissertatio_, contained in his _De Jure Belli et
Pacis. Hagae Comitis_, 1680.
CHAPTER X
MAN'S RELATION TO THE WATER
Despite the extensive use which man makes of the water highways of the
world, they remain to him highways, places for his passing and
repassing, not for his abiding. Essentially a terrestrial animal, he
makes his sojourn upon the deep only temporary, even when as a fisherman
he is kept upon the sea for months during the long season of the catch,
or when, as whaler, year-long voyages are necessitated by the
remoteness and expanse of his field of operations. Yet even this rule
has its exceptions. The Moro Bajan are sea gypsies of the southern
Philippines and the Sulu archipelago, of whom Gannett says "their home
is in their boats from the cradle to the grave, and they know no art but
that of fishing." Subsisting almost exclusively on sea food, they wander
about from shore to shore, one family to a boat, in little fleets of
half a dozen sail; every floating community has its own headman called
the Captain Bajan, who embodies all their slender political
organization. When occasionally they abandon their rude boats for a
time, they do not abandon the sea, but raise their huts on piles above
the water on some shelving beach. Like the ancient lake-dwellers of
Switzerland and Italy, only in death do they acknowledge their ultimate
connection with the solid land. They never bury their dead at sea, but
always on a particular island, to which the funeral cortege of rude
outrigged boats moves to the music of the paddle's dip.[579]
[Sidenote: Protection of a water frontier.]
The margin of river, lake and sea has always attracted the first
settlements of man because it offered a ready food supply in its animal
life and an easy highway for communication. Moreover, a water front made
a comparatively safe frontier for the small, isolated communities which
constituted primitive societies. The motive of protection, dominant in
the savage when selecting sites for his villages, led him to place them
on the pear-shaped peninsula formed by a river loop, or on an island in
the stream or off the coast; or to sever his connection with the solid
land, whence attack might come, and provide himself with a boundary
waste of water by raising his hut on piles above the surface of lake,
river or sheltered seacoast, within easy reach of the shore. In this
location the occupant of the pile dwelling has found all his needs
answered--fishing grounds beneath and about his hut, fields a few
hundred feet away on shore, easily reached by his dug-out canoe, and a
place of retreat from a land enemy, whether man or wild beast.
[Sidenote: Ancient pile villages.]
Such pile dwellings, answering the primary need of protection, have had
wide distribution, especially in the Tropics, and persist into our own
times among retarded peoples living in small, isolated groups too weak
for effective defence. They were numerous in the lakes of Switzerland[580]
and northern Italy down to the first century of our era, and existed
later in slightly modified form in Ireland, Scotland, England and
southern Wales.[581] In ancient Ireland they were constructed on
artificial islands, raised in shallow spots of lakes or morasses by
means of fascines weighted down with gravel and clay, and moored to the
bottom by stakes driven through the mass. Such groups of dwellings were
called _Crannogs_; they existed in Ireland from the earliest historical
period and continued in use down to the time of Queen Elizabeth. In the
turbulent twelfth century, the warring lords of the soil adopted them as
places of refuge and residence.[582] Herodotus describes a pile village of
the ancient Thracians in Lake Prasias near the Hellespont, built quite
after the Swiss type, with trap doors in the floor for fishing or
throwing out refuse. Its inhabitants escaped conquest by the Persians
under King Darius, and avoided the fate of their fellow tribesmen on
land, who were subdued and removed as colonists to Asia.[583]
[Sidenote: Present distribution.]
Among Europeans such pile villages belong to primitive stages of
development, chiefly to the Stone, Bronze, and early Iron Ages. They are
widely distributed in modern times among retarded peoples, who in this
way seek compensation for their social and economic weakness. In South
America, the small timid tribe of the native Warraus till quite recently
built their dwellings on platforms over the water in the river network
of the Orinoco delta and along the swamp coast as far as the Essequibo.
These pile villages, "_fondata sopra l'acqua come Venezia_," as
Vespuccius says, suggested to him the name of Venezuela or little Venice
for this coast.[584] A pile village in Jull Lake, a lacustrine expansion
in a tributary of the upper Salwin River, is inhabited by the Inthas,
apparently an alien colony in Burma. They have added a detail in their
floating gardens, rafts covered with soil, on which they raise tomatoes,
watermelons and gourds.[585]
In little Lake Mohrya, located near the upper Lualaba River, a southern
headstream of the Congo, Cameron found numerous pile dwellings, whose
owners moved about in dug-out canoes and cultivated fields on land,[586]
as did their Swiss confrères of twenty centuries ago. Livingstone, in
descending from Lake Nyassa by the Shire River, found in the lakelet of
Pamalombe, into which the stream widened, similar water huts inhabited
by a number of Manganja families, who had been driven from their homes
by slave raiders. The slender reeds of the papyrus thicket, lining the
shore in a broad band, served as piles, number compensating for the lack
of strength; the reeds, bent downward and fastened together into a mat,
did indeed support their light dwellings, but heaved like thin ice when
the savages moved from hut to hut. The dense forest of papyrus left
standing between village and shore effectually screened their retreat,
and the abundant fish in the lake provided them with food.[587]
[Sidenote: Malayan pile dwellings.]
In the vast island world of Indonesia, where constant contact with the
sea has bred the amphibian Malay race, we are not surprised to find that
the typical Malay house is built on piles above the water; and that when
the coast Malay is driven inland by new-comers of his own stock and
forced to abandon his favorite occupations of trade, piracy and fishing,
he takes to agriculture but still retains his sea-born architecture and
raises his hut on poles above the ground, beyond the reach of an enemy's
spear-thrust. The Moro Samal Laut of the southern Sulu Archipelago avoid
the large volcanic islands of the group, and place their big villages
over the sea on low coral reefs. The sandy beaches of the shore hold
their coco-palms, whose nuts by their milk eke out the scanty supply of
drinking water, and whose fronds shade the tombs of the dead.[588] The
sea-faring Malays of the Sunda Islands, in thickly populated points of
the coast, often dwell in permanently inhabited rafts moored near the
pile dwellings. Palembang on the lower swampy course of the River Musi
has a floating suburb of this sort. It is called the "Venice of
Sumatra," just as Banjarmasin, a vast complex of pile and raft
dwellings, is called the "Venice of Borneo," and Brunei to the north is
the "Venice of the East."[589] Both these towns are the chief commercial
centers of their respective islands. The little town of Kilwaru,
situated on a sandbank off the eastern end of Ceram, seems to float on
the sea, so completely has it surrounded and enveloped with pile-built
houses the few acres of dry land which form its nucleus. It is a place
of busy traffic, the emporium for commerce between the Malay Archipelago
and New Guinea.[590]
[Sidenote: In Melanesia.]
Farther east in Melanesia, whose coast regions are more or less
permeated by Malayan stock and influences, pile dwellings, both over
water and on land form a characteristic feature of the scenery. The
village of Sowek in Geelvink Bay, on the northern coast of Dutch New
Guinea, consists of thirty houses raised on piles above the water,
connected with each other by tree trunks but having only boat connection
with the shore. Similar villages are found hovering over the lapping
waves of Humboldt Bay, all of them recalling with surprising fidelity
the prehistoric lake-dwellings of Switzerland.[591] The Papuan part of
Port Moresby, on the southern coast of British New Guinea, covers the
whole water-front of the town with pile dwellings. In the vicinity are
similar native pile villages, such as Tanobada, Hanuabada, Elevara and
Hula, the latter consisting of pile dwellings scattered about over the
water in a circuit of several miles and containing about a thousand
inhabitants. Here, too, the motive is protection against the attacks of
inland mountain tribes, with whom the coast people are in constant
war.[592]
The Malay fisherman, trader and pirate, with the love of the sea in his
blood, by these pile dwellings combines security from his foe and
proximity to his familiar field of activity. The same objects are
achieved by white traders on the west coast of Africa by setting up
their dwellings and warehouses on the old hulks of dismasted vessels,
which are anchored for this purpose in the river mouths. They afford
some protection against both fever and hostile native, and at the same
time occupy the natural focus of local trade seeking foreign exchanges.
[Sidenote: River dwellers in populous lands.]
When advancing civilization has eliminated the need for this form of
protection, water-dwellers may survive or reappear in old and
relatively over-populated countries, as we find them universally on the
rivers of China and less often in Farther India. Here they present the
phenomenon of human life overflowing from the land to the streams of the
country; because these, as highways of commerce, afford a means of
livelihood, even apart from the food supply in their fish, and offer an
unclaimed bit of the earth's surface for a floating home. Canton has
250,000 inhabitants living on boats and rafts moored in the river, and
finding occupation in the vast inland navigation of the Empire, or in
the trade which it brings to this port of the Si-kiang. Some of the
boats accommodate large families, together with modest poultry farms,
crowded together under their low bamboo sheds. Others are handsome
wooden residences ornamented with plants, and yet others are pleasure
resorts with their professional singing girls.[593] In the lakes and
swamp-bordered rivers of southern Shantung, a considerable fishing
population is found living in boats, while the land shows few
inhabitants. This population enjoys freedom from taxation and
unrestricted use of the rivers and fisheries. To vary their scant and
monotonous diet, they construct floating gardens on rafts of bamboo
covered with earth, on which they plant onions and garlic and which they
tow behind their boats. They also raise hundreds of ducks, which are
trained to go into the water to feed and return at a signal,[594] thus
expanding the resources of their river life. Bangkok has all its
business district afloat on the Menam River--shops, lumber yards,
eating-houses and merchants' dwellings. Even the street vendor's cart is
a small boat, paddled in and out among the larger junks.[595]
A far more modern type of river-dwellers is found in the "shanty-boat"
people of the western rivers of the United States. They are the gypsies
of our streams, nomads who float downstream with the current, tying up
at intervals along the bank of some wooded island or city waterfront,
then paying a tug to draw their house-boat upstream. The river furnishes
them with fish for their table and driftwood for their cooking-stove,
and above all is the highway for the gratification of their nomad
instincts. There is no question here of trade and overpopulation.
[Sidenote: Reclamation of land from the sea.]
Pile dwellings and house-boats are a paltry form of encroachment upon
the water in comparison with that extensive reclamation of river swamps
and coastal marshes which in certain parts of the world has so increased
the area available for human habitation. The water which is a necessity
to man may become his enemy unless it is controlled. The alluvium which
a river deposits in its flood-plain, whether in some flat stretch of its
middle course or near the retarding level of the sea, attracts
settlement because of its fertility and proximity to a natural highway;
but it must be protected by dikes against the very element which created
it. Such deposits are most extensive on low coasts at or near the
river's mouth, just where the junction of an inland and oceanic waterway
offers the best conditions for commerce. Here then is a location
destined to attract and support a large population, for which place can
be made only by steady encroachment upon the water of both river and
sea. Diking is necessitated not only by the demand for more land for the
growing population, but also by the constant silting up of the drainage
outfalls, which increases the danger of inundation while at the same
time contributing to the upbuilding of the land. Conditions here
institute an incessant struggle between man and nature;[596] but the
rewards of victory are too great to count the cost. The construction of
sea-walls, embankment of rivers, reclamation of marshes, the cutting of
canals for drains and passways in a water-soaked land, the conversion of
lakes into meadow, the rectification of tortuous streams for the greater
economy of this silt-made soil, all together constitute the greatest
geographical transformation that man has brought about on the earth's
surface.[597]
[Sidenote: The struggle with the water.]
Though the North Sea lowland of Europe has suffered from the serious
encroachment of the sea from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century,
when the Zuyder Zee, the Dollart and Jade Bay were formed, nevertheless
the counter encroachment of the land upon the water, accomplished
through the energy and intelligence of the inhabitants, has more than
made good the loss. Between the Elbe and Scheldt more than 2,000 square
miles (5,000 square kilometers) have been reclaimed from river and sea
in the past three hundred years. Holland's success in draining her large
inland waters, like the Haarlem Meer (70 square miles or 180 square
kilometers) and the Lake of Ij, has inspired an attempt to recover 800
square miles (2,050 square kilometers) of fertile soil from the borders
of the Zuyder Zee and reduce that basin to nearly one-third of its
present size.[598] One-fourth of the Netherlands lies below the average
of high tides, and in 1844 necessitated 9,000 windmills to pump the
waste water into the drainage canals.[599]
The Netherlands, with all its external features of man's war against the
water, has its smaller counterpart in the 1,200 square miles of
reclaimed soil about the head of the Wash, which constitute the Fenland
of England. Here too are successive lines of sea-wall, the earliest of
them attributed to the Romans, straightened and embanked rivers,
drainage canals, windmills and steam pumps, dikes serving as roads,
lines of willows and low moist pastures dotted with grazing cattle. No
feature of the Netherlands is omitted. The low southern part of
Lincolnshire is even called Holland, and Dutch prisoners from a naval
battle of 1652 were employed there on the work of reclamation, which was
begun on a large scale about this time.[600] In the medieval period, the
increase of population necessitated measures to improve the drainage and
extend the acreage; but there was little co-operation among the land
owners, and the maintenance of river dikes and sea-walls was neglected,
till a succession of disasters from flooding streams and invading tides
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries led to severe measures
against defaulters. One culprit was placed alive in a breach which his
own neglect or criminal cutting had caused, and was built in, by way of
educating the Fenlanders to a sense of common responsibility.[601]
The fight against the water on the coast begins later than that against
rivers and swamps in the interior of the land; it demands greater
enterprise and courage, because it combats two enemies instead of one;
but its rewards are correspondingly greater. The Netherlands by their
struggle have acquired not only territory for an additional half
million population, but have secured to themselves a strategic position
in the maritime trade of the world.
[Sidenote: Mound villages in river flood-plains.]
The abundant fertility of river flood-plains inevitably attracts
population and necessitates some kind of artificial protection against
inundation. The most primitive form of this protection is obvious and
widespread, restricted in neither locality nor race. When the flood
season converts the flat plain of the White Nile below Gondokora (7° N.
Lat.) into an extensive marsh, countless hills of the white ant emerge
over the waters. During the dry season, the ants build up their hills to
about ten feet, and then live in safety in the upper section during the
flood. They greatly surpass in intelligence and constructive ability the
human occupants of the valley, the low and wretched Kytch tribe of the
Dinka Negroes, who like the ants are attracted by the natural vegetation
of the flood-plain, and who use the ant-hills as refuge stations for
themselves and their cattle during the flood.[602] Elsewhere in Africa
the natives are more intelligent, for flood-plain villages built on
artificial mounds have existed from the earliest times. Diodorus Siculus
tells us that those of ancient Egypt, when the Nile was high, looked
like the Cyclades Islands.[603] Similar ones are constructed by the
Barotse tribe on the upper Zambesi.[604] The Niger River, rising in the
Foota Jallon and Kong Mountains which form a region of heavy rainfall
from February to July, inundates a plain of several thousand square
miles for a distance of 250 miles above Timbuctoo. Here again the
villages of the agricultural Song-hoi duplicate those of Egypt, built on
the same clay mounds, wreathed in the same feathery palms, and
communicating with one another only by small boats.[605] The same picture
is presented by the Yangtze Kiang plain during the summer overflow--low
artificial hills rising from the expanse of muddy water and topped with
trees and villages, while sampans moored to their base show the means of
communication.[606] In the broad flood-plain of the lower Mississippi
River, the chronicles of the De Soto expedition state that the Indian
villages visited stood "on mounds made by art." The Yazoo River Indians,
at the commencement of the eighteenth century, had their cabins
dispersed over the low deltaic land on earthen mounds made by their own
hands. There is also strong evidence that some of the works of the
Mound-builders in the "bottoms" of the middle and lower Mississippi
served as protected sites for the dwellings of their chiefs.[607]
[Sidenote: Diking of rivers.]
Such meager provisions against inundation suffice for the sparse
population characterizing the lower stages of civilization, but they
must be supplemented for the increasing density of higher stages by the
embankment of the stream, to protect also the adjacent fields. Hence the
process of confining rivers within dikes goes back into gray antiquity.
Those of the Po and its tributaries were begun before the political
history of the Lombardy plains commenced. Strabo mentions the canals and
dikes of Venetia, whereby a part of the country was drained and rendered
tillable.[608] The main Po has been embanked for centuries as far up as
Cremona, a distance of 600 miles, and the Adige to Verona.[609] But the
most gigantic dike system in the world is that of the Hoangho, by which
a territory the size of England is won from the water for
cultivation.[610] The cost of protecting the far spread crops against the
autumn floods has been a large annual expenditure and unceasing
watchfulness; and this the Chinese have paid for two thousand years, but
have not always purchased immunity. Year by year the Yellow River mounts
higher and higher on its silted bed above the surrounding lowlands,
increasing the strain on the banks and the area of destruction, when its
fury is uncaged. The flood of 1887 covered an area estimated at 50,000
square miles, wiped out of existence a million people, and left a
greater number a prey to famine.[611] So the fertile Chengtu plain of the
Min River, supporting four millions of people on its 2,500 square miles
of area, owes its prosperity to the embanking and irrigating works of
the engineer heroes, Li Ping and his son, who lived before the Christian
era. On the temple in their honor in the city of Kuan Hsien is Li Ping's
motto, incised in gold: "Dig the bed deep, keep the banks low." For
twenty-one centuries these instructions have been carried out. The stone
dikes are kept low to permit a judicious amount of flooding for
fertilization, and every year five to six feet of silt are removed from
the artificial channel of the Min. To this work the whole population of
the Chengtu plain contributes.[612] [See map page 8.]
[Sidenote: Social gain by control of the water.]
In such organized struggles to reduce the domain of the water and extend
that of the dry land, the material gain is not all: more significant by
far is the power to co-operate that is developed in a people by a
prolonged war against overwhelming sea or river. A common natural
danger, constantly and even regularly recurring, necessitates for its
resistance a strong and sustained union, that draws men out of the
barren individualism of a primitive people, and forces them without halt
along the path of civilization. It brings a realizing sense of the
superiority of common interests over individual preferences, strengthens
the national bond, and encourages voluntary subservience to law.
This is the social or political gain; but this is not all. The danger
emanating from natural phenomena has its discoverable laws, and
therefore leads to a first empirical study of winds, currents, seasonal
rainfall and the whole science of hydraulics. With deep national
insight, the Greeks embodied in their mythology the story of Perseus and
his destruction of the sea monster who ravaged the coast, and Hercules'
killing of the many-headed serpent who issued from the Lernean Marshes
to lay waste the country of Argos. Even so early a writer as Strabo
states that yet earlier authorities interpreted Hercules' victory over
the river god of the Achelous as the embankment of that stream and the
draining of its inundated delta tract by the national benefactor.[613] So
the Chinese, whose land abounds in swamps and devastating rivers, have a
long list of engineer heroes who embanked and drained for the salvation
and benefit of mankind. It is highly probable that the communal work
involved in the construction of dikes and canals for the control of the
Hoangho floods cemented the Chinese nationality of that vast lowland
plain, and supplied the cohesive force that developed here at a very
remote period a regularly organized state and an advancing civilization.
[Sidenote: Control of water as factor in early civilizations of arid
lands.]
The history of Egypt shows a similar effect of the yearly inundation of
the Nile Valley. Here, as in all rainless countries where irrigation
must be practiced, the water becomes a potent factor of political union
and civilization. Its scarcity necessitates common effort in the
construction and maintenance of irrigation works, and a central control
to secure fair distribution of the water to the fields of the
inhabitants. A stimulus to progress is found in the presence of a
problem, perennial as the yearly threatenings of the Hoangho, which
demands the application of human intelligence and concerted labor for
its solution. Additional arable land for the growing population can be
secured only by the wider distribution of the fructifying water; this in
turn depends upon corporate effort wisely directed and ably controlled.
Every lapse in governmental efficiency means an encroachment of the
desert upon the alluvial fields and finally to the river bank, as to-day
in Mesopotamia.
The fact that the earliest civilizations have originated in the
sub-tropical rainless districts of the world has been ascribed solely to
the regular and abundant returns to tillage under irrigation, as opposed
to the uncertain crops under variable meteorological conditions; to the
consequent accumulation of wealth, and the emancipation of man for other
and higher activities, which follows his escape from the agricultural
vicissitudes of an uncertain climate. When Draper says: "Civilization
depends on climate and agriculture," and "the civilization of Egypt
depended for its commencement on the sameness and stability of the
African climate," and again, "agriculture is certain in Egypt and there
man first became civilized,"[614] he seizes upon the conspicuous fact of
a stable food supply as the basis of progress, failing to detect those
potent underlying social effects of the inundations--social and
political union to secure the most effective distribution of the Nile's
blessings and to augment by human devices the area accessible to them,
the development of an intelligent water economy, which ultimately
produced a long series of intellectual achievements.[615]
[Sidenote: Cultural areas in primitive America.]
This unifying and stimulating national task of utilizing and
controlling the water was the same task which in various forms prompted
the early civilization of the Hoangho and Yangtze basins, India,
Mesopotamia, Persia, Peru, Mexico, and that impressive region of
prehistoric irrigation canals found in the Salt, Gila River, and upper
Rio Grande valleys.[616] Here the arid plateaus of the Cordilleras
between the Pueblo district and Central America had no forests in which
game might be found; so that the Indian hunter had to turn to
agriculture and a sedentary life beside his narrow irrigated fields.
Here native civilization reached its highest grade in North America.
Here desert agriculture achieved something more than a reliable food
supply. It laid the foundation of the first steady integration of
wandering Indian hordes into a stable, permanently organized society.
Elsewhere throughout the North American continent, we see only shifting
groups of hunter and fisher folk, practising here and there a half
nomadic agriculture to supplement the chase.
The primitive American civilization that arose among the Pueblo Indians
of New Mexico and Arizona, the only strictly sedentary tribes relying
exclusively on agriculture north of the Mexican plateau, was primarily a
result of the pressure put upon these people by a restricted water
supply.[617] Though chiefly offshoots of the wild Indians of the northern
plains, they have been markedly differentiated from their wandering
Shoshone and Kiowa kindred by local environment.[618] Scarcity of water
in those arid highlands and paucity of arable land forced them to a
carefully organized community life, made them invest their labor in
irrigation ditches, terraced gardens and walled orchards, whereby they
were as firmly rooted in their scant but fertile fields as were their
cotton plants and melon vines;[619] while the towering mesas protected
their homes against marauding Ute, Navajo and Apache.[620] This thread of
a deep underlying connection between civilization and the control of
water can be traced through all prehistoric America, as well as through
the earliest cultural achievements in North Africa and Asia.
[Sidenote: Economy of the water: fisheries.]
The economy of the water is not confined to its artificial distribution
over arid fields, but includes also the exploitation of the mineral and
animal resources of the vast world of waters, whether the production of
salt from the sea, salt lakes and brine springs, the cultivation of
oyster beds, or the whole range of pelagic fisheries. The animal life of
the water is important to man owing not only to its great abundance, but
also to its distribution over the coldest regions of the globe. It
furnishes the chief food supply of polar and sub-polar peoples, and
therefore is accountable for the far-northern expansion of the habitable
world. Even the reindeer tribes of Arctic Eurasia could hardly subsist
without the sea food they get by barter from the fishermen of the coast.
Norway, where civilization has achieved its utmost in exploiting the
limited means of subsistence, shows a steady increase from south to
north in the proportion of the population dependent upon the harvest of
the deep. Thus the fisheries engross 44 per cent. of the rural
population in Nordland province, which is bisected by the Arctic Circle;
over 50 per cent. in Tromso, and about 70 per cent. in Finmarken. If the
towns also be included, the percentages rise, because here fishing
interests are especially prominent.[621] Proximity to the generous larder
of the ocean has determined the selection of village sites, as we have
seen among the coast Indians of British Columbia and southern Alaska,
among all the Eskimo, and numerous other peoples of Arctic lands. [See
map page 153.]
[Sidenote: Fisheries as factors in maritime expansion.]
Not only in polar but also in temperate regions, the presence of
abundant fishing grounds draws the people of the nearest coast to their
wholesale exploitation, especially if the land resources are scant.
Fisheries then become the starting point or permanent basis of a
subsequent wide maritime development, by expanding the geographical
horizon. It was the search for the purple-yielding _murex_ that first
familiarized the Phoenicians with the commercial and colonial
possibilities of the eastern Mediterranean coasts.[622] The royal dye of
this marine product has through all the ages seemed to color with
sumptuous magnificence the sordid dealings of those Tyrian traders, and
constituted them an aristocracy of merchants. The shoals of tunny fish,
arriving every spring in the Bosporus, from the north, drew the early
Greeks and Phoenicians after them into the cold and misty Euxine, and
furnished the original impulse to both these peoples for the
establishment of fishing and trading stations on its uncongenial
shores.[623] To the fisheries of the Baltic and especially to the summer
catch of the migratory herring, which in vast numbers visited the shores
of Pomerania and southern Sweden to spawn, the Hanse Towns of Germany
owed much of their prosperity. Salt herring, even in the twelfth
century, was the chief single article of their exchanges with Catholic
Europe, which made a strong demand for the fish, owing to the numerous
fast days. When, in 1425, by one of those unexplained vagaries of animal
life, the herring abandoned the Baltic and selected the North Sea for
its summer destination, a new support was given to the wealth of the
Netherlands.[624] There is a considerable amount of truth in the saying
that Amsterdam was built on herrings. New England, with an unproductive
soil at home, but near by in the sea a long line of piscine feeding
grounds in the submarine banks stretching from Cape Cod to Cape Race and
beyond, found her fisheries the starting point and base of her long
round of exchanges, a constant factor in her commercial and industrial
evolution.[625]
[Sidenote: Fisheries as nurseries of seamen.]
Fisheries have always been the nurseries of seamen, and hence have been
encouraged and protected by governments as providing an important
element of national strength. The Newfoundland Banks were the training
school which supplied the merchant marine and later the Revolutionary
navy of colonial New England;[626] ever since the establishment of the
Republic, they have been forced into prominence in our international
negotiations with the United Kingdom, with the object of securing
special privileges, because the government has recognized them as a
factor in the American navy. The causal connection between fisheries and
naval efficiency was recognized in England in the early years of
Elizabeth's reign, by an act aiming to encourage fisheries by the
remission of custom duties to native fishermen, by the imposition of a
high tariff on the importation of foreign fish in foreign vessels, and
finally by a legislative enforcement of fasts to increase the demand for
fish, although any belief in the religious efficacy of fasts was frankly
disclaimed. Thus an artificial demand for fish was created, with the
result that a report on the success of the Fishery Acts stated that a
thousand additional men had been attracted to the fishing trade, and
were consequently "ready to serve in Her Majesty's ships."[627]
The fishing of the North Sea, especially on the Dogger Bank, is
participated in by all the bordering countries, England, the
Netherlands, Germany and Belgium; and is valued equally on account of
the food supply which it yields and as a school of seamen.[628] The
Pomors or "coasters" of Arctic Russia, who dwell along the shores of the
White Sea and live wholly by fisheries, have all their taxes remitted
and receive free wood from the crown forests for the construction of
their ships, on the condition that they serve on call in the imperial
navy.[629] The history of Japan affords the most striking illustration of
the power of fisheries alone to maintain maritime efficiency; for when
by the seclusion act of 1624 all merchant vessels were destroyed, the
marine restricted to small fishing and coasting vessels, and intercourse
confined to Japan's narrow island world, the fisheries nevertheless kept
alive that intimacy with the sea and preserved the nautical efficiency
that was destined to be a decisive factor in the development of awakened
Japan.
[Sidenote: Anthropo-geographic importance of navigation.]
The resources of the sea first tempted man to trust himself to its
dangerous surface; but their rewards were slight in comparison with the
wealth of experiences and influences to which he fell heir, after he
learned to convert the barrier of the untrod waste into a highway for
his sail-borne keel. It is therefore true, as many anthropologists
maintain, that after the discovery of fire the next most important step
in the progress of the human race was the invention of the boat. No
other has had such far-reaching results. Since water covers
three-fourths of the earth's surface and permits the land-masses to rise
only as islands here and there, it presents to man for his nautical
ventures three times the area that he commands for his terrestrial
habitat. On every side, the break of the waves and the swell of the
tides block his wanderings, unless he has learned to make the water
carry him to his distant goal. Spacially, therefore, the problem and the
task of navigation is the most widespread and persistent in the history
of mankind. The numerous coaling-stations which England has scattered
over the world are mute witnesses to this spacial supremacy of the
water, to the length of ocean voyages, and the power of the ocean to
divide and unite. But had the proportion of land and water been
reversed, the world would have been poorer, deprived of all these
possibilities of segregation and differentiation, of stimulus to
exchange and far-reaching intercourse, and of ingenious inventions which
the isolating ocean has caused. Without this ramifying barrier between
the different branches of the human family, these would have resembled
each other more closely, but at the cost of development. The mere
multiplicity of races and sub-races has sharpened the struggle for
existence and endowed the survivors with higher qualities. But it was
navigation that released primitive man from the seclusion of his own
island or continent, stimulated and facilitated the intercourse of
peoples, and enabled the human race to establish itself in every
habitable part of the world.
NOTES TO CHAPTER X
[579] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 465, 563-567, 573.
Washington, 1905.
[580] Sir John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, pp. 173-223. New York, 1872.
[581] Ferdinand Keller, Lake Dwellings, Vol. I, pp. 2-7, 576. London,
1876. English Lake Dwellings, _Westminster Review_, pp. 337-347. 1887.
[582] P.W. Joyce, A Social History of Ancient Ireland, Vol. II, pp.
65-66. London, 1903.
[583] Herodotus, V. 16.
[584] Alexander von Humboldt, Aspects of Nature, pp. 148-149. Translated
by Mrs. Sabine, Philadelphia, 1849. E.F. im Thurn, Among the Indians of
Guiana, p. 203. London, 1883.
[585] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, p. 184. London, 1905.
[586] Verney L. Cameron, Across Africa, pp. 332-334. London, 1885.
[587] David and Charles Livingstone, Narrative of Expedition to the
Zambezi, p. 414. New York, 1866.
[588] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 464-466, 565.
Washington, 1905.
[589] Stanford's Australasia, Vol. II, pp. 256-257. London, 1894.
[590] A.R. Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, pp. 368, 381. New York, 1869.
[591] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, pp. 262-263, 344. London,
1896-1898.
[592] Richard Semon, In the Australian Bush, pp. 340-342, 347. London,
1899.
[593] John L. Stoddard, Lectures, Vol. III, p. 311. Boston, 1903.
[594] John Barrows, Travels in China, pp. 377-379. Philadelphia, 1805.
[595] William M. Wood, Fankwei, pp. 169-174. New York, 1859.
[596] Edmondo de Amicis, Holland and Its People, pp. 4-13. New York,
1890.
[597] G.P. Marsh, The Earth as Modified by Human Action, chap. IV, pp.
330-352. New York, 1871.
[598] J. Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 106-108. London, 1903.
[599] Roscher, _National-Oekonomik des Ackerbaues_, p. 127, Note 1.
Stuttgart, 1888.
[600] Elisée Reclus, Europe, Vol. IV, pp. 222-223. New York, 1886.
Miller and Skertchley, The Fenland, Past and Present, pp. 7-9. London,
1878.
[601] _Ibid._, pp. 145-147.
[602] Sir Samuel W. Baker, The Albert Nyanza, Great Basin of the Nile,
pp. 49-50. London and Philadelphia, 1866.
[603] Diodorus Siculus, Book I, chap. III, p. 41. Translated by G.
Booth. London, 1814.
[604] David Livingstone, Missionary Travels in Africa, pp. 234-236, 239,
272. New York, 1858.
[605] Felix Dubois, Timbuctoo, pp. 51-55, 145. New York, 1896.
[606] Isabella B. Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond., Vol. I, pp. 8,
10, 97. London and New York, 1900.
[607] Cyrus Thomas, Mound Explorations, pp. 626, 650-653. Twelfth Annual
Report Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, 1894.
[608] Strabo, Book V, chap. I, 4.
[609] W. Deecke, Italy, pp. 88-89. London, 1904.
[610] John Barrows, Travels in China, p. 349. Philadelphia, 1805.
[611] Meredith Townsend, Asia and Europe, pp. 278-284. New York, 1904.
[612] Isabella B. Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. II, pp.
72-73 76-81. New York and London, 1900. For the future of land
reclamation, see N.S. Shaler, Man and the Earth, chap. V. New York, 1906.
[613] Strabo, Book X, chap. II, 19.
[614] John W. Draper, Intellectual Development of Europe, Vol. I, pp.
84-86. New York, 1876.
[615] Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, pp. 9-17. Eighth Edition, New
York.
[616] Irrigation, Thirteenth Report of the U.S. Geological Survey, Part
III, pp. 133-135. Washington, 1895. J.W. Powell, Twenty-third Annual
Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, pp. XII, XIII. Washington, 1904.
Cosmos Mindeleff, Aboriginal Remains in the Verde Valley, Arizona, pp.
187, 192-194, 238-245. Thirteenth Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology.
Washington, 1896. V. Mindeleff, Pueblo Architecture, pp. 80, 216-217.
Eighth Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology. Washington, 1891. F. W.
Hodge, Prehistoric Irrigation in Arizona, _American Anthropologist_,
July, 1893.
[617] McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 105-106, 113,
118, 120-144, 478. Philadelphia, 1905.
[618] Eleventh Census, Report on the Indians, pp. 49, 161, 415.
Washington, 1894. D.G. Brinton, The American Race, pp. 116-117.
Philadelphia, 1901.
[619] _Ibid._, pp. 161, 181, 182, 188, 191, 193, 198, 410, 441-445. M.C.
Stevenson, The Zuni Indians, pp. 351-354. Twenty-third Annual Report of
Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, 1904.
[620] _Ibid._, pp. 13-14. H.H. Bancroft, The Native Races, Vol. I, pp.
539-547. San Francisco, 1886.
[621] Norway, Official Publication, pp. 99-100. Christiania, 1900.
[622] Ernst Curtius, History of Greece, Vol. I, pp. 49-50. New York.
[623] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 440.
[624] Dietrich Schaefer, _Die Hansestädte und König Waldemar von
Dänemark_, pp. 255-257. Jena, 1879. Helen Zimmern, Story of the Hansa
Towns, pp. 26-27. New York, 1895.
[625] W.B. Weeden, Social and Economic History of New England, Vol. I,
pp. 17, 18, 90, 91, 128-135, 139. Boston, 1899.
[626] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 245.
[627] H.D. Traill, Social England, Vol. III, pp. 363-364, 540. London
and New York, 1895.
[628] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 311. London, 1903.
[629] Alexander P. Engelhardt, A Russian Province of the North, pp.
54-71. From the Russian. London, 1899.
CHAPTER XI
THE ANTHROPO-GEOGRAPHY OF RIVERS
[Sidenote: Rivers as intermediaries between land and sea.]
To a large view, rivers appear in two aspects. They are either part of
the general water envelope of the earth, extensions of seas and
estuaries back into the up-hill reaches of the land, feeders of the
ocean, roots which it spreads out over the surface of the continents,
not only to gather its nourishment from ultimate sources in spring and
glacier, but also to bring down to the coast the land-born products of
the interior to feed a sea-born commerce; or rivers are one of the land
forms, merely water filling valley channels, serving to drain the fields
and turn the mills of men. In the first aspect their historical
importance has been both akin and linked to that of the ocean, despite
the freshness and smaller volume of their waters and the unvarying
direction of their currents. The ocean draws them and their trade to its
vast basin by the force of gravity. It unites with its own the history
of every log-stream in Laurentian or Himalayan forest, as it formerly
linked the beaver-dammed brooks of wintry Canada with the current of
trade following the Gulf Stream to Europe.
Where sea and river meet, Nature draws no sharp dividing line. Here the
indeterminate boundary zone is conspicuous. The fresh water stream
merges into brackish estuary, estuary into saltier inlet and inlet into
briny ocean. Closely confined sea basins like the Black and Baltic,
located in cool regions of slight evaporation and fed from a large
catchment basin, approach in their reduced salinity the fresh water
lakes and coastal lagoons in which rivers stretch out to rest on their
way to the ocean. The muddy current of the Yangtze Kiang colors the
Yellow Sea, and warns incoming Chinese junks of the proximity of land
many hours before the low-lying shores can be discerned.[630] Columbus,
sailing along the Caribbean coast of South America off the Orinoco
mouth, found the ocean waters brackish and surmised the presence of a
large river and therefore a large continent on his left.[631]
The transitional form between stream and pelagic inlet found in every
river mouth is emphasized where strong tidal currents carry the sea far
into these channels of the land. The tides move up the St. Lawrence
River 430 miles (700 kilometers) or half way between Montreal and
Quebec, and up the Amazon 600 miles (1,000 kilometers). Owing to their
resemblance to pelagic channels, the estuaries of the American rivers
with their salty tide were repeatedly mistaken, in the period of
discoveries, for the Northwest Passage to the Pacific. Newport in 1608
explored the broad sluggish course of the James River in his search for
a western ocean. Henry Hudson ascended the Hudson River almost as far as
Albany, before he discovered that this was no maritime pathway, like the
Bosporus or Dardanelles, leading to an ulterior sea. The long tidal
course of the St. Lawrence westward into the heart of the continent fed
La Salle's dream of finding here a water route to the Pacific, and fixed
his village of "La Chine" above the rapids at Montreal as a signpost
pointing the way to the Indies and Cathay. In the same way a tidal river
at the head of Cook's Inlet on the Alaskan coast was mistaken for a
Northeast Passage, not by Captain Cook but by his fellow officers, on
his Pacific voyage of 1776-1780; and it was followed for several days
before its character as a river was established.[632]
[Sidenote: Sea navigation merges into river navigation.]
Rivers have always been the great intermediaries between land and sea,
for in the ocean all find their common destination. Until the
construction of giant steamers in recent years, sea navigation has
always passed without break into river navigation. Sailing vessels are
carried by the trade wind 600 miles up the Orinoco to San Fernando.
Alexander's discovery of the Indus River led by almost inevitable
sequence to the rediscovery of the Eastern sea route, which in turn ran
from India through the Strait of Oman and the Persian Gulf up the
navigable course of the Euphrates to the elbow of the river at
Thapsacus. Enterprising sea folk have always used rivers as natural
continuations of the marine highway into the land. The Humber estuary
and its radiating group of streams led the invading Angles in the sixth
century into the heart of Britain.[633] The long navigable courses of the
rivers of France exposed that whole country to the depredations of the
piratical Northmen in the ninth and tenth centuries. Up every river they
came, up the Scheldt into Flanders, the Seine to Paris and the Marne to
Meaux; up the Loire to Orleans, the Garonne to Toulouse and the Rhone to
Valence.[634] So the Atlantic rivers of North America formed the lines of
European exploration and settlement. The St. Lawrence brought the French
from the ocean into the Great Lakes basin, whose low, swampy watershed
they readily crossed in their light canoes to the tributaries of the
Mississippi; and scarcely had they reached the "Father of Waters" before
they were planting the flag of France on the Gulf of Mexico at its
mouth. The Tupi Indians of South America, a genuine water-race, moved
from their original home on the Paraguay headstream of the La Plata down
to its mouth, then expanded northward along the coast of Brazil in their
small canoes to the estuary of the Amazon, thence up its southern
tributary, the Tapajos, and in smaller numbers up the main stream to the
foot of the Andes, where detached groups of the race are still found.[635]
So the migrations of the Carib river tribes led them from their native
seats in eastern Brazil down the Xingu to the Amazon, thence out to sea
and along the northern coast of South America, thence inland once more,
up the Orinoco to the foot of the Andes, into the lagoon of Maracaibo
and up the Magdalena. Meanwhile their settlements at the mouth of the
Orinoco threw off spores of pirate colonies to the adjacent islands and
finally, in the time of Columbus, to Porto Rico and Haiti.[636] [See map
page 101.]
[Sidenote: Historical importance of seas and oceans influenced by their
debouching streams.]
So intimate is this connection between marine and inland waterways, that
the historical and economic importance of seas and oceans is noticeably
influenced by the size of their drainage basins and the navigability of
their debouching rivers. This is especially true of enclosed seas. The
only historical importance attached to the Caspian's inland basin is
that inherent in the Volga's mighty stream. The Mediterranean has always
suffered from its paucity of long river highways to open for it a wide
hinterland. This lack checked the spread of its cultural influences and
finally helped to arrest its historical development. If we compare the
record of the Adriatic and the Black seas, the first a sharply walled
_cul de sac_, the second a center of long radiating streams, sending out
the Danube to tap the back country of the Adriatic and the Dnieper to
draw on that of the Baltic, we find that the smaller sea has had a
limited range of influence, a concentrated brilliant history, precocious
and short-lived as is that of all limited areas; that the Euxine has
exercised more far-reaching influences, despite a slow and still
unfinished development. The Black Sea rivers in ancient times opened
their countries to such elements of Hellenic culture as might penetrate
from the Greek trading colonies at their mouths, especially the Greek
forms of Christianity. It was the Danube that in the fourth century
carried Arianism, born of the philosophic niceties of Greek thought, to
the barbarians of southern Germany, and made Unitarians of the
Burgundians and Visigoths of southern Gaul.[637] The Dnieper carried the
religion of the Greek Church to the Russian princes at Kief, Smolensk,
and Moscow. Owing to the southward course of its great rivers, Russia
has found the crux of her politics in the Black Sea, ever since the
tenth century when the barbarians from Kiev first appeared before
Constantinople. This sea has had for her a higher economic importance
than the Baltic, despite the latter's location near the cultural center
of western Europe.
[Sidenote: Baltic and White Sea rivers.]
In other seas, too, rivers play the same part of extending their
tributary areas and therefore enhancing their historical significance.
The disadvantages of the Baltic's smaller size and far-northern
location, as compared with the Mediterranean, were largely compensated
for by the series of big streams draining into it from the south, and
bringing out from a vast hinterland the bulky necessaries of life. Hence
the Hanseatic League of the Middle Ages, which had its origin among the
southern coast towns of the Baltic from Lubeck to Riga, throve on the
combined trade of sea and river.[638] The mouths of the Scheldt, Rhine,
Weser, Elbe and Thames long concentrated in themselves the economic,
cultural and historical development of the North Sea basin. So the White
Sea, despite its sub-polar location, is valuable to Russia for two
reasons; it affords a politically open port, and it receives the
Northern Dwina, which is navigable for river steamers from Archangel
south to Vologda, a distance of six hundred miles, and carries the
export trade of a large territory.[639] Similarly in recent years, Bering
Sea has gained unwonted commercial activity because the Yukon River
serves as a waterway 1,370 miles long to the Klondike gold fields.
[Sidenote: Atlantic and Pacific rivers.]
If we compare the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in respect to their
rivers, we find that the narrow Atlantic has a drainage basin of over
19,000,000 square miles as opposed to the 8,660,000 square miles of
drainage area commanded by the vastly larger Pacific. The Pacific is for
the most part rimmed by mountains, discharging into the ocean only mad
torrents or rapid-broken streams. The Atlantic, bordered by gently
sloping plains of wide extent, receives rivers that for the most part
pursue a long and leisurely course to the sea. Therefore, the commercial
and cultural influences of the Atlantic extend from the Rockies and
Andes almost to the heart of Russia, and by the Nile highway they even
invade the seclusion of Africa. Through the long reach of its rivers,
therefore, the Atlantic commands a land area twice as great as that of
the Pacific; and by reason of this fundamental geographic advantage, it
will retain the historical preëminence that it so early secured. The
development of the World Ocean will mean the exploitation of the Pacific
trade from the basis of the Atlantic, the domination of the larger ocean
by the historic peoples of the smaller, because these peoples have wider
and more accessible lands as the base of their maritime operations.
[Sidenote: Lack of coast articulations supplied by rivers.]
The geographic influence of abundant rivers navigable from the sea is
closely akin to that of highly articulated coasts. The effect of the
Hardanger or Sogne Fiord, admitting ocean steamers a hundred miles into
the interior of Norway, is similar to that of the Elbe and Weser
estuaries, which admit the largest vessels sixty miles upstream to
Hamburg and Bremen. Since river inlets can, to a certain extent, supply
the place of marine inlets, from the standpoint of anthropo-geographic
theory and of human practice, a land dissected by navigable rivers can
be grouped with one dissected by arms of the sea. South America and
Africa are alike in the unbroken contour of their coasts, but strongly
contrasted in the character of their rivers. Hence the two continents
present the extremes of accessibility and inaccessibility. South
America, most richly endowed of all the continents with navigable
streams, receiving ocean vessels three thousand miles up the Amazon as
far as Tabatinga in Peru, and smaller steamers up the Orinoco to the
spurs of the Andes, was known in its main features to explorers fifty
years after its discovery. Africa, historically the oldest of
continents, but cursed with a mesa form which converts nearly every
river into a plunging torrent on its approach to the sea, kept its vast
interior till the last century wrapped in utmost gloom. China, amply
supplied with smaller littoral indentations but characterized by a
paucity of larger inlets, finds compensation in the long navigable
course of the Yangtze Kiang. This river extends the landward reach of
the Yellow Sea 630 miles inland to Hanchow, where ocean-going vessels
take on cargoes of tea and silk for Europe and America,[640] and pay for
them in Mexican dollars, the coin of the coast. Hence it is lined with
free ports all the way from Shanghai at its mouth to Ichang, a thousand
miles up its course.[641]
[Sidenote: River highways as basis of commercial preeminence.]
Navigable rivers opening passages directly from the sea are obviously
nature-made gates and paths into wholly new countries; but the
accessibility with which they endow a land becomes later a permanent
factor in its cultural and economic development, a factor that remains
constantly though less conspicuously operative when railroads have done
their utmost to supplant water transportation. The importance of inland
waterways for local and foreign trade and intercourse has everywhere
been recognized. The peoples who have long maintained preëminence among
the commercial and maritime nations of the world have owed this in no
small part to the command of these natural highways, which have served
to give the broad land basis necessary for permanent commercial
ascendency. This has been the history of England, Holland, France and
the recent record of Germany. The medieval League of the Rhine Cities
flourished by reason of the Rhone-Rhine highway across western Europe.
The Hanseatic League, from Bruges all the way east to Russian Novgorod,
owed their brilliant commercial career, not only to the favorable
maritime field in the enclosed sea basins in front of them, but also to
the series of long navigable rivers behind them from the Scheldt to the
Neva and Volchov. Wherefore we find the League, originally confined to
coast towns, drawing into the federation numerous cities located far up
these rivers, such as Ghent, Cologne, Magdeburg, Breslau, Cracow, Pskof
and Novgorod.[642]
[Sidenote: Importance of rivers in large countries.]
In countries of large area, where commerce and intercourse must cover
great distances, these natural and therefore cheap highways assume
paramount importance, especially in the forest and agricultural stages
of development, when the products of the land are bulky in proportion to
their value. Small countries with deeply indented coasts, like Greece,
Norway, Scotland, New England, Chile, and Japan, can forego the
advantage of big river systems; but in Russia, Siberia, China, India,
Canada, the United States, Venezuela, Brazil and Argentine, the history
of the country, economic and political, is indissolubly connected with
that of its great rivers. The storm center of the French and English
wars in America was located on the upper Hudson, because this stream
enabled the English colonies to tap the fur trade of the Great Lakes,
and because it commanded the Mohawk Valley, the easiest and most obvious
path for expansion into the interior of the continent. The Spanish,
otherwise confining their activities in South America to the Caribbean
district and the civilized regions of the Andean highlands, established
settlements at the mouth of the La Plata River, because this stream
afforded an approach from the Atlantic side toward the Potosi mines on
the Bolivian Plateau. The Yangtze Kiang, that great waterway leading
from the sea across the breadth of China and the one valuable river
adjunct of maritime trade in the whole Orient, was early appropriated by
the discerning English as the British "sphere of influence."
[Sidenote: Rivers as highways of expansion.]
No other equally large area of the earth is so generously equipped by
nature for the production and distribution of the articles of commerce
as southern Canada and that part of the United States lying east of the
Rocky Mountains. The simple build of the North American continent,
consisting of a broad central trough between distant mountain ranges,
and characterized by gentle slopes to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of
Mexico, has generated great and small rivers with easy-going currents,
that everywhere opened up the land to explorer, trader and settler. The
rate of expansion from the "Europe-fronting shore" of the continent was
everywhere in direct proportion to the length of the rivers first
appropriated by the colonists. North of Chesapeake Bay the lure to
landward advance was the fur trade. The Atlantic rivers of the coast
pre-empted by the English were cut short by the Appalachian wall. They
opened up only restricted fur fields which were soon exhausted, so that
the migrant trapper was here early converted into the agricultural
settler, his shifting camp fire into the hearthstone of the farmhouse.
Expansion was slow but solid. The relatively small area rendered
accessible by their streams became compactly filled by the swelling tide
of immigrants and the rapid natural increase of population. In sharp
contrast to this development, the long waterway of the St. Lawrence and
the Great Lakes leading to the still vaster river system of the
Mississippi betrayed the fur-trading French into excessive expansion,
and enabled them to appropriate but not to hold a vast extent of
territory. A hundred years after the arrival of Champlain at Montreal,
they were planting their fur stations on Lake Superior and the
Mississippi, 1,400 miles (2,300 kilometers) back from the coast, at a
time when the English settlements had advanced little beyond tide-water.
And when after 1770 the westward movement swept the backwoodsmen of the
English colonies over the Appalachian barrier to the Ohio, Cumberland
and Tennessee, these long westward flowing streams carried them rapidly
on to the Mississippi, communicated the mobility and restlessness of
their own currents to the eager pioneer, and their capacity to master
great distances; so that in forty short years, by 1810, settlements were
creeping up the western tributaries of the Mississippi. The abundant
water communication in the Mississippi Valley, which even for present
large river craft contains 15,410 miles of navigable streams and which
had therefore a far greater mileage in the day of canoe and flatboat,
afforded outlet for bulky, backwoods produce to the sea at New Orleans.
When the English acquired Canada in 1763, they straightway fell under
the sway of its harsh climate and long river systems, taking up the
life of the fur trader; they followed the now scarcer pelts from the
streams of Superior westward by Lake Winnipeg and along the path of the
Saskatchewan River straight to the foot of the Rockies.
[Sidenote: Siberian rivers and Russian expansion.]
Rivers have played the same part in expediting Russian expansion across
the wide extent of Siberia. Here again a severe climate necessitated
reliance on furs, the chief natural product of the country, as the basis
of trade. These, as the outcome of savage economy, were gathered in from
wide areas which only rivers could open up. Therefore, where the
Siberian streams flatten out their upper courses east and west against
the northern face of the Asiatic plateau, with low watersheds between,
the Russian explorer and sable hunter struck their eastward water trail
toward the Pacific. The advance, which under Yermak crossed the Ural
Mountains in 1579, reached the Yenisei River in 1610 and planted there
the town of Turuchansk as a sort of milestone, almost on the Arctic
Circle opposite the mouth of the Lower Tunguska, a long eastern
tributary. Up this they passed to the Lena in 1627, thence to Bering Sea
by the Kolima and Anadyr rivers, because these arctic fields yielded
sable, beaver and fox skins in greatest quantity.[643] The Lena
especially, from its source down to its eastern elbow at Yakutsk, that
great rendezvous of Siberian fur traders, was a highway for trapper and
Cossack tribute-gatherer.[644] From the sources of the Yenisei in Lake
Baikal to the navigable course of the Amur was a short step, taken in
1658, though the control of the river, which was claimed by China, was
not secured till two hundred years later.[645] [See map page 103.]
As the only highways in new countries, rivers constitute lines of least
resistance for colonial peoples encroaching upon the territory of
inferior races. They are therefore the geographic basis of those
streamers of settlement which we found making a fringe of civilization
across the boundary zone of savagery or barbarism on the typical
colonial frontier. Ethnic islands of the expanding people cluster along
them like iron filings on a magnetized wire. Therefore in all countries
where navigable rivers have fixed the lines of expansion, as in the
United States, the northern part of the Russian Empire, and the eastern
or colonial border of Germany and Austria, there is a strong
anthropo-geographic resemblance in the frontiers of successive decades
or centuries. But in arid or semi-arid regions like South Africa, the
western plains of North America, the steppes of Russian and Chinese
Turkestan, the river highway _motif_ in expansion is lost in a variety
of other geographic and geologic factors, though the water of the
streams still attracts trail and settlement.
[Sidenote: Determinants of routes in arid or semi-arid lands.]
A river like the Nile, lower Volga, Irtysh or Indus, rising in highlands
of abundant rainfall but traversing an arid or desert land, acquires
added importance because it furnishes the sole means of water travel and
of irrigation. The Nile has for ages constituted the main line of
intercourse between the Mediterranean and Equatorial Africa. The Tigris,
Euphrates, Indus, and the Niger where it makes its great northern bend
into the Sahara near Timbuctoo,[646] attest the value to local fertility
and commerce inherent in these rivers of the deserts and steppes. Such
rivers are always oasis-makers, whether on their way to the sea they
periodically cover a narrow flood-plain like that of the Nile, or one
ninety miles wide, like that of the Niger's inland delta above
Timbuctoo;[647] or whether they emerge into a silent sea of sand, like
the Murghab of Russian Turkestan, which spreads itself out to water the
gardens of Merv.
Even where such rivers have a volume too scanty to float a raft, they
yet point the highway, because they alone supply water for man and beast
across the desert tract. The Oxus and Sir Daria have from time
immemorial determined the great trade routes through Turkestan to
Central Asia. The Platte, Arkansas, Cimarron and Canadian rivers fixed
the course of our early western trails across the arid plains to the
foot of the Rockies; and beyond this barrier the California Trail
followed the long-drawn oasis formed by the Humboldt River across the
Nevada Desert, the Gila River guided the first American fur-trapping
explorers across the burning deserts of Arizona to the Pacific, and the
succession of water-holes in the dry bed of the Mohave River gave
direction to the Spanish Trail across the Mohave Desert towards Los
Angeles. In the same way, Livingstone's route from the Orange River in
South Africa to Lake Ngami, under the direction of native guides, ran
along the margin of the Kalahari Desert up the dry bed of the Mokoko
River, which still retained an irregular succession of permanent
wells.[648]
[Sidenote: Wadi routes in arid lands.]
In the trade-wind regions of the world, which are characterized by
seasons of intense drought, we find rivers carrying a scant and variable
amount of water but an abundance of gravel and sand; they are known in
different localities as wadis, fiumares and arroyos. Their beds, dry for
long periods of the year, become natural roads, paved with the gravel
which the stream regularly deposits in the wet season. Local travel in
Sicily, Italy[649] and other Mediterranean countries uses such natural
roads extensively. Trade routes across the plateau of Judea and Samaria
follow the wadis, because these give the best gradient and the best
footing for the ascent.[650] Wadis also determine the line of caravan
routes across the highlands of the Sahara. In the desert of Southwest
Africa, the Khiuseb Is the first river north of the Orange to reach the
Atlantic through the barrier dunes of the coast. Hence it has drawn to
its valley the trade routes from a wide circle of inland points from
Ottawe to Windhoek and Rehobeth, and given added importance to the
British coast of Walfish Bay, into which it debouches.[651] But just to the
north, the broad dry bed of the Swakop offered a natural wagon route
into the interior, and has been utilized for the railroad of German
Southwest Africa.
[Sidenote: Increasing historical importance from source to mouth.]
The historical importance of a river increases from its source toward
its mouth. Its head springs, gushing from the ground, and the ramifying
brooks of its highland course yield a widely distributed water supply
and thereby exercise a strong influence in locating the dwellings of
men; but they play no part in the great movements and larger activities
of peoples. Only when minor affluents unite to form the main stream,
enlarge it in its lower course by an increasing tribute of water, and
extend constantly its tributary area, does a river assume real
historical importance. It reaches its fullest significance at its mouth,
where it joins the world's highway of the ocean. Here are combined the
best geographical advantages--participation in the cosmopolitan
civilization characteristic of coastal regions, opportunity for inland
and maritime commerce, and a fertile alluvial soil yielding support for
dense populations. The predominant importance of the debouchment stretch
of a river is indicated by the presence of such cities as London,
Rotterdam, Hamburg, Bremen, Bordeaux, Odessa, Alexandria, Calcutta,
Rangoon, Bangkok, Hongkong, Canton, Nanking and Shanghai, Montreal and
Quebec, New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Buenos Ayres and
Montevideo. This debouchment stretch gains in practical value and hence
in permanent historical importance if it is swept by a scouring tide,
which enables the junction of inland and maritime routes to penetrate
into the land. Even Strabo recognized this value of tidal reaches.[652]
Hence in tideless basins like the Baltic and Caribbean, the great river
ports have to advance coastward to meet the sea; and the lower course of
even mighty streams like the Volga and Nile achieve a restricted
importance.[653]
The control of a river mouth becomes a desideratum or necessity to the
upstream people. Otherwise they may be bottled up. Though history shows
us countless instances of upstream expansion, nevertheless owing to the
ease of downstream navigation and this increasing historical importance
from source to mouth, the direction of a river's flow has often
determined the course of commerce and of political expansion.
[Sidenote: Location at hydrographic centers.]
The possibility of radial expansion, which we have found to be the chief
advantage of a central location, is greatly enhanced if that central
location coincides with a hydrographic center of low relief. The tenth
century nucleus of the Russian Empire was found about the low nodal
watershed formed by the Valdai Hills, whence radiated the rivers later
embodied in the Muscovite domain. Here In Novgorod at the head of the
Volchov-Ladoga-Neva system, Pskof on the Velikaya, Tver at the head of
the navigable Volga, Moscow on the Oka, Smolensk on the Dnieper, and
Vitebsk on the Duna, were gathered the Russians destined to displace the
primitive Finnish population and appropriate the wide plains of eastern
Europe. Everywhere their conquests, colonization, and commercial
relations have followed the downstream course of their rivers. The
Dnieper carried the Rus of Smolensk and Kief to the Euxine, into contact
with the Byzantine world, and brought thence religion, art, and
architecture for the untutored empire of the north. The influence of the
Volga has been irresistible. Down its current Novgorod traders in the
twelfth century sought the commerce of the Caspian and the Orient; and
later the Muscovite princes pushed their conquest of the Tartar hordes
from Asia. The Northern Dwina, Onega, Mesen and Petchora have carried
long narrow bands of Slav settlement northward to the Arctic Ocean. [See
map page 225.] Medieval Russian trade from Hanseatic Pskof and Novgorod,
and later Russian dominion followed the Narva and Neva to the Baltic.
"The Dnieper made Russia Byzantine, the Volga made It Asiatic. It was
for the Neva to make it European."[654]
In the same way, when the early French explorers and traders of Canada
reached the hydrographic center of the continent about Lakes Superior
and Michigan, they quickly crossed the low rim of these basins southward
to the Mississippi, and northward to the Rainy Lake and Winnipeg system
draining to Hudson Bay.[655] While it took them from 1608 to 1659 and
1662 to penetrate upstream from Quebec to this central watershed, only
nine years elapsed from the time (1673) Marquette reached the westward
flowing Wisconsin River to 1682, when La Salle reached the mouth of the
Mississippi.
[Sidenote: Effect of current upon trade and expansion.]
The effect of mere current upon the course of trade and political
expansion was conspicuous in the early history of the Mississippi
Valley, before steam navigation began to modify the geographic
influence of a river's flow. The wide forest-grown barrier of the
Appalachian Mountains placed the western pioneers under the geographic
control of the western waters. The bulkiness of their field and forest
products, fitted only for water transportation, and the immense mass of
downstream commerce called loudly for a maritime outlet and the
acquisition from Spain of some port at the Mississippi mouth. For twenty
years the politics of this transmontane country centered about the
"Island of New Orleans," and in 1803 saw its dream realized by the
Louisiana Purchase.
For the western trader, the Mississippi and Ohio were preeminently
downstream paths. Gravity did the work. Only small boats, laden with
fine commodities of small bulk and large value, occasionally made the
forty day upstream voyage from New Orleans to Louisville. Flat boats and
barges that were constructed at Pittsburg for the river traffic were
regularly broken up for lumber at downstream points like Louisville and
New Orleans; for the traders returned overland by the old Chickasaw
Trail to the Cumberland and Ohio River settlements, carrying their
profits in the form of gold. The same thing happens today, as it also
happened two thousand years ago, on the Tigris and Euphrates. The
highlander of Armenia or northern Mesopotamia floats down the current in
his skin boat or on his brushwood raft, to sell his goods and the wood
forming the frame-work of his primitive craft in timberless Bagdad and
Busra, as formerly in treeless Babylon. He dries out his skins, loads
them on his shoulders or on a mule brought down for the purpose, and
returns on foot to his highland village.[656] The same preponderance of
downstream traffic appears to-day in eastern Siberia. Pedlers on the
Amur start in the spring from Stretensk, 2025 miles up the river, with
their wares in barges, and drift down with the current, selling at the
villages _en route_, to the river's mouth at Nikolaievsk. Here they
dispose of their remaining stock and also of their barges, the lumber of
which is utilized for sidewalks, and they themselves return upstream by
steamer. The grain barges of western Siberia, like the coal barges of
the Mississippi, even within recent decades, are similarly disposed of
at the journey's end.[657] The tonnage of downstream traffic on the Ohio
and Mississippi to-day greatly exceeds that upstream. The fleet of 56
coal boats, carrying about 70,000 tons, which the great towboat Sprague
takes in a single trip from Louisville down to New Orleans, all return
empty. Of the 15,226,805 net tons of freight shipped in 1906 on the Ohio
system, 13,980,368 tons of coal, stone, sand and lumber were carried in
unrigged craft, fitted chiefly for downstream traffic.[658]
[Sidenote: Importance of mouth to upstream people.]
Owing to the strong pull exerted by a river's mouth upon all its basin,
current, commerce and people alike tend to reach the ocean. For a nation
holding the terrestrial course of a stream, the political fate of its
tidal course or mouth must always be a matter of great concern. To the
early westerner of the United States, before the acquisition of the
Louisiana country, it was of vital importance whether belligerent France
or more amenable Spain or the Republic itself should own the mouth of
the Mississippi. Germany, which holds 240 miles (400 kilometers) of the
navigable Danube,[659] can never be indifferent to the political
ownership of its mouth, or to the fact that a great power like Russia
has edged forward, by the acquisition of Bessarabia in 1878, to the
northern or Kilia debouchment channel.[660] Such interest shows itself in
sustained efforts either to gain political control of the mouth, or to
secure the neutrality of the stream by having it declared an
international waterway, and thus partially to deprive the state holding
its mouth of the advantages of its transit location.
The only satisfactory solution is undivided political ownership. After
France pushed eastward to the Rhine in 1648, she warred for three
centuries to acquire its mouth. Napoleon laid claim to Belgium and
Holland on the ground that their soil had been built up by the alluvium
of French rivers. Germany's conquest of Schleswig-Holstein in 1864 was
significant chiefly because it dislodged Denmark from the right bank of
the lower Elbe, and secured undivided control of this important estuary.
The Rhine, which traverses the Empire from north to south and
constitutes its greatest single trade route, gives to Germany a more
vital interest in Holland than ever France had. Her most important iron
and coal mines and manufacturing industries are located on this
waterway or its tributaries, the Ruhr, Mosel, Saar and Main. Hence the
Rhine is the great artery of German trade and outlet for her enormous
exports, which chiefly reach the sea through the ports of Belgium and
Holland. These two countries therefore fatten on German commerce and
reduce German profits. Hence the Empire, by the construction of the
Emden-Dortmund canal, aims to divert its trade from Rotterdam and
Antwerp to a German port, and possibly thereby put the screw on Holland
to draw her into some kind of a commercial union with Germany.[661]
Heinrich von Treitschke, in his "_Politik_," deplores the fact that the
most valuable part of the great German river has fallen into alien
hands, and he declares it to be an imperative task of German policy to
recover the mouth of that stream, "either by a commercial or political
union." "We need the entrance of Holland into our customs union as we
need our daily bread."[662]
[Sidenote: Prevention of monopoly of river mouth.]
When the middle and upper course of a river system are shared by several
nations, their common interest demands that the control of the mouth be
divided, as in the case of the La Plata between Argentine and Uruguay;
or held by a small state, like Holland, too weak to force the monopoly
of the tidal course. The Treaty of Paris in 1856 extended the territory
of Moldavia at the cost of Russia, to keep the Russian frontier away
from the Danube.[663] Her very presence was ominous. The temptation to
giant powers to gobble up these exquisite morsels of territory is
irresistible. Hence the advisability of neutralizing small states
holding such locations, as in the case of Roumania; and making their
rivers international waterways, as in the case of the Orinoco,[664]
Scheldt, Waal, Rhine and Danube.[665] The Yangtze Kiang mouth, where
already the treaty ports cluster thick, will probably be the first part
of China to be declared neutral ground, and as such to be placed under
the protection of the combined commercial powers,[666] as is even now
foreshadowed by the International Conservancy Board of 1910.[667] The
United States, by her treaty with Mexico in 1848, secured the right of
free navigation on the lower or Mexican course of the Colorado River and
the Gulf of California. The Franco-British convention, which in 1898
confirmed the western Sudan to France, also conceded the principle of
making the Niger, the sole outlet of this vast and isolated territory,
an international waterway, and created two French _enclaves_ in British
Nigeria to serve as river ports.[668]
[Sidenote: Motive for canals in lower course.]