The mouth of a large river system is the converging point of many lines

of inland and maritime navigation. The interests of commerce, especially

in its earlier periods of development, demand that the contact here of

river and sea be extensive as possible. Nature suggests the way to

fulfill this requirement. The sluggish lowland current of a river, on

approaching sea level, throws out distributaries that reach the coast at

various points and form a network of channels, which can be deepened and

rendered permanent by canalization. In such regions the opportunity for

the improvement and extension of waterways has been utilized from the

earliest times. The ancient Egyptians, Chaldeans, East Indians, and the

Gauls of the lower Po for thousands of years canaled the waters of their

deltas and coastal lowlands for the combined purpose of irrigation,

drainage, and navigation. The great canal system of China, constructed

in the seventh century primarily to facilitate Inland intercourse

between the northern and central sections of the Empire, extends from

the sea at Hangchow 700 miles northward through the coastal alluvium of

the Yangtze Kiang, Hoang-ho and Pie-ho to Tientsin, the port of Peking.

Only the canal system of the center, important both for the irrigation

of the fertile but porous loess and for the transportation of crops, is

still in repair. Here the meshes of the canal network are little more

than half a mile wide; farmers dig canals to their barns and bring in

their produce in barges instead of hay wagons.[669] Holland, where the

ancient Romans constructed channels in the Rhine delta and where the

debouchment courses of the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt present a labyrinth

of waterways, has to-day 1903 miles (3069 kilometers) of canals, which

together with the navigable rivers, have been important geographic

factors in the historical preëminence of Dutch foreign commerce. So on

the lower Mississippi, in the greatest alluvial area of the United

States, the government has expended large sums for the improvement of

the passes and bayous of the river. The Barataria, Atchafalaya,

Terrebonne, Black, Teche and Lafourche bayous have been rendered

navigable, and New Orleans has been given canal outlets to the sea

through Lakes Salvador, Pontchartrain and Borgne.

[Sidenote: Watershed canals.]

As the dividing channels of the lower course point to the feasibility of

amplifying the connection with the ocean highway, so the spreading

branches of a river's source, which approach other head waters on a low

divide, suggest the extension of inland navigation by the union of two

such drainage systems through canals. Where the rivers of a country

radiate from a relatively low central watershed, as from the Central

Plateau of France and the Valdai Hills of Russia, nature offers

conditions for extensive linking of inland waterways. Hence we find a

continuous passway through Russia from the Caspian Sea to the Baltic by

the canal uniting the Volga and Neva rivers; another from the Black Sea

up the Dnieper, which by canals finds three different outlets to the

Baltic through the Vistula, Niemen and Duna.[670] The Northern Dwina,

linked, by canals, with the Neva through Lakes Onega and Ladoga, unites

the White Sea with the Baltic.[671] Sully, the great minister of Henry

IV. of France, saw that the relief of the country would permit the

linking of the Loire, Seine, Meuse, Saône and Rhine, and the

Mediterranean with the Garonne. All his plans were carried out by his

successors, but he himself, at the end of the sixteenth century, began

the construction of the Briare Canal between the Loire near Orleans and

the Seine at Fontainebleau.[672] Similarly in the eastern half of the

United States, the long, low watershed separating the drainage basin of

the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes from that of the Mississippi and the

Hudson made feasible the succession of canals completing the "Great

Belt" of inland navigation from St. Lawrence and New York bays to the

Gulf. Albert Gallatin's famous report of 1808[673] pointed out the

adaptation of the three low divides to canal communication; but long

before this, every line of possible canoe travel by river and portage

over swamp or lake-dotted watershed had been used by savages, white

explorers and French voyageurs, from Lake Champlain to Lake Winnebago,

so that the canal engineer had only to select from the numerous portage

paths already beaten out by the moccasined feet of Indian or fur-trader.

[Sidenote: Rivers and railroads.]

The cheapness and ease of river travel have tended to check or delay the

construction of highroads and railways, where facilities for inland

navigation have been abundant, and later to regulate railway freight

charges. Conversely, riverless lands have everywhere experienced an

exaggerated and precocious railroad development, and have suffered from

its monopoly of transportation. Even canals have in most lands had a far

earlier date than paved highroads. This has been true of Spain, France,

Holland, and England.[674] In the Hoang-ho Valley of northern China where

waterways are restricted, owing to the rapid current and shallowness of

this river, highroads are comparatively common; but they are very rare

in central and southern China where navigable rivers and canals

abound.[675] New England, owing to its lack of inland navigation, was the

first part of the United States to develop a complete system of

turnpikes and later of railroads. On the other hand, the great river

valleys of America have generally slighted the highroad phase of

communication, and slowly passed to that of railroads. The abundance of

natural waterways in Russia--51,800 miles including canals--has

contributed to the retardation of railroad construction.[676] The same

thing is true in the Netherlands, where 4875 miles (7863 kilometers) of

navigable waterways[677] in an area of only 12,870 square miles (33,000

square kilometers) have kept the railroads down to a paltry 1818 miles

(2931 kilometers); but smaller Belgium, commanding only 1375 miles (3314

kilometers) of waterway and stimulated further by a remarkable

industrial and commercial development, has constructed 4228 miles (6819

kilometers) of railroad.

[Sidenote: Relation of rivers to railroads in recent colonial lands.]

If we compare the countries of Central and South America, where

railroads are still mere adjuncts of river and coastwise routes, a stage

of development prevalent in the United States till 1858, we find an

unmistakable relation between navigable waterways and railroad mileage.

The countries with ample or considerable river communication, like

Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia and Paraguay, are all relatively slow in

laying railroads as compared with Mexico and Argentine, even when

allowance is made for differences of zonal location, economic

development, and degree of European elements in their respective

populations. Mexico and Argentine, having each an area only about

one-fourth that of Brazil but a railroad mileage nearly one-fourth

greater, have been pushed to this development primarily by a common lack

of inland navigation. Similarly South Africa, stricken with poverty of

water communication south of the Zambesi, has constructed 7500 miles of

railroads[678] in spite of the youth of the country and the sparsity of

its white population. Similar geographic conditions have forced the

mileage of Australian railways up to twice that of South Africa, in a

country which is still in the pastoral and agricultural stage of

development, and whose most densely populated province Victoria has only

fourteen inhabitants to the square mile. In the almost unpeopled wastes

of Trans-Caspia, where two decades ago the camel was the only carrier,

the Russian railroad has worked a commercial revolution by stimulating

production and affording an outlet for the irrigated districts of the

encircling mountains.[679] In our own Trans-Missouri country, where the

scanty volume of the streams eliminated all but the Missouri itself as a

dependable waterway, even for the canoe travel of the early western

trappers, railroads have developed unchecked by the competition of river

transportation.[680] With no rival nearer than the Straits of Magellan

and the Isthmus of Panama for transportation between the Mississippi and

the Pacific coast, they have fixed their own charges on a monopoly

basis, and have fought the construction of the Isthmian Canal.

[Sidenote: Unity of a river system.]

A river system is a system of communication. It therefore makes a bond

of union between the people living among its remoter sources and those

settled at its mouth. Every such river system forms geographically an

unbroken whole. Only where a wild, torrent-filled gorge, like the

Brahmaputra's path through the Himalayas, interrupts communication

between the upper and lower course, is human life in the two sections

divorced. But such cases are rare. Even the River Jhelam, which springs

with mad bounds from the lofty Vale of Kashmir through the outer range

of the Himalayas down to its junction with the Indus, carries quantities

of small logs to be used as railway sleepers; and though it shatters a

large per cent. of them, it makes a link between the lumber men of the

Kashmir forests and British railroad engineers in the treeless plains of

the Indus.[681]

[Sidenote: The effect of common water supply in arid lands.]

In arid lands, where the scant and variable streams are useless for

navigation, but invaluable for irrigation, a rival interest in the

limited water supply leads almost inevitably to conflict, and often to

the political union of the peoples holding the upper and lower courses,

in order to secure adjustment of their respective claims. The ancient

Salassi of the upper Doria Baltea Valley in the Alps drew off all the

water of the stream for washing gold, and thus deprived the agricultural

people lower down the valley of the water necessary for irrigation. The

result was frequent wars between the two tribes.[682] The offensive is

taken by the downstream people, whose fields and gardens suffer from

every extension of tillage or increase of population in the settlements

above them. Occasionally a formal agreement is a temporary expedient.

The River Firenze and other streams watering southern Trans-Caspia have

their sources in the mountains of northern Persia; hence the Russians,

in the boundary convention with Persia of 1881, stipulated that no new

settlement be established along these streams within Persian territory,

no extension of land under cultivation beyond the present amount, and no

eduction of the water beyond that necessary to irrigate the existing

fields.[683] Russia's designs upon Afghanistan aim not only at access to

India, but also at the control of the upper Murghab River, on whose

water depends the prosperity of the Pendjeh and Merv oases.[684] In such

regions the only logical course is the extension of the political

frontier to the watershed, a principle which Russia is applying in

western Asia, and which California applied in drawing her eastern

boundary to include even Goose Lake.

[Sidenote: Union of opposite river banks.]

Rivers unite. Ancient Rome grew up on both banks of the Tiber, and

extended her commercial and political supremacy up and down stream. Both

sides of the Rhine were originally occupied by the Gallic tribes, whose

villages were in some instances bisected by the river. Cæsar found the

Menapii, a Belgian people on the lower Rhine, with their fields,

farmhouses and villages on both banks.[685] Then the westward advance of

the Teutonic tribes gradually transformed the Rhine into a German river,

from the island of Batavia at its mouth up to the great elbow at the

foot of the Jura Mountains.[686] To the American Indians even the widest

rivers were no barriers. Christopher Gist, exploring the Ohio in 1751,

found a Shawnee village situated on both sides of the river below the

mouth of the Scioto, with about a hundred houses on the north bank and

forty on the south.[687] The small and unique nation of the Mandan

Indians were found by Lewis and Clark near the northern bend of the

Missouri in 1804, in two groups of villages on opposite sides of the

river. They had previously in 1772 occupied nine villages lower down the

stream, two on the east bank and seven on the west.[688] The Connecticut

River settlers of early colonial days laid out all their towns straight

across the valley, utilizing the alluvial meadows on both banks for

tillage, the terraces for residence sites, and the common river for

intercourse.[689]

[Sidenote: Tendency toward ethnic and cultural unity in a river valley.]

Every river tends to become a common artery feeding all the life of its

basin, and gradually obliterating ethnic and cultural differences among

the peoples of its valley. The Nile, with its narrow hem of flood-plain

on either bank and barrier sands beyond, has so linked race and history

in Egypt and Nubia, that the two countries cannot be separated. A common

highway from mountains to sea, a common frontier of trackless desert

have developed here a blended similarity of race, language and culture

from the delta to Kordofan. The Hamitic race seems to have originated in

the south and migrated northward down the Nile towards the delta. Later

the whole valley, north and south, received the same Semitic or Arab

immigration, which spread from Cairo to the old Sudanese capital of

Sennar, while a strain of negro blood has filtered in from the

equatorial black belt and followed the current down to the sea.[690] The

culture of the valley originated in Lower Egypt, and, with that easy

transmissibility which characterizes ideas, it moved upstream into

Ethiopia, which never evolved a culture of its own. Just as noticeable

is the political interplay. The rule of the Pharaohs extended far up the

Nile, at times to the Third Cataract at 20° N.L.; and at one period

Ethiopian kings extended their sway over Egypt. At another, a large body

of mutinous Egyptian soldiers abandoned their country and their wives,

and emigrated along the one line of slight resistance open to them into

Ethiopia, to found there a new state and new families by marriage with

native women, thus contributing to the amalgamation of races in the

valley.

[Sidenote: Identity of country with river valley.]

The most pronounced types of the identity of a country with a river

valley are found where strongly marked geographical boundaries, like

deserts and mountains, emphasize the inner unity of the basins by

accentuating their isolation from without. This is especially the case

in high mountain regions; here canton or commune or county coincides

with the river valley. Population hugs the margins of the streams where

alone is soil fit for cultivation, and fairly level land suitable for

dwellings. Above are the unoccupied heights, at once barrier and

boundary. In the Alps, Salzburg is approximately identical with the

valley of the Salzach, Uri with that of the Reuss, the Valais with the

upper Rhone, the Engadine with the upper Inn, Glarus with the Linth,

Graubünden or Grisons with the upper Rhine, Valtellina with the Adda. So

in the great upheaved area of the Himalayas, the state of Kashmir was

originally the valley of the upper Jhelam River, while Assam, in its

correct delimitation, is the valley of the Brahmaputra between the

Himalayan gorge and the swamps of Bengal.[691]

In mountain regions which are also arid, the identity of a district with

a stream basin becomes yet more pronounced, because here population must

gather about the common water supply, must organize to secure its fair

distribution, and cooperate in the construction of irrigation channels

to make the distribution as economical and effective as possible. Thus

in Chinese Turkestan, the districts of Yarkand, Kashgar, Aksu and

Kut-sha are identical with as many mountain tributaries of the Tarim,

whose basin in turn comprises almost the whole of Chinese Turkestan.

[Sidenote: Enclosed river valleys.]

In all such desert and mountain-rimmed valleys, the central stream

attracts to its narrow hem of alluvial soil the majority of the

population, determines the course of the main highroad, and is itself

often the only route through the encompassing barriers. Hence the

importance attached to the river by the inhabitants, an importance

reflected in the fact that the river often gives its name to the whole

district. To the most ancient Greeks _Aigiptos_ meant the river, whose

name was later transferred to the whole land; for the narrow arable

strip which constituted Egypt was "the gift of the Nile." The Aryans,

descending into India through the mountains on its northwest border,

gave the name of _Sindhu_, "the flood" or "the ocean," to the first

great river they met. In the mouth of Persians and Greeks the name was

corrupted into Indus, and then applied to the whole country; but it

still survives in its original form in the local designation of the Sind

province, which comprises the valley of the Indus below the confluence

of the five rivers, which again formed and named the original Punjab.

Significantly enough the western political boundary of the Sind extends

into the barren foothills of Baluchistan only so far as the affluents of

the Indus render the land arable by irrigation; for the Indus performs

for the great province of the Sind, by annual inundation and perennial

irrigation, the same service that the Nile does for Egypt.

The segregation of such districts, and the concentration of their

interests and activities along the central streams have tended to

develop in the population an intense but contracted national

consciousness, and to lend them a distinctive history. Their rivers

become interwoven with their mythology and religion, are gods to be

worshipped or appeased, become goals of pilgrimages, or acquire a

peculiar sanctity. The Nile, Ganges, Jamna, Jordan, Tiber and Po are

such sacred streams, while the Rhine figures in German mythology.

[Sidenote: Rivers as boundaries of races and peoples.]

From the uniting power of rivers it follows that they are poor

boundaries. Only mountains and seas divide sharply enough to form

scientific frontiers. Rivers may serve as political lines of demarcation

and therefore fix political frontiers; but they can never take the place

of natural boundaries. A migrating or expanding people tend always to

occupy both slopes of a river valley. They run their boundary of race or

language across the axis of their river basin, only under exceptional

circumstances along the stream itself. The English-French boundary in

the St. Lawrence Valley crosses the river in a broad transitional zone

of mingled people and speech in and above the city of Montreal. The

French-German linguistic frontier in Switzerland crosses the upper Rhone

Valley just above Sierre, but the whole canton of Valais above the elbow

of the river at Martigny shows fundamental ethnic unity, indicated by

identity of head form, stature and coloring.[692] Where the Elbe flows

through the low plains of North Germany, its whole broad valley is

occupied by a pure Teutonic population--fair, tall, long-headed; a more

brunette type occupies its middle course across the uplands of Saxony,

and speaks German like the downstream folk; but its upper course, hemmed

in by the Erz and Riesen Mountains, shows the short, dark and

broad-headed people of the Bohemian basin, speaking the Czech

language.[693] On the Danube, too, the same thing is true. The upper

stream is German in language and predominantly Alpine in race stock down

to the Austro-Hungarian boundary; from this point to the Drave mouth it

is Hungarian; and from the Drave to the Iron Gate it is Serbo-Croatian

on both banks.[694] Lines of ethnic demarcation, therefore, cut the Elbe

and Danube transversely, not longitudinally. [See map page 223.]

The statements of Cæsar and Pliny that the Seine and Marne formed the

boundary between the Gauls and Belgians, and the Garonne that between

the Gauls and Aquitanians, must be accepted merely as general and

preliminary; for exceptions are noted later in the text. Parisii, for

instance, were represented as holding both banks of the Seine and Marne

at their confluence, and the Gallic Bituriges were found on the

Aquitanian side of the Garonne estuary.

[Sidenote: Scientific river boundaries.]

Only under peculiar conditions do rivers become effective as ethnic,

tribal or political boundaries. Most often it is some physiographic

feature which makes the stream an obstacle to communication, and lends

it the character of a scientific boundary. The division of the Alpine

foreland of southern Germany first into tribal and later into political

provinces by the Iller, Lech, Inn, and Salzach can be ascribed in part

to the tumultuous course of these streams from the mountains to the

Danube, which renders them useless for communication.[695] The lower

Danube forms a well maintained linguistic boundary between the

Bulgarians and Roumanians, except in the northwest corner of Bulgaria,

where the hill country between the Timok River and the Danube has

enticed a small group of Roumanians across to the southern side. From

this point down the stream, a long stretch of low marshy bank on the

northern side, offering village sites only at the few places where the

loess terrace of Roumania comes close to the river, exposed to

overflows, strewn with swamps and lakes, and generally unfit for

settlement, has made the Danube an effective barrier.[696] Similarly, the

broad, sluggish Shannon River, which spreads out to lake breadth at

close intervals in its course across the boggy central plain of Ireland,

has from the earliest times proved a sufficient barrier to divide the

plain into two portions, Connaught and Meath,[697] contrasted in history,

in speech and to some extent even in race elements.[698] A different

cause gave the Thames its unique rôle among the larger English rivers as

a boundary between counties from source to mouth. London's fortified

position at the head of the Thames estuary closed this stream as a line

of invasion to the early Saxons, and forced them to make detours to the

north and south of the river, which therefore became a tribal

boundary.[699]

Where navigation is peculiarly backward, a river may present a barrier.

An instructive instance is afforded by the River Yo, which flows

eastward through northern Bornu into Lake Chad, and serves at once as

boundary and protection to the agricultural tribes of the Kanuri

against the depredations of the Tibbu robbers living in the Sahara or

the northern grassland. But during the dry season from April to August,

when the trickling stream is sucked up by the thirsty land and thirstier

air, the Tibbu horsemen sweep down on the unprotected Kanuri and retreat

with their booty across the vanished barrier. The primitive navigation

by reed or brushwood rafts, practiced in this almost streamless

district, affords no means of retreat for mounted robbers; so the

raiding season opens with the fall of the river.[700]

[Sidenote: Rivers as political boundaries.]

For political boundaries, which are often adopted with little reference

to race distribution, rivers serve fairly well. They are convenient

lines of demarcation and strategic lines of defense, as is proved by the

military history of the Rhine, Danube, Ebro, Po, and countless other

streams. On the lower Zambesi Livingstone found the territories of the

lesser chiefs defined by the rivulets draining into the main river. The

leader of the Makololo formally adopted the Zambesi as his political and

military frontier, though his people spread and settled beyond the

river.[701] Long established political frontiers may become ethnic

boundaries, more or less distinct, because of protracted political

exclusion. To the Romans, the Danube and Rhine as a northeastern

frontier had the value chiefly of established lines in an imperfectly

explored wilderness, and of strategic positions for the defense of an

oft assailed border; but the long maintenance of this political frontier

resulted in the partial segregation and hence differentiation of the

people dwelling on the opposite banks.

Poor as a scientific boundary, a river is not satisfactory even as a

line of demarcation, because of its tendency to shift its bed in every

level stretch of its course. A political boundary that follows a river,

therefore, is often doomed to frequent surveys. The plantations on the

meanders of the lower Mississippi are connected now with one, now with

the other of the contiguous states, as the great stream straightens its

course after the almost annual overflow.[702] The Rio Grande has proved a

troublesome and expensive boundary between the United States and

Mexico. Almost every rise sees it cutting a new channel for itself, now

through Texas, now through Mexican territory, occasioning endless

controversies as to the ownership of the detached land, and demanding

fresh surveys. Recent changes in the lower course of the Helmund between

Nasralabad and the Sistan Swamp, which was adopted in 1872 as the

boundary between Afghanistan and Persia, have necessitated a new

demarcation of the frontier; and on this task a commission is at present

engaged.[703] In a like manner Strabo tells us that the River Achelous,

forming the boundary between ancient Acarnania and Aetolia in western

Hellas, by overflowing its delta region, constantly obliterated the

boundaries agreed upon by the two neighbors, and thereby gave rise to

disputes that were only settled by force of arms.[704]

[Sidenote: Fluvial settlements and peoples.]

Rivers tend always to be centers of population, not outskirts or

perimeters. They offer advantages that have always attracted

settlement--fertile alluvial soil, a nearby water supply, command of a

natural highway for intercourse with neighbors and access to markets.

Among civilized peoples fluvial settlements have been the nuclei of

broad states, passing rapidly through an embryonic development to a

maturity in which the old center can still be distinguished by a greater

density of population. Only among savages or among civilized people who

have temporarily reverted to primitive conditions in virgin colonial

lands, do we find genuine riverine folk, whose existence is closely

restricted to their bordering streams. The river tribes of the Congo

occupy the banks or the larger islands, while the land only three or

four miles back from the stream is held by different tribes with whom

the riverine people trade their fish. The latter are expert fishermen

and navigators, and good agriculturists, raising a variety of fruits and

vegetables. On the river banks at regular intervals are market greens,

neutral ground, whither people come from up and down stream and from the

interior to trade. Their long riparian villages consist of a single

street, thirty feet wide and often two miles long, on which face perhaps

three hundred long houses,[705] Fisher and canoe people line the Welle,

the great northern tributary of the Congo.[706] The same type appeared

in South America in the aboriginal Caribs and Tupis dwelling along the

southern tributaries of the Amazon and the affluents of the Paraguay.

These were distinctly a water race, having achieved a meager development

only in navigation, fishing and the cultivation of their alluvial

soil.[707] The ancient mound-builders of America located their villages

chiefly, though not exclusively, along the principal watercourses, like

the Mississippi, Illinois, Miami, Wabash, Wisconsin, and Fox,[708] on the

very streams later dotted by the trading posts of the French voyageurs.

[Sidenote: Riparian villages of French Canada.]

The presence of the great waterways of Canada and the demand of the fur

trade for extensive and easy communication made the early French

colonists as distinctly a riverine people as the savage Congo tribes.

Like these, they stretched out their villages in a single line of cabins

and clearings, three or four miles long, facing the river, which was the

King's highway. Such a village was called a _côte_. One côte ran into

the next, for their expansion was always longitudinal, never lateral.

These riparian settlements lined the main watercourses of French Canada,

especially the St. Lawrence, whose shores from Beaupre, fifteen miles

below Quebec, up to Montreal at an early date presented the appearance

of a single street. Along the river passed the stately trading ship from

France with its cargo of wives and merchandise for the colonists, the

pirogue of the _habitant_ farmer carrying his onions and grain to the

Quebec market, the birchbark canoe of the adventurous voyageur bringing

down his winter's hunt of furs from the snow-bound forests of the

interior, and the fleet of Jesuit priests bound to some remote inland

mission.

[Illustration: THE RIPARIAN VILLAGES OF THE LOWER ST. LAWRENCE.]

On this water thoroughfare every dwelling faced. Hence land on the river

was at a premium, while that two miles back was to be had for the

taking. The original grants measured generally 766 feet in width and

7,660 in depth inland; but when bequeathed from generation to

generation, they were divided up along lines running back at right

angles to the all important waterway. Hence each _habitant_ farm

measured its precious river-front by the foot and its depth by the mile,

while the cabins were ranged side by side in cosy neighborliness. The

_côte_ type of village, though eminently convenient for the Indian

trade, was ill adapted for government and defense against the savages;

but the need for the communication supplied by the river was so

fundamental, that it nullified all efforts of the authorities to

concentrate the colonists in more compact settlements. Parkman says:

"One could have seen almost every house in Canada by paddling a canoe up

the St. Lawrence and Richelieu."[709] The same type of land-holding can

be traced to-day on the Chaudiere River, where the fences run back from

the stream like the teeth of a comb. It is reproduced on a larger scale

in the long, narrow counties ranged along the lower St. Lawrence, whose

shape points to the old fluvial nuclei of settlement. Similarly the

early Dutch grants on the Hudson gave to the patroons four miles along

the river and an indefinite extension back from the stream. In the early

Connecticut River settlements, the same consideration of a share in the

river and its alluvial bottoms distributed the town lots among the

inhabitants in long narrow strips running back from the banks.[710]

[Sidenote: Boatmen tribes or castes.]

In undeveloped countries, where rivers are the chief highways, we

occasionally see the survival of a distinct race of boatmen amid an

intruding people of different stock, preserved in their purity by their

peculiar occupation, which has given them the aloofness of a caste. In

the Kwang-tung province of southern China are 40,000 Tanka boat people,

who live in boats and pile-dwellings in the Canton River. The Chinese,

from whom they are quite distinct, regard them as a remnant of the

original population, which was dislodged by their invasion and forced to

take refuge on the water. They gradually established intercourse with

the conquerors of the land, but held themselves aloof. They marry only

among themselves, have their own customs, and enjoy a practical monopoly

of carrying passengers and messages between the steamers and the shore

at Macao, Hongkong and Canton.[711] In the same way, the middle Niger

above Gao possesses a distinct aquatic people, the Somnos or Bosos, who

earn their living as fishermen and boatmen on the river. They spread

their villages along the Niger and its tributaries, and occupy separate

quarters in the large towns like Gao and Timbuctoo. They are creatures

of the river rather than of the land, and show great skill and endurance

in paddling and poling their narrow dugouts on their long Niger

voyages.[712]

Reference has been made before to the large river population of China

who live on boats and rafts, and forward the trade of the vast inland

waterways. These are people, differentiated not in race, but in

occupation and mode of life, constantly recruited from the congested

population of the land. Allied to them are the trackers or towing crews

whose villages form a distinctive feature of the turbulent upper

Yangtze, and who are employed, sometimes three hundred at a time, to

drag junks up the succession of rapids above Ichang.[713] Similarly the

complex of navigable waterways centering about Paris, as far back as the

reign of Tiberius Cæsar, gave rise to the _Nautae Parisii_ or guild of

mariners, from whom the city of Paris derived its present coat of

arms--a vessel under full sail. These Lutetian boatmen handled the river

traffic in all the territory drained by the Seine, Marne, and Oise.

Later, in the reign of Louis the Fat, they were succeeded by the

_Mercatores aquae Parisiaci_, and from them sprang the municipal body

appointed to regulate the river navigation and commerce.[714]

[Sidenote: River islands as protected sites.]

The location of the ancient tribe of the Parisii is typical of many

other weak riverine folk who seek in the islands of a river a protected

position to compensate for their paucity of number. The Parisii, one of

the smallest of the Gallic tribes, ill-matched against their populous

neighbors, took refuge on ten islands and sandbars of the Seine and

there established themselves.[715] Stanley found an island in the Congo

near the second cataract of Stanley Falls occupied by five villages of

the Baswa, who had taken refuge there from the attacks of the

bloodthirsty Bakuma.[716] During the Tartar invasions of Russia in the

thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, bands of refugees from the

surrounding country gathered for mutual defense on the islands of the

Dnieper River, and became the nucleus of the Dnieper Cossacks.[717] The

Huron tribe of American Indians, reduced to a mere fragment by repeated

Iroquois attacks, fled first to the islands of St. Joseph and

Michilimackinac in Lake Huron, and in 1856 to the Isle of Orleans in the

St. Lawrence. But even this location under the guns of their French

allies in Quebec failed to protect them, for the St. Lawrence was a

highway for the war fleets of their implacable foe.[718]

[Sidenote: River and lake islands as robber strongholds.]

A river island not only confers the negative benefit of protection, but

affords a coign of vantage for raids on the surrounding country, being

to some extent proof against punitive attacks. It offers special

facilities for depredations on parties crossing the river; here the

divided current, losing something of its force, is less of an obstacle,

and the island serves as a resting place on the passage. Immunity from

punishment breeds lawlessness. The Ba Toka who, fifty years ago,

inhabited the islands in the great southern bend of the Zambesi,

utilized their location to lure wandering tribes on to their islands,

under the pretext of ferrying them across, and then to rob them, till

Sebituane, the great Makololo chief, cleaned out their fastnesses and

opened the river for trade.[719] The islands in the wide stretches of the

Lualaba River in the Babemba country were described to Livingstone as

harboring a population of marauders and robbers, who felt themselves

safe from attack.[720] The same unenviable reputation attaches to the

Budumas of the Lake Chad islands. A weak, timid, displaced people, they

nevertheless lose no chance of raiding the herds of the Sudanese tribes

inhabiting the shores of the Lake, and carrying off the stolen cattle on

their wretched rafts to their island retreats.[721]

[Sidenote: River peninsulas as protected sites.]

The protection of an island location is almost equalled in the

peninsulas formed by the serpentines or meanders of a river. Hence these

are choice sites for fortress or settlement in primitive communities,

where hostilities are always imminent and rivers the sole means of

communication. The defensive works of the mound-builders in great

numbers occupied such river peninsulas. The neck of the loop was

fortified by a single or double line of ditch and earthen wall,

constructed from bank to bank of the encircling stream.[722] This was

exactly the location of Vesontio, now Besançon, once the ancient

stronghold of the Sequani in eastern Gaul. It was situated in a loop of

the Dubis, so nearly a circle that its course seems to have been

"described by a compass," Cæsar says, while fortifications across the

isthmus made the position of the town almost impregnable.[723] Verona,

lying at the exit of the great martial highway of the Brenner Pass,

occupies just such a loop of the Adige, as does Capua on the Volturno,

and Berne on the Aare. Shrewsbury, in the Middle Ages an important

military point for the preservation of order on the marches of Wales, is

almost encircled by the River Severn, while a castle on the neck of the

peninsula completes the defense on the land side.[724] Graaf Reinett, at

one time an exposed frontier settlement of the Dutch in Cape Colony, had

a natural moat around it in the Sunday River, which here describes

three-fourths of a circle.

[Sidenote: River islands as sites of trading posts and colonies.]

The need of protection felt by all colonists in new countries amid

savage or barbarous people whom encroachment sooner or later makes

hostile, leads them if possible to place their first trading posts and

settlements on river islands, especially at the mouth of the streams,

where a delta often affords the site required, and where the junction of

ocean and river highway offers the best facilities for trade. A river

island fixed the location of the English settlement at Jamestown in

Virginia, the French at Montreal and New Orleans, the Dutch at Manhattan

and Van Renssellær Island in the Hudson, the Swedes at Tinicum Island

in the Delaware River a few miles below the mouth of the Schuylkill.[725]

St. Louis, located on a delta island of the Senegal River, is one of the

oldest European towns in West Africa;[726] and Bathurst, founded in 1618

on a similar site at the mouth of the Gambia, has for centuries now been

the safe outlet for the trade of this stream.[727] Such island

settlements at river mouths are a phenomenon of the outer edge of every

coastal region; but inland stations for trade or military control also

seek the protection of an island site. The Russians in the seventeenth

century secured their downstream conquest of the Amur by a succession of

river island forts,[728] which recall Colonel Byrd's early frontier post

on an island in the Holston River, and George Rogers Clark's military

stockade on Corn Island in the Ohio, which became the nucleus of the

later city of Louisville.

[Sidenote: Swamps as barriers and boundaries.]

More effective than rivers in the protection which they afford are

swamps. Neither solid land nor navigable water, their sluggish, passive

surface raises an obstacle of pure inertia to the movements of mankind.

Hence they form one of those natural boundaries that segregate. In

southern England, Ronmey Marsh, reinforced by the Wealden Forest, fixed

the western boundary of the ancient Saxon kingdom of Kent by blocking

expansion in that direction, just as the bordering swamps of the Lea and

Colne rivers formed the eastern and western boundaries of

Middlesex.[729] The Fenland of the Wash, which extended in Saxon days

from the highland about Lincoln south to Cambridge and Newmarket, served

to hem in the Angles of Norfolk and Suffolk on the west, so that the

occupation of the interior was left to later bands who entered by the

estuaries of the Humber and Forth.[730] In northern Germany, the low

cross valleys of the Spree, Havel and Netze rivers, bordered by alder

swamps, were long a serious obstacle to communication, and therefore

became boundaries of districts,[731] just as the Bourtanger Moor drew

the dividing line between Holland and Hanover.

[Sidenote: Swamps as regions of survival.]

Swamp-bordered regions, as areas of natural isolation, guard and keep

intact the people which they hold. Therefore they are regions of

survival of race and language. The scattered islets of the Fens of

England furnished an asylum to the early British Celts from Teutonic

attacks,[732] and later protected them against dominant infusion of

Teutonic blood. Hence to-day in the Fenland and in the district just to

the south we find a darker, shorter people than in the country to the

east or west.[733] Similarly the White Russians, occupying the poor,

marshy region of uncertain watershed between the sources of the Duna,

Dnieper and Volga, have the purest blood of all the eastern Slavs,

though this distinction is coupled with poverty and retarded

culture,[734] a combination that anthropo-geography often reveals.

Wholly distinct from the Russians and segregated from them by a barrier

of swampy forests, we find the Letto-Lithuanians in the Baltic province

of Courland, speaking the most primitive form of flectional languages

classed as Aryan. The isolation which preserved their archaic speech, of

all European tongues the nearest to the Sanskrit, made them the last

European people to accept Christianity.[735] The great race of the

Slavic Wends, who once occupied all northern Germany between the Vistula

and Elbe, has left only a small and declining remnant of its language in

the swampy forests about the sources of the Spree.[736] [See

ethnographical map, p. 223.] The band of marshlands stretching through

Holland from the shallow Zuyder Zee east to the German frontier, has

given to Friesland and the coast islands of Holland a peculiar

isolation, which has favored the development and survival of the

peculiar Friesian dialect, that speech so nearly allied to Saxon

English, and has preserved here the purest type of the tall, blond

Teuton among the otherwise mixed stock of the Netherlands.[737]

[Sidenote: Swamps as places of refuge.]

Inaccessible to all except those familiar with their treacherous paths

and labyrinthine channels, swamps have always afforded a refuge for

individuals and peoples; and therefore as places of defense they have

played no inconspicuous part in history. What the Dismal Swamp of North

Carolina and the cypress swamps of Louisiana were to the run-away

slaves, that the Everglades of Florida have been to the defeated

Seminoles. In that half-solid, half-fluid area, penetrable only to the

native Indian who poles his canoe along its tortuous channels of liquid

mud, the Seminoles have set up their villages on the scattered hummocks

of solid land, and there maintained themselves, a tribe of 350 souls,

despite all efforts of the United States government to remove them to

the Indian Territory. The swamps of the Nile delta have been the asylum

of Egyptian independence from the time King Amysis took refuge there for

fifty years during an invasion of the Ethiopians,[738] to the retreat

thither of Amyrtaeus, a prince of Sais, after his unsuccessful revolt

against the Persian conqueror Artaxerxes I.[739] The Isle of Athelney

among the marshes of the Parret River afforded a refuge to Alfred the

Great and a band of his followers during the Danish invasion of Wessex

in 878,[740] while the Isle of Ely in the Fenland was another point of

sustained resistance to the invaders. It was the Fenland that two

hundred years later was the last stronghold of Saxon resistance to

William of Normandy. Here on the Isle of Ely the outlawed leader

Hereward maintained Saxon independence, till the Conqueror at last

constructed a long causeway across the marshes to the "Camp of

Refuge."[741]

[Sidenote: The spirit of the marshes.]

The spirit of the marshlands is the spirit of freedom. Therefore these

small and scarcely habitable portions of the land assume an historical

dignity and generate stirring historical events out of all proportion to

their size and population. Their content is ethical rather than

economic. They attract to their fastnesses the vigorous souls protesting

against conquest or oppression, and then by their natural protection

sustain and nourish the spirit of liberty. It was the water-soaked

lowlands of the Rhine that enabled the early Batavians,[742] Ditmarscher

and Frieslanders to assert and to maintain their independence, generated

the love of Independence among the Dutch and helped them defend their

liberty against the Spanish[743] and French. So the Fenland of England

was the center of resistance to the despotism of King John, who

therefore fixed his headquarters for the suppression of the revolt at

Lincoln and his military depôt at Lynn. Later in the conflict of the

barons with Henry III, Simon de Montfort and other disaffected nobles

entrenched themselves in the islands of Ely and Axholm, till the

Provisions of Oxford in 1267 secured them some degree of constitutional

rights.[744] Four centuries later the same spirit sent many Fenlanders

to the support of Cromwell.

[Sidenote: Economic and political importance of lakes.]

A river that spreads out into the indeterminate earthform of a marsh is

an effective barrier; but one that gathers waters into a natural basin

and forms a lake retains the uniting power of a navigable stream and

also, by the extension of its area and elimination of its current,

approaches the nature of an enclosed sea. Mountain rivers, characterized

by small volume and turbulent flow, first become navigable when they

check their impetuosity and gather their store of water in some lake

basin. The whole course of the upper Rhone, from its glacier source on

the slope of Mount Furca to its confluence with the Saône at Lyon, is

unfit for navigation, except where it lingers in Lake Geneva. The same

thing is true of the Reuss in Lake Lucerne, the upper Rhine in Lake

Constance, the Aare in Thun and Brienze, and the Linth in Lake Zurich.

Hence such torrent-fed lakes assume economic and political importance in

mountainous regions, owing to the paucity of navigable waterways. The

lakes of Alpine Switzerland and Italy and of Highland Scotland form so

many centers of intercourse and exchange. Even such small bodies of

water as the Alpine lakes have therefore become goals of expansion, so

that we find the shores of Geneva, Maggiore, Lugano, and Garda, each

shared by two countries. Switzerland, the Austrian Tyrol, and the three

German states of Baden, Wurtemberg and Bavaria, have all managed to

secure a frontage upon Lake Constance. Lake Titicaca, lying 12,661 feet

(3854 meters) above sea level but affording a navigable course 136 miles

(220 kilometers) long, is an important waterway for Peru and Bolivia. In

the central Sudan, where aridity reduces the volume of all streams, even

the variable and indeterminate Lake Chad has been an eagerly sought

objective for expanding boundaries. Twenty years ago it was divided

among the native states of Bornu, Bagirmi and Kanem; today it is shared

by British Nigeria, French Sudan, and German Kamerun. The erratic

northern extension of the German boundary betrays the effort to reach

this goal.

[Sidenote: Lakes as nuclei of states.]

The uniting power of lakes manifests itself in the tendency of such

basins to become the nuclei of states. Attractive to settlement in

primitive times, because of the protected frontier they afford--a motive

finding its most emphatic expression in the pile villages of the early

lake-dwellers--later because of the fertility of their bordering soil

and the opportunity for friendly intercourse, they gradually unite their

shores in a mesh of reciprocal relations, which finds its ultimate

expression in political union. It is a significant fact that the Swiss

Confederation originated in the four forest cantons of Lucerne, Schwyz,

Uri and Unterwalden, which are linked together by the jagged basin of

Lake Lucerne or the Lake of the Four Forest Cantons, as the Swiss

significantly call it, but are otherwise divided by mountain barriers.

So we find that Lake Titicaca was the cradle of the Inca Empire, just as

Lake Tezcoco was that of the Toltecs in Mexico and an island in Lake

Chalco later that of the Aztec domain.[745] The most stable of the

short-lived native states of Africa have apparently found an element of

strength and permanence in a protected lake frontier. Such are the petty

kingdoms of Bornu, Bagirmi and Kanem on Lake Chad, and Uganda on

Victoria Nyanza.

Large lakes, which include in their area islands, peninsulas, tides,

currents, fiords, inlets, deltas, and dunes, and present every

geographical feature of an enclosed sea, approach the latter too in

historical importance. Some of the largest, however, have long borne the

name of seas. The Caspian, which exceeds the Baltic in area, and the

Aral, which outranks Lake Michigan, show the closest physical

resemblance to thalassic basins, because of their size, salinity and

enclosed drainage systems; but their anthropo-geographical significance

is slight. The very salinity which groups them with the sea points to an

arid climate that forever deprives them of the densely populated coasts

characteristic of most enclosed seas, and hence reduces their historical

importance. Their tributary streams, robbed of their water by irrigation

canals, like "the shorn and parcelled Oxus", renounce their function of

highways into the interior. To this rule the Volga is a unique

exception. Finally, cut off from union with the ocean, these salt lakes

lose the supreme historical advantage which is maintained by freshwater

lakes, like Ladoga, Nyassa, Maracaibo and the Great Lakes of North

America, all lying near sea level.

[Sidenote: Lakes as fresh water seas.]

Lakes as part of a system of inland waterways may possess commercial

importance surpassing that of many seas. This depends upon the

productivity, accessibility and extent of their hinterland, and this in

turn depends upon the size and shape of the inland basin. The chain of

the five Great Lakes, which together present a coastline of four

thousand miles and a navigable course as long as the Baltic between the

Skager Rack and the head of the Gulf of Bothnia, constitutes a

freshwater Mediterranean. It has played the part of an enclosed sea in

American history and has enabled the Atlantic trade to penetrate 1400

miles inland to Chicago and Duluth. Its shores have therefore been a

coveted object of territorial expansion. The early Dutch trading posts

headed up the Hudson and Mohawk toward Lake Ontario, as did the English

settlements which succeeded them. The French, from their vantage point

at Montreal, threw out a frail casting-net of fur stations and missions,

which caught and held all the Lakes for a time. Later the American

shores were divided among eight of our states. The northern boundaries

of Indiana and Illinois were fixed by Congress for the express purpose

of giving these commonwealths access to Lake Michigan. Pennsylvania with

great difficulty succeeded in protruding her northwestern frontier to

cover a meager strip of Erie coast, while New York's frontage on the

same lake became during the period of canal and early railroad

construction, a great factor in her development.

In 1901, the tonnage of our merchant vessels on the Great Lakes was half

that of our Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf coasts combined,[746]

constituting a freshwater fleet greater than the merchant marine of

either France or sea-bred Norway. A remote but by no means faint echo of

this fact is found in the five hundred or more boats, equally available

for trade or war, which Henry M. Stanley saw the Uganda prince muster on

the shore of Victoria Nyanza Lake. Ocean, sea, bay, estuary, river,

swamp, lake: here is Nature's great circle returning upon itself, a

circle faintly notched into arcs, but one in itself and one in man's

uses.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XI

[630] Isabella B. Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. I, pp.

26-27. New York and London, 1900.

[631] Fiske, Discovery of America, Vol. I, p. 492. Boston, 1892.

[632] Capt. James Cook, Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, 1776-1780, Vol. II,

pp. 321-332. New York, 1796.

[633] John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, pp. 63-66,

84-86, 95, 96. London, 1904.

[634] E. Lavisse, _Histoire de France_, Vol. II, Part I, pp. 374-375,

378-379, 381-382, 385-386. Paris, 1903.

[635] Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 189-191, map. New York,

1902-1906.

[636] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 192-194.

[637] G.W. Kitchen, History of France, Vol. I, pp. 59-60. Oxford, 1892.

[638] Dietrich Schaeffer, _Die Hansestädte und König Waldemar von

Dänemark_, p. 36. Jena, 1879.

[639] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 311. London, 1904.

[640] Capt. A.T. Mahan, The Problem of Asia, pp. 41, 60, 120. New York,

1900.

[641] Isabella B. Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. I, pp.

97-98. New York and London, 1900.

[642] E.C. Semple, Development of the Hanse Towns in Relation to their

Geographic Environment, Bulletin Amer. Geog. Soc., Vol. 31. No. 3. 1899.

[643] Nordenskiold, Voyage of the Vega, pp. 519-530, 552. New York,

1882. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, Note pp.

278-281. New York, 1902.

[644] Agnes Laut, Voyagers of the Northern Ocean, _Harper's Magazine_,

January, 1906.

[645] Alexis Krausse, Russia in Asia, pp. 21-54. New York, 1899.

[646] Felix Dubois, Timbuctoo, pp. 198-190, 251-257. New York, 1896.

[647] _Ibid._, p. 38.

[648] D. Livingstone, Missionary Travels, pp. 71, 177. New York, 1858.

[649] W. Deecke, Italy, p. 87. London, 1904.

[650] G. Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, map facing

p. 167; also pp. 287, 327-328. New York, 1897.

[651] F.M. Stapff, _Karte des unteren Khiusebthal, Petermanns

Mitteilungen_, p. 202. July, 1885.

[652] Strabo, Book III, chap. II, 4.

[653] For full discussion, see Roscher, _National-Oekonomik des Handels

und Gewerbefleisses_. Stuttgart, 1889.

[654] Rambaud, History of Russia, Vol. I, pp. 24-28. Boston, 1886.

[655] A.B. Hulbert, Historic Highways of America, Vol. VII, Portage

Paths, pp. 182-183, 187-188. Cleveland, 1903.

[656] Herodotus, Book I, 194. A.H. Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains, Vol.

II, pp. 79-81. New York, 1849.

[657] Charles W. Hawes, The Uttermost East, p. 60. New York, 1904.

[658] Transportation by Water in 1906, Table 30, p. 181. Report of

Department of Commerce and Labor, Washington, 1908.

[659] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 277. London, 1904.

[660] E.A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, p. 466. London.

1882.

[661] J. Ellis Barker, Modern Germany, pp. 68-85. London, 1907.

[662] Heinrich von Treitschke, _Politik_, Vol. I, p. 218. Leipzig, 1897.

[663] E.A. Freeman, Historical Geography of Europe, p. 466. London,

1882.

[664] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 511. London, 1904.

[665] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 318. London, 1903.

[666] Ratzel, _Politische Geographie_, pp. 739-740. Munich, 1903.

[667] Annual Register for 1901, p. 358. New Series, London and New York,

1902.

[668] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 958. New York, 1902.

[669] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 473. London, 1896-1898.

[670] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 406. New York, 1902.

[671] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, map p. 312. London, 1904.

[672] Blanqui, History of Political Economy, pp. 273, 277, 296. New

York, 1880.

[673] Albert Gallatin, American State Papers, Misc. Doc., Vol. I, No.

250. Washington, 1834.

[674] Roscher, _National-Oekonomik des Handels und Gewerbefleisses_, pp.

449, 453-454. Stuttgart, 1889.

[675] H.R. Mill, International Geography, pp. 530-531. New York, 1902.

[676] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 310, 312. London, 1904.

[677] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 314. London, 1903.

[678] Statesman's Yearbook for 1907.

[679] Henry Norman, All the Russias, pp. 254-255, 285-292. New York,

1902.

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

251-255. Boston, 1903.

[681] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, p. 6. London, 1897.

[682] Strabo, Book IV, chap. VI, 7.

[683] Alexis Krausse, Russia in Asia, pp. 361-362. New York, 1899.

[684] Angus Hamilton, Afghanistan, pp. 137-141. New York and London,

1906. Henry Norman, All the Russias, pp. 276-277. New York, 1902.

[685] _Bella Gallico_, Book IV, chap. IV.

[686] _Ibid._, Book I, chap. XXXI; Book II, chap. III; Book IV, chap. I.

[687] Journals of Dr. Thomas Walker and Christopher Gist, p. 129. Filson

Club Publications, Louisville, 1898.

[688] H.R. Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes of the United States, Vol. III,

pp. 248-249. Philadelphia, 1853.

[689] Martha K. Genthe, The Valley Towns of Connecticut, Bull. of Amer.

Geog. Society, Vol. 39, pp. 1-7. New York, 1907.

[690] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 181-182, 192. London,

1898.

[691] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 495. New York, 1902.

[692] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 284-285. New York, 1899.

[693] _Ibid._, Maps pp. 222, 340, 350.

[694] _Ibid._, Maps pp. 402, 429.

[695] J. Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 43, 241. London, 1903.

[696] _Ibid._, p. 69. Sydow-Wagner, _Methodischer Schul-Atlas_, compare

maps No. 13 and No. 25.

[697] Elisée Reclus, Europe, Vol. IV, pp. 380, 389-390. New York, 1882.

[698] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, p. 318, map. New York, 1899.

[699] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 202-203. London,

1904.

[700] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. I, pp. 168, 169,

232, 306-307. London, 1907.

[701] Livingstone, Missionary Travels, pp. 102, 642. New York, 1858.

[702] See Century Atlas, maps of Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas for

boundary line of 1850.

[703] Sir Thomas Holdich, India, p. 57. London, 1905.

[704] Strabo, Book X, chap. II, 19.

[705] Henry M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, Vol. II, pp.

120-124, 155-158, 168, 169, 173, 176, 177, 182, 266-274, 327. New York,

1879.

[706] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. II, pp. 252,

269-270. London, 1907.

[707] Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 189, 192-194. New York,

1902-1906.

[708] Cyrus Thomas, Mound Explorations, pp. 526-527, 531, 551. Twelfth

Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, 1894.

[709] Parkman, The Old Regime in Canada, pp. 292-303. Boston, 1904. E.C.

Semple, The Influences of Geographic Environment on the Lower St.

Lawrence, Bull. of Amer. Geog. Society, Vol. 36, pp. 449-466. 1904.

[710] Martha Krug Genthe, Valley Towns of Connecticut, pp. 10-12,

figures V. and VI, Bull. of Amer. Geog. Society, Vol. 39, 1907.

[711] J. Nacken, _Die Provinz Kwantung und ihre Bevölkerung, Petermanns

Mitteilungen_, Vol. 24, p. 421, 1878. W.M. Wood, Fankwei, pp. 276-277.

New York, 1859.

[712] Felix Dubois, Timbuctoo, pp. 19-22, 38. New York, 1896.

[713] Isabella B. Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. I, pp.

164, 174-175, 179, 182, 189, 215. London and New York, 1900.

[714] William Walton, Paris, Vol. I, pp. 31-32, 35. Philadelphia, 1899.

[715] Cæsar, _Bella Gallico_, Book VIII, chaps, 57, 58.

[716] Henry M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, Vol. II, pp.

227-228. New York, 1879.

[717] Article, Cossack, Encyclopedia Britannica.

[718] Parkman, The Jesuits in North. America, pp. 292-303, 498-505, 534,

535. Boston, 1904.

[719] Livingstone, Missionary Travels, pp. 100, 102. New York, 1858.

[720] Livingstone, Last Journals, Vol. I, p. 359. London, 1874.

[721] Heinrich Barth, Travels in North and Central Africa, Vol. II, pp.

64, 66, 233. New York, 1857. Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile,

Vol. I, pp. 237, 303-304, 320, 331-336; Vol. II, pp. 54, 56-58, 67-68,

96-99, 104-105. London, 1907.

[722] J.P. McLean, The Mound Builders, p. 20. Cincinnati, 1904. Squier

and Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, pp. 6, 9, 10.

New York, 1848.

[723] Cæsar, _Bello Gallico_, Book I, chaps. 38, 39.

[724] Elisée Reclus, Europe, Vol. IV, pp. 101-102. New York, 1882.

[725] John Fiske, Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America, Vol. I, p. 241.

Boston.

[726] H.E. Mill, International Geography, p. 956. New York, 1902.

[727] H.B. George, Historical Geography of the British Empire, pp.

259-260. London, 1904.

[728] Alexis Krausse, Russia in Asia, pp. 30-33, 50. New York, 1899.

[729] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 198-199. London,

1904.

[730] John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, pp. 63, 66.

London, 1904.

[731] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 102. London, 1903.

[732] Miller and Skertchley, The Fenland Past and Present, pp. 10, 11,

27-30. London, 1878.

[733] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 322-323. Map p. 327. New York,

1899.

[734] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, p. 108.

New York, 1893.

[735] _Ibid._, pp. 104-106. W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 340-342,

352, 365. New York, 1899.

[736] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 135. London, 1903.

[737] _Ibid._, p. 133. W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 294-295. New

York, 1899.

[738] Herodotus, II, 137, 140.

[739] Thucydides, I, 110. Brugsch-Bey, History of Egypt, Vol. II, p.

333. London, 1881.

[740] John Richard Green, History of the English People, Vol. I, chap.

III, p. 71.

[741] Miller and Skertchley, The Fenland Past and Present, pp. 83, 101,

104, 107, 108. London, 1878.

[742] Tacitus, History of the Germans, Book VI, chap. VI. Motley, Rise

of the Dutch Republic, Vol. I, pp. 2-5, 13. New York, 1885.

[743] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 299. London, 1903.

[744] Miller and Skertchley, The Fenland Past and Present, pp. 113-114.

London, 1878.

[745] Edward John Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol.

I, pp. 327-328, 502-503. Oxford, 1892. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol.

II, p. 163. London, 1896-1898.

[746] U.S. Report of Commission of Navigation, p. 10. Washington, 1901.

CHAPTER XII

CONTINENTS AND THEIR PENINSULAS

[Sidenote: Insularity of the land-masses.]

The division of the earth's surface into 28 per cent. land and 72 per

cent. water is an all important fact of physical geography and

anthropo-geography. Owing to this proportion, the land-masses, which

alone provide habitats for man, rise as islands out of the three-fold

larger surface of the uninhabitable ocean. Consequently, the human

species, like the other forms of terrestrial life, bears a deeply

ingrained insular character. Moreover, the water causes different

degrees of separation between the land-masses, according as it appears

as inlet, strait, sea, an island-strewn or islandless ocean; it

determines the grouping of the habitable areas and consequently the

geographic basis of the various degrees of ethnic and cultural kinship

between the divisions of land. Finally, since the sea is for man only a

highway to some ulterior shore, this geography of the land-masses in

relation to the encompassing waters points the routes and goals of human

wanderings.

Each fragment of habitable land, large or small, continent or islet,

means a corresponding group or detachment of the vast human family. Its

size fixes the area at the service of the group which occupies it. Its

location, however, may either endow it with a neighborliness like that

subsisting between Africa and Europe and involving an interwoven

history; or remoteness like that of South America from Australia, so

complete that even the close net of intercourse thrown by modern

commerce over the whole world has scarcely sufficed to bring them into

touch. Therefore the highly irregular distribution of the land areas,

here compactly grouped, there remote, deserves especial attention, since

it produces far-reaching results. Finally, continents and islands, by

their zonal situation, their land forms, rainfall, river systems, flora

and fauna, produce for man varied life conditions, which in their turn

are partially dependent upon the size and grouping of the land-masses.

[Sidenote: Classification of land-masses according to size and

location.]

A comparison of the large and small land-masses of the from the

standpoint of both physical and anthropological geography yields a

classification based upon size and location on the one hand, and

historical influences on the other. The following table indicates the

relation between the two.

I. Independent Land-masses.

A. _Continents_. Independent by reason of size, which enables them

to support a large number of people and afford the conditions for

civilization.

(a) Insular continents, whose primitive and modern development are

marked by remoteness. Australia.

(b) Neighboring continents, separated by narrow seas and showing

community of historical events. Europe and Africa. Asia and North

America around Bering Sea.

B. _Islands_. Independent by reason of location.

(a) Oceanic islands, characterized by greatest remoteness from

continents and other islands, and also by independent or detached

history. St. Helena and Iceland.

(b) Member of a group of oceanic islands, therefore less

independent. Hawaii, Fayal in the Azores, Tongatabu.

(c) Large islands, approaching by reason of size the independence

of continents and thereby finding compensation for a less

independent location. New Guinea, Borneo, Madagascar; in a cultural

sense, Great Britain and Japan.

II. Dependent Land-masses.

(a) Inshore or coast islands, whose history is intimately connected

with that of the nearby mainland. Euboea, Long Island, Vancouver,

Sakhalin, Ceylon.

(b) Neighboring islands, showing less intimate historical

relations. Formosa, the Canaries, Ireland in contrast to Great

Britain.

(c) Islands of enclosed or marginal seas, contained in a circle of

lands and exposed to constant intercourse from all sides. Jamaica,

Java, Crete, Sicily, Zealand, Gotland, St. Lawrence in Bering Sea.

(d) Island groups not to be considered apart from other groups.

Samoa, Fiji and Friendly Isles; Philippine, Sulu and Sunda Islands;

Greater and Lesser Antilles.

[Sidenote: Effect of size of land-masses.]

As the homes of man, these land-masses vary greatly owing to difference

of size. Only the six continents have been large enough to generate

great bodies of people, to produce differentiated branches of the human

family, and to maintain them in such numerical force that alien

intermixtures were powerless essentially to modify the gradually

developing ethnic type. The larger continents are marked by such

diversity of climate, relief and contour, that they have afforded the

varied environments and the area for the development of several great

types or sub-types of mankind. Australia has been just large enough to

produce one distinct native race, the result of a very ancient blend of

Papuan and Malayan stocks. But prevailing aridity has cast a mantle of

monotony over most of the continent, nullifying many local geographic

differences in highland and lowland, curtailing the available area of

its already restricted surface, and hence checking the differentiation

that results either from the competition of large numbers or from a

varied environment. We find Australia characterized above all other

continents by monotony of culture, mode of life, customs, languages, and

a uniform race type from the Murray River to York peninsula.[747] The twin

continents of the Americas developed a race singularly uniform in its

physical traits,[748] if we leave out of account the markedly divergent

Eskimos, but displaying a wide range of political, social and economic

developments, from the small, unorganized groups of wandering savages,

like the desert Shoshones and coast Fuegians, to the large, stable

empire of the Incas, with intensive agriculture, public works, a state

religion and an enlightened government.

Even the largest islands of the world, such as Borneo, New Guinea and

Madagascar, show no such independent ethnic development. This is the

distinguishing characteristic of the largest land-masses. Europe, except

on the basis of its size and peninsula form, has no title to the name of

continent; certainly not on anthropo-geographical grounds. Its

classification as a continent arose in the Mediterranean among the

Greeks, as a geographical expression of the antagonism between

themselves and their Carian, Phoenician and Persian enemies across the

Aegean; the idea had therefore a political origin, and was formed

without knowledge of that vast stretch of plains between the Black Sea

and the Arctic Ocean, where Asia's climate and races lap over into

Europe, and where to-day we find the Muscovite Empire, in point of

geographic conditions, its underlying ethnic stock and form of

government, as much Asiatic as European. The real or western Europe,

which the Roman Empire gradually added to the narrow Europe of the

Greeks, and which is strikingly contrasted to Asia in point of size,

relief, contour, climate and races, only served to maintain the

distinction between the two continents in men's minds. But from a

geographical standpoint the distinction is an error. It has confused the

interpretation of the history of the Greeks and the development of the

Russians. It has brought disorder into the question of the European or

Asiatic origin of the Aryan linguistic family, which the

anthropo-geographer would assign to the single continent of Eurasia. The

independent development that falls to the lot of great world islands

like the Americas and Australia is impossible in a peninsular continent

like Europe, large as it is.

[Sidenote: Independence of location versus independence of size.]

The independence of a land-mass is based not alone on size: there is

also an independence of location. This, owing to the spherical form of

the earth, tends to be neutralized by the independence based upon large

area. The larger a land-mass is, the nearer it approaches to others.

Eurasia, the largest of all the continents, comes into close proximity

and therefore close relations with Africa, North America, and even

Australia; whereas Australia is at once the smallest and the most

isolated of the continents. The remote oceanic islands of the Atlantic

Ocean, measuring only a few square miles in area, have a location so

independent of other inhabited lands, that before the period of the

great discoveries they had never appeared on the horizon of man.

[Sidenote: The case of Asia.]

Asia's size and central location to the other continents were formerly

taken as an argument for its correspondingly significant position in the

creation and history of man. Its central location is reflected in the

hypothesis of the Asiatic origin of the Indo-European linguistic group

of peoples; and though the theory has been justly called into question,

these peoples have undoubtedly been subjected to Asiatic influences.

The same thing is true of the native American race, both as to Asiatic

origin and influences; because the approximation of Siberia to Alaska is

too close to exclude human relations between the two continents. The

Malays, too, were probably sprung from the soil of southeastern Asia and

spread thence over their close-packed Archipelago. Even the native

Australians betray a Malayan and therefore Asiatic element in their

composition,[749] while the same element can be traced yet more distinctly

in the widely scattered Polynesians and the Hovas of Madagascar. This

radiation of races seems to reflect Asia's location at the core of the

land-masses. Yet the capacity to form such centers of ethnic

distribution is not necessarily limited to the largest continents;

history teaches us that small areas which have early achieved a

relatively dense population are prone to scatter far their seeds of

nations.

[Sidenote: Location of hemispheres and ethnic kinship.]

The continents harbor the most widely different races where they are

farthest apart; where they converge most nearly, they show the closest

ethnic kinships. The same principle becomes apparent in their plants and

animals. The distribution of the land-masses over the earth is

conspicuous for their convergence in the north and divergence in long

peninsular forms toward the south. The contrasted grouping is reflected

in both, the lower animals and the peoples inhabiting these respectively

vicinal and remote lands. Only where North America and Eurasia stretch

out arms to one another around the polar sea do Eastern and Western

Hemisphere show a community of mammalian forms. These are all strictly

Arctic animals, such as the reindeer, elk, Arctic fox, glutton and

ermine.[750] This is the Boreal sub-region of the Holoarctic zoological

realm, characterized by a very homogeneous and very limited fauna.[751] In

contrast, the portion of the hemispheres lying south of the Tropic of

Cancer is divided into four distinct zoological realms, corresponding to

Central and South America, Africa south of Sahara, the two Indian

peninsulas with the adjacent islands, and Australia.[752] But when we

consider the continental extremities projecting beyond the Tropic of

Capricorn, where geographic divergence reaches a climax, we find their

faunas and floras utterly dissimilar, despite the fact that climate and

physical conditions are very similar.[753] We find also widely divergent

races in the southern sections of Africa, Australia or Tasmania and

South America, while Arctic Eurasia and America come as near meeting

ethnically as they do geographically. Here and here only both Eastern

and Western Hemisphere show a strong affinity of race. The Eskimo, long

classed as Mongoloid, are now regarded as an aberrant variety of the

American race, owing to their narrow headform and linguistic affinity;

though in Alaska even their headform closely approximates the Mongoloid

Siberian type.[754] But in stature, color, oblique eyes, broad flat face,

and high cheek bones, in his temperament and character, artistic

productions and some aspects of his culture, he groups with the Asiatic

Hyperboreans across the narrow sixty miles of water forming Bering

Strait.[755] In the northern part of the earth's land area, the

distribution of floras, faunas, and races shows interdependence,

intercourse; in the southern, separation, isolation.

[Sidenote: Continental convergence and ethnic kinship.]

What is true where the hemispheres come together is true also where

continents converge. The core of the Old World is found in the

Mediterranean basin where Europe, Asia and Africa form a close circle of

lands and where they are inhabited by the one white Mediterranean race.

Contrast their racial unity about this common center with the extremes

of ethnic divergence in their remote peripheries, where Teutons,

Mongols, Malays and Negroes differ widely from the Mediterranean stock

and from each other. Eastern Australia represents the ethnic antipodes

of western Asia, in harmony with the great dividing distance between

them, but the sides of these continents facing each other across the

bridge of the Sunda Islands are sparsely strewn with a common Malay

element.

[Sidenote: Africa's location.]

Africa's early development was never helped by the fact that the

continent lay between Asia and South America. It was subjected to strong

and persistent Asiatic Influences, but apparently to no native American

ones. From that far-off trans-Atlantic shore came no signs of life.

Africa appears in history as an appendage of Asia, a cultural peninsula

of the larger continent. This was due not only to the Suez Isthmus and

the narrowness of the Red Sea rift, but to its one-sided invasion by

Asiatic races and trade from the east, while the western side of the

continent lay buried in sleep, unstirred by any voice from the silent

shores of America. Semitic influences, in successive waves, spread over

the Dark Continent as far as Morocco, the Senegal, Niger, Lake Chad,

Nyanza, Tanganyika and Nyassa, and gave it such light as it had before

the 16th century. Only after the Atlantic gulf was finally crossed did

influences from the American side of the ocean begin to impinge upon the

West African coast, first in the form of the slave and rum trade, then

in the more humane aspect of the Liberian colony. But with the full

development of the Atlantic period in history, we see all kinds of

Atlantic influences, though chiefly from the Atlantic states of Europe,

penetrating eastward into the heart of Africa, and there meeting other

commercial and political activities pressing inland from the Indian

Ocean.

[Sidenote: The Atlantic abyss.]

The long Atlantic rift between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres,

which was such a potent factor in the primitive retardation of Africa

is, from the standpoint of anthropo-geography, the most important

feature in the distribution of the land-masses over the globe. Not till

the discovery of America bridged this abyss did the known world become a

girdle round the earth. Except the Norse ventures to the American

continent by way of Iceland and Greenland between 1000 and 1347, no

account of pre-Columbian intercourse between the two shores of the

Atlantic has ever been substantiated. Columbus found the opposite land

unfamiliar in race as in culture. He described the people as neither

whites nor blacks, the two ethnic types which he knew on the eastern

side of the Atlantic abyss. He and his successors found in the Americas

only a Stone Age culture, a stage already outgrown by Europe and Africa.

These continents from Lapland to the Hottentot country were using iron.

Prior to the voyage of the great Genoese, Europe gave nothing to America

and received nothing from it, except the Gulf Stream's scanty cargo of

driftwood stranded on bleak Icelandic shores. The Tertiary land-bridge

across the North Atlantic between Norway and Greenland may possibly have

guided a pre-Caucasic migration to America and given that continent part

of its aboriginal population.[756] However, no trace of any European

stock remains.

[Sidenote: Atlantic islands uninhabited.]

The collapse of the bridge at the close of the Glacial Epoch left the

Atlantic abyss effectually dividing the two hemispheres. Its islands,

few and far between, were helpless to maintain intercourse between the

opposite shores; this is proven by the fact that all of them from

Greenland to Tristan da Cunha, excepting only the Canaries, were

uninhabited at the time of their discovery. History records when the

first bold voyagers came upon them in that unmarked waste of waters, and

gave them their first occupants. The political upheavals of Norway in

King Harfagr's time (872) sent to the Faroes and Iceland their first

settlers, though these islands were previously known to the Celts of

Ireland. The Norse colonists who went to Greenland in the year 1000 seem

to have been the first regular settlers on those inhospitable coasts.

They found no native inhabitants, but numerous abandoned dwellings,

fragments of boats and stone implements,[757] which doubtless recorded

the intermittent voyages thither of the Eskimo, preliminary to permanent

occupation. The Scandinavians did not encounter natives on the island

till the 12th century, when Greenland probably received its first Eskimo

immigration.[758]

[Sidenote: Geographical character of the Pacific.]

While the Atlantic thus formed a long north-and-south rift across the

inhabited world at the period of the great discoveries, the Pacific,

strewn with islands and land-rimmed at its northern extremity by the

peninsulas of Alaska and eastern Siberia, spread a nebula of population

from the dense centers of Asia across to the outskirts of America. The

general Mongoloid character of the American Indians as a race, the

stronger Asiatic stamp of the Western Eskimo, the unmistakeable ethnic

and cultural affinities of the Northwest Coast tribes both with southern

Polynesians and Asiatics,[759] all point to America as the great eastern

wing of the Mongoloid or Asiatic area, and therefore as the true Orient

of the world.

Geographic conditions have made this possible or even probable. The

winds and currents of the North Pacific set from Japan straight toward

the American coast. Junks blown out to sea from China or Japan have been

carried by the Kuro Siwo and the prevailing westerlies across the

Pacific to our continent. There is record of a hundred instances of this

occurrence.[760]

[Sidenote: Pacific affinities of North American Indians.]

The broken bridge across Bering Strait formed by East Cape, Cape Prince

of Wales and the Diomede Islands between, and further south the natural

causeway of the Commander and Aleutian Islands leading from the

peninsula of Kamchatka to that of Unalaska, have facilitated intercourse

between Asia and America.[761] Justin Winsor says, "There is hardly a

stronger demonstration of such connection between the two continents

than the physical resemblances of the peoples now living on opposite

sides of the Pacific Ocean in these upper latitudes."[762] This

resemblance is by no means confined to the Eskimo and Chukches, who have

exchanged colonists across Bering Sea. Recent investigations have

revealed a wider kinship. The population of northern Siberia speaks in

general Ural-Altaic languages, but it includes a few scattered tribes

whose singular speech excludes them from this linguistic group, and who

have therefore been placed by ethnologists in a distinct class called

"paleasiatics" or "hyperboreans." This class is composed of the Ostyak

and Kot on the Yenisei River, the Gilyak and Ainos at the mouth of the

Amur and on the Kurile, Sakhalin and Yezo islands, the Kamchadal and

Koryak of Kamchatka, and the Chukches and Yukaghir of extreme

northeastern Siberia. As far back as 1850, the eminent philologist

Robert Latham noted a marked linguistic agreement, both in structure and

verbal affinity, between our Northwest Coast tribes and the peoples of

the islands and peninsulas fringing northeastern Asia. "Koriak is

notably American," he said.[763] The recent Jesup Expedition to the

Northwest Coast of America and the nearby coast of Asia investigated the

Koryak, to determine whether in the past there had been any connection

between the cultures and ethnic types of the Old and New World. These

investigations have proved beyond doubt a kinship of culture,

attributable either to a remote common origin or to former contact, long

and close, between these isolated Siberian tribes and the American

aborigines. They show that the Koryak are one of the Asiatic tribes

standing nearest to the northwestern American Indian.[764] [See map page

103.]

[Sidenote: Polynesian affinities.]

W.H. Dall finds the inhabitants of the Pacific slope of North America

conspicuously allied with Oceanica in cultural achievements, whose

origin he therefore assigns to that vast congeries of islands stretching

from Asia toward South America in latitude 25° south. These islands,

closely clustered as far as the Paumota group, straggle along with

widening spaces between, through Easter Isle, which carries the

indestructible memorials of a strange civilization, through

Sala-y-Gomez, San Felix, and St. Ambrose almost to the threshold of the

Peruvian coast. It is to be noted that these islands lie just outside

the westward-bearing Equatorial Current and trade-winds, on the margin

of the South Pacific anti-cyclonic winds and a southern current which

sets towards the Peruvian coast.[765] A more probable avenue for the

introduction of these Polynesian or Malayan elements of culture is found

in O.T. Mason's theory, that primitive mariners of the southwestern

Pacific, led into migration by the eternal food quest, may have skirted

the seaboard of East Asia and Northwest America, passing along a

great-circle route through the succession of marginal seas and

archipelagoes to various ports of entry on the Pacific front of America.

Such a route, favored by the prevailing marine currents and winds from

the southwest, and used repeatedly during long periods of time, might

have introduced trans-Pacific elements of race and culture into the

western side of America.[766]

[Sidenote: The real Orient of the World.]

Moreover, primitive America resembled Oceanica and northern Asia in its

ignorance of iron, in its Stone Age civilization, and its retarded

social and political development. Such affinities as it shows were

predominantly Pacific or trans-Pacific.[767] On its Atlantic side, it

stood out in striking contrast to the contemporaneous civilizations and

races in Europe and Africa; this was its unneighbored shore, lying on

the eastern margin of that broad zone of habitation which stretched

hence westward on and on around the world, to the outermost capes of

Europe and Africa. The Atlantic abyss formed the single gap in this

encircling belt of population, to which Columbus at last affixed the

clasp. The Atlantic face of the Americas formed therefore the drowsy

unstirred Orient of the inhabited world, which westward developed

growing activity--dreaming a civilization in Mexico and Peru, roused to

artistic and maritime achievement in Oceanica and the Malay Archipelago,

to permanent state-making and real cultural development in Asia, and

attaining the highest civilization at last in western Europe. There was

the sunset margin of the inhabited world, the area of achievement, the

adult Occident, facing across the dividing ocean that infant Orient

beyond. Here the Old World, the full-grown world, had accumulated in

Columbus' time the matured forces of a hemisphere; it was searching for

some outlet across the shoreless distances of the Atlantic, waiting for

some call from its voiceless beyond.

[Sidenote: The Atlantic abyss in historic movements of peoples.]

This deep, unbridged chasm of the Atlantic, closed only four hundred

years ago, must be taken into account in all investigations of the

geographical distribution of races, whether in prehistoric or historic

times. The influences of those ages when it formed an impassable gulf

are still operative in directing the movements of the peoples to-day

inhabiting its shores, because that barrier maintained the continents of

America as a vast territorial reserve, sparsely inhabited by a Stone Age

people, and affording a fresh field for the superior, accumulated

energies of Europe.

[Sidenote: Races and continents.]

Australia and the double continent of America show each the coincidence

of an ethnic realm with an isolated continent. In contrast, when we come

to the Old World triad of Europe, Asia and Africa, we find three races,

to be sure, but races whose geographical distribution ignores the

boundaries of the continents. The White race belongs to all three, and

from time immemorial has made the central basin of the Mediterranean the

white man's sea. The Mongolian, though primarily at home in Asia,

stretches along the coast of the Arctic Ocean to the Atlantic shores of

Norway, and in historical times has penetrated up the Danube to the foot

of the Alps. Nor was the Negroid stock confined to Africa, though Africa

has always been its geographical core. The Indian Peninsula and Malay

Archipelago, once peopled by a primitive Negroid race, but now harboring

only remnants of them in the Deccan, Malacca, the Philippines and

elsewhere, bridge the distance to the other great Negroid center in

Melanesia and the derivative or secondary Negroid area of

Australia.[768] The Negroid race belongs essentially to the long southern

land pendants of the Eastern Hemisphere; and wherever it has bordered on

the lighter northern stocks, it has drawn a typical boundary zone of

mingled tints which never diverges far from the Equator, from the

Atlantic shores of the Sudan to Pacific Fiji.[769] [See map page 105.]

The effort of the old ethnology, as represented by Blumenbach, to make a

five-fold division of the races in agreement with the five continents

was a mistake. To distinguish between the continents is one thing and to

distinguish between the races is another. Neither bio-geography nor

anthropo-geography can adopt the continents as geographical provinces,

although floras, faunas and races the world over give evidence of

partial or temporary restriction to a certain continent, whence they

have overflowed to other lands. A ground-plan for the geographical

classification of races is to be found, as Tylor says, in the fact that

they are not found scattered indiscriminately over the earth's surface,

but that certain races belong to certain regions, in whose peculiar

environment they have developed their type, and whence they have spread

to other lands, undergoing modifications from race intermixture and

successive changes of environment on the way.[770]

[Sidenote: Contrast of the northern and southern continents.]

From this general law of race movements it follows that certain groups

of land-masses, favored by location and large area, play a great

imperial rôle, holding other lands as appanages. The Eastern Hemisphere,

as we have seen, enjoys this advantage over the Western. Still more the

Northern Hemisphere, blessed with an abundance of land and a predominant

Temperate Zone location, is able to lord it over the Southern, so

insular in its poverty of land. The history of the Northern Hemisphere

is marked by far-reaching historical influences and wide control; that

of the Southern, by detachment, aloofness and impotence, due to the

small area and isolation of its land-masses. A subordinate rôle is its

fate. Australia will always follow in the train of Eurasia, whence alone

it has derived its incentives and means of progress. Neither the

southern half of Africa nor South America has ever in historical times

struck out a road to advancement unaided by its northern neighbors.

Primitive South America developed the only independent civilization that

ever blossomed in the Southern Hemisphere, but the Peruvian achievements

in progress were inferior to those of Mexico and Central America.[771]

[Sidenote: Isolation of the southern continents.]

This subordination of the southern continents is partly due to the fact

that they have only one side of contact or neighborhood with any other

land, that is, on the north; yet even here the contact is not close. In

Australia the medium of communication is a long bridge of islands; in

America, a winding island chain and a mountainous isthmus; in Africa, a

broad zone of desert dividing the Mediterranean or Eurasian from the

tropical and Negroid part of the continent. Intercourse was not easy,

and produced clear effects only in the case of Africa. Enlightenment

filtering in here was sadly dimmed as it spread. Moreover it was delayed

till the introduction from Asia of the horse and camel, which were not

native to Africa, and which, as Ratzel points out, alone made possible

the long journey across the Sahara. The opposite or peninsular sides,

running out as great spurs from the compacter land-masses of the north,

look southward into vacant wastes of water, find no neighbors in those

Antarctic seas. Owing to this unfavorable location on the edge of

things, they were historically dead until four centuries ago, when

oceanic navigation opened up the great sea route of the Southern

Hemisphere, and for the first time included them in the world's circle

of communication. But even when lifted by the ensuing Europeanizing

process, they only emphasize the fundamental dependence of the Southern

Hemisphere upon the superior geographical endowments of the Northern.

[Sidenote: Effect of continental structure upon historical development.]

The build of the land-masses influences fundamentally the movements and

hence the development of the races who inhabit them. A simple

continental structure gives to those movements a few simple features and

a wide monotonous distribution which checks differentiation. A manifold,

complex build, varied in relief and ragged in contour, breaks up the

moving streams of peoples, turns each branch into a different channel,

lends it a distinctive character through isolation, finally brings it up

in a _cul de sac_ formed by a peninsula or mountain-rimmed basin, where

further movement is checked and the process of local individualization

begins. Therefore great simplicity of continental build may result in

historical poverty, as in the flat quadrangle of European Russia, the

level plateau of Africa, and the smooth Atlantic slope of North America,

with its neatly trimmed outline. Complexity, abounding in contrasted

environments, tends to produce a varied wealth of historical

development. Africa lies on the surface of the ocean, a huge torso of a

continent, headless, memberless, inert. Here is no diversity of outward

form, no contrast of zonal location, no fructifying variety of

geographic conditions. Humanity has forgotten to grow in its stationary

soil. Only where the Suez Isthmus formed an umbilical cord uniting

ancient Egypt to the mother continent of Asia was Africa vitalized by

the pulse of another life. European influences penetrated little beyond

the northern coast.

Asia, on the other hand, radiating great peninsulas, festooned with

islands, supporting the vast corrugations of its highlands and lowlands,

its snow-capped mountains and steaming valleys, stretching from the

Equator through all the zones to the ice-blocked shores of the Arctic,

knowing drought and deluge, tundra waste and teeming jungle, has offered

the manifold environment and segregated areas for individualized

civilizations, which have produced such far-reaching historical results.

The same fact is true of Europe, and that in an intensified degree. Here

a complex development of mountains and highlands built on diverse axes,

peninsulas which comprise 27 per cent. and Islands which comprise nearly

8 per cent. of the total area,[772] vast thalassic inlets cleaving the

continent to the core, have provided an abundance of those naturally

defined regions which serve as cradles of civilization and, reacting

upon the continent as a whole, endow it with lasting historical

significance.[773] Even Strabo saw this. He begins his description of the

inhabited world with Europe, because, as he says, it has such a

"polymorphous formation" and is the region most favorable to the mental

and social ennoblement of man.[774]

[Sidenote: Structure of North and South America.]

In North and South America, great simplicity of continental build gave

rise to a corresponding simplicity of native ethnic and cultural

condition. There is only one marked contrast throughout the length of

this double continent, that between its Atlantic and Pacific slopes. On

the Atlantic side of the Cordilleras, a vast trough extends through both

land-masses from the Arctic Ocean to Patagonia; this has given to

migration in each a longitudinal direction and therefore constantly

tended to nullify the diversities arising from contrasted zonal

conditions. On the Pacific side of North America, there has been an

unmistakeable migration southward along the accessible coast from Alaska

to the Columbia River, and down the great intermontane valleys of the

western highlands from, the Great Basin to Honduras;[775] while South

America shows the same meridional movement for 2,000 miles along the

Pacific coast and longitudinal valleys of the Andes system. There was

little encouragement to cut across the grain of the continents. The

eastern range of the Cordilleras drew in general a dividing line between

the eastern and western tribes.[776] Though Athapascans from the east

overstepped it at a few points in North America, the Great Divide has

served effectually to isolate the two groups from one another and to

draw that line of linguistic cleavage which Major Powell has set down in

Ms map of Indian linguistic stocks. Consequently, Americanists recognize

a distinct resemblance among the members of the North Atlantic group of

Indians, as among those of the South Atlantic group; but they note an

equally distinct contrast between each of them and its corresponding

Pacific group. Nor is this contrast superficial; it extends to physical

traits, temperament and culture,[777] and appears in the use of the

vigesimal system of enumeration in primitive Mexico, Central America,

among the Tlingits of the Northwest coast and the Eskimo as also among

the Chukches and Ainus of Asia, while in the Atlantic section of North

America the decimal system, with one doubtful exception, was alone in

use.[778]

[Sidenote: Cultural superiority of the Pacific slope Indians.]

To the anthropo-geographer, the significant fact is that all the higher

phases of native civilization are confined to the Pacific slope group of

Indians, which includes the Mexican and Isthmian tribes. From the

elongated center of advanced culture stretching from the Bolivian

highlands northward to the Anahuac Plateau, the same type shades off by

easy transitions through northern Mexico and the Pueblo country,

vanishes among the lower intrusive stocks of Oregon and California, only

to reappear among the Haidas and Tlingits of British Columbia and

Alaska, whose cultural achievements show affinity to those of the Mayas

in Yucatan.[779] Dall found certain distinguishing customs or

characteristics spread north and south along the western slope of the

continent in a natural geographical line of migration. They included

labretifery, tattooing the chin of adult women, certain uses of masks, a

certain style of conventionalizing natural objects, the use of

conventional signs as hieroglyphics, a peculiar facility in carving wood

and stone, a similarity of angular designs on their pottery and

basketry, and of artistic representations connected with their common

religious or mythological ideas. Many singular forms of carvings and the

method of superimposing figures of animals one upon another in their

totem poles are found from Alaska to Panama, except in California. These

distinguishing features of an incipient culture are found nowhere else

in North America, even sporadically. Dall therefore concludes that "they

have been impressed upon the American aboriginal world from without,"

and on the ground of affinities, attributes their origin to

Oceanica.[780]

Cyrus Thomas, on the basis of the character and distribution of the

archeological remains in North America, concurs in this opinion. He

finds that these remains fall into two classes, one east of the Rocky

Mountain watershed and the other west. "When those of the Pacific slope

as a whole are compared with those of the Atlantic slope, there is a

dissimilarity which marks them as the products of different races or as

the result of different race influences." He emphasizes the resemblance

of the customs, arts and archeological remains of the west coast to

those of the opposite shores and islands of the Pacific, and notes the

lack of any resemblance to those of the Atlantic; and finally leans to

the conclusion that the continent was peopled from two sources, one

incoming stream distributing itself over the Atlantic slope, and the

other over the Pacific, the two becoming gradually fused into a

comparatively homogeneous race by long continental isolation. Yet these

two sources may not necessarily include a trans-Atlantic origin for one

of the contributing streams; ethnic evidence is against such a

supposition, because the characteristics of the American race and of the

archeological remains point exclusively to affinity with the people of

the Pacific.[781] John Edward Payne also reaches the same conclusion,

though on other grounds.[782]

[Sidenote: Lack of segregated districts.]

The one strong segregating feature in primitive America was the

Cordilleras, which held east and west apart. In the natural pockets

formed by the high intermontane valleys of the Andes and the Anahuac

Plateau, and in the constricted isthmian region, the continent afforded

a few secluded localities where civilization found favorable conditions

of development. But in general, the paucity of large coast

articulations, and the adverse polar or subpolar location of most of

these, the situation of the large tropical islands along that barren

Atlantic abyss, and the lack of a broken or varied relief, have

prevented the Americas from developing numerous local centers of

civilization, which might eventually have lifted the cultural status of

the continents.[783]

[Sidenote: Coast articulations of continents.]

It is necessary to distinguish two general classes of continental

articulations; first, marginal dependences, like the fringe of European

peninsulas and islands, resulting from a deeply serrated contour; and

second, surface subdivisions of the interior, resulting from differences

of relief or defined often by enclosing mountains or deserts, like the

Tibetan Plateau, the Basin of Bohemia, the Po River trough, or the

sand-rimmed valley of the Nile. The first class is by far the more

important, because of the intense historical activity which results from

the vitalizing contact with the sea. But in considering coast

articulations, anthropo-geography is led astray unless it discriminates

between these on the basis of size and location. Without stopping to

discuss the obvious results of a contrasted zonal location, such as that

between Labrador and Yucatan, the Kola Peninsula and Spain, it is

necessary to keep in mind always the effect of vicinal location. An

outlying coastal dependency like Ireland has had its history

impoverished by excessive isolation, in contrast to the richer

development of England, Jutland, and Zealand in the same latitude,

because these have profited from the closer neighborhood of other

peripheral regions. So from ancient times, Greece has had a similar

advantage over the Crimea, the Tunisian Peninsula of North Africa over

Spain, the Cotentin Peninsula of France over Brittany, and Kent over

Cornwall or Caithness in Great Britain.

[Sidenote: Importance of size in continental articulations.]

Articulations on a vast scale, like the southern peninsulas of Asia,

produce quite different cultural and historical effects from small

physical sub-divisions, like the fiord promontories and "skerries" of

Norway and southern Alaska, or the finger peninsulas of the

Peloponnesus. The significant difference lies in the degree of isolation

which the two types yield. Large continental dependencies of the Asiatic

class resemble small continents in their power to segregate; while

overgrown capes like ancient Attica and Argolis or the more bulky

Peloponnesus have their exclusiveness tempered by the mediating power of

the small marine inlets between them. Small articulations, by making a

coast accessible, tend to counteract the excessive isolation of a large

articulation. They themselves develop in their people only minor or

inner differentiations, which serve to enrich the life of the island or

peninsula as a whole, but do not invade its essential unity. The

contrast in the history of Hellas and the Peloponnesus was due largely

to their separation from one another; yet neither was able to make of

its people anything but Greeks. Wales and Cornwall show in English

history the same contrast and the same underlying unity.

[Sidenote: Historical contrast of large and small peninsulas.]

In discussing continental articulations, therefore, it makes a great

difference whether we draw our deductions from small projections of the

coast, like Wales, the Peloponnesus, Brittany and the Crimea, whose

areas range from 7442 to 10,023 square miles (19,082 to 25,700 square

kilometers); or the four Mediterranean peninsulas, which range in size

from the 58,110 square miles (149,000 square kilometers) of the

Apennine Peninsula to the 197,600 square miles (506,-600 square

kilometers) of Asia Minor and the 227,700 square miles (584,000 square

kilometers) of the Iberian; or the vast continental alcoves of southern

Asia, like Farther India with its 650,000 square miles (1,667,000 square

kilometers), Hither India with 814,320 square miles (2,088,000 square

kilometers) and Arabia with 1,064,700 square miles (2,730,000 square

kilometers).[784] The fact that the large compound peninsula of western

Europe which comprises Spain, Portugal, France, Jutland, Belgium,

Holland, Switzerland, Italy and western Germany, and has its base in the

stricture between the Adriatic and the Baltic, is about the size of

peninsular India, suggests how profound may be the difference in

geographic effects between large and small peripheral divisions. The

three huge extremities which Asia thrusts forward into the Indian Ocean

are geographical entities, which in point of size and individualization

rank just below the continents; and in relation to the solid mass of

Central Asia, they have exhibited in many respects an aloofness and

self-sufficiency, that have resulted in an historical divergence

approximating that of the several continents. India, which has more

productive territory than Australia and a population not much smaller

than that of Europe, becomes to the administrators of its government

"the Continent of India," as it is regularly termed in the Statistical

Atlas published at Calcutta. Farther India has in the long-drawn pendant

of Malacca a sub-peninsula half as large again as Italy. The Deccan has

in Ceylon an insular dependency the size of Tasmania. The whole scale is

continental. It appears again somewhat diminished, in the largest

articulations of Europe, in Scandinavia, the British Isles, the Iberian

and Balkan peninsulas. This continental scale stamps also the

anthropo-geography of such large individualized fields. They are big

enough for each to comprise one or even several nations, and isolated

enough to keep their historical processes for long periods at a time to

a certain extent detached from those of their respective continents.

[Sidenote: Peninsular conditions most favorable to historical

development.]

The most favorable conditions for historical development obtain where

the two classes of marginal articulation are combined, and where they

occur in groups, as we find them in the Mediterranean and the North

Sea-Baltic basin. Here the smaller indentations multiply contact with

the sea, and provide the harbors, bays and breakwaters of capes and

promontories which make the coast accessible. The larger articulations,

by their close grouping, break up the sea into the minor thalassic

basins which encourage navigation, and thus insure the exchange of their

respective cultural achievements. In other words, such conditions

present the pre-eminent advantages of vicinal location around an

enclosed sea.

The enormous articulations of southern Asia suffer from their paucity of

small indentations, all the more because of their vast size and

sub-tropical location. The Grecian type of peninsula, with its broken

shoreline, finds here its large-scale homologue only in Farther India,

to which the Sunda Islands have played in history the part of a gigantic

Cyclades. The European type of articulation is found only about the

Yellow-Japan Sea, where the island of Hondo and the peninsulas of

Shangtung and Korea reproduce approximately the proportions of Great

Britain, Jutland and Italy respectively. Arabia and India, like the

angular shoulder of Africa which protrudes into the Indian Ocean,

measure an imposing length of coastline, but this length shrinks in

comparison with the vast area of the peninsulas. The contour of a

peninsula is like the surface of the brain: in both it is convolutions

that count. Southern Asia has had lobes enough but too few convolutions.

For this reason, the northern Indian Ocean, despite its exceptional

location as the eastward extension of the Mediterranean route to the

Orient, found its development constantly arrested till the advent of

European navigators.

[Sidenote: Length of coastline.]

Although the peripheral articulations of a continent differ

anthropo-geographically according to their size, their zonal and vicinal

location, yet large and small, arctic and tropical, are grouped

indiscriminately together in the figures that state the length of

coastlines. For this reason, statistics of continental coastlines have

little value. For instance, the fact that Eurasia has 67,000 miles

(108,000 kilometers) and North America 46,500 miles (75,000 kilometers)

of contact with the ocean is not illuminating; these figures do not

reveal the fact that the former has its greatest coastal length on its

tropical and sub-tropical side, while the latter continent has wasted

inlets and islands innumerable in the long, bleak stretch from

Newfoundland poleward around to Bering Sea.

[Sidenote: The continental base of the peninsulas.]