Influences of Geographic Environment Part 16

Not unlike this serial grouping of oasis states along caravan routes through the desert are the island way stations that rise out of the waste of the sea and are connected by the great maritime routes of trade. Such are the Portuguese Madeiras, Bissagos, and San Thome on the line between Lisbon and Portuguese Loanda in West Africa; and their other series of the Madeiras, Cape Verde, and Fernando, which facilitated communication with Pernambuco when Brazil was a Portuguese colony. The cla.s.sic example of this serial grouping is found in the line of islands, physical or political, which trace England's artery of communication with India--Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Perim, Aden, Sokotra, and Ceylon, besides her dominant position at Suez.

[Sidenote: Scattered location of primitive tribes.]

Quite different from this scattered distribution, due to physical conditions, in an otherwise uninhabited waste is that wide dispersal of a people in small detached groups which is the rule in lower stages of culture, and which bespeaks the necessity of relatively large territorial reserves for the uneconomic method of land utilization characteristic of hunting, fishing, pastoral nomadism, and primitive agriculture. A distribution which claims large areas, without, however, maintaining exclusive possession or complete occupation, indicates among advanced peoples an unfinished process,[262] especially unfinished expansion, such as marked the early French and English colonies in America and the recent Russian occupation of Siberia. Among primitive peoples it is the normal condition, belongs to the stage of civilization, not to any one land or any one race, though it has been called the American form of distribution.

Not only are villages and encampments widely dispersed, but also the tribal territories. The Tupis were found by the Portuguese explorers along the coast of eastern Brazil and in the interior from the mouth of the La Plata to the lower Amazon, while two distant tribes of the Tupis were dropped down amid a prevailing Arawak population far away among the foothills of the Andes in two separate localities on the western Amazon.[263] [See map page 101.] The Athapascans, from their great compact northern area between Hudson Bay, the Saskatchewan River, and the Eskimo sh.o.r.es of the Arctic Ocean sent southward a detached offshoot comprising the Navajos, Apaches and Lipans, who were found along the Rio Grande from its source almost to its mouth; and several smaller fragments westward who were scattered along the Pacific seaboard from Puget Sound to northern California.[264] The Cherokees of the southern Appalachians and the Tuscaroras of eastern North Carolina were detached groups of the Iroquois, who had their chief seat about the lower Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence. Virginia and North Carolina harbored also several tribes of Sioux,[265] who were also represented in southern Mississippi by the small Biloxi nation, though the chief Sioux area lay between the Arkansas and Saskatchewan rivers. Similarly the Caddoes of Louisiana and eastern Texas had one remote offshoot on the Platte River and another, the Arikaras, on the upper Missouri near its great bend.

[See map page 54.] But the territory of the Caddoes, in turn, was sprinkled with Choctaws, who belonged properly east of the Mississippi, but who in 1803 were found scattered in fixed villages or wandering groups near the Bayou Teche, on the Red River, the Was.h.i.ta, and the Arkansas.[266] Their villages were frequently interspersed with others of the Biloxi Sioux.

This fragmentary distribution appears in Africa among people in parallel stages of civilization. Dr. Junker found it as a universal phenomenon in Central Africa along the watershed between the White Nile and the Welle-Congo. Here the territory of the dominant Zandeh harbored a motley collection of shattered tribes, remnants of peoples, and intruding or refugee colonies from neighboring districts.[267] The few weak bonds between people and soil characterizing r.e.t.a.r.ded races are insufficient to secure permanent residence in the face of a diminished game supply, as in the case of the Choctaws above cited, or of political disturbance or oppression, or merely the desire for greater independence, as in that of so many African tribes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION IN THE UNITED STATES IN 1800.]

[Sidenote: Ethnic islands of expansion.]

A scattered location results in all stages of civilization when an expanding or intruding people begins to appropriate the territory of a different race. Any long continued infiltration, whether peaceful or aggressive, results in race islands or archipelagoes distributed through a sea of aborigines. Semitic immigration from southern Arabia has in this way striped and polka-dotted the surface of Hamitic Abyssinia.[268]

Groups of pure German stock are to-day scattered through the Baltic and Polish provinces of Russia.[269] [See map page 223.] In ancient times the advance guard of Teutonic migration crossed the Rhenish border of Gaul, selected choice sites here and there, after the manner of Ariovistus, and appeared as enclaves in the encompa.s.sing Gallic population. While the Anahuac plateau of Mexico formed the center of the Aztec or Nahuatl group of Indians, outlying colonies of this stock occurred among the Maya people of the Tehuantepec region, and in Guatemala and Nicaragua.[270]

Such detached fragments or rather spores of settlement characterize all young geographical boundaries, where ethnic and political frontiers are still in the making. The early French, English, Dutch, and Swedish settlements in America took the form of archipelagoes in a surrounding sea of Indian-owned forest land; and in 1800, beyond the frontier of continuous settlement in the United States long slender peninsulas and remote outlying islands of white occupation indicated American advance at the cost of the native. Similarly the Portuguese, at the end of the sixteenth century, seized and fortified detached points along the coast of East Africa at Sofala, Malindi, Momba.s.sa, Kilwa, Lamu, Zanzibar and Barava, which served as way stations for Portuguese ships bound for India, and were outposts of expansion from their Mocambique territory.[271] The snow-m.u.f.fled forests of northern Siberia have their solitudes broken at wide intervals by Russian villages, located only along the streams for fishing, gold-washing and trading with the native.

These lonely clearings are outposts of the broad band of Muscovite settlement which stretches across southern Siberia from the Ural Mountains to the Angara River.[272] [See map page 103.]

[Sidenote: Political islands of expansion.]

The most exaggerated example of scattered political location existing to-day is found in the bizarre arrangement of European holdings on the west coast of Africa between the Senegal and Congo rivers. Here in each case a handful of governing whites is dropped down in the midst of a dark-skinned population in several districts along the coast. The six detached seaboard colonies of the French run back in the interior into a common French-owned hinterland formed by the Sahara and western Sudan, which since 1894 link the Guinea Coast colonies with French Algeria and Tunis; but the various British holdings have no territorial cohesion at any point, nor have the Spanish or Portuguese or German. The scattered location of these different European possessions is for the most part the expression of a young colonizing activity, developed in the past fifty years, and signalized by the vigorous intrusion of the French and Germans into the field. To the anthropo-geographer the map of western Africa presents the picture of a political situation wholly immature, even embryonic. The history of similar scattered outposts of political expansion in America, India and South Africa teaches us to look for extensive consolidation.

[Sidenote: Ethnic islands of survival.]

Race islands occur also when a land is so inundated by a tide of invasion or continuous colonization that the original inhabitants survive only as detached remnants, where protecting natural conditions, such as forests, jungles, mountains or swamps, provide an asylum, or where a sterile soil or rugged plateau has failed to attract the cupidity of the conqueror. The dismembered race, especially one in a lower status of civilization, can be recognized as such islands of survival by their divided distribution in less favored localities, into which they have fled, and in which seldom can they increase and recombine to recover their lost heritage. In Central Africa, between the watersheds of the Nile, Congo and Zambesi, there is scarcely a large native state that does not shelter in its forests scattered groups of dwarf hunter folk variously known as Watwa, Batwa, and Akka.[273] They serve the agricultural tribes as auxiliaries in war, and trade with them in meat and ivory, but also rob their banana groves and manioc patches.

The local dispersion of these pygmies in small isolated groups among stronger peoples points to them as survivals of a once wide-spread aboriginal race, another branch of which, as Schweinfurth suggested, is probably found in the dwarfed Bushmen and Hottentots of South Africa.[274] [See map page 105.]

Similar in distribution and in mode of life are the aborigines of the Philippines, the dwarf Negritos, who are still found inhabiting the forests in various localities. They are dispersed through eight provinces of Luzon and in several other islands, generally in the interior, whither they have been driven by the invading Malays.[275] [See map page 147.] But the Negritos crop out again in the mountain interior of Formosa and Borneo, in the eastern peninsula of Celebes, and in various islands of the Malay Archipelago as far east as Ceram and Flores, amid a prevailing Malay stock. Toward the west they come to the surface in the central highland of Malacca, in the Nicobar and Andaman Islands, and in several mountain and jungle districts of India. Here again is the typical geographic distribution of a moribund aboriginal race, whose shrivelled patches merely dot the surface of their once wide territory.[276] The aboriginal Kolarian tribes of India are found under the names of Bhils, Kols and Santals scattered about in the fastnesses of the Central Indian jungles, the Vindhyan Range, and in the Rajputana Desert, within the area covered by Indo-Aryan occupation.[277] [See map page 103.]

[Sidenote: Discontinuous distribution.]

Such broad, intermittent dispersal is the anthropological prototype of the "discontinuous distribution" of biologists. By this they mean that certain types of plants and animals occur in widely separated regions, without the presence of any living representatives in the intermediate area. But they point to the rock records to show that the type once occupied the whole territory, till extensive elimination occurred, owing to changes in climatic or geologic conditions or to sharpened compet.i.tion in the struggle for existence, with the result that the type survived only in detached localities offering a favorable environment.[278] In animal and plant life, the ice invasion of the Glacial Age explains most of these islands of survival; in human life, the invasion of stronger peoples. The Finnish race, which in the ninth century covered nearly a third of European Russia, has been shattered by the blows of Slav expansion into numerous fragments which lie scattered about within the old ethnic boundary from the Arctic Ocean to the Don-Volga watershed.[279] The encroachments of the whites upon the red men of America early resulted in their geographical dispersion. The map showing the distribution of population in 1830 reveals large detached areas of Indian occupancy embedded in the prevailing white territory.[280] The rapid compression of the tribal lands and the introduction of the reservation system resulted in the present arrangement of yet smaller and more widely scattered groups. Such islands of survival tend constantly to contract and diminish in number with the growing progress, density, and land hunger of the surrounding race. The Kaffir islands and the Hottentot "locations" in South Africa, large as they now are, will repeat the history of the American Indian lands, a history of gradual shrinkage and disappearance as territorial ent.i.ties.

[Sidenote: Contrasted location.]

Every land contains in close juxtaposition areas of sharply contrasted cultural, economic and political development, due to the influence of diverse natural locations emphasizing lines of ethnic cleavage made perhaps by some great historical struggle. In mountainous countries the conquered people withdraw to the less accessible heights and leave the fertile valleys to the victorious intruders. The two races are thus held apart, and the difference in their respective modes of life forced upon them by contrasted geographic conditions tends still farther for a time to accentuate their diversity. The contrasted location of the dislodged Alpine race, surviving in all the mountains and highlands of western Europe over against the Teutonic victors settled in the plains,[281] has its parallel in many parts of Asia and Africa; it is almost always coupled with a corresponding contrast in mode of life, which is at least in part geographically determined. In Algeria, the Arab conquerors, who form the larger part of the population, are found in the plains where they live the life of nomads in their tents; the Berbers, who were the original inhabitants, driven back into the fastnesses of the Atlas ranges, form now an industrious, sedentary farmer cla.s.s, living in stone houses, raising stock, and tilling their fields as if they were market gardeners.[282] In the Andean states of South America, the eastern slopes of the Cordilleras, which are densely forested owing to their position in the course of the trade-winds, harbor wild, nomadic tribes of hunting and fishing Indians who differ in stock and culture from the Inca Indians settled in the drier Andean basins.[283] [See map page 101.]

[Sidenote: Geographical polarity.]

Every geographical region of strongly marked character possesses a certain polarity, by reason of which it attracts certain racial or economic elements of population, and repels others. The predatory tribes of the desert are constantly reinforced by refugee outlaws from the settled agricultural communities along its borders.[284] The mountains which offer a welcome asylum for the persecuted Waldenses have no lure for the money-making Jew, who is therefore rarely found there. The negroes of the United States are more and more congregating in the Gulf States, making the "Black Belt" blacker. The fertile tidewater plains of ante-bellum Virginia and Maryland had a rich, aristocratic white population of slave-holding planters; the mountain backwoods of the Appalachian ranges, whose conditions of soil and relief were ill adapted for slave cultivation, had attracted a poorer democratic farmer cla.s.s, who tilled their small holdings by their own labor and consequently entertained little sympathy for the social and economic system of the tidewater country. This is the contrast between mountain and plain which is as old as humanity. It presented problems to the legislation of Solon, and caused West Virginia to split off from the mother State during the Civil War.[285]

Each contrasted district has its own polarity; but with this it attracts not one but many of the disruptive forces which are pent up in every people or state. Certain conditions of climate, soil, and tillable area in the Southern States of the Union made slave labor remunerative, while opposite conditions in the North combined eventually to exclude it thence. Slave labor in the South brought with it in turn a whole train of social and economic consequences, notably the repulsion of foreign white immigration and the development of shiftless or wasteful industrial methods, which further sharpened the contrast between the two sections. The same contrast occurs in Italian territory between Sicily and Lombardy. Here location at the two extremities of the peninsula has involved a striking difference in ethnic infusions in the two districts, different historical careers owing to different vicinal grouping, and dissimilar geographic conditions. These effects operating together and attracting other minor elements of divergence, have conspired to emphasize the already strong contrast between northern and southern Italy.

[Sidenote: Geographical marks of growth.]

In geographical location can be read the signs of growth or decay. There are racial and national areas whose form is indicative of development, expansion, while others show the symptoms of decline. The growing people seize all the geographic advantages within their reach, whether lying inside their boundaries or beyond. In the latter case, they promptly extend their frontiers to include the object of their desire, as the young United States did in the case of the Mississippi River and the Gulf coast. European peoples, like the Russians in Asia, all strive to reach the sea; and when they have got there, they proceed to embrace as big a strip of coast as possible. Therefore the whole colonization movement of western and central Europe was in the earlier periods restricted to coasts, although not to such an excessive degree as that of the Phoenicians and Greeks. Their own maritime location had instructed them as to the value of seaboards, and at the same time made this form of expansion the simplest and easiest.

[Sidenote: Marks of inland expansion.]

On the other hand, that growing people which finds its coastward advance blocked, and is therefore restricted to landward expansion, seizes upon every natural feature that will aid its purpose. It utilizes every valley highway and navigable river, as the Russians did in the case of the Dnieper, Don, Volga, Kama and Northern Dwina in their radial expansion from the Muscovite center at Moscow, and as later they used the icy streams of Siberia in their progress toward the Pacific; or as the Americans in their trans-continental advance used the Ohio, Tennessee, the Great Lakes, and the Missouri. They reach out toward every mountain pa.s.s leading to some choice ultramontane highway. Bulges or projecting angles of their frontier indicate the path they plan to follow, and always include or aim at some natural feature which will facilitate their territorial growth. The acquisition of the province of Ticino in 1512 gave the Swiss Confederation a foothold upon Lake Maggiore, perhaps the most important waterway of northern Italy, and the possession of the Val Leventina, which now carries the St. Gotthard Railroad down to the plains of the Po. Every bulge of Russia's Asiatic frontier, whether in the Trans-Caucasus toward the Mesopotamian basin and the Persian Gulf, or up the Murghab and Tedjend rivers toward the gates of Herat, is directed at some mountain pa.s.s and an outlet seaward beyond.

If this process of growth bring a people to the borders of a desert, there they halt perhaps for a time, but only, as it were, to take breath for a stride across the sand to the nearest oasis. The ancient Egyptians advanced by a chain of oases--Siwa, Angila, Sella and Sokna, across the Libyan Desert to the Syrtis Minor. The Russians in the last twenty-five years have spread across the arid wastes of Turkestan by way of the fertile spots of Khiva, Bukhara and Merv to the irrigated slopes of the Hindu Kush and Tian Shan Mountains. The French extended the boundaries of Algiers southward into the desert to include the caravan routes focusing at the great oases of t.w.a.t and Tidekelt, years before their recent appropriation of the western Sahara.

[Sidenote: Marks of decline.]

As territorial expansion is the mark of growth, so the sign of decline is the relinquishment of land that is valuable or necessary to a people's well-being. The gradual retreat of the Tartars and in part also of the Kirghis tribes from their best pasture lands along the Volga into the desert or steppes indicates their decrease of power, just as the withdrawal of the Indians from their hunting grounds in forest and prairie was the beginning of their decay. Bolivia maimed herself for all time when in 1884 she relinquished to Chile her one hundred and eighty miles of coast between the Rio Lao and the twenty-fourth parallel. Her repeated efforts later to recover at least one seaport on the Pacific indicate her own estimate of the loss by which she was limited to an inland location, and deprived of her maritime periphery.[286]

[Sidenote: Interpretation of scattered and marginal location.]

The habits of a people and the consequent demands which they make upon their environment must be taken into account in judging whether or not a restricted geographical location is indicative of a retrograde process.

The narrow marginal distribution of the Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshean Indians on the islands and coastal strips of northwestern America means simply the selection of sites most congenial to those inveterate fisher tribes. The fact that the English in the vicinity of the Newfoundland Banks settled on a narrow rim of coast in order to exploit the fisheries, while the French peasants penetrated into the interior forests and farmlands of Canada, was no sign of territorial decline.

English and French were both on the forward march, each in their own way. The scattered peripheral location of the Phoenician trading stations and later of the Greek colonies on the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean was the expression of the trading and maritime activity of those two peoples. Centuries later a similar distribution of Arab posts along the coast of East Africa, Madagascar and the western islands of the Sunda Archipelago indicated the great commercial expansion of the Mohammedan traders of Oman and Yemen. The lack came when this distribution, normal as a preliminary form, bore no fruit in the occupation of wide territorial bases. [See map page 251.]

[Sidenote: Prevalence of ethnic islands of decline.]

In general, however, any piecemeal or marginal location of a people justifies the question as to whether it results from encroachment, dismemberment, and consequently national or racial decline. This inference as a rule strikes the truth. The abundance of such ethnic islands and reefs--some scarcely distinguishable above the flood of the surrounding population--is due to the fact that when the area of distribution of any life form, whether racial or merely animal, is for any cause reduced, it does not merely contract but breaks up into detached fragments. These isolated groups often give the impression of being emigrants from the original home who, in some earlier period of expansion, had occupied this outlying territory. At the dawn of western European history, Gaul was the largest and most compact area of Celtic speech. For this reason it has been regarded as the land whence sprang the Celts of Britain, the Iberian Peninsula, the Alps and northern Italy. Freeman thinks that the Gauls of the Danube and Po valleys were detachments which had been left behind in the great Celtic migration toward the west;[287] but does not consider the possibility of a once far more extensive Celtic area, which, as a matter of fact, once reached eastward to the Weser River and the Sudetes Mountains and was later dismembered.[288] The islands of Celtic speech which now mark the western flank of Great Britain and Ireland are shrunken fragments of a Celtic linguistic area which, as place-names indicate, once comprised the whole country.[289] Similarly, all over Russia Finnic place-names testify to the former occupation of the country by a people now submerged by the immigrant Slavs, except where they emerge in ethnic islands in the far north and about the elbow of the Volga.[290] [See map page 225.] Beyond the compact area of the Melanesian race occupying New Guinea and the islands eastward to the Fiji and Loyalty groups, are found scattered patches of negroid folk far to the westward, relegated to the interiors of islands and peninsulas. The dispersed and fragmentary distribution of this negroid stock has suggested that it formed the older and primitive race of a wide region extending from India to Fiji and possibly even beyond.[291]

[Sidenote: Contrast between ethnic islands of growth and decline.]

Ethnic or political islands of decline can be distinguished from islands of expansion by various marks. When survivals of an inferior people, they are generally characterized by inaccessible or unfavorable geographic location. When remnants of former large colonial possessions of modern civilized nations, they are characterized by good or even excellent location, but lack a big compact territory nearby to which they stand in the relation of outpost. Such are the Portuguese fragments on the west coast of India at Goa, Damaon, and Diu Island, and the Portuguese half of the island of Timor with the islet of Kambing in the East Indies. Such also are the remnants of the French empire in India, founded by the genius of Francois Dupleix, which are located on the seaboard at Chandarnagar, Carical, Pondicherry, Yanaon and Mahe. They tell the geographer a far different story from that of the small detached French holding of Kw.a.n.g-chan Bay and Nao-chan Island on the southern coast of China, which are outposts of the vigorous French colony of Tongking.

The scattered islands of an intrusive people, bent upon conquest or colonization, are distinguished by a choice of sites favorable to growth and consolidation, and by the rapid extension of their boundaries until that consolidation is achieved; while the people themselves give signs of the rapid differentiation incident to adaptation to a new environment.

NOTES TO CHAPTER V

[239] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I. pp.

98-101. New York. 1893.

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

5-8, 12, 13, 19-28, 37. New York, 1897.

[241] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 272-273. New York, 1899.

[242] Monette, History of the Valley of the Mississippi, Vol. II, chap.

I. 1846.

[243] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 336, 334. Map. p. 53. New York, 1899.

[244] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 137. London, 1903.

[245] Eleventh Census, Report for Alaska, pp. 66, 67, 70. Washington, 1893.

[246] Livingstone, Travels in South Africa, p. 56. New York, 1858.

[247] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol I, pp. 36, 108. New York, 1893.