Influences of Geographic Environment Part 26

The early history of maritime colonization shows in general two geographic phases: first, the appropriation of the islet and headland outskirts of the seaboard, and later--it may be much later--an advance toward the inner edge of the coast, or yet farther into the interior.

Progress from the earlier to the maturer phase depends upon the social and economic development of the colonizers, as reflected in their valuation of territorial area. The first phase, the outcome of a low estimate of the value of land, is best represented by the Phoenician and earliest Greek colonies, whose purposes were chiefly commercial, and who sought merely such readily accessible coastal points as furnished the best trading stations on the highway of the Mediterranean and the adjacent seas. The earlier Greek colonies, like those of the Triopium promontory forming the south-western angle of Asia Minor, Chalcidice, the Thracian Chersonesus, Calchedon, Byzantium, the Pontic Heraclea, and Sinope, were situated on peninsulas or headlands, that would afford a convenient anchor ground; or, like Syracuse and Mitylene, on small insh.o.r.e islets, which were soon outgrown, and from which the towns then spread to the mainland near by. The advantages of such sites lay in their accessibility to commerce, and in their natural protection against the attack of strange or hostile mainland tribes. For a nation of merchants, satisfied with the large returns but also with the ephemeral power of middlemen, these considerations sufficed. While the Phoenician trading posts in Africa dotted the outer rim of the coast, the inner edge of the zone was indicated by Libyan or Ethiopian towns, where the inhabitants of the interior bartered their ivory and skins for the products of Tyre.[436] So that commercial expansion of the Arabs down the east coast of Africa in the first and again in the tenth century seized upon the offsh.o.r.e islands of Zanzibar, Pemba, and Mafia, the small insh.o.r.e islets like Mombasa and Lamu, and the whole outer rim of the coast from the equator southward to the Rovuma River.[437] The Sultan of Zanzibar, heir to this coastal strip, had not expanded it a decade ago, when he had to relinquish the long thread of his continental possessions.

[Sidenote: Inland advance of colonies.]

But when a people has advanced to a higher conception of colonization as an outlet for national as well as commercial expansion, and when it sees that the permanent prosperity of both race and trade in the new locality depends upon the occupation of larger tracts of territory and the development of local resources as a basis for exchanges, their settlements spread from the outer rim of the coasts to its inner edge and yet beyond, if alluvial plains and river highways are present to tempt inland expansion. Such was the history of many later colonies of the Greeks[438] and Carthaginians, and especially of most modern colonial movements, for these have been dominated by a higher estimate of the value of land.

After the long Atlantic journey, the outposts of the American coast were welcome resting-places to the early European voyagers, but, owing to their restricted area and therefore limited productivity, they were soon abandoned, or became mere bases for inland expansion. The little island of Cuttyhunk, off southern Ma.s.sachusetts, was the site of Gosnold's abortive attempt at colonization in 1602, like Raleigh's attempt on Roanoke Island in 1585, and the later one of Popham on the eastern headland of Cas...o...b..y. The Pilgrims paused at the extremity of Cape Cod, and again on Clark's Island, before fixing their settlement on Plymouth Bay. Monhegan Island, off the Maine coast, was the site of an early English trading post, which, however, lasted only from 1623 to 1626;[439]

and the same dates fix the beginning and end of a fishing and trading station established on Cape Ann, and removed later to Salem harbor. The Swedes made their first settlement in America on Cape Henlopen, at the entrance of Delaware Bay; but their next, only seven years later, they located well up the estuary of the Delaware River. Thus for the modern colonist the outer edge of the coast is merely the gateway of the land.

From it he pa.s.ses rapidly to the settlement of the interior, wherever fertile soil and abundant resources promise a due return upon his labor.

[Sidenote: Interpenetration of land and sea.]

Since it is from the land, as the inhabited portion of the earth's surface, that all maritime movements emanate, and to the land that all oversea migrations are directed, the reciprocal relations between land and sea are largely determined by the degree of accessibility existing between the two. This depends primarily upon the articulation of a land-ma.s.s, whether it presents an unbroken contour like Africa and India, or whether, like Europe and Norway, it drops a fringe of peninsulas and a shower of islands into the bordering ocean. Mere distance from the sea bars a country from its vivifying contact; every protrusion of an ocean artery into the heart of a continent makes that heart feel the pulse of life on far-off, unseen sh.o.r.es. The Baltic inlet which makes a seaport of St. Petersburg 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) back from the western rim of Europe, brings Atlantic civilization to this half-Asiatic side of the continent. The solid front presented by the Iberian Peninsula and Africa to the Atlantic has a narrow crack at Gibraltar, whence the Mediterranean penetrates inland 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers), and converts the western foot of the Caucasus and the roots of the Lebanon Mountains into a seaboard. By means of the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean runs northward 1,300 miles (2,200 kilometers) from Cape Comorin to meet the Indus delta; and then turns westward 700 miles farther through the Oman and Persian gulfs to receive the boats from the Tigris and Euphrates. Such marine inlets create islands and peninsulas; which are characterized by proximity to the sea on all or many sides; and in the interior of the continents they produce every degree of nearness, shading off into inaccessible remoteness from the watery highway of the deep.

The success with which such indentations open up the interior of the continents depends upon the length of the inlets and the size of the land-ma.s.s in question. Africa's huge area and unbroken contour combine to hold the sea at arm's length, Europe's deep-running inlets open that small continent so effectively that Kazan, Russia's most eastern city of considerable size, is only 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) distant from the nearest White Sea, Baltic, and Azof ports. Asia, the largest of all the continents, despite a succession of big indentations that invade its periphery from Sinai peninsula to East Cape, has a vast inland area hopelessly far from the surrounding oceans.

[Sidenote: Ratio of sh.o.r.eline to area.]

In order to determine the coast articulation of any country or continent, Carl Ritter and his followers divided area by sh.o.r.eline, the latter a purely mathematical line representing the total contour length.

By this method Europe's ratio is one linear mile of coast to 174 square miles of area, Australia's 1:224, Asia's 1:490, and Africa's 1:700. This means that Europe's proportion of coast is three times that of Asia and four times that of Africa; that a country like Norway, with a sh.o.r.eline of 12,000 miles traced in and out along the fiords and around the larger islands,[440] has only 10 square miles of area for every mile of seaboard, while Germany, with every detail of its littoral included in the measurement, has only 1,515 miles of sh.o.r.eline and a ratio of one mile of coast to every 159 square miles of area.

The criticism has been made against this method that it compares two unlike measures, square and linear, which moreover increase or decrease in markedly different degrees, according as larger or smaller units are used. But for the purposes of anthropo-geography the method is valid, inasmuch as it shows the amount of area dependent for its marine outline upon each mile of littoral. A coast, like every other boundary, performs the important function of intermediary in the intercourse of a land with its neighbors; hence the length of this sea boundary materially affects this function. Area and coastline are not dead mathematical quant.i.ties, but like organs of one body stand in close reciprocal activity, and can be understood only in the light of their persistent mutual relations.

The division of the area of a land by the length of its coastline yields a quotient which to the anthropo-geographer is not a dry figure, but an index to the possible relations between seaboard and interior. A comparison of some of these ratios will ill.u.s.trate this fact.

Germany's sh.o.r.eline, traced in contour without including details, measures 787 miles; this is just one-fifth that of Italy and two-fifths that of France, so that it is short. But since Germany's area is nearly twice Italy's and a little larger than that of France, it has 267 square miles of territory for every mile of coast, while Italy has only 28 square miles, and France 106. Germany has towns that are 434 miles from the nearest seaboard, but in Italy the most inland point is only 148 miles from the Mediterranean.[441] If we turn now to the United States and adopt Mendenhall's estimate of its general or contour coastline as 5,705 miles, we find that our country has 530 square miles of area dependent for its outlet upon each mile of seaboard. This means that our coast has a heavy task imposed upon it, and that its commercial and political importance is correspondingly enhanced; that the extension of our Gulf of Mexico littoral by the purchase of Florida and the annexation of Texas were measures of self-preservation, and that the unbroken contour and mountain-walled face of our Pacific littoral is a serious national handicap.

[Sidenote: Criticism of this formula.]

But this method is open to the legitimate and fundamental criticism that, starting from the conception of a coast as a mere line instead of a zone, it ignores all those features which belong to every littoral as a strip of the earth's surface--location, geologic structure, relief, area, accessibility to the sea in front and to the land behind, all which vary from one part of the world's seaboard to another, and serve to differentiate the human history of every littoral. Moreover, of all parts of the earth's surface, the coast as the hem of the sea and land, combining the characters of each, is most complex. It is the coast as a human habitat that primarily concerns anthropo-geography. A careful a.n.a.lysis of the multifarious influences modifying one another in this mingled environment of land and water reveals an intricate interplay of geographic forces, varying from inland basin to marginal sea, from marginal sea to open ocean, and changing from one historical period to another--an interplay so mercurial that it could find only a most inadequate expression in the rigid mathematical formula of Carl Ritter.

[Sidenote: Accessibility of coasts from hinterland.]

As the coast, then, is the border zone between the solid, inhabited land and the mobile, untenanted deep, two important factors in its history are the accessibility of its back country on the one hand, and the accessibility of the sea on the other. A littoral population barred from its hinterland by mountain range or steep plateau escarpment or desert tract feels little influence from the land; level or fertile soil is too limited in amount to draw inland the growing people, intercourse is too difficult and infrequent, transportation too slow and costly. Hence the inhabitants of such a coast are forced to look seaward for their racial and commercial expansion, even if a paucity of good harbors limits the accessibility of the sea; they must lead a somewhat detached and independent existence, so far as the territory behind them is concerned.

Here the coast, as a peripheral organ of the interior, as the outlet for its products, the market for its foreign exchanges, and the medium for intercourse with its maritime neighbors, sees its special function impaired. But it takes advantage of its isolation and the protection of a long sea boundary to detach itself politically from its hinterland, as the histories of Phoenicia, the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, Dalmatia, the republics of Amalfi, Venice, and Genoa, the county of Barcelona, and Portugal abundantly prove. At the same time it profits by its seaboard location to utilize the more varied fields of maritime enterprise before it, in lieu of the more or less forbidden territory behind it. The height and width of the landward barrier, the number and practicability of the pa.s.sways across it, and especially the value of the hinterland's products in relation to their bulk, determine the amount of intercourse between that hinterland and its mountain or desert barred littoral.

[Sidenote: Mountain-barred hinterlands.]

The interior is most effectively cut off from the periphery, where a mountain range or a plateau escarpment traces the inner line of the coastland, as in the province of Liguria in northern Italy, Dalmatia, the western or Malabar coast of India, most parts of Africa, and long stretches of the Pacific littoral of the Americas. The highland that backs the Norwegian coast is crossed by only one railroad, that pa.s.sing through the Trondhjem depression; and this barrier has served to keep Norway's historical connection with Sweden far less intimate than with Denmark. The long inlet of the Adriatic, bringing the sea well into the heart of Southern Europe, has seen nevertheless a relatively small maritime development, owing to the wall of mountains that everywhere shuts out the hinterland of its coasts. The greatness of Venice was intimately connected with the Brenner Pa.s.s over the Alps on the one hand, and the trade of the eastern Mediterranean on the other. Despite Austro-Hungary's crucial interest in the northeast corner of the Adriatic as a maritime outlet for this vast inland empire, and its herculean efforts at Trieste and Fiume to create harbors and to connect them by transmontane railroads with the valley of the Danube, the maritime development of this coast is still restricted, and much of Austria's trade goes out northward by German ports.[442] Farther south along the Dalmatian and Albanian coasts, the deep and sheltered bays between the half-submerged roots of the Dinaric Alps have developed only local importance, because they lack practicable connection with the interior. This was their history too in early Greek and Roman days, for they found only scant support in the few caravans that crossed by the Roman road to Dyrrachium to exchange the merchandise of the Aegean for the products of the Ionian Isles. Spain has always suffered from the fact that her bare, arid, and unproductive tableland almost everywhere rises steeply from her fertile and densely populated coasts; and therefore that the two have been unable to cooperate either for the production of a large maritime commerce or for national political unity.

Here the diverse conditions of the littoral and the wall of the great central terrace of the country have emphasized that tendency to defection that belongs to every periphery, and therefore necessitated a strong centralized government to consolidate the restive maritime provinces with their diverse Galician, Basque, Catalonian, and Andalusian folk into one nation with the Castilians of the plateau.[443]

[Sidenote: Accessible hinterlands.]

Where mountain systems run out endwise into the sea, the longitudinal valleys with their drainage streams open natural highways from the interior to the coast. This structure has made the Atlantic side of the Iberian Peninsula far more open than its Mediterranean front, and therefore contributed to its leadership in maritime affairs since 1450.

So from the sh.o.r.es of Thrace to the southern point of the Peloponnesus, all the valleys of Greece open out on the eastern or Asiatic side. Here every mountain-flanked bay has had its own small hinterland to draw upon, and every such interior has been accessible to the civilization of the Aegean; here was concentrated the maritime and cultural life of h.e.l.las.[444] The northern half of Andean Colombia, by way of the parallel Atrato, Rio Cauco, and Magdalena valleys, has supported the activities of its Caribbean littoral, and through these avenues has received such foreign influences as might penetrate to inland Bogota. In like manner, the mountain-ridged peninsula of Farther India keeps its interior in touch with its leading ports through its intermontane valleys of the Irawadi, Salwin, Menam, and Mekong rivers.

Low coasts rising by easy gradients to wide plains, like those of northern France, Germany, southern Russia, and the Gulf seaboard of the United States, profit by an accessible and extensive hinterland.

Occasionally, however, this advantage is curtailed by a political boundary reinforced by a high protective tariff, as Holland, Belgium, and East Prussia[445] know to their sorrow.

These low hems of the land, however, often meet physical obstructions to ready communications with the interior in the silted inlets, shallow lagoons, marshes, or mangrove swamps of the littoral itself. Here the larger drainage streams give access across this amphibian belt to the solid land behind. Where they flow into a tide-swept bay like the North Sea or the English Channel, they scour out their beds and preserve the connection between sea and land;[446] but debouchment into a tideless basin like the Caspian or the Gulf of Mexico, even for such mighty streams as the Volga and the Mississippi, sees the slow silting up of their mouths and the restriction of their agency in opening up the hinterland. Thus the character of the bordering sea may help to determine the accessibility of the coast from the land side.

[Sidenote: Accessibility of coasts from the sea.]

Its accessibility from the sea depends primarily upon its degree of articulation; and this articulation depends upon whether the littoral belt has suffered elevation or subsidence. When the insh.o.r.e sea rests upon an uplifted bottom, the contour of the coast is smooth and unbroken, because most of the irregularities of surface have been overlaid by a deposit of waste from the land; so it offers no harbor except here and there a silted river mouth, while it shelves off through a broad amphibian belt of tidal marsh, lagoon, and sand reef to a shallow sea. Such is the coast of New Jersey, most of the Gulf seaboard of the United States and Mexico, the Coromandel coast of India, and the long, low littoral of Upper Guinea. Such coasts harbor a population of fishermen living along the strands of their placid lagoons,[447] and stimulate a timid insh.o.r.e navigation which sometimes develops to extensive coastwise intercourse, where a network of lagoons and deltaic channels forms a long insh.o.r.e pa.s.sage, as in Upper Guinea, but which fears the break of the surf outside.[448]

The rivers draining these low uplifted lands are deflected from their straight path to the sea by coastwise deposits, and idly trail along for miles just inside the outer beach; or they are split up into numerous offshoots among the silt beds of a delta, to find their way by shallow, tortuous channels to the ocean, so that they abate their value as highways between sea and land. The silted mouths of the Nile excluded the larger vessels even of Augustus Caesar's time and admitted only their lighters,[449] just as to-day the lower Rufigi River loses much of its value to German East Africa because of its scant hospitality to vessels coming from the sea.

[Sidenote: Embayed coasts.]

The effect of subsidence, even on a low coastal plain, is to increase accessibility from the sea by flooding the previous river valleys and transforming them into a succession of long shallow inlets, alternating with low or hilly tongues of land. Such embayed coasts form our Atlantic seaboard from Delaware Bay, through Chesapeake Bay to Pamlico Sound, the North Sea face of England, the funnel-shaped "forden" or firths on the eastern side of Jutland and Schleswig-Holstein, and the ragged sounds or "Bodden" that indent the Baltic sh.o.r.e of Germany from the Bay of Lubeck to the mouth of the Oder River.[450] Although the shallowness of the bordering sea and the sand-bars and sand reefs which characterize all flat coasts here also exclude the largest vessels, such coasts have nevertheless ample contact with both land and sea. They tend to develop, therefore, the activities appropriate to both. A fertile soil and abundant local resources, as in tidewater Maryland and Virginia, make the land more attractive than the sea; the inhabitants become farmers rather than sailors. On the other hand, an embayed coastland promising little return to the labor of tillage, but with abundant fisheries and a superior location for maritime trade, is sure to profit by the accessible sea, and achieve the predominant maritime activity which characterized the mediaeval Hanse Towns of northern Germany and colonial New England.

[Sidenote: Maritime activity on steep embayed coasts.]

Subsidence that brings the beat of the surf against the bolder reliefs of the land produces a ragged, indented coast, deep-water inlets penetrating far into the country, hilly or mountainous tongues of land running far out into the sea and breaking up into a swarm of islands and rocks, whose outer limits indicate approximately the old prediluvial line of sh.o.r.e.[451] Such are the fiord regions of Norway, southern Alaska, British Columbia, Greenland, and southern Chile; the Rias or submerged river valley coast of northwestern Spain; and the deeply sunken mountain flank of Dalmatia, whose every lateral valley has become a bay or a strait between mainland and island. All these coasts are characterized by a close succession of inlets, a limited amount of level country for settlement or cultivation, and in their rear a steep slope impeding communication with their hinterland. Inaccessibility from the land, a high degree of accessibility from the sea, and a paucity of local resources unite to thrust the inhabitants of such coasts out upon the deep, to make of them fishermen, seamen, and ocean carriers. The same result follows where no barrier on the land side exists, but where a granitic or glaciated soil in the interior discourages agriculture and landward expansion, as in Brittany, Maine, and Newfoundland. In all these the land repels and the sea attracts. Brittany furnishes one-fifth of all the sailors in France's merchant marine,[452] and its pelagic fishermen sweep the seas from Newfoundland to Iceland. Three-fifths of the maritime activity of the whole Austrian Empire is confined to the ragged coast of Dalmatia, which furnishes to-day most of the sailors for the imperial marine, just as in Roman days it manned the Adriatic fleet of the Caesars.[453] The Haida, Tsimshean, and Tlingit Indians of the ragged western coast of British Columbia and southern Alaska spread their villages on the narrow tide-swept hem of the land, and subsist chiefly by the generosity of the deep. They are poor landsmen, but excellent boat-makers and seamen, venturing sometimes twenty-five miles out to sea to gather birds' eggs from the outermost fringe of rocks.

[Sidenote: Contrasted coastal belts.]

As areas of elevation or subsidence are, as a rule, extensive, it follows that coasts usually present long stretches of smooth simple sh.o.r.eline, or a long succession of alternating inlet and headland.

Therefore different littoral belts show marked contrasts in their degree of accessibility to the sea, and their harbors appear in extensive groups of one type--fiords, river estuaries, sand or coral reef lagoons, and embayed mountain roots. A sudden change in relief or in geologic history sees one of these types immediately succeeded by a long-drawn group of a different type. Such a contrast is found between the Baltic and North Sea ports of Denmark and Germany, the eastern and southern seaboards of England, the eastern and western sides of Scotland, and the Pacific littoral of North America north and south of Juan de Fuca Strait, attended by a contrasted history.

A common morphological history, marked by mountain uplift, glaciation, and subsidence, has given an historical development similar in not a few respects to the fiord coasts of New England, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, the Alaskan "panhandle," and southern Chile. Large subsidence areas on the Mediterranean coasts from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Bosporus have in essential features duplicated each other's histories, just as the low infertile sh.o.r.es of the Baltic from Finland to the Skager Rack have had much in common in their past development.

Where, however, a purely local subsidence, as in Kamerun Bay and Old Calabar on the elsewhere low monotonous stretch of the Upper Guinea coast,[454] or a single great river estuary, as in the La Plata and the Columbia, affords a protected anchorage on an otherwise portless sh.o.r.e, such inlets a.s.sume increased importance. In the long unbroken reach of our Pacific seaboard, San Francis...o...b..y and the Columbia estuary are of inestimable value; while, by the treaty of 1848 with Mexico, the international boundary line was made to bend slightly south of west from the mouth of the Gila River to the coast, in order to include in the United States territory the excellent harbor of San Diego. The mere nicks in the rim of Southwest Africa const.i.tuting Walfish Bay and Angra Pequena a.s.sume considerable value as trading stations and places of refuge along that 1,200-mile reach of inhospitable coast extending from Cape Town north to Great Fish Bay.[455] It is worthy of notice in pa.s.sing that, though both of these small inlets lie within the territory of German Southwest Africa, Walfish Bay with 20 miles of coast on either side is a British possession, and that two tiny islets which commands the entrance to the harbor of Angra Pequena, also belong to Great Britain. On the uniform coast of East Africa, the single considerable indentation formed by Delagoa Bay a.s.sumes immense importance, which, however, is due in part to the mineral wealth of its Transvaal hinterland. From this point northward for 35 degrees of lat.i.tude, a river mouth, like that fixing the site of Beira, or an insh.o.r.e islet affording protected harborage, like that of Mombasa, serves as the single ocean gateway of a vast territory, and forms the terminus of a railroad--proof of its importance.

[Sidenote: Evolution of ports.]

The maritime evolution of all amply embayed coasts, except in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions inimical to all historical development, shows in its highest stage the gradual elimination of minor ports, and the concentration of maritime activity in a few favored ones, which have the deepest and most capacious harbors and the best river, ca.n.a.l, or railroad connection with the interior. The earlier stages are marked by a multiplicity of ports, showing in general activity nearly similar in amount and in kind. England's merchant marine in the fourteenth century was distributed in a large group of small but important ports on the southern coast, all which, owing to their favorable location, were engaged in the French and Flemish trade; and in another group on the east coast, reaching from Hull to Colchester, which partic.i.p.ated in the Flemish, Norwegian, and Baltic trade.[456] Most of these have now declined before the overpowering compet.i.tion of a few such seaboard marts as London, Hull, and Southampton. The introduction of steam trawlers into the fishing fleets has in like manner led to the concentration of the fishermen in a few large ports with good railroad facilities, such as Aberdeen and Grimsby, while the fishing villages that fringed the whole eastern and southern coasts have been gradually depopulated.[457] So in colonial days, when New England was little more than a cordon of settlements along that rock-bound littoral, almost every inlet had its port actively engaged in coastwise and foreign commerce in the West Indies and the Guinea Coast, in cod and mackerel fisheries, in whaling and shipbuilding, and this with only slight local variations. This widespread h.o.m.ogeneity of maritime activity has been succeeded by strict localization and differentiation, and reduction from many to few ports. So, for the whole Atlantic seaboard of the United States, evolution of seaports has been marked by increase of size attended by decrease of numbers.

[Sidenote: Offsh.o.r.e islands.]

A well dissected coast, giving ample contact with the sea, often fails nevertheless to achieve historical importance, unless outlying islands are present to ease the transition from insh.o.r.e to pelagic navigation, and to tempt to wider maritime enterprise. The long sweep of the European coast from northern Norway to Brittany has played out a significant part of its history in that procession of islands formed by Iceland, the Faroes, Shetland, Orkneys, Great Britain, Ireland and the Channel Isles, whether it was the navigator of ancient Armorica steering his leather-sailed boat to the sh.o.r.es of Caesar's Britain, or the modern Breton fisherman pulling in his nets off the coasts of distant Iceland.

The dim outline of mountainous Cyprus, seen against a far-away horizon from the slopes of Lebanon, beckoned the Phoenician ship-master thither to trade and to colonize, just as the early Etruscan merchants pa.s.sed from their busy ironworks on the island of Elba over the narrow strait to visible Corsica.[458] It was on the eastern side of Greece, with its deep embayments, its valleys opening out to the Aegean, with its 483 islands scattered thickly as stars in the sky, and its Milky Way of the Cyclades leading to the deep, rich soils of the Asia Minor coast, with its sea-made contact with all the stimulating influences and dangers emanating from the Asiatic littoral, that h.e.l.lenic history played its impressive drama. Here was developed the spirit of enterprise that carried colonies to far western Sicily and Italy, while the western or rear side had a confined succession of local events, scarce worthy the name of history. Neither mountain-walled Epirus nor Corcyra had an h.e.l.lenic settlement in 735 B.C., at a date when the eastern Greeks had reached the Ionian coast of the Aegean and had set up a lonely group of colonies even on the Bay of Naples. Turning to America, we find that the Antilles received their population from the only two tribes, first the Arawaks and later the Caribs, who ever reached the indented northern coast of South America between the Isthmus of Panama and the mouth of the Orinoco. Here the small islands of the Venezuelan coast, often in sight, lured these peoples of river and sh.o.r.e to open-sea navigation, and drew them first to the Windward Isles, then northward step by step or island by island, to Hayti and Cuba.[459]

[Sidenote: Offsh.o.r.e islands as vestibules of the mainland.]

In all these instances, offsh.o.r.e islands tempt to expansion and thereby add to the historical importance of the nearby coast. Frequently, however, they achieve the same result by offering advantageous footholds to enterprising voyagers from remote lands, and become the medium for infusing life into hitherto dead coasts. The long monotonous littoral of East Africa from Cape Guadafui to the Cape of Good Hope, before the planting here of Portuguese way-stations on the road to India in the sixteenth century, was dest.i.tute of historical significance, except that stretch opposite the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, which Arab merchants in the tenth century appropriated as the basis for their slave and ivory trade. The East Indies and Ceylon have been so many offsh.o.r.e stations whence, first through the Portuguese, and later through the Dutch and English, European influences percolated into southeastern Asia. Asia, with its island-strewn sh.o.r.es, has diffused its influences over a broad zone of the western Pacific, and through the agency of its active restless Malays, even halfway across that ocean. In contrast, the western coast of the Americas, a stretch nearly 10,000 miles from Tierra del Fuego to the Aleutian chain, has seen its aboriginal inhabitants barred from seaward expansion by the lack of offsh.o.r.e islands, and its entrance upon the historical stage delayed till recent times.

In general it can be said that islandless seas attain a later historical development than those whose expanse is rendered less forbidding by hospitable fragments of land. This factor, as well as its location remote from the old and stimulating civilization of Syria and Asia Minor, operated to r.e.t.a.r.d the development of the western Mediterranean long after the eastern basin had reached its zenith.

[Sidenote: Previous habitat of coast-dwellers.]

Coast-dwelling peoples exhibit every degree of intimacy with the water, from the amphibian life of many Malay tribes who love the wash of the waves beneath their pile-built villages, to the Nama Bushmen who inhabit the dune-walled coast of Southwest Africa, and know nothing of the sea.

In the resulting nautical development the natural talents and habits of the people are of immense influence; but these in turn have been largely determined by the geographical environment of their previous habitat, whether inland or coastal, and by the duration in time, as well as the degree and necessity, of their contact with the sea. The Phoenicians, who, according to their traditions as variously interpreted, came to the coast of Lebanon either from the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea,[460]

brought to their favorable maritime location a different endowment from that of the land-trading Philistines, who moved up from the south to occupy the sand-choked sh.o.r.es of Palestine,[461] or from that of the Jews, bred to the gra.s.slands of Mesopotamia and the gardens of Judea, who only at rare periods in their history forced their way to the sea.[462] The unindented coast stretching from Cape Carmel south to the Nile delta never produced a maritime people and never achieved maritime importance, till a race of experienced mariners like the Greeks planted their colonies and built their harbor moles on the sh.o.r.es of Sharon and Philistia.[463] So on the west face of Africa, from the Senegal southward along the whole Guinea Coast to Benguela, all evidences of kinship and tradition among the local tribes point to an origin on the interior plains and a recent migration seaward,[464] so that no previous schooling enabled them to exploit the numerous harbors along this littoral, as did later the sea-bred Portuguese and English.

[Sidenote: Habitability of coasts as factor in maritime development.]

Not only the accessibility of the coast from the sea, but also its habitability enters as a factor into its historical importance. A sandy desert coast, like that of Southwest Africa and much of the Peruvian littoral, or a sterile mountain face, like that of Lower California, excludes the people of the country from the sea. Saldanha Bay, the one good natural harbor on the west coast of Cape Colony, is worthless even to the enterprising English, because it has no supply of fresh water.[465] The slowness of the ancient Egyptians to take the short step forward from river to marine navigation can undoubtedly be traced to the fact that the sour swamps, barren sand-dunes, and pestilential marshes on the seaward side of the Nile delta must have always been spa.r.s.ely populated as they are to-day,[466] and that a broad stretch of sandy waste formed their Red Sea littoral.