Influences of Geographic Environment Part 38

The presence of the great waterways of Canada and the demand of the fur trade for extensive and easy communication made the early French colonists as distinctly a riverine people as the savage Congo tribes.

Like these, they stretched out their villages in a single line of cabins and clearings, three or four miles long, facing the river, which was the King's highway. Such a village was called a _cote_. One cote ran into the next, for their expansion was always longitudinal, never lateral.

These riparian settlements lined the main watercourses of French Canada, especially the St. Lawrence, whose sh.o.r.es from Beaupre, fifteen miles below Quebec, up to Montreal at an early date presented the appearance of a single street. Along the river pa.s.sed the stately trading ship from France with its cargo of wives and merchandise for the colonists, the pirogue of the _habitant_ farmer carrying his onions and grain to the Quebec market, the birchbark canoe of the adventurous voyageur bringing down his winter's hunt of furs from the snow-bound forests of the interior, and the fleet of Jesuit priests bound to some remote inland mission.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE RIPARIAN VILLAGES OF THE LOWER ST. LAWRENCE.]

On this water thoroughfare every dwelling faced. Hence land on the river was at a premium, while that two miles back was to be had for the taking. The original grants measured generally 766 feet in width and 7,660 in depth inland; but when bequeathed from generation to generation, they were divided up along lines running back at right angles to the all important waterway. Hence each _habitant_ farm measured its precious river-front by the foot and its depth by the mile, while the cabins were ranged side by side in cosy neighborliness. The _cote_ type of village, though eminently convenient for the Indian trade, was ill adapted for government and defense against the savages; but the need for the communication supplied by the river was so fundamental, that it nullified all efforts of the authorities to concentrate the colonists in more compact settlements. Parkman says: "One could have seen almost every house in Canada by paddling a canoe up the St. Lawrence and Richelieu."[709] The same type of land-holding can be traced to-day on the Chaudiere River, where the fences run back from the stream like the teeth of a comb. It is reproduced on a larger scale in the long, narrow counties ranged along the lower St. Lawrence, whose shape points to the old fluvial nuclei of settlement. Similarly the early Dutch grants on the Hudson gave to the patroons four miles along the river and an indefinite extension back from the stream. In the early Connecticut River settlements, the same consideration of a share in the river and its alluvial bottoms distributed the town lots among the inhabitants in long narrow strips running back from the banks.[710]

[Sidenote: Boatmen tribes or castes.]

In undeveloped countries, where rivers are the chief highways, we occasionally see the survival of a distinct race of boatmen amid an intruding people of different stock, preserved in their purity by their peculiar occupation, which has given them the aloofness of a caste. In the Kw.a.n.g-tung province of southern China are 40,000 Tanka boat people, who live in boats and pile-dwellings in the Canton River. The Chinese, from whom they are quite distinct, regard them as a remnant of the original population, which was dislodged by their invasion and forced to take refuge on the water. They gradually established intercourse with the conquerors of the land, but held themselves aloof. They marry only among themselves, have their own customs, and enjoy a practical monopoly of carrying pa.s.sengers and messages between the steamers and the sh.o.r.e at Macao, Hongkong and Canton.[711] In the same way, the middle Niger above Gao possesses a distinct aquatic people, the Somnos or Bosos, who earn their living as fishermen and boatmen on the river. They spread their villages along the Niger and its tributaries, and occupy separate quarters in the large towns like Gao and Timbuctoo. They are creatures of the river rather than of the land, and show great skill and endurance in paddling and poling their narrow dugouts on their long Niger voyages.[712]

Reference has been made before to the large river population of China who live on boats and rafts, and forward the trade of the vast inland waterways. These are people, differentiated not in race, but in occupation and mode of life, constantly recruited from the congested population of the land. Allied to them are the trackers or towing crews whose villages form a distinctive feature of the turbulent upper Yangtze, and who are employed, sometimes three hundred at a time, to drag junks up the succession of rapids above Ichang.[713] Similarly the complex of navigable waterways centering about Paris, as far back as the reign of Tiberius Caesar, gave rise to the _Nautae Parisii_ or guild of mariners, from whom the city of Paris derived its present coat of arms--a vessel under full sail. These Lutetian boatmen handled the river traffic in all the territory drained by the Seine, Marne, and Oise.

Later, in the reign of Louis the Fat, they were succeeded by the _Mercatores aquae Parisiaci_, and from them sprang the munic.i.p.al body appointed to regulate the river navigation and commerce.[714]

[Sidenote: River islands as protected sites.]

The location of the ancient tribe of the Parisii is typical of many other weak riverine folk who seek in the islands of a river a protected position to compensate for their paucity of number. The Parisii, one of the smallest of the Gallic tribes, ill-matched against their populous neighbors, took refuge on ten islands and sandbars of the Seine and there established themselves.[715] Stanley found an island in the Congo near the second cataract of Stanley Falls occupied by five villages of the Baswa, who had taken refuge there from the attacks of the bloodthirsty Bak.u.ma.[716] During the Tartar invasions of Russia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, bands of refugees from the surrounding country gathered for mutual defense on the islands of the Dnieper River, and became the nucleus of the Dnieper Cossacks.[717] The Huron tribe of American Indians, reduced to a mere fragment by repeated Iroquois attacks, fled first to the islands of St. Joseph and Michilimackinac in Lake Huron, and in 1856 to the Isle of Orleans in the St. Lawrence. But even this location under the guns of their French allies in Quebec failed to protect them, for the St. Lawrence was a highway for the war fleets of their implacable foe.[718]

[Sidenote: River and lake islands as robber strongholds.]

A river island not only confers the negative benefit of protection, but affords a coign of vantage for raids on the surrounding country, being to some extent proof against punitive attacks. It offers special facilities for depredations on parties crossing the river; here the divided current, losing something of its force, is less of an obstacle, and the island serves as a resting place on the pa.s.sage. Immunity from punishment breeds lawlessness. The Ba Toka who, fifty years ago, inhabited the islands in the great southern bend of the Zambesi, utilized their location to lure wandering tribes on to their islands, under the pretext of ferrying them across, and then to rob them, till Sebituane, the great Makololo chief, cleaned out their fastnesses and opened the river for trade.[719] The islands in the wide stretches of the Lualaba River in the Babemba country were described to Livingstone as harboring a population of marauders and robbers, who felt themselves safe from attack.[720] The same unenviable reputation attaches to the Budumas of the Lake Chad islands. A weak, timid, displaced people, they nevertheless lose no chance of raiding the herds of the Sudanese tribes inhabiting the sh.o.r.es of the Lake, and carrying off the stolen cattle on their wretched rafts to their island retreats.[721]

[Sidenote: River peninsulas as protected sites.]

The protection of an island location is almost equalled in the peninsulas formed by the serpentines or meanders of a river. Hence these are choice sites for fortress or settlement in primitive communities, where hostilities are always imminent and rivers the sole means of communication. The defensive works of the mound-builders in great numbers occupied such river peninsulas. The neck of the loop was fortified by a single or double line of ditch and earthen wall, constructed from bank to bank of the encircling stream.[722] This was exactly the location of Vesontio, now Besancon, once the ancient stronghold of the Sequani in eastern Gaul. It was situated in a loop of the Dubis, so nearly a circle that its course seems to have been "described by a compa.s.s," Caesar says, while fortifications across the isthmus made the position of the town almost impregnable.[723] Verona, lying at the exit of the great martial highway of the Brenner Pa.s.s, occupies just such a loop of the Adige, as does Capua on the Volturno, and Berne on the Aare. Shrewsbury, in the Middle Ages an important military point for the preservation of order on the marches of Wales, is almost encircled by the River Severn, while a castle on the neck of the peninsula completes the defense on the land side.[724] Graaf Reinett, at one time an exposed frontier settlement of the Dutch in Cape Colony, had a natural moat around it in the Sunday River, which here describes three-fourths of a circle.

[Sidenote: River islands as sites of trading posts and colonies.]

The need of protection felt by all colonists in new countries amid savage or barbarous people whom encroachment sooner or later makes hostile, leads them if possible to place their first trading posts and settlements on river islands, especially at the mouth of the streams, where a delta often affords the site required, and where the junction of ocean and river highway offers the best facilities for trade. A river island fixed the location of the English settlement at Jamestown in Virginia, the French at Montreal and New Orleans, the Dutch at Manhattan and Van Renssellaer Island in the Hudson, the Swedes at Tinic.u.m Island in the Delaware River a few miles below the mouth of the Schuylkill.[725]

St. Louis, located on a delta island of the Senegal River, is one of the oldest European towns in West Africa;[726] and Bathurst, founded in 1618 on a similar site at the mouth of the Gambia, has for centuries now been the safe outlet for the trade of this stream.[727] Such island settlements at river mouths are a phenomenon of the outer edge of every coastal region; but inland stations for trade or military control also seek the protection of an island site. The Russians in the seventeenth century secured their downstream conquest of the Amur by a succession of river island forts,[728] which recall Colonel Byrd's early frontier post on an island in the Holston River, and George Rogers Clark's military stockade on Corn Island in the Ohio, which became the nucleus of the later city of Louisville.

[Sidenote: Swamps as barriers and boundaries.]

More effective than rivers in the protection which they afford are swamps. Neither solid land nor navigable water, their sluggish, pa.s.sive surface raises an obstacle of pure inertia to the movements of mankind.

Hence they form one of those natural boundaries that segregate. In southern England, Ronmey Marsh, reinforced by the Wealden Forest, fixed the western boundary of the ancient Saxon kingdom of Kent by blocking expansion in that direction, just as the bordering swamps of the Lea and Colne rivers formed the eastern and western boundaries of Middles.e.x.[729] The Fenland of the Wash, which extended in Saxon days from the highland about Lincoln south to Cambridge and Newmarket, served to hem in the Angles of Norfolk and Suffolk on the west, so that the occupation of the interior was left to later bands who entered by the estuaries of the Humber and Forth.[730] In northern Germany, the low cross valleys of the Spree, Havel and Netze rivers, bordered by alder swamps, were long a serious obstacle to communication, and therefore became boundaries of districts,[731] just as the Bourtanger Moor drew the dividing line between Holland and Hanover.

[Sidenote: Swamps as regions of survival.]

Swamp-bordered regions, as areas of natural isolation, guard and keep intact the people which they hold. Therefore they are regions of survival of race and language. The scattered islets of the Fens of England furnished an asylum to the early British Celts from Teutonic attacks,[732] and later protected them against dominant infusion of Teutonic blood. Hence to-day in the Fenland and in the district just to the south we find a darker, shorter people than in the country to the east or west.[733] Similarly the White Russians, occupying the poor, marshy region of uncertain watershed between the sources of the Duna, Dnieper and Volga, have the purest blood of all the eastern Slavs, though this distinction is coupled with poverty and r.e.t.a.r.ded culture,[734] a combination that anthropo-geography often reveals.

Wholly distinct from the Russians and segregated from them by a barrier of swampy forests, we find the Letto-Lithuanians in the Baltic province of Courland, speaking the most primitive form of flectional languages cla.s.sed as Aryan. The isolation which preserved their archaic speech, of all European tongues the nearest to the Sanskrit, made them the last European people to accept Christianity.[735] The great race of the Slavic Wends, who once occupied all northern Germany between the Vistula and Elbe, has left only a small and declining remnant of its language in the swampy forests about the sources of the Spree.[736] [See ethnographical map, p. 223.] The band of marshlands stretching through Holland from the shallow Zuyder Zee east to the German frontier, has given to Friesland and the coast islands of Holland a peculiar isolation, which has favored the development and survival of the peculiar Friesian dialect, that speech so nearly allied to Saxon English, and has preserved here the purest type of the tall, blond Teuton among the otherwise mixed stock of the Netherlands.[737]

[Sidenote: Swamps as places of refuge.]

Inaccessible to all except those familiar with their treacherous paths and labyrinthine channels, swamps have always afforded a refuge for individuals and peoples; and therefore as places of defense they have played no inconspicuous part in history. What the Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and the cypress swamps of Louisiana were to the run-away slaves, that the Everglades of Florida have been to the defeated Seminoles. In that half-solid, half-fluid area, penetrable only to the native Indian who poles his canoe along its tortuous channels of liquid mud, the Seminoles have set up their villages on the scattered hummocks of solid land, and there maintained themselves, a tribe of 350 souls, despite all efforts of the United States government to remove them to the Indian Territory. The swamps of the Nile delta have been the asylum of Egyptian independence from the time King Amysis took refuge there for fifty years during an invasion of the Ethiopians,[738] to the retreat thither of Amyrtaeus, a prince of Sais, after his unsuccessful revolt against the Persian conqueror Artaxerxes I.[739] The Isle of Athelney among the marshes of the Parret River afforded a refuge to Alfred the Great and a band of his followers during the Danish invasion of Wess.e.x in 878,[740] while the Isle of Ely in the Fenland was another point of sustained resistance to the invaders. It was the Fenland that two hundred years later was the last stronghold of Saxon resistance to William of Normandy. Here on the Isle of Ely the outlawed leader Hereward maintained Saxon independence, till the Conqueror at last constructed a long causeway across the marshes to the "Camp of Refuge."[741]

[Sidenote: The spirit of the marshes.]

The spirit of the marshlands is the spirit of freedom. Therefore these small and scarcely habitable portions of the land a.s.sume an historical dignity and generate stirring historical events out of all proportion to their size and population. Their content is ethical rather than economic. They attract to their fastnesses the vigorous souls protesting against conquest or oppression, and then by their natural protection sustain and nourish the spirit of liberty. It was the water-soaked lowlands of the Rhine that enabled the early Batavians,[742] Ditmarscher and Frieslanders to a.s.sert and to maintain their independence, generated the love of Independence among the Dutch and helped them defend their liberty against the Spanish[743] and French. So the Fenland of England was the center of resistance to the despotism of King John, who therefore fixed his headquarters for the suppression of the revolt at Lincoln and his military depot at Lynn. Later in the conflict of the barons with Henry III, Simon de Montfort and other disaffected n.o.bles entrenched themselves in the islands of Ely and Axholm, till the Provisions of Oxford in 1267 secured them some degree of const.i.tutional rights.[744] Four centuries later the same spirit sent many Fenlanders to the support of Cromwell.

[Sidenote: Economic and political importance of lakes.]

A river that spreads out into the indeterminate earthform of a marsh is an effective barrier; but one that gathers waters into a natural basin and forms a lake retains the uniting power of a navigable stream and also, by the extension of its area and elimination of its current, approaches the nature of an enclosed sea. Mountain rivers, characterized by small volume and turbulent flow, first become navigable when they check their impetuosity and gather their store of water in some lake basin. The whole course of the upper Rhone, from its glacier source on the slope of Mount Furca to its confluence with the Saone at Lyon, is unfit for navigation, except where it lingers in Lake Geneva. The same thing is true of the Reuss in Lake Lucerne, the upper Rhine in Lake Constance, the Aare in Thun and Brienze, and the Linth in Lake Zurich.

Hence such torrent-fed lakes a.s.sume economic and political importance in mountainous regions, owing to the paucity of navigable waterways. The lakes of Alpine Switzerland and Italy and of Highland Scotland form so many centers of intercourse and exchange. Even such small bodies of water as the Alpine lakes have therefore become goals of expansion, so that we find the sh.o.r.es of Geneva, Maggiore, Lugano, and Garda, each shared by two countries. Switzerland, the Austrian Tyrol, and the three German states of Baden, Wurtemberg and Bavaria, have all managed to secure a frontage upon Lake Constance. Lake t.i.ticaca, lying 12,661 feet (3854 meters) above sea level but affording a navigable course 136 miles (220 kilometers) long, is an important waterway for Peru and Bolivia. In the central Sudan, where aridity reduces the volume of all streams, even the variable and indeterminate Lake Chad has been an eagerly sought objective for expanding boundaries. Twenty years ago it was divided among the native states of Bornu, Bagirmi and Kanem; today it is shared by British Nigeria, French Sudan, and German Kamerun. The erratic northern extension of the German boundary betrays the effort to reach this goal.

[Sidenote: Lakes as nuclei of states.]

The uniting power of lakes manifests itself in the tendency of such basins to become the nuclei of states. Attractive to settlement in primitive times, because of the protected frontier they afford--a motive finding its most emphatic expression in the pile villages of the early lake-dwellers--later because of the fertility of their bordering soil and the opportunity for friendly intercourse, they gradually unite their sh.o.r.es in a mesh of reciprocal relations, which finds its ultimate expression in political union. It is a significant fact that the Swiss Confederation originated in the four forest cantons of Lucerne, Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden, which are linked together by the jagged basin of Lake Lucerne or the Lake of the Four Forest Cantons, as the Swiss significantly call it, but are otherwise divided by mountain barriers.

So we find that Lake t.i.ticaca was the cradle of the Inca Empire, just as Lake Tezcoco was that of the Toltecs in Mexico and an island in Lake Chalco later that of the Aztec domain.[745] The most stable of the short-lived native states of Africa have apparently found an element of strength and permanence in a protected lake frontier. Such are the petty kingdoms of Bornu, Bagirmi and Kanem on Lake Chad, and Uganda on Victoria Nyanza.

Large lakes, which include in their area islands, peninsulas, tides, currents, fiords, inlets, deltas, and dunes, and present every geographical feature of an enclosed sea, approach the latter too in historical importance. Some of the largest, however, have long borne the name of seas. The Caspian, which exceeds the Baltic in area, and the Aral, which outranks Lake Michigan, show the closest physical resemblance to thala.s.sic basins, because of their size, salinity and enclosed drainage systems; but their anthropo-geographical significance is slight. The very salinity which groups them with the sea points to an arid climate that forever deprives them of the densely populated coasts characteristic of most enclosed seas, and hence reduces their historical importance. Their tributary streams, robbed of their water by irrigation ca.n.a.ls, like "the shorn and parcelled Oxus", renounce their function of highways into the interior. To this rule the Volga is a unique exception. Finally, cut off from union with the ocean, these salt lakes lose the supreme historical advantage which is maintained by freshwater lakes, like Ladoga, Nya.s.sa, Maracaibo and the Great Lakes of North America, all lying near sea level.

[Sidenote: Lakes as fresh water seas.]

Lakes as part of a system of inland waterways may possess commercial importance surpa.s.sing that of many seas. This depends upon the productivity, accessibility and extent of their hinterland, and this in turn depends upon the size and shape of the inland basin. The chain of the five Great Lakes, which together present a coastline of four thousand miles and a navigable course as long as the Baltic between the Skager Rack and the head of the Gulf of Bothnia, const.i.tutes a freshwater Mediterranean. It has played the part of an enclosed sea in American history and has enabled the Atlantic trade to penetrate 1400 miles inland to Chicago and Duluth. Its sh.o.r.es have therefore been a coveted object of territorial expansion. The early Dutch trading posts headed up the Hudson and Mohawk toward Lake Ontario, as did the English settlements which succeeded them. The French, from their vantage point at Montreal, threw out a frail casting-net of fur stations and missions, which caught and held all the Lakes for a time. Later the American sh.o.r.es were divided among eight of our states. The northern boundaries of Indiana and Illinois were fixed by Congress for the express purpose of giving these commonwealths access to Lake Michigan. Pennsylvania with great difficulty succeeded in protruding her northwestern frontier to cover a meager strip of Erie coast, while New York's frontage on the same lake became during the period of ca.n.a.l and early railroad construction, a great factor in her development.

In 1901, the tonnage of our merchant vessels on the Great Lakes was half that of our Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf coasts combined,[746]

const.i.tuting a freshwater fleet greater than the merchant marine of either France or sea-bred Norway. A remote but by no means faint echo of this fact is found in the five hundred or more boats, equally available for trade or war, which Henry M. Stanley saw the Uganda prince muster on the sh.o.r.e of Victoria Nyanza Lake. Ocean, sea, bay, estuary, river, swamp, lake: here is Nature's great circle returning upon itself, a circle faintly notched into arcs, but one in itself and one in man's uses.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XI

[630] Isabella B. Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. I, pp.

26-27. New York and London, 1900.

[631] Fiske, Discovery of America, Vol. I, p. 492. Boston, 1892.

[632] Capt. James Cook, Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, 1776-1780, Vol. II, pp. 321-332. New York, 1796.

[633] John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, pp. 63-66, 84-86, 95, 96. London, 1904.

[634] E. Lavisse, _Histoire de France_, Vol. II, Part I, pp. 374-375, 378-379, 381-382, 385-386. Paris, 1903.

[635] Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 189-191, map. New York, 1902-1906.

[636] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 192-194.

[637] G.W. Kitchen, History of France, Vol. I, pp. 59-60. Oxford, 1892.

[638] Dietrich Schaeffer, _Die Hansestadte und Konig Waldemar von Danemark_, p. 36. Jena, 1879.

[639] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 311. London, 1904.

[640] Capt. A.T. Mahan, The Problem of Asia, pp. 41, 60, 120. New York, 1900.

[641] Isabella B. Bishop, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, Vol. I, pp.

97-98. New York and London, 1900.

[642] E.C. Semple, Development of the Hanse Towns in Relation to their Geographic Environment, Bulletin Amer. Geog. Soc., Vol. 31. No. 3. 1899.