Influences of Geographic Environment Part 27

On the other hand, where the hem of the continents is fertile enough to support a dense population, a large number of people are brought into contact with the sea, even where no elaborate articulation lengthens the sh.o.r.eline. When this teeming humanity of a garden littoral is barred from landward expansion by desert or mountain, or by the already overcrowded population of its own hinterland, it wells over the brim of its home country, no matter how large, and overflows to other lands across the seas. The congested population of the fertile and indented coast of southern China, though not strictly speaking a sea-faring people, found an outlet for their redundant humanity and their commerce in the tropical Sunda Islands. By the sixth century their trading junks were doing an active business in the harbors of Java, Sumatra, and Malacca; they had even reached Ceylon and the Persian Gulf, and a little later were visiting the great focal market of Aden at the entrance of the Red Sea.[467] A strong infusion of Chinese blood improved the Malay stock in the Sunda Islands, and later in North Borneo and certain of the Philippines, whither their traders and emigrants turned in the fourteenth century, when they found their opportunities curtailed in the archipelago to the south by the spread of Islam.[468] Now the "yellow peril" threatens the whole circle of these islands from Luzon to Sumatra.

Similarly India, first from its eastern, later from its western coast, sent a stream of traders, Buddhist priests, and colonists to the Sunda Islands, and especially to Java, as early as the fifth century of our era, whence Indian civilization, religion, and elements of the Sanskrit tongue spread to Borneo, Sumatra, Bali, Lombok, and even to some smaller islands among the Molucca group.[469] The Hindus became the dominant commercial nation of the Indian Ocean long before the great development of Arabian sea power, and later shared the trade of the East African coast with the merchants of Oman and Yemen.[470] To-day they form a considerable mercantile cla.s.s in the ports of Mascat, Aden, Zanzibar, Pemba, and Natal.

[Sidenote: Geographic conditions for brilliant maritime development.]

On the coasts of large fertile areas like China and India, however, maritime activity comes not as an early, but as an eventual development, a.s.sumes not a dominant, but an incidental historical importance. The coastlands appearing early on the maritime stage of history, and playing a brilliant part in the drama of the sea, have been habitable, but their tillable fields have been limited either in fertility, as in New England, or in amount, as in Greece, or in both respects, as in Norway.

But if blessed with advantageous location for international trade and many or even a few fairly good harbors, such coasts tend to develop wide maritime dominion and colonial expansion.[471]

Great fertility in a narrow coastal belt barred from the interior serves to concentrate and energize the maritime activities of the nation. The 20-mile wide plain stretching along the foot of the Lebanon range from Antioch to Cape Carmel is even now the garden of Syria.[472] In ancient Phoenician days its abundant crops and vines supported luxuriant cities and a teeming population, which sailed and traded and colonized to the Atlantic outskirts of Europe and Africa. Moreover, their maritime ventures had a wide sweep as early as 1100 B. C. Quite similar to the Phoenician littoral and almost duplicating its history, is the Oman seaboard of eastern Arabia. Here again a fertile coastal plain sprinkled with its "hundred villages," edged with a few tolerable harbors, and backed by a high mountain wall with an expanse of desert beyond, produced a race of bold and skilful navigators,[473] who in the Middle Ages used their location between the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea to make themselves the dominant maritime power of the Indian ocean. With them maritime expansion was typically wide in its sweep and rapid in its development. Even before Mohammed's time they had reached India; but under the energizing influences of Islam, by 758 they had established a flourishing trade with China, for which they set up way stations or staple-points in Canton and the Sunda Islands.[474] First as voyagers and merchants, then as colonists, they came, bringing their wares and their religion to these distant sh.o.r.es. Marco Polo, visiting Sumatra in 1260, tells us the coast population was "Saracen," but this was probably more in religion than in blood.[475] Oman ventures, seconded by those of Yemen, reached as far south as east. The trading stations of Madisha and Barawa were established on the Somali coast of East Africa in 908, and Kilwa 750 miles further south in 925. In the seventeenth century the Oman Arabs dislodged the intruding Portuguese from all this coast belt down to the present northern boundary of Portuguese East Africa. Even so late as 1850 their capital, Mascat, sent out fine merchantmen that did an extensive carrying trade, and might be seen loading in the ports of British India, in Singapore, Java, and Mauritius.

[Sidenote: Soil of coastlands as factor.]

Brittany's active part in the maritime history of France is due not only to its ragged contour, its insh.o.r.e and offsh.o.r.e islands, its forward location on the Atlantic which brought it near to the fisheries of Newfoundland and the trade of the West Indies, but also to the fact that the "Golden Belt," which, with but few interruptions, forms a band of fertility along the coast, has supported a denser population than the sterile granitic soils of the interior,[476] while the sea near by varied and enriched the diet of the inhabitants by its abundance of fish, and in its limy seaweed yielded a valuable fertilizer for their gardens.[477]

The small but countless alluvial deposits at the fiord heads in Norway, aided by the products of the sea, are able to support a considerable number of people. Hence the narrow coastal rim of that country shows always a density of population double or quadruple that of the next density belt toward the mountainous interior, and contains seventeen out of Norway's nineteen towns having more than 5,000 inhabitants.[478] It is this relative fertility of the coastal regions, as opposed to the sterile interior, that has brought so large a part of Norway's people in contact with the Atlantic and helped give them a prominent place in maritime history.

[Sidenote: Barren coast of fertile hinterland.]

Occasionally an infertile and spa.r.s.ely inhabited littoral bordering a limited zone of singular productivity, especially if favorably located for international trade, will develop marked maritime activity, both in trade and commercial colonization. Such was Arabian Yemen, the home of the ancient Sabaeans on the Red Sea, stretching from the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb north-westward for 500 miles. Here a mountain range, rising to 10,000 feet and bordering the plateau desert of central Arabia, condenses the vapors of the summer monsoon and creates a long-drawn oasis, where terraced coffee gardens and orchards blossom in the irrigated soil; but the arid coastal strip at its feet, harboring a spa.r.s.e population only along its tricking streams, developed a series of considerable ports as outlets for the abundant products and crowded population of the highlands.[479] A location on the busy sea lane leading from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, near the meeting place of three continents, made the merchants of the Yemen coast, like the Oman Arabs to the north, middlemen in the trade of Europe with eastern Africa and India.[480] Therefore, even in the second century these Sabaeans had their trading stations scattered along the east coast of Africa as far south as Zanzibar.[481] In 1502 Vasco da Gama found Arabs, either of Oman or Yemen, yet farther south in Sofala, the port for the ivory and gold trade. Some of them he employed as pilots to steer his course to India.[482]

History makes one fact very plain: a people who dwell by the sea, and to whom nature applies some lash to drive them out upon the deep, command opportunity for practically unlimited expansion. In this way small and apparently ill-favored strips of the earth's surface have become the seats of wide maritime supremacy and colonial empire. The scattered but extensive seaboard possession of little Venice and Genoa in the latter centuries of the Middle Ages are paralleled in modern times by the large oversea dominions of the English and Dutch.

Seaward expansions of peoples are always of great moment and generally of vast extent, whether they are the coastward movements of inland peoples to get a foothold upon the great oceanic highway of trade and civilization, as has been the case with the Russians notably since the early eighteenth century, and with numerous interior tribes of West Africa since the opening of the slave trade; or whether they represent the more rapid and extensive coastwise and oversea expansions of maritime nations like the English, Dutch, and Portuguese. In either event they give rise to widespread displacements of peoples and a bizarre arrangement of race elements along the coast. When these two contrary movements meet, the shock of battle follows, as the recent history of the Russians and j.a.panese in Manchuria and Korea ill.u.s.trates, the wars of Swedes and Russians for the possession of the eastern Baltic littoral, and the numerous minor conflicts that have occurred in Upper Guinea between European commercial powers and the would-be trading tribes of the bordering hinterland.

[Sidenote: Ethnic contrast between coast and interior peoples.]

A coast region is a peculiar habitat, inasmuch as it is more or less dominated by the sea. It is exposed to inundation by tidal wave and to occupation by immigrant fleets. It may be the base for out-going maritime enterprise or the goal of some oversea movement, the dispenser or the recipient of colonists. The contrast between coast-dwellers and the nearby inland people which exists so widely can be traced not only to a difference of environment, but often to a fundamental difference of race or tribe caused by immigration to accessible sh.o.r.es. The Greeks, crowded in their narrow peninsula of limited fertility, wove an h.e.l.lenic border on the skirts of the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean lands, just as the Carthaginians added a fringe of aliens to North Africa, where the Punic people of the coast presented a marked contrast to the Berbers of the interior. [See map page 251.]

An ethnographical map of Russia to-day shows a narrow but almost continuous rim of Germans stretching from the River Niemen north through the Baltic coast of Courland, Livland, and Esthland, as far as Revel; and again, a similar band of Swedes along the seaboard of Finland, from a point east of Helsingfors on the south around to Uleaborg on the north,[483] dating from the time when Finland was a political dependency of Sweden, and influenced by the fact that the frozen Gulf of Bothnia every winter makes a bridge of ice between the two sh.o.r.es. [See map page 225.]

[Sidenote: Ethnic contrasts in the Pacific islands.]

Everywhere in the Melanesian archipelago, where Papuans and Malays dwell side by side, the latter as the new-comers are always found in possession of the coast, while the darker aborigines have withdrawn into the interior. So in the Philippines, the aboriginal Negritos, pure or more often mixed with Malayan blood, as in the Mangyan tribe of central Mindoro, are found crowded back into the interior by the successive invasions of Malays who have encircled the coasts. [See map page 147.]

The Zamboanga peninsula of Mindanao has an inland pagan population of primitive Malayan race called Subanon, who have been displaced from the littoral by the seafaring Samal Moros, Mohammedanized Malays from the east sh.o.r.es of Sumatra and the adjacent islands, who spread northward about 1300 under the energizing impulse of their new religion.[484] Even at so late a date as the arrival of Magellan, the Subanon seem to have still occupied some points of the coast,[485] just as the savage Ainos of the Island of Yezo touched the sea about Sapporo only forty years ago, though they are now surrounded by a seaboard rim of j.a.panese.[486]

[Sidenote: Ethnic contrasts in the Americas.]

If we turn to South America, we find that warlike Tupi, at the time of the discovery, occupied the whole Brazilian coast from the southern tropic north to eastern Guiana, while the highlands of eastern Brazil immediately in their rear were populated by tribes of Ges, who had been displaced by the coastwise expansion of the Tupi canoemen.[487] [See map page 101.] And to-day this same belt of coastland has been appropriated by a foreign population of Europeans and Negroes, while the vast interior of Brazil shows a predominance of native Indian stocks, only broken here and there by a lonely _enclave_ of Portuguese settlement.

The early English and French territories in America presented this same contrast of coast and inland people--the colonists planting themselves on the hem of the continent to preserve maritime connection with the home countries, the aborigines forced back beyond reach of the tide.

Wherever an energetic seafaring people with marked commercial or colonizing bent make a highway of the deep, they give rise to this distinction of coast and inland people on whatever sh.o.r.es they touch.

The expanding Angles and Saxons did it in the North Sea and the Channel, where they stretched their _litus Saxonic.u.m_ faintly along the coast of the continent to the apex of Brittany, and firmly along the hem of England from Southampton Water to the Firth of Forth;[488] the sea-bred Scandinavians did it farther north in the Teutonic fringe of settlements which they placed on the sh.o.r.es of Celtic Scotland and Ireland.[489]

[Sidenote: Older ethnic stock in coastlands.]

As a rule it is the new-comers who hold the coast, but occasionally the coast-dwellers represent the older ethnic stock. In the Balkan Peninsula to-day the descendants of the ancient h.e.l.lenes are, with few exceptions, confined to the coast. The reason is to be found in the fact that the Slavs and other northern races who have intruded by successive invasions from the plains of southern Russia are primarily inland peoples, and therefore have occupied the core of the peninsula, forcing the original Greek population before them to the edge of the sea.[490] This is the same anthropo-geographical process which makes so many peninsulas the last halting-place of a dislodged earlier race. But the Greeks who line the northern and western sh.o.r.es of Asiatic Turkey are such only in language and religion, because their prevailing broad head-form shows them to be Turks and Armenians in race stock.[491]

Sometimes the distinction of race between coast and interior is obliterated so far as language and civilization are concerned, but survives less conspicuously in head-form and pigmentation. The outermost fringe of the Norwegian coast, from the extreme south to the lat.i.tude of Trondhjem in the north, is occupied by a broad-headed, round-faced, rather dark people of only medium height, who show decided affinities with the Alpine race of Central Europe, and who present a marked contrast to the tall narrow-headed blondes of pure Teutonic type, const.i.tuting the prevailing population from the inner edge of the coast eastward into Sweden. This brachycephalic, un-Germanic stock of the Norwegian seaboard seems to represent the last stand made by that once wide-spread Alpine race, which here has been shoved along to the rocky capes and islands of the outer edge by a later Teutonic immigration coming from Sweden.[492] So the largest continuous area of Negrito stock in the Philippines is found in the Sierra Madre mountains defining the eastern coast of northern Luzon.[493] Facing the neighborless wastes of the Pacific, whence no new settler could come, turned away from the sources of Malay immigration to the southwest, its location made it a retreat, rather than a gateway to incoming races. [See map page 147.]

[Sidenote: Ethnic amalgamations in coastlands.]

Where an immigrant population from oversea lands occupies the coastal hem of a country, rarely do they preserve the purity of their race.

Coming at first with marauding or trading intent, they bring no women with them, but inst.i.tute their trading stations or colonies by marriage with the women of the country. The ethnic character of the resultant population depends upon the proportion of the two const.i.tuent elements, the nearness or remoteness of their previous kinship, and the degree of innate race antagonism. The ancient Greek elements which crossed the Aegean from different sections of the peninsula to colonize the Ionian coast of Asia Minor mingled with the native Carian, Cretan, Lydian, Pelasgian, and Phoenician populations which they found there.[494] On all the barbarian sh.o.r.es where the Greeks established themselves, there arose a mixed race--in Celtic Ma.s.silia, in Libyan Barca, and in Scythian Crimea--but always a race h.e.l.lenized, born interpreters and mercantile agents.[495]

A maritime people, engrossed chiefly with the idea of trade, moves in small groups and intermittently; hence it modifies the original coastal population less than does a genuine colonizing nation, especially as it prefers the smallest possible territorial base for its operations. The Arab element in the coast population of East Africa is strongly represented, but not so strongly as one might expect after a thousand years of intercourse, because it was scattered in detached seaboard points, only a few of which were really stable. The native population of Zanzibar and Pemba and the fringe of coast tribes on the mainland opposite are clearly tinged with Arab blood. These Swahili, as they are called, are a highly mixed race, as their negro element has been derived not only from the local coast peoples, but also from the slaves who for centuries have been halting here on their seaward journey from the interior of Africa.[496] [See map page 105.]

[Sidenote: Multiplicity of race elements on coasts.]

Coast peoples tend to show something more than the hybridism resulting from the mingling of two stocks. So soon as the art of navigation developed beyond its initial phase of mere coastwise travel, and began to strike out across the deep, all coast peoples bordered upon each other, and the sea became a common waste boundary between. Unlike a land boundary, which is in general accessible from only two sides and tends to show, therefore, only two const.i.tuent elements in its border population, a sea boundary is accessible from many directions with almost equal ease; it therefore draws from many lands, and gives its population a variety of ethnic elements and a cosmopolitan stamp. This, however, is most marked in great seaports, but from them it penetrates into the surrounding country. The whole southern and eastern coast population of England, from Cornwall to the Wash, received during Elizabeth's reign valuable accessions of industrious Flemings and Huguenots, refugees from Catholic persecution in the Netherlands and France.[497] Our North Atlantic States, whose population is more than half (50.9 per cent.) made up of aliens and natives born of foreign parents,[498] have drawn these elements from almost the whole circle of Atlantic sh.o.r.es, from Norway to Argentine and from Argentine to Newfoundland. Even the Southern States, so long unattractive to immigrants on account of the low status of labor, show a fringe of various foreign elements along the Gulf coast, the deeper tint of which on the census maps fades off rapidly toward the interior. The same phenomenon appears with Asiatic and Australian elements in our Pacific seaboard states.[499] The cosmopolitan population of New York, with its "Chinatown," its "Little Italy," its Russian and Hungarian quarters, has its counterpart in the mixed population of Mascat, peopled by Hindu, Arabs, Persians, Kurds, Afghans, and Baluchis, settled here for purposes of trade; or in the equally mongrel inhabitants of Aden and Zanzibar, of Ma.r.s.eilles, Constantinople, Alexandria, Port Said, and other Mediterranean ports.

[Sidenote: Lingua franca of coasts.]

The cosmopolitanism and the commercial activity that characterize so many seaboards are reflected in the fact that, with rare exceptions, it is the coast regions of the world that give rise to a _lingua franca_ or _lingua geral_. The original _lingua franca_ arose on the coast of the Levant during the period of Italian commercial supremacy there. It consisted of an Italian stock, on which were grafted Greek, Arabic, and Turkish words, and was the regular language of trade for French, Spanish, and Italians.[500] It is still spoken in many Mediterranean ports, especially in Smyrna, and in the early part of the nineteenth century was in use from Madagascar to the Philippines.[501] From the coastal strip of the Zanzibar Arabs, recently transferred to German East Africa, the speech of the Swahili has become a means of communication over a great part of East Africa, from the coast to the Congo and the sources of the Nile. It is a Bantu dialect permeated with Arabic and Hindu terms, and spa.r.s.ely sprinkled even with English and German words.[502] "Pidgin English" (business English) performs the function of a _lingua franca_ in the ports of China and the Far East. It is a jargon of corrupted English with a slight mixture of Chinese, Malay, and Portuguese words, arranged according to the Chinese idiom. Another mongrel English does service on the coast of New Guinea. The "n.i.g.g.e.r English" of the West African trade is a regular dialect among the natives of the Sierra Leone coast. Farther east, along the Upper Guinea littoral, the Eboe family of tribes who extend across the Niger delta from Lagos to Old Calabar have furnished a language of trade in one of their dialects.[503] The Tupi speech of the Brazilian coast Indians, with whom the explorers first came into contact, became, in the mouth of Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries, the _lingua geral_ or medium of communication between the whites and the various Indian tribes throughout Brazil.[504] The Chinook Indians, located on our Pacific coast north and south of the Columbia River, have furnished a jargon of Indian, French, and English words which serves as a language of trade throughout a long stretch of the northwest Pacific coast, not only between whites and Indians, but also between Indians of different linguistic stocks.[505]

[Sidenote: Coast-dwellers as middlemen.]

The coast is the natural habitat of the middleman. One strip of seaboard produces a middleman people, and then sends them out to appropriate other littorals, if geographic conditions are favorable; otherwise it is content with the transit trade of its own locality. It breeds essentially a race of merchants, shunning varied production, nursing monopoly by secrecy and every method to crush compet.i.tion. The profits of trade attract all the free citizens, and the laboring cla.s.s is small or slave. Expansion landward has no attraction in comparison with the seaward expansion of commerce. The result is often a relative dearth of local land-grown food stuffs. King Hiram of Tyre, in his letter to King Solomon, promised to send him trees of cedar and cypress, made into rafts and conveyed to the coast of Philistia, and asked in return for grain, "which we stand in need of because we inhabit an island." The pay came in the form of wheat, oil, and wine. But Solomon furnished a considerable part of the laborers--30,000 of them--who were sent, 10,000 at a time, to Mount Lebanon to cut the timber, apparently under the direction of the more skilful Sidonian foresters.[506] A type of true coast traders is found in the Duallas of the German Kamerun, at the inner angle of the Gulf of Guinea. Located along the lower course and delta of the Mungo River where it flows into the Kamerun estuary, they command a good route through a mountainous country into the interior.

This they guard jealously, excluding all compet.i.tion, monopolizing the trade, and imposing a transit duty on all articles going to and from the interior. They avoid agriculture so far as possible. Their women and slaves produce an inadequate supply of bananas and yams, but crops needing much labor are wholly neglected, so that their coasts have a reputation for dearness of provisions.[507]

Along the 4,500 miles of West African coast between the Senegal and the Kunene rivers the negro's natural talent for trade has developed special tribes, who act as intermediaries between the interior and the European stations on the seaboard. Among these we find the Bihenos and Banda of Portuguese Benguela, who fit out whole caravans for the back country; the Portuguese of Loanda rely on the Ambaquistas and the Mbunda middlemen. The slave trade particularly brought a sinister and abnormal activity to these seaboard tribes,[508] just as it did to the East Coast tribes, and stimulated both in the exploitation of their geographic position as middlemen.[509]

[Sidenote: Monopoly of trade with the hinterland.]

The Alaskan coast shows the same development. The Kinik Indians at the head of Cook's Inlet buy skins of land animals from the inland Athapascans at the sources of the Copper River, and then make a good profit by selling them to the American traders of the coast. These same Athapascans for a long time found a similar body of middlemen in the Ugalentz at the mouth of the Copper River, till the Americans there encouraged the inland hunters to bring their skins to the fur station on the coast.[510] The Chilcats at the head of Lynn Ca.n.a.l long monopolized the fur trade with the Athapascan Indians about Chilkoot Pa.s.s; these they would meet on the divide and buy their skins, which they would carry to the Hudson Bay Company agents on the coast. They guarded their monopoly jealously, and for fifty years were able to exclude all traders and miners from the pa.s.ses leading to the Yukon.[511]

The same policy of monopoly and exclusion has been pursued by the Moro coast dwellers of Mindanao in relation to the pagan tribes of the interior. They buy at low prices the forest and agriculture products of the inland Malays, whom they do not permit to approach either rivers or seaboard, for fear they may come into contact with the Chinese merchants along the coast. So fiercely is their monopoly guarded by this middleman race, that the American Government in the Philippines will be able to break it only by military interference.[512]

[Sidenote: Differentiation of coast from inland people.]

Differences of occupation, of food supply, and of climate often further operate to differentiate the coast from the inland people near by, and to emphasize the ethnic difference which is almost invariably present, either inconspicuously from a slight infusion of alien blood, or plainly as in an immigrant race. Sometimes the contrast is in physique.

In Finisterre province of western Brittany, the people along the more fertile coastal strip are on the average an inch taller than the inhabitants of the barren, granitic interior. Their more generous food supply, further enriched by the abundant fisheries at their doors, would account for this increased stature; but this must also be attributed in part to intermixture of the local Celts with a tall Teutonic stock which brushed along these sh.o.r.es, but did not penetrate into the unattractive interior.[513] So the negroes of the Guinea Coast, though not immune from fevers, are better nourished on the alluvial lowlands near the abundant fish of the lagoons, and hence are often stronger and better looking than the plateau interior tribes near by. But here, again, an advantageous blending of races can not be excluded as a contributing cause.[514] Sometimes the advantage in physique falls to the inland people, especially in tropical countries when a highland interior is contrasted with a low coast belt. The wild Igorotes, inhabiting the mountainous interior of northern Luzon, enjoy a cooler climate than the lowlands, and this has resulted in developing in them a decidedly better physique and more industrious habits than are found in the civilized people of the coasts encircling them.[515]

[Sidenote: Early civilization of coasts.]

Where a coast people is an immigrant stock from some remote oversea point, it brings to its new home a surplus of energy which was perhaps the basis of selection in the exodus from the mother country. Such a people is therefore characterized by greater initiative, enterprise, and endurance than the sedentary population which it left behind or that to which it comes; and these qualities are often further stimulated by the transfer to a new environment rich in opportunities. Sea-born in their origin, sea-borne in their migration, they cling to the zone of littoral, because here they find the conditions which they best know how to exploit. Dwelling on the highway of the ocean, living in easy intercourse with distant countries, which would have been far more difficult of access by land-travel over territories inhabited by hostile races, exchanging with these both commodities and ideas, food-stuffs and religions, they become the children of civilization, and their sun-burned seamen the st.u.r.dy apostles of progress. Therefore it may be laid down as a general proposition, that the coasts of a country are the first part of it to develop, not an indigenous or local civilization, but a cosmopolitan culture, which later spreads inland from the seaboard.

[Sidenote: r.e.t.a.r.ded coastal peoples.]

Exceptions to this rule are found in barren or inaccessible coasts like the Pacific littoral of Peru and Mexico, and on sh.o.r.es like those of California, western Africa and eastern Luzon, which occupy an adverse geographic location facing a neighborless expanse of ocean and remote from the world's earlier foci of civilization. Therefore the descent from the equatorial plateau of Africa down to the Atlantic littoral means a drop in culture also, because the various elements of civilization which for ages have uninterruptedly filtered into Sudan from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, have rarely penetrated to the western rim of the highland, and hence never reached the coast.

Moreover, this steaming lowland, from the Senegal River to the Kamerun Mountains, has been a last asylum for dislodged tribes who have been driven out by expanding peoples of the plateau. They have descended in their flight upon the original coast dwellers, adding to the general condition of political disruption, multiplying the number of small weak tribes, increasing the occasions for intertribal wars, and furthering the prevailing degradation. The seaboard lowlands of Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Ivory Coast have all suffered thus In historic times.[516] All this region was the original home of the low, typical "Guinea n.i.g.g.e.r" of the Southern plantation. The coasts of Oregon and California showed a parallel to this in their fragmentary native tribes of r.e.t.a.r.ded development, whose level of culture, low at best, sank rapidly from the interior toward the seaboard. They seem to have been intruders from the central highlands, who further deteriorated in their weakness and isolation after reaching the coast. They bore every mark of degradation in their short stature, linguistic and tribal dismemberment, their low morals and culture, which ranked them little above the brutes.

In contrast, all the large and superior Indian groups of North America belonged to the interior of the continent.[517]

[Sidenote: Cultural contrast of coast and interior.]

The long, indented coast of the Mediterranean has in all ages up to modern times presented the contrast of a littoral more advanced in civilization than the inland districts. The only exception was ancient Egypt before Psammeticus began to exploit his mud-choked seaboard. This contrast was apparent, not only wherever Phoenicians or Greeks had appropriated the remote coast of an alien and r.e.t.a.r.ded people, but even in near-by Thrace the savage habits of the interior tribes were softened only where these dwelt in close proximity to the Ionian colonies along the coast, a fact as noticeable in the time of Tacitus as in that of Herodotus five hundred years before.[518] The ancient philosophers of Greece were awake to the deep-rooted differences between an inland and a maritime city, especially in respect to receptivity of ideas, activity of intellect, and affinity for culture.[519]

If we turn to the Philippines, we find that 65 per cent. of the Christian or civilized population of the islands live on or near the coast; and of the remaining 35 per cent. dwelling inland, by far the greater part represents simply the landward extension of the area of Christian civilization which had Manila Bay for a nucleus.[520]

Otherwise, all the interior districts are occupied by wild or pagan tribes. Mohammedanism, too, a religion of civilization, rims the southernmost islands which face the eastern distributing point of the faith in Java; it is confined to the coasts, except for its one inland area of expansion along the lake and river system of the Rio Grande of Mindanao, which afforded an inland extension of sea navigation for the small Moro boat. Even the Fiji Islands show different shades of savagery between coasts and interior.[521]

[Sidenote: Progress from thala.s.sic to oceanic coasts.]