Influences of Geographic Environment Part 28

Coasts are areas of out-going and in-coming maritime influences. The nature and amount of these influences depend upon the sea or ocean whose rim the coast in question helps to form, and the relations of that coast to its other tide-washed sh.o.r.es. Our land-made point of view dominates us so completely, that we are p.r.o.ne to consider a coast as margin of its land, and not also as margin of its sea, whence, moreover, it receives the most important contributions to its development. The geographic location of a coast as part of a thala.s.sic or of an oceanic rim is a basic factor in its history; more potent than local conditions of fertility, irregular contour, or accessibility from sea and hinterland.

Everything that can be said about the different degrees of historical importance attaching to inland seas and open oceans in successive ages applies equally to the countries and peoples along their sh.o.r.es; and everything that enhances or diminishes the cultural possibilities of a sea--its size, zonal location, its relation to the oceans and continents--finds its expression in the life along its coasts.

The anthropo-geographical evolution which has pa.s.sed from small to large states and from small to large seas as fields of maritime activity has been attended by a continuous change in the value of coasts, according as these were located on enclosed basins like the Mediterranean, Red, and Baltic; on marginal ones like the China and North seas; or on the open ocean. In the earlier periods of the world's history, a location on a relatively small enclosed sea gave a maritime horizon wide enough to lure, but not so wide as to intimidate; and by its seclusion led to a concentration and intensification of historical development, which in many of its phases left models for subsequent ages to wonder at and imitate. This formative period and formative environment outgrown, historical development was transferred to locations on the open oceans, according to the law of human advance from small to large areas. The historical importance of the Mediterranean and the Baltic sh.o.r.es was transitory, a prelude to the larger importance of the Atlantic littoral of Europe, just as this in turn was to attain its full significance only when the circ.u.mnavigation of Africa and South America linked the Atlantic to the World Ocean. Thus that gradual expansion of the geographic horizon which has accompanied the progress of history has seen a slow evolution in the value of seaboard locations, the transfer of maritime leadership from small to large basins, from thala.s.sic to oceanic ports, from Lubeck to Hamburg, from Venice to Genoa, as earlier from the Piraeus to Ostia, and later from England's little _Cinque Ports_ to Liverpool and the Clyde.

[Sidenote: Geographic location of coasts.]

Though the articulations of a coast determine the ease with which maritime influences are communicated to the land, nevertheless history shows repeated instances where an exceptional location, combined with restricted area, has raised a poorly indented seaboard to maritime and cultural preeminence. Phoenicia's brilliant history rose superior to the limitation of indifferent harbors, owing to a position on the Arabian isthmus between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean at the meeting place of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Moreover, the advantages of this particular location have in various times and in various degrees brought into prominence all parts of the Syrian and Egyptian coasts from Antioch to Alexandria. So the whole stretch of coast around the head of the Adriatic, marking the conjunction of a busy sea-route with various land-routes over the encircling mountains from Central Europe, has seen during the ages a long succession of thriving maritime cities, in spite of fast-silting harbors and impeded connection with the hinterland. Here in turn have ruled with maritime sway Spina, Ravenna, Aquileia,[522]

Venice, and Trieste. On the other side of the Italian peninsula, the location on the northernmost inlet of the western Mediterranean and at the seaward base of the Ligurian Apennines, just where this range opens two pa.s.ses of only 1,800 feet elevation to the upper Po Valley, made an active maritime town of Genoa from Strabo's day to the present. In its incipiency it relied upon one mediocre harbor on an otherwise harborless coast, a local supply of timber for its ships, and a road northward across the mountains.[523] The maritime ascendency in the Middle Ages of Genoa, Pisa, Venice, and Barcelona proves that no long indented coast is necessary, but only one tolerable harbor coupled with an advantageous location.

[Sidenote: Intermediate location between contrasted coasts.]

Owing to the ease and cheapness of water transportation, a seaboard position between two other coasts of contrasted products due to a difference either of zonal location or of economic development or of both combined, insures commercial exchanges and the inevitable activities of the middleman. The position of Carthage near the center of the Mediterranean enabled her to fatten on the trade between the highly developed eastern basin and the r.e.t.a.r.ded western one. Midway between the teeming industrial towns of medieval Flanders, Holland, and western Germany, and the new unexploited districts of r.e.t.a.r.ded Russia, Poland, and Scandinavia, lay the long line of the German Hanseatic towns--Kiel, Lubeck, Wiemar, Rostock, Stralsund, Greifswald, Anclam, Stettin, and Colberg, the _civitates maritimae_. For three centuries or more they made themselves the dominant commercial and maritime power of the Baltic by exchanging Flemish fabrics, German hardware, and Spanish wines for the furs and wax of Russian forests, tallow and hides from Polish pastures, and crude metals from Swedish mines.[524] So Portugal by its geographical location became a staple place where the tropical products from the East Indies were transferred to the vessels of Dutch merchants, and by them distributed to northern Europe. Later New England, by a parallel location, became the middleman in the exchanges of the tropical products of the West Indies, the tobacco of Virginia, and the wheat of Maryland for the manufactured wares of England and the fish of Newfoundland.

[Sidenote: Historical decline of certain coasts.]

Primitive or early maritime commerce has always been characterized by the short beat, a succession of middlemen coasts, and a close series of staple-places, such as served the early Indian Ocean trade in Oman, Malabar Coast, Ceylon, Coromandel Coast, Malacca, and Java. Therefore, many a littoral admirably situated for middleman trade loses this advantage so soon as commerce matures enough to extend the sweep of its voyages, and to bring into direct contact the two nations for which that coast was intermediary. This is only another aspect of the anthropo-geographic evolution from small to large areas. The decline of the Mediterranean coasts followed close upon the discovery of the sea-route to India; nor was their local importance restored by the Suez Ca.n.a.l. Portugal declined when the Dutch, excluded from the Tagus mouth on the union of Portugal with Spain, found their way to the Spice Isles.

Ceylon, though still the chief port of call in the Indian Ocean, has lost its preeminence as chief market for all the lands between Africa and China, which it enjoyed in the sixth century, owing to the "long haul" of modern oceanic commerce.

[Sidenote: Political factors in this decline.]

Not only that far-reaching readjustment of maritime ascendency which in the sixteenth century followed the advance from thala.s.sic to oceanic fields of commerce, but also purely local political events may for a time produce striking changes in the use or importance of coasts. The Piraeus, which had been the heart of ancient Athens, almost wholly lost its value in the checkered political history of the country during the Middle Ages, when naval power and merchant marine almost vanished; but with the restoration of Grecian independence in 1832, much of its pristine activity was restored. Up to the beginning of the seventeenth century, j.a.pan had exploited her advantageous location and her richly indented coast to develop a maritime trade which extended from Kamchatka to India; but in 1624 an imperial order withdrew every j.a.panese vessel from the high seas, and for over two hundred years robbed her busy littoral of all its historical significance. The real life of the Pacific coast of the United States began only with its incorporation into the territory of the Republic, but it failed to attain its full importance until our acquisition of Alaska, Hawaii, and the Philippines.

So the coast of the Persian Gulf has had periods of activity alternating with periods of deathlike quiet. Its conquest by the Saracens in the seventh century inaugurated an era of intense maritime enterprise along its drowsy sh.o.r.es. What new awakening may it experience, if it should one day become a Russian littoral!

[Sidenote: Physical causes of decline.]

Sometimes the decline in historical importance is due to physical modifications in the coast itself, especially when, the mud transported by a great river to the sea is constantly pushing forward the outer sh.o.r.eline. The control of the Adriatic pa.s.sed in turn from Spina to Adria, Ravenna, Aquileia, Venice, and Trieste, owing to a steady silting up of the coast.[525] Strabo records that Spina, originally a port, was in his time 90 stadia, or 10 miles, from the sea.[526] Bruges, once the great _entrepot_ of the Hanseatic League, was originally on an arm of the sea, with which it was later connected by ca.n.a.l, and which has been silted up since 1432, so that its commerce, disturbed too by local wars, was transferred to Antwerp on the Scheldt.[527] Many early English ports on the coast of Kent and on the old solid rim of the Fenland marshes now lie miles inland from the Channel and the Wash.

A people never utilizes all parts of its coast with equal intensity, or any part with equal intensity in all periods of its development; but, according to the law of differentiation, it gradually concentrates its energies in a few favored ports, whose maritime business tends to become specialized. Then every extension of the subsidiary territory and intensification of production with advancing civilization increases the ma.s.s of men and wares pa.s.sing through these ocean gateways. The sh.o.r.es of New York, Delaware, and Chesapeake bays are more important to the country now than they were in early colonial days, when their back country extended only to the watershed of the Appalachian system. Our Gulf coast has gained in activity with the South's economic advance from slave to free labor, and from almost exclusive cotton planting to diversified production combined with industries; and it will come into its own, in a maritime sense, when the opening of the Panama Ca.n.a.l will divert from the Atlantic outlets those products of the Mississippi basin which will be seeking Trans-Pacific markets.

[Sidenote: Interplay of geographic factors in coastlands.]

A careful a.n.a.lysis of the life of coast peoples in relation to all the factors of their land and sea environment shows that these are multiform, and that none are negligible; it takes into consideration the extent, fertility, and relief of the littoral, its accessibility from the land as well as from the sea, and its location in regard to outlying islands and to opposite sh.o.r.es, whether near or far; it holds in view not only the small articulations that give the littoral ready contact with the sea, but the relation of the seaboard to the larger continental articulations, whether it lies on an outrunning spur of a continental ma.s.s, like the Malacca, Yemen, or Peloponnesian coast, or upon a retiring inlet that brings it far into the heart of a continent, and provides it with an extensive hinterland; and, finally, it never ignores the nature of the bordering sea, which furnishes the school of seamanship and fixes the scope of maritime enterprise.

All these various elements of coastal environment are further differentiated in their use and their influence according to the purposes of those who come to tenant such tide-washed rims of the land.

Pirates seek intricate channels and hidden inlets for their lairs; a merchant people select populous harbors and navigable river mouths; would-be colonists settle upon fertile valleys opening into quiet bays, till their fields, and use their coasts for placid maritime trade with the mother country; interior peoples, pushed or pushing out to the tidal periphery of their continent, with no maritime history behind them, build their fishing villages on protected lagoons, and, unless the shadowy form of some outlying island lure them farther, there they tarry, deaf to the siren song of the sea.

NOTES TO CHAPTER VIII

[412] Rudolph Reinhard, _Die Wichtigsten Deutschen Seehandelstadte_, pp.

24, 25. Stuttgart, 1901. Joseph Partsch, Central Europe, p. 291. London, 1903.

[413] _Ibid_, p. 301.

[414] John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, pp. 51-54; maps, pp. 36 and 54. London, 1904.

[415] _Ibid_, Vol. I, pp. 12, 63; maps pp. xxii and 54.

[416] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 98, 139. London, 1896-1898.

[417] Joseph Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 284-288. London, 1903.

[418] H.B. Mill, International Geography, p. 251. New York, 1902.

[419] Rudolph Reinhard, _Die Wichtigsten Deutschen Seehandelstadte_, pp.

21-22. Stuttgart, 1901.

[420] Fitz-Roy and Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, Vol. II, pp. 140, 178; Vol. III, pp. 231-236. London, 1839.

[421] Eleventh Census, Population and Resources of Alaska, pp. 166-171.

Washington, 1893.

[422] Nordenskiold, The Voyage of the Vega, pp. 327, 334, 335, 365, 366, 412, 416, 459, 467. New York, 1882.

[423] G. Frederick Wright, Greenland Icefields, pp. 68-70, 100, 105. New York, 1896. For Eskimo of Hudson Bay and Baffin Land, see F. Boas, The Central Eskimo, pp. 419, 420, 460-462. _Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology_. Washington, 1888.

[424] _Bella Gallico_, Book III, chap. 12.

[425] Ernst Curtius, History of Greece, Vol. I, p, 15. New York.

[426] Strabo's Geography, Book II, chap. V, 4. Book III, chap. I, 4.

[427] Grote, History of Greece, Vol. III, pp. 266-267. New York, 1857.

[428] Thucydides, Book VI, 2.

[429] Grote, History of Greece, Vol. III, p. 273. New York, 1857.

[430] Strabo's Geography, Book XVII, chap. III, 13, 14.

[431] Thucydides, Book I, 5, 7, 8.

[432] Strabo, Book VIII, chap. VI, 2, 4, 13, 14, 22.

[433] Grote, History of Greece, Vol. III, pp. 4, 191. New York, 1857.

[434] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 291. London, 1903.

[435] Rudolph Reinhard, _Die Wichtigsten Deutschen Seehandelstadte_, p.

23. Stuttgart, 1901.

[436] Grote, History of Greece, Vol. III, p. 273. New York, 1857.

[437] Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, Vol. II, pp. 452-454, 610.

London, 1883. Duarte Barbosa, East Africa and Malabar Coasts in the Sixteenth Century, p. 3-16. Hakluyt Society, London, 1866.

[438] Ernst Curtius, History of Greece, Vol. I, pp. 433-434. New York.