Influences of Geographic Environment Part 31

[526] Strabo, Book III, chap. I, 2.

[527] Roscher, _National-Oekonomik des Handels und Gewerbefleisses_, p.

93, Note 1. Stuttgart, 1899.

CHAPTER IX

OCEANS AND ENCLOSED SEAS

The water of the earth's surface, viewed from the standpoint of anthropo-geography, is one, whether it appears as atmospheric moisture, spring, river, lake, brackish lagoon, enclosed sea-basin or open ocean.

Its universal circulation, from the falling of the dews to the vast sweep of ocean current, causes this inviolable unity. Variations in the geographical forms of water are superficial and constantly changing; they pa.s.s into one another by almost imperceptible gradations, shift their unstable outlines at the bidding of the mobile, restless element.

In contrast to the land, which is marked by diversity of geologic structure and geographic form, the world of water is everywhere approximately the same, excepting only the difference in the mineral composition of sea water as opposed to that of spring and stream.

Therefore, whenever man has touched it, it has moulded him in much the same way, given the same direction to his activities, dictated the use of the same implements and methods of navigation. As maritime trader or colonist, he has sailed to remote, unknown, yet familiar coasts, and found himself as much at home as on his native sh.o.r.es. He has built up maritime empires, the centre of whose dominion, race and commerce, falls somewhere in the dividing yet uniting sea.

[Sidenote: The water a factor in man's mobility.]

Man must be grouped with the air and water as part of the mobile envelope of the earth's surface. The mobility which maintains the unity of air and water has caused the unity of the human race. Abundant facilities of dispersal often give animal forms a wide or cosmopolitan distribution. Man, by appropriating the mobile forces in the air and water to increase his own powers of locomotion, has become a cosmopolitan being, and made the human race reflect the unity of atmosphere and hydrosphere.

Always the eternal unrest of the moving waters has knocked at the door of human inertia to arouse the sleeper within; always the flow of stream and the ebb of tide have sooner or later stirred the curiosity of the land-born barbarian about the unseen destination of these marching waters. Rivers by the mere force of gravity have carried him to the sh.o.r.es of their common ocean, and placed him on this highway of the world. Then from his sea-girt home, whether island or continent, he has timidly or involuntarily followed the track which headland-dotted coast, or ocean current, or monsoon, or trade wind marked out for him across the pathless waters, so that at the gray dawn of history he appears as a cosmopolite, occupying every part of the habitable earth.

These sporadic oversea wanderings, with intervals of centuries or milleniums between, opened to his occupancy strange and remote lands, in whose isolation and new environment he developed fresh variations of mind, body and cultural achievements, to arm him with new weapons in the struggle for existence. The sea which brought him bars him for a few ages from his old home, till the tradition of his coming even is lost.

Then with higher nautical development, the sea loses its barrier nature; movements of people, and trade recross its surface to unite those who have been long severed and much differentiated in their mutual remoteness. The ensuing friction and mingling weed out the less fit variations of each, and combine in the new race the qualities able to fortify a higher type of man. Not only seas and oceans, but also mountains and deserts serve to isolate the migrant people who once has crossed them; but wastes of water raise up the most effective barriers.

[Sidenote: Oceans and seas in universal history.]

The transformation of the ocean into a highway by the development of navigation is a late occurrence in the history of man and is perhaps the highest phase of his adaptation to environment, because an adaptation which has placed at his disposal that vast water area const.i.tuting three-fourths of the earth's surface from which he had previously been excluded. Moreover, it was adaptation to an alien and hostile element, whose violent displays of power recurrently stimulated the human adjustment between attack and defense.

Because adaptation to the sea has been vastly more difficult than to the land, commensurate with the harder struggle it has brought greater intellectual and material rewards. This conquest of the sea is ent.i.tled to a peculiarly high place in history, because it has contributed to the union of the various peoples of the world, has formed a significant part of the history of man, whether that history is economic, social, political or intellectual. Hence history has always staged its most dramatic acts upon the margin of seas and oceans; here always the plot thickens and gives promise of striking development. Rome of the seven hills pales before England of the "Seven Seas."

[Sidenote: The sea in universal history.]

Universal history loses half its import, remains an aggregate of parts, fails to yield its significance as a whole, if it does not continually take into account the unifying factor of the seas. Indeed, no history is ent.i.tled to the name of universal unless it includes a record of human movements and activities on the ocean, side by side with those on the land. Our school text-books in geography present a deplorable hiatus, because they fail to make a definite study of the oceans over which man explores and colonizes and trades, as well as the land on which he plants and builds and sleeps.

The striking fact about the great World Ocean to-day is the manifold relations which it has established between the dwellers on its various coasts. Marine cables, steamer and sailing routes combine to form a network of paths across the vast commons of the deep. Over these the commercial, political, intellectual, or even purely migrant activities of human life move from continent to continent. The distinctive value of the sea is that it promotes many-sided relations as opposed to the one-sided relation of the land. France on her eastern frontier comes into contact with people of kindred stock, living under similar conditions of climate and soil to her own; on her maritime border she is open to intermittent intercourse with all continents and climes and races of the world. To this sea border must be ascribed the share that France has taken in the history of North and South America, the West Indies, North and Equatorial Africa, India, China and the South Seas. So we find the great maritime peoples of the world, from the Phoenicians to the English, each figuring in the history of the world of its day, and helping weave into a web of universal history the stories of its various parts.

[Sidenote: Origin of navigation.]

Man's normal contact with the sea is registered in his nautical achievements. The invention of the first primitive means of navigation, suggested by a floating log or bloated body of a dead animal, must have been an early achievement, of a great many peoples who lived near the water, or who in the course of their wanderings found their progress obstructed by rivers; it belongs to a large cla.s.s of similar discoveries which answer urgent and constantly recurring needs. It was, in all probability, often made and as often lost again, until a growing habit of venturing beyond sh.o.r.e or river bank in search of better fishing, or of using the easy open waterways through the thick tangle of a primeval forest to reach fresh hunting grounds, established it as a permanent acquisition.

[Sidenote: Primitive forms.]

The first devices were simply floats or rafts, made of light wood, reeds, or the hollow stems of plants woven together and often buoyed up by the inflated skins of animals. Floats of this character still survive among various peoples, especially in poorly timbered lands. The skin rafts which for ages have been the chief means of downstream traffic on the rivers of Mesopotamia, consist of a square frame-work of interwoven reeds and branches, supported by the inflated skins of sheep and goats;[528] they are guided by oars and poles down or across the current.

These were the primitive means by which Layard transported his winged bull from the ruins of Nineveh down to the Persian Gulf, and they were the same which he found on the bas-reliefs of the ancient capital, showing the methods of navigation three thousand years ago.[529] Similar skin rafts serve as ferry boats on the Sutlej, Shajok and other head streams of the Indus.[530] They reappear in Africa as the only form of ferry used by the Moors on the River Morbeya in Morocco; on the Nile, where the inflated skins are supplanted by earthen pots;[531] and on the Yo River of semi-arid Sudan, where the platform is made of reeds and is buoyed up by calabashes fastened beneath.[532]

[Sidenote: Primitive craft in arid lands.]

In treeless lands, reeds growing on the margins of streams and lakes are utilized for the construction of boats. The Buduma islanders of Lake Chad use clumsy skiffs eighteen feet long, made of hollow reeds tied into bundles and then lashed together in a way to form a slight cavity on top.[533] In the earliest period of Egyptian history this type of boat with slight variations was used in the papyrus marshes of the Nile,[534]

and it reappears as the ambatch boat which Schweinfurth observed on the upper White Nile.[535] It is in use far away among the Sayads or Fowlers, who inhabit the reed-grown rim of the Sistan Lake in arid Persia.[536] As the Peruvian balsa, it has been the regular means of water travel on Lake t.i.ticaca since the time of the Incas, and in more primitive form it appears among the Shoshone Indians of the Snake River Valley of Idaho, who used this device in their treeless land to cross the streams, when the water was too cold for swimming.[537] Still cruder rafts of reeds, without approach to boat form, were the sole vehicles of navigation among the backward Indians of San Francis...o...b..y, and were the prevailing craft among the coast Indians farther south and about the Gulf of Lower California.[538] Trees abounded; but these remnant tribes of low intelligence, probably recent arrivals on the coast from the interior, equipped only with instruments of bone and stone, found the difficulty of working with wood prohibitive.

The second step in the elaboration of water conveyance was made when mere flotation was succeeded by various devices to secure displacement.

The evolution is obvious. The primitive raftsman of the Mesopotamian rivers wove his willow boughs and osiers into a large, round basket form, covered it with closely sewn skins to render it water-tight, and in it floated with his merchandise down the swift current from Armenia to Babylon. These were the boats which Herodotus saw on the Euphrates,[539] and which survive to-day.[540] According to Pliny, the ancient Britons used a similar craft, framed of wicker-work and covered with hide, in which they crossed the English and Irish channels to visit their kinsfolk on the opposite sh.o.r.es. This skin boat or coracle or currach still survives on the rivers of Wales and the west coast of Ireland, where it is used by the fishermen and considered the safest craft for stormy weather.[541] It recalls the "bull-skin boat" used in pioneer days on the rivers of our western plains, and the skiffs serving as pa.s.senger ferries to-day on the rivers of eastern Tibet.[542] It reappears among the Arikara Indians of the upper Missouri,[543] and the South American tribes of the Gran Chaco.[544] The first wooden boat was made of a tree trunk, hollowed out either by fire or axe. The wide geographical distribution of the dug-out and its survival in isolated regions of highly civilized lands point it out as one of those necessary and obvious inventions that must have been made independently in various parts of the world.

[Sidenote: Relation of the river to marine navigation.]

The quieter water of rivers and lakes offered the most favorable conditions for the feeble beginnings of navigation, but the step from inland to marine navigation was not always taken. The Egyptians, who had well-constructed river and marine boats, resigned their maritime commerce to Phoenicians and Greeks, probably, as has been shown, because the silted channels and swamps of the outer Nile delta held them at arm's length from the sea. Similarly the equatorial lakes of Central Africa have proved fair schools of navigation, where the art has pa.s.sed the initial stages of development. The kingdom of Uganda on Victoria Nyanza, at the time of Stanley's visit, could muster a war fleet of 325 boats, a hundred of them measuring from fifty to seventy feet in length; the largest were manned by a crew of sixty-four paddlers and could carry as many more fighting men.[545] The long plateau course of the mighty Congo has bred a race of river navigators, issuing from their riparian villages to attack the traveler in big flotillas of canoes ranging from fifty to eighty-five feet in length, the largest of them driven through the water by eighty paddlers and steered by eight more paddles in the stern.[546] But the Congo and lake boats are barred from the coast by a series of cataracts, which mark the pa.s.sage of the drainage streams down the escarpment of the plateau.

[Sidenote: r.e.t.a.r.ded navigation.]

There are peoples without boats or rafts of any description. Among this cla.s.s are the Central Australians, Bushmen, navigation. Hottentots and Kaffirs of arid South Africa,[547] and with few exceptions also the Damaras. Even the coast members of these tribes only wade out into the shallow water on the beach to spear fish. The traveler moving northward from Cape Town through South Africa, across its few scant rivers, goes all the way to Ngami Lake before he sees anything resembling a canoe, and then only a rude dugout. Still greater is the number of people who, though inhabiting well indented coasts, make little use of contact with the sea. Navigation, unknown to many Australian coast tribes, is limited to miserable rafts of mangrove branches on the northwest seaboard, and to imperfect bark canoes with short paddles on the south; only in the north where Malayan influences are apparent does the hollowed tree-stem with outrigger appear.[548] This r.e.t.a.r.dation is not due to fear, because the South Australian native, like the Fuegian, ventures several miles out to sea in his frail canoe; it is due to that deep-seated inertia which characterizes all primitive races, and for which the remote, outlying location of peninsular South America, Southern Africa and Australia, before the arrival of the Europeans, afforded no antidote in the form of stimulating contact with other peoples. But the Irish, who started abreast of the other northern Celts in nautical efficiency, who had advantages of proximity to other sh.o.r.es, and in the early centuries of their history sailed to the far-away Faroes and even to Iceland, peopled southern Scotland by an oversea emigration, made piratical descents upon the English coast, and in turn received colonies of bold Scandinavian mariners, suffered an arrested development in navigation, and failed to become a sea-faring folk.

[Sidenote: Regions of advanced navigation.]

Turning from these regions of merely rudimentary navigation and inquiring where the highest efficiency in the art was obtained before the spread of Mediterranean and European civilization, we find that this distinction belongs to the great island world of the Pacific and to the neighboring lands of the Indian Ocean. Sailing vessels and outrigger boats of native design and construction characterize the whole sea-washed area of Indo-Malaysian civilization from Malacca to the outermost isles of the Pacific. The eastern rim of Asia, also, belongs to this wide domain of nautical efficiency, and the coast Indians of southern Alaska and British Columbia may possibly represent an eastern spur of the same,[549] thrown out in very remote times and maintained by the advantageous geographic conditions of that indented, mountainous coast. Adjoining this area on the north is the long-drawn Arctic seaboard of the Eskimo, who unaided have developed in their sealskin kayak and bidarka sea-going craft unsurpa.s.sed for the purposes of marine hunting and fishing, and who display a fearlessness and endurance born of long and enforced intimacy with the deep. Driven by the frozen deserts of his home to seek his food chiefly in the water, the Eskimo, nevertheless, finds his access to the sea barred for long months of winter by the jagged ice-pack along the sh.o.r.e.

[Sidenote: Geographic conditions in Polynesia.]

The highest degree of intimacy is developed in that vast island-strewn stretch of the Pacific const.i.tuting Oceanica.[550] Here where a mild climate enables the boatman race to make a companion of the deep, where every landscape is a seascape, where every diplomatic visit or war campaign, every trading journey or search for new coco-palm plantation means a voyage beyond the narrow confines of the home island, there dwells a race whose splendid chest and arm muscles were developed in the gymnasium of the sea; who, living on a paltry 515,000 square miles (1,320,300 square kilometers) of scattered fragments of land, but roaming over an ocean area of twenty-five million square miles, are not more at home in their palm-wreathed islets than on the encompa.s.sing deep. Migrations, voluntary and involuntary, make up their history.

Their trained sense of locality, enabling them to make voyages several hundred miles from home, has been mentioned by various explorers in Polynesia. The Marshall Islanders set down their geographical knowledge in maps which are fairly correct as to bearings but not as to distances.

The Ralick Islanders of this group make charts which include islands, routes and currents.[551] Captain Cook was impressed by the geographical knowledge of the people of the South Seas. A native Tahitian made for him a chart containing seventy-four islands, and gave an account of nearly sixty more.[552] Information and directions supplied by natives have aided white explorers to many discoveries in these waters. Quiros, visiting the Duff Islands in 1606, learned the location of Ticopia, one of the New Hebrides group, three hundred miles away. Not only the excellent seamanship and the related pelagic fishing of the Polynesians bear the stamp of their predominant water environment; their mythology, their conception of a future state, the germs of their astronomical science, are all born of the sea.

Though the people living on the uttermost boundaries of this island world are 6,000 miles (or 10,000 kilometers) apart, and might be expected to be differentiated by the isolation of their island habitats, nevertheless they all have the same fundamental characteristics of physique, language and culture from Guam to Easter Isle, reflecting in their unity the oneness of the encompa.s.sing ocean over which they circulate.[553]

[Sidenote: Mediterranean versus Atlantic seamanship.]

Midway between these semi-aquatic Polynesians and those Arctic tribes who are forced out upon the deep, to struggle with it rather than a.s.sociate with it, we find the inhabitants of the Mediterranean islands and peninsulas, who are favored by the mild climate and the tideless, fogless, stormless character of their sea. While such a body of water invites intimacy, it does not breed a hardy or bold race of navigators; it is a nursery, scarcely a training school. Therefore, except for the far-famed Dalmatian sailors, who for centuries have faced the storms sweeping down from the Dinaric Alps over the turbulent surface of the Adriatic, Mediterranean seamanship does not command general confidence on the high seas. Therefore it is the German, English and Dutch steamship lines that are to-day the chief ocean carriers from Italian ports to East Africa, Asia, Australia, North and South America, despite the presence of native lines running from Genoa to Buenos Ayres.

Montevideo and New York; just as it was the Atlantic states of Europe, and only these and all of these, except Germany, who, trained to venture out into the fogs and storms and unmarked paths of the _mare tenebrosum_, partic.i.p.ated in the early voyages to the Americas. One after the other they came--Norwegians, Spaniards, Portuguese, English, French, Dutch, Swedes and Danes. The anthropo-geographical principle is not invalidated by the fact that Spain and England were guided in their initial trans-Atlantic voyages by Italian navigators, like Columbus, Cabot and Amerigo Vespucci. The long maritime experience of Italy and its commercial relations with the Orient, reaching back into ancient times, furnished abundant material for the researches and speculations of such practical theorists; but Italy's location fixed the sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean as her natural horizon, narrowed her vision to its shorter radius. Her obvious interest in the preservation of the old routes to the Orient made her turn a deaf ear to plans aiming to divert European commerce to trans-Atlantic routes. Italy's entrance upon the high seas was, therefore, reluctant and late, r.e.t.a.r.ded by the necessity of outgrowing the old circ.u.mscribed outlook of the enclosed basin before adopting the wider vision of the open ocean. Venice and Genoa were crippled not only by the discovery of the sea route to India, but also by their adherence to old thala.s.sic means and methods of navigation inadequate for the high seas.[554] However, these Mediterranean sea folk are being gradually drawn out of their seclusion, as is proved by the increase of Italian oceanic lines and the recent installation of an h.e.l.lenic steamship line between Piraeus and New York.

[Sidenote: Three geographic stages of maritime development.]

The size of a sea or ocean is a definite factor in its power to attract or repel maritime ventures, especially in the earlier stages of nautical development. A broken, indented coast means not only a longer and broader zone of contact between the inhabitants and the sea; it means also the breaking up of the adjacent expanse of water into so many alcoves, in which fisherman, trader and colonist may become at home, and prepare for maritime ventures farther afield. The enclosed or marginal sea tempts earlier because it can be compa.s.sed by coastwise navigation; then by the proximity of its opposite sh.o.r.es and its usual generous equipment with islands, the next step to crosswise navigation is encouraged. For the earliest stages of maritime development, only the smaller articulations of the coast and the insh.o.r.e fringe of sea inlets count. This is shown in the primitive voyages of the Greeks, before they had ventured into the Euxine or west of the forbidding Cape Malia; and in the "inside pa.s.sage" navigation of the Indians of southern Alaska, British Columbia, and Chile, who have never stretched their nautical ventures beyond the outermost rocks of their skerry-walled coast.

[Sidenote: Influence of enclosed seas upon navigation.]

A second stage is reached when an enclosed basin is at, hand to widen the maritime horizon, and when this larger field is exploited in all its commercial, colonial and industrial possibilities, as was done by the Phoenicians and Greeks in the Mediterranean, the Hanse Towns in the Baltic, the Dutch and English in the North Sea. The third and final stage is reached when the nursery of the insh.o.r.e estuary or gulf and the elementary school of the enclosed basin are in turn outgrown, and the larger maritime spirit moves on to the open ocean for its field of operation. It is a significant fact that the Norse, bred to the water in their fiords and channels behind their protecting "skerry-wall," then trained in the stormy basins of the North and Irish Seas, were naturally the first people of Europe to cross the Atlantic, because the Atlantic of their sh.o.r.es, narrowing like all oceans and seas toward the north, a.s.sumes almost the character of an enclosed basin. The distance from Norway to Greenland is only 1,800 miles, little more than that across the Arabian Sea between Africa and India. We trace, therefore, a certain a.n.a.logy between the physical subdivisions of the world of water into inlet, marginal sea and ocean, and the anthropo-geographical gradations in maritime development.

The enclosed or marginal sea seems a necessary condition for the advance beyond coastwise navigation and the much later step to the open ocean.

Continents without them, like Africa, except for its frontage upon the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, have shown no native initiative in maritime enterprise. Africa was further cursed by the mockery of desert coasts along most of her scant thala.s.sic sh.o.r.es. In the Americas, we find the native races compa.s.sing a wide maritime field only in the Arctic, where the fragmentary character of the continent breaks up the ocean into Hudson's Bay, Davis Strait, Baffin Bay, Gulf of Boothia, Melville Sound and Bering Sea; and in the American Mediterranean of the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. The excellent seamanship developed in the archipelagoes of southern Alaska and Chile remained abortive for maritime expansion, despite a paucity of local resources and the spur of hunger, owing to the lack of a marginal sea; but in the Caribbean basin, the Arawaks and later the Caribs spread from the southern mainland as far as Cuba.[555] [See map page 101.]

[Sidenote: Enclosed seas as areas of ethnic and cultural a.s.similation.]

Enclosed or marginal seas were historically the most important sections of the ocean prior to 1492. Apart from the widening of the maritime horizon which they give to their bordering people, each has the further advantage of const.i.tuting an area of close vicinal grouping and constant interchange of cultural achievements, by which the civilization of the whole basin tends to become elevated and unified. This unification frequently extends to race also, owing to the rapidity of maritime expansion and the tendency to ethnic amalgamation characteristic of all coast regions. We recognize an area of Mediterranean civilization from the Isthmus of Suez to the Sacred Promontory of Portugal, and in this area a long-headed, brunette Mediterranean race, clearly unified as to stock, despite local differentiations of culture, languages and nations in the various islands, peninsulas and other segregated coastal regions of this sea.[556] The basin appears therefore as an historical whole; for in it a certain group of peoples concentrated their common efforts, which crossed and criss-crossed from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e. Phoenicia's trade ranged westward to the outer coasts of Spain, and later Barcelona's maritime enterprises reached east to the Levant. Greece's commercial and colonial relations embraced the Crimea and the mouth of the Rhone, and Genoa's extended east to the Crimea again. The Saracens, on reaching the Mediterranean edge of the Arabian peninsula, swept the southern coasts and islands, swung up the western rim of the basin to the foot of the Pyrenees, and taught the sluggish Spaniards the art of irrigation practiced on the garden slopes of Yemen. The ships of the Crusaders from Venice, Genoa and Ma.r.s.eilles anch.o.r.ed in the ports of Mohammedanized Syria, brought the symbol of the cross back to its birthplace In Jerusalem, but carried away with them countless suggestions from the finished industries of the East. Here was give and take, expansion and counter-expansion, conquest and expulsion, all together making up a great sum of reciprocal relations embracing the whole basin, the outcome of that close geographical connection which every sharply defined sea establishes between the coasts which it washes.

[Sidenote: North Sea and Baltic basins.]

The same thing has come to pa.s.s in the North Sea. Originally Celtic on its western or British side, as opposed to its eastern or Germanic coast, it has been wholly Teutonized on that flank also from the Strait of Dover to the Firth of Tay, and sprinkled with Scandinavian settlers from the Firth of Tay northward to Caithness.[557] The eleventh century saw this ethnic unification achieved, and the end of the Middle Ages witnessed the diffusion of the elements of a common civilization through the agency of commerce from Bruges to Bergen. The Baltic, originally Teutonic only on its northern and western sh.o.r.es, has in historical times become almost wholly Teutonic, including even the seaboard of Finland and much of the coast provinces of Russia.[558] Unification of civilization attended this unification of race. In its period of greatest historical significance from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, the Baltic played the role of a northern Mediterranean.[559] The countless shuttles of the Hanse ships wove a web of commercial intercourse between its remotest sh.o.r.es. Novgorod and Abo were in constant communication with Lubeck and Stralsund;[560] and Wisby, on the island of Gotland at the great crossroads of the Baltic,[561] had the focal significance of the Piraeus in ancient Aegean trade.