[Sidenote: Political factors in this decline.]

Not only that far-reaching readjustment of maritime ascendency which in the sixteenth century followed the advance from thalassic 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, Japan 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 Japanese 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 shores. 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 shoreline. The control of the Adriatic passed 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 canal, 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 mass of men and wares passing through these ocean gateways. The shores 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 Canal 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 analysis 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 shores, 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 mass, 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 Seehandelstaedte, 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 Seehandelstaedte, 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 Seehandelstaedte, 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.

[439] W.B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, Vol. I, p. 93. Boston, 1899.

[440] Norway, Official Publication, p. 1. Christiania, 1900.

[441] Ratzel, Deutschland, pp. 150-151. Leipzig, 1898.

[442] J. Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 227-230. London, 1903.

[443] Elisee Reclus, The Earth and Its Inhabitants; Europe, Vol. 1, pp. 370-372. New York, 1886.

[444] Ernst Curtius, History of Greece, Vol. I, pp. 15-20. New York.

[445] Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, Vol. 1, p. 215. Leipzig, 1897.

[446] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 35, 40. London, 1902.

[447] William Morris Davis, Physical Geography, pp. 115-122. Boston, 1899.

[448] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 95. London, 1896-1898.

[449] Strabo, Book XVII, chap. I, 18. Diodorus Siculus, Book I, chap. III, p. 36. London, 1814.

[450] J. Partsch, Central Europe, pp. 96-98. London, 1903. Ratzel, Deutschland, pp. 143-144. Leipzig, 1898.

[451] For geomorphology of coasts, see William Morris Davis, Physical Geography, pp. 112-136, 347-383. Boston, 1899.

[452] Elisee Reclus, Europe, Vol. II, p, 252. New York, 1886.

[453] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 231. London, 1903.

[454] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, pp. 44, 446. London, 1904.

[455] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 1012. New York, 1902. Hereford George, Historical Geography of the British Empire, pp. 278-279. London, 1904.

[456] J.E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages, pp. 123-124. New York, 1884.

[457] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 148. New York, 1902.

[458] Diodorus Siculus, Book V, chap. I, p. 304. London, 1814. Strabo, Book V, chap. VI, 6, 7.

[459] Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 188-189, 193-195. New York, 1902-1906.

[460] Strabo, Book XVI, chap. III, 4, 27. Herodotus, Book I, chap. I; Book VII, chap. 89. J.T. Brent, The Bahrein Islands of the Persian Gulf, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, Vol. XII, pp. 13-16. London, 1890.

[461] George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 169-170. New York, 1897.

[462] Ibid., pp. 179, 185, 286.

[463] Ibid., pp. 127-131.

[464] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 100-102, 132-145. London, 1896-1898.

[465] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 985. New York, 1902.

[466] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, pp. 84, 166. London, 1902.

[467] J. Naken, Die Provinz Kwangtung und ihre Bevoelkerung, Petermanns Geographische Mittheilungen, Vol. 24, pp. 409, 420. 1878. Ferdinand von Richthofen, China, Vol. I, pp. 568-569. Berlin, 1877. Cathay and the Way Thither, Vol. I, p. lxxviii. Hakluyt Society, London, 1866.

[468] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 397. London, 1896-1898. Philippine Census, Vol. I, pp. 438, 481-491. Washington, 1905.

[469] Stanford's Australasia, Vol. II, pp. 103, 121, 126-135, 196. London, 1894. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, p. 547. New York, 1902-1906.

[470] Ibid., Vol. III, pp. 431, 434. Vol. II, p. 603.

[471] Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Handels und Gewerbefleisses, pp. 78-79, 99-100. Stuttgart, 1899. Capt. A.T. Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History, pp. 26-28. Boston, 1902.

[472] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, pp. 111-112, 152. London, 1902.

[473] Ibid., pp. 73-74, 139, 267.

[474] Cathay and the Way Thither, Vol. I, p. LXXX. Hakluyt Society. London, 1866. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, p. 548. New York, 1902-1906.

[475] The Book of Ser Marco Polo, edited by Sir Henry Yule, Vol. II, Book III, pp. 284, 288, 303. New York, 1903.

[476] P. Vidal de la Blache, Geographie de la France, pp. 335-337. Paris, 1903.

[477] Elisee Reclus, Europe, Vol. II, p. 252. New York, 1882.

[478] Norway, Official Publication, pp. 89-91, map p. 4. Christiania, 1900.

[479] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, pp. 114, 140, 163-164, 202, 267. London, 1902.

[480] H.F. Tozer, History of Ancient Geography, pp. 276-280. Cambridge, 1897. Strabo, Book XVI, chap. IV, 2, 19.

[481] Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. III, p. 433. New York, 1902-1906.

[482] James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, pp. 78-82, 99. New York, 1897.

[483] Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, Vol. I, map p. 80. New York, 1893.

[484] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 412-413, 481, 464, 562., Washington, 1905.

[485] Ibid., Vol. I, p. 416.

[486] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, p. 449. London, 1896-1898.

[487] P. Ehrenreich, Die Eintheilung und Verbreitung der Voelkerstaemme Brasiliens, Petermanns Mittheilungen, Vol. 37, pp. 88-89. Gotha, 1891. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, p. 185, map p. 189. New York, 1902-1906.

[488] John Richard Green, The Making of England, Vol. I, chap. I. London, 1904.

[489] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, p. 189. London, 1904. W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 312-315, map. New York, 1899.

[490] D.G. Hogarth, The Nearer East, p. 152. London, 1902. W. Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 402, 404, map. New York, 1899.

[491] Ibid., pp. 117, 404-405, 409-419.

[492] Ibid., pp. 206-208, 210-212. Norway, Official Publication, pp. 80-81. Christiania, 1900.

[493] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. II, p. 52, map p. 50. Washington, 1905.

[494] Grote, History of Greece, Vol. III, pp. 175-176, 186-189. New York, 1857.

[495] Ernst Curtius, History of Greece, Vol. I, pp. 492-493. New York.

[496] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp. 530-533. London, 1896-1898.

[497] H.D. Trail, Social England, Vol. III, pp. 367-368. London and New York, 1895.

[498] Twelfth Census, Bulletin No. 103, table 23. Washington, 1902.

[499] E.C. Semple, American History and Its Geographic Conditions, pp. 314-328. Boston, 1903.

[500] G.G. Chisholm, Commercial Geography, p. 58. London, 1904.

[501] Roscher, National-Oekonomik des Handels und Gewerbefleisses, p. 85, Note 18. Stuttgart, 1899.

[502] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, p. 533. London, 1896-1898.

[503] Ibid., Vol. III, pp. 139, 145.

[504] H.R. Mill, International Geography, p. 869. New York, 1902.

[505] D.G. Brinton, The American Race, p. 107. Philadelphia, 1901. H.H. Bancroft, The Native Races, p. 239, footnote p. 274. San Francisco, 1886.

[506] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Book VIII, chap. II, 6, 7, 9.

[507] J. Scott Keltie, The Partition of Africa, p. 327. London, 1895. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 121-122. London, 1896-1898.

[508] Ibid., Vol. III, pp. 121, 132-133.

[509] Ibid., Vol. II, p. 239.

[510] Eleventh Census, Report on Alaska, p. 70. Washington, 1893.

[511] Ibid., p. 156. E.R. Scidmore, Guidebook to Alaska, p. 94. New; York, 1897.

[512] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 556-561, 575, 581-583. Washington, 1905.

[513] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 85-86, 99-101, map pp. 151-152. New York, 1899.

[514] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 97, 106. New York, 1896-1898.

[515] Henry Gannett, The Peoples of the Philippines, in Report of the Eighth International Geographic Congress, p. 673. Washington, 1904.

[516] A.H. Keane, Africa, Stanford's Compendium, pp. 372-376, 385-388. London, 1895. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. III, pp. 402, 456-457, 462. New York, 1902-1906.

[517] H.H. Bancroft, The Native Races, Vol. I, pp. 440-441; Vol. III, pp. 325, 362. San Francisco, 1886. McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 37-38, 78, 88-89, 95-98. Vol. XIX of History of North America. Philadelphia, 1905.

[518] Grote, History of Greece, Vol. IV, p. 22. New York, 1857.

[519] Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 225, 226.

[520] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. II, pp. 34, 35. Washington, 1905.

[521] Williams and Calvert, Fiji and the Fijians, pp. 81-82. New York, 1859.

[522] Strabo, Book V, chap. I, 7, 8.

[523] Strabo, Book IV, chap. VI, 1, 2; Book V, chap. I, 11.

[524] Dietrich Schaefer, Die Hansestaedte und Koenig Waldemar von Daenemark, pp. 184, 189. Jena, 1879.

[525] W. Deecke, Italy, pp. 89-91. London, 1904.

[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 pass 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 shores. 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 shores 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 constituting 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 entitled 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 entitled 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 class 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 shore 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 Titicaca 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 Francisco Bay, 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 shores. 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 passenger 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 passed 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 passage of the drainage streams down the escarpment of the plateau.

[Sidenote: Retarded navigation.]

There are peoples without boats or rafts of any description. Among this class 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 retardation 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 shores, 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 unsurpassed 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 shore.

[Sidenote: Geographic conditions in Polynesia.]

The highest degree of intimacy is developed in that vast island-strewn stretch of the Pacific constituting 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 encompassing 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 encompassing 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 associate 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, participated 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 shores 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, retarded by the necessity of outgrowing the old circumscribed 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 thalassic 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 Hellenic 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 compassed by coastwise navigation; then by the proximity of its opposite shores 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 inshore 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 passage" 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 inshore 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 shores, narrowing like all oceans and seas toward the north, assumes 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 analogy 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 thalassic shores. In the Americas, we find the native races compassing 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 assimilation.]

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 constituting 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 shore to shore. 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 Marseilles anchored 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 pass 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 shores, 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 shores. Novgorod and Aboe were in constant communication with Luebeck 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.

[Sidenote: Bering Sea.]

If we turn to Asia, we find that even the unfavorable Arctic location of Bering Sea has been unable to rob it entirely of historical significance. This is the one spot where a native American race has transplanted itself by its natural expansion to Asiatic shores. The circular rim and island-dotted surface have guided Eskimo emigrants to the coast of the Chukchian Peninsula, where they have become partly assimilated in dress and language to the local Chukches.[562] The same conditions also facilitated the passage of a few Chukches across Bering Strait to the Alaskan side. At Pak (or Peck) on East Cape and on Diomed Island, situated in the narrowest part of Bering Strait, are the great intercontinental markets of the polar tribes. Here American furs have for many decades been exchanged for the reindeer skins of northern Siberia and Russian goods from far-away Moscow.[563] Only the enclosed character of the sea, reported by the Danish explorer Vitus Bering, tempted the land-bred Russians, who reached the northeastern coast of Siberia at the middle of the eighteenth century, to launch their leaky boats of unseasoned timber, push across to the American continent, and make this whole Bering basin a Russian sea;[564] just as a few decades before, when land exploration of Kamchatka had revealed the enclosed character of the Sea of Okhotsk, the Russian pioneers took a straight course across the water to their Pacific outpost of Petropavlovsk near the southern end of the peninsula. But even before the coming of the Slavs to its shores, the Sea of Okhotsk seems to have been an area of native commercial and ethnic intercourse from the Amur River in Siberia in a half circle to the east, through Sakhalin, Yezo, the Kurile Islands and southern Kamchatka,[565] noticeably where the rim of the basin presented the scantiest supply of land and where, therefore, its meager resources had to be eked out by fisheries and trade on the sea.

[Sidenote: Red Sea basin.]

On the southwest margin of Asia, the Red Sea, despite its desert shores, has maintained the influence of its intercontinental location and linked the neighboring elements of Africa and Asia. Identity of climatic conditions on both sides of this long rift valley has facilitated ethnic exchanges, and made it the center of what Ratzel calls the "Red Sea group of peoples," related in race and culture.[566] The great ethnic solvent here has been Semitic. Under the spur of Islam, the Arabs by 1514 had made the Red Sea an Arabian and Mohammedan sea. They had their towns or trading stations at Zeila on the African side of the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, at Dalaqua, the port of Abyssinia, at Massowa, Suakin, and other towns, so that this coast too was called Arabia Felix.[567]

[Sidenote: Assimilation facilitated by ethnic kinship.]

Vicinal location about an enclosed basin produces more rapidly a unification of race and culture, when some ethnic relationship and affinity already exists among the peoples inhabiting its shores. As in the ancient and medieval Mediterranean, so in the Yellow Sea of Asia, the working of this principle is apparent. The presence along its coasts of divergent but kindred peoples like the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese, allowed these to be easily assimilated to a Yellow Sea race and to absorb quickly any later infusion, like that of the Tatars and Manchus. China, by reason of its larger area, long-drawn coast, massive population, and early civilization, was the dominant factor in this basin; Korea and Japan were its culture colonies-a fact that justifies the phrase calling "China the Rome of the Far East." Historical Japan began on the island of Kiu-sui, facing the Yellow Sea. Like Korea, it derived its writing, its fantastic medical notions, its industrial methods, some features of its government administration, its Buddhism and its religion of Confucius from the people about the lower Hoangho.[568] Three centuries ago Japan had its colony on Korean soil at Fusan, the Calais of the East.[569] For purposes of piracy and smuggling Japanese penetrated far up the rivers of China. Korea has kept in touch with China by an active trade and diplomatic relations through the centuries.

But to-day China is going to school to Japan. Since Japan renounced her policy of seclusion in 1868 along with her antiquated form of government, and since Korea has been forced out of her hermit life, the potency of vicinal location around this enclosed sea has been suddenly restored. The enforced opening of the treaty ports of Japan, Korea and China simply prepared the way for this basin to reassert its power to unite, and to unite now more closely and effectively than ever before, under the law of increasing territorial areas. The stimulus was first communicated to the basin from without, from the trading nations of the Occident and that new-born Orient rising from the sea on the California shores. Japan has responded most promptly and most actively to these over-sea stimuli, just as England has, of all Europe, felt most strongly the reflex influences from trans-Atlantic lands. The awakening of this basin has started, therefore, from its seaward rim; its star has risen in the east. It is in the small countries of the world that such stars rise. The compressed energies of Japan, stirred by over-sea contact and an improved government at home, have overleaped the old barriers and are following the lines of slight resistance which this land-bound sea affords. Helped by the bonds of geographical conditions and of race, she has begun to convert China and Korea into her culture colonies. The on-looking world feels that the ultimate welfare of China and Korea can be best nurtured by Japan, which will thus pay its old debt to the Middle Kingdom.

[Sidenote: Chinese expansion seaward.]

Despite the fact that China's history has always had a decidedly inland character, that its political expansion has been landward, that it has practiced most extensively and successively internal colonization, and that its policy of exclusion has tended to deaden its outlook toward the Pacific, nevertheless China's direct intercourse with the west and its westward-directed influence have never, in point of significance, been comparable with that toward the east and south. Here a succession of marginal seas offered easy water-paths, dotted with way stations, to their outermost rim in Japan, the Philippines and remote Australia. About the South China Sea, the Gulf of Siam, the Sulu, Celebes, and Java Seas, the coastal regions of the outlying islands have for centuries received Chinese goods and culture, and a blend of that obstinately assertive Chinese blood.

The strength of these influences has decreased with every increase of distance from the indented coasts and teeming, seafaring population of South China, and with every decrease in race affinity. They have left only faint traces on the alien shores of far-away Australia. The divergent ethnic stock of the widespread Malay world has been little susceptible to these influences, which are therefore weak in the remoter islands, but clearly discernible on the coasts of the Philippines,[570] Borneo, the nearer Sunda Islands, and the peninsula of Malacca, where the Chinese have had trading colonies for centuries.[571] But in the eastern half of Farther India, which is grouped with China by land as well as by sea, and whose race stock is largely if not purely Mongolian, these influences are very marked, so that the whole continental rim of the South China Sea, from Formosa to the Isthmus of Malacca, is strongly assimilated in race and culture. Tongking, exposed to those modifying influences which characterize all land frontiers, as well as to coastwise intercourse, is in its people and civilization merely a transcript of China. The coast districts and islands of Annam are occupied by Chinese as far as the hills of Cambodia, and the name of Cochin China points to the origin of its predominant population. One-sixth of the inhabitants of Siam are Chinese, some of whom have filtered through the northern border; Bangkok, the capital, has a large Chinese quarter. The whole economic life and no small part of the intellectual life of the eastern face of Farther India south to Singapore is centered in the activity of the Chinese.[572]

[Sidenote: Importance of zonal and continental location.]

The historical significance of an enclosed sea basin depends upon its zonal location and its position in relation to the surrounding lands. We observe a steady decrease of historical importance from south to north through the connected series of the Yellow, Japan, Okhotsk, Bering Seas and the Arctic basin, miscalled ocean. The far-northern location of the Baltic, with its long winters of ice-bound ports and its glaciated lands, retarded its inclusion in the field of history, curtailed its important historical period, and reduced the intensity of its historical life, despite the brave, eager activity of the Hanseatic League. The Mediterranean had the advantage, not only of a more favorable zonal situation, but of a location at the meeting place of three continents and on the line of maritime traffic across the eastern hemisphere from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

[Sidenote: Thalassic character of the Indian Ocean.]

These advantages it shares in some degree with the Indian Ocean, which, as Ratzel justly argues, is not a true ocean, at best only half an ocean. North of the equator, where it is narrowed and enclosed like an inland sea, it loses the hydrospheric and atmospheric characteristics of a genuine ocean. Currents and winds are disorganized by the close-hugging lands. Here the steady northeast trade wind is replaced by the alternating air currents of the northeast and southwest monsoons, which at a very early date[573] enabled merchant vessels to break away from their previous slow, coastwise path, and to strike a straight course on their voyage between Arabia or the east coast of Africa and India.[574] Moreover, this northern half of the Indian Ocean looks like a larger Mediterranean with its southern coast removed. It has the same east and west series of peninsulas harboring differentiated nationalities, the same northward running recesses, but all on a larger scale. It has linked together the history of Asia and Africa; and by the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, it has drawn Europe and the Mediterranean into its sphere of influence. At the western corner of the Indian Ocean a Semitic people, the Arabs of Oman and Yemen, here first developed brilliant maritime activity, like their Phoenician kinsmen of the Lebanon seaboard. Similar geographic conditions in their home lands and a nearly similar intercontinental location combined to make them the middlemen of three continents. Just as the Phoenicians, by way of the Mediterranean, reached and roused slumberous North Africa into historical activity and became the medium for the distribution of Egypt's culture, so these Semites of the Arabian shores knocked at the long-closed doors of East Africa facing on the Indian basin, and drew this region into the history of southern Asia. Thus the Africa of the enclosed seas was awakened to some measure of historical life, while the Africa of the wide Atlantic slept on.

[Sidenote: The sea route to the Orient.]

From the dawn of history the northern Indian Ocean was a thoroughfare. Alexander the Great's rediscovery of the old sea route to the Orient sounds like a modern event in relation to the gray ages behind it. Along this thoroughfare Indian colonists, traders, and priests carried the elements of Indian civilization to the easternmost Sunda Isles; and Oriental wares, sciences and religions moved westward to the margin of Europe and Africa. The Indian Ocean produced a civilization of its own, with which it colored a vast semi-circle of land reaching from Java to Abyssinia, and more faintly, owing to the wider divergence of race, the further stretch from Abyssinia to Mozambique.

Thus the northern Indian Ocean, owing to its form, its location in the angle between Asia and Africa and the latitude where, round the whole earth, "the zone of greatest historical density" begins, and especially its location just southeast of the Mediterranean as the eastern extension of that maritime track of ancient and modern times between Europe and China, has been involved in a long series of historical events. From the historical standpoint, prior to 1492 it takes a far higher place than the Atlantic and Pacific, owing to its nature as an enclosed sea.[575] But like all such basins, this northern Indian Ocean attained its zenith of historical importance in early times. In the sixteenth century it suffered a partial eclipse, which passed only with the opening of the Suez Canal. During this interval, however, the Portuguese. Dutch and English had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and entered this basin on its open or oceanic side. By their trading stations, which soon traced the outlines of its coasts from Sofala in South Africa around to Java, they made this ocean an alcove of the Atlantic, and embodied its events in the Atlantic period of history. It is this open or oceanic side which differentiates the Indian Ocean physically, and therefore historically, from a genuine enclosed sea.

[Sidenote: Limitation of small area in enclosed seas.]

The limitation of every enclosed or marginal sea lies in its small area and in the relatively restricted circle of its bordering lands. Only small peninsulas and islands can break its surface, and short stretches of coast combine to form its shores. It affords, therefore, only limited territories as goals for expansion, restricted resources and populations to furnish the supply and demand of trade. What lands could the Mediterranean present to the colonial outlook of the Greeks comparable to the North America of the expanding English or the Brazil of the Portuguese? Yet the Mediterranean as a colonial field had great advantages in point of size over the Baltic, which is only one-sixth as large (2,509,500 and 431,000 square kilometers respectively), and especially over the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, whose effective areas were greatly reduced by the aridity of their surrounding lands. But the precocious development and early cessation of growth marking all Mediterranean national life have given to this basin a variegated history; and in every period and every geographical region of it, from ancient Phoenicia to modern Spain and Italy, the early exhaustion of resources and dwarfing of political ideals which characterize most small areas become increasingly conspicuous. The history of Sweden, Denmark, and the Hanse Towns in the Baltic tells the same story, the story of a hothouse plant, forced in germination and growth, then stifled in the close air.

[Sidenote: Successive maritime periods in history.]

Growth demands space. Therefore, the progress of history has been attended by an advance from smaller to larger marine areas, with a constant increase in those manifold relations between peoples and lands which the water is able to establish. Every great epoch of history has had its own sea, and every succeeding epoch has enlarged its maritime field. The Greek had the Aegean, the Roman the whole Mediterranean, to which the Middle Ages made an addition in the North Sea and Baltic. The modern period has had the Atlantic, and the twentieth century is now entering upon the final epoch of the World Ocean. The gradual inclusion of this World Ocean in the widened scope of history has been due to the expansion of European peoples, who, for the past twenty centuries, have been the most far-reaching agents in the making of universal history. Owing to the location and structure of their continent, they have always found the larger outlet in a western sea. In the south the field widened from the Phoenician Sea to the Aegean, then to the Mediterranean, on to the Atlantic, and across it to its western shores; in the north it moved from the quiet Baltic to the tide-swept North Sea and across the North Atlantic. Only the South Atlantic brought European ships to the great world highway of the South Seas, and gave them the choice of an eastern or western route to the Pacific. Every new voyage in the age of discovery expanded the historical horizon; and every improvement in the technique of navigation has helped to eliminate distance and reduced intercourse on the World Ocean to the time-scale of the ancient Mediterranean.

It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the larger oceanic horizon has meant a corresponding increase in the relative content and importance of history for the known world of each period. Such an intense, concentrated national life as occurred in those little Mediterranean countries in ancient times is not duplicated now, unless we find a parallel in Japan's recent career in the Yellow Sea basin. There was something as cosmic in the colonial ventures of the Greeks to the wind-swept shores of the Crimea or barbarous wilds of Massilia, as in the establishment of English settlements on the brimming rivers of Virginia or the torrid coast of Malacca. Alexander's conquest of the Asiatic rim of the Mediterranean and Rome's political unification of the basin had a significance for ancient times comparable with the Russification of northern Asia and the establishment of the British Empire for our day.

The ocean has always performed one function in the evolution of history; it has provided the outlet for the exercise of redundant national powers. The abundance of opportunity which it presents to these disengaged energies depends upon the size, location and other geographic conditions of the bordering lands. These opportunities are limited in an enclosed basin, larger in the oceans, and largest in the northern halves of the oceans, owing to the widening of all land-masses towards the north and the consequent contraction of the oceans and seas in the same latitudes.

[Sidenote: Contrasted historical roles of northern and southern hemispheres.]

A result of this grouping is the abundance of land in the northern hemisphere, and the vast predominance of water in the southern, by reason of which these two hemispheres have each assumed a distinct role in history. The northern hemisphere offers the largest advantages for the habitation of man, and significantly enough, contains a population five times that of the southern hemisphere. The latter, on the other hand, with its vast, unbroken water areas, has been the great oceanic highway for circum-mundane exploration and trade. This great water girdle of the South Seas had to be discovered before the spherical form of the earth could be proven. In the wide territory of the northern hemisphere civilization has experienced an uninterrupted development, first in the Old World, because this offered in its large area north of the equator the fundamental conditions for rapid evolution; then it was transplanted with greatest success to North America. The northern hemisphere contains, therefore, "the zone of greatest historical density," from which the track of the South Seas is inconveniently remote. Hence we find in recent decades a reversion to the old east-west path along the southern rim of Eurasia, now perfected by the Suez Canal, and to be extended in the near future around the world by the union of the Pacific with the Caribbean Sea at Panama; so that finally the northern hemisphere will have its own circum-mundane waterway, along the line of greatest intercontinental intercourse.

[Sidenote: Size of the oceans]

The size of the ocean as a whole is so enormous, and yet its various subdivisions are so uniform in their physical aspect, that their differences of size produce less conspicuous historical effects than their diversity of area would lead one to expect. A voyage across the 177,000 square miles (453,500 square kilometers) of the Black Sea does not differ materially from one across the 979,000 square miles (2,509,500 square kilometers) of the Mediterranean; or a voyage across the 213,000 square miles (547,600 square kilometers) of the North Sea, from one across the three-hundredfold larger area of the Pacific. The ocean does not, like the land, wear upon its surface the evidences and effects of its size; it wraps itself in the same garment of blue waves or sullen swell, wherever it appears; but the outward cloak of the land varies from zone to zone. The significant anthropo-geographical influence of the size of the oceans, as opposed to that of the smaller seas, comes from the larger circle of lands which the former open to maritime enterprise. For primitive navigation, when the sailor crept from headland to headland and from island to island, the small enclosed basin with its close-hugging shores did indeed offer the best conditions. To-day, only the great tonnage of ocean-going vessels may reflect in some degree the vast areas they traverse between continent and continent. Coasting craft and ships designed for local traffic in enclosed seas are in general smaller, as in the Baltic, though the enormous commerce of the Great Lakes, which constitute in effect an inland sea, demands immense vessels.

[Sidenote: Neutrality of the seas, its evolution.]

The vast size of the oceans has been the basis of their neutrality. The neutrality of the seas is a recent idea in political history. The principle arose in connection with the oceans, and from them was extended to the smaller basins, which previously tended to be regarded as private political domains. Their limited area, which enabled them to be compassed, enabled them also to be appropriated, controlled and policed. The Greek excluded the Phoenician from the Aegean and made it an Hellenic sea. Carthage and Tarentum tried to draw the dead line for Roman merchantmen at the Lacinian Cape, the doorway into the Ionian Sea, and thereby involved themselves in the famous Punic Wars. The whole Mediterranean became a Roman sea, the mare nostrum. Pompey's fleet was able to police it effectively and to exterminate the pirates in a few months, as Cicero tells us in his oration for the Manilian Law. Venice, by the conquest of the Dalmatian pirates in 991 prepared to make herself dominatrix Adriatici maris, as she was later called. By the thirteenth century she had secured full command of the sea, spoke of it as "the Gulf," in her desire to stamp it as a mare clausum, maintained in it a powerful patrol fleet under a Capitan in Golfo, whose duty it was to police the sea for pirates and to seize all ships laden with contraband goods. She claimed and enforced the right of search of foreign vessels, and compelled them to discharge two-thirds of their cargo at Venice, which thus became the clearing house of the whole Adriatic. She even appealed to the Pope for confirmation of her dominion over the sea.[576] Sweden and Denmark strove for a dominum maris Baltici; but the Hanse Towns of northern Germany secured the maritime supremacy in the basin, kept a toll-gate at its entrance, and levied toll or excluded merchant ships at their pleasure, a right which after the fall of the Hanseatic power was assumed by Denmark and maintained till 1857. "The Narrow Seas" over which England claimed sovereignty from 1299 to 1805, and on which she exacted a salute from every foreign vessel, included the North Sea as far as Stadland Cape in Norway, the English Channel, and the Bay of Biscay down to Cape Finisterre in northern Spain.[577]

At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Indian Ocean was a Portuguese sea. Spain was trying to monopolize the Caribbean and even the Pacific Ocean. But the immense areas of these pelagic fields of enterprise, and the rapid intrusion into them of other colonial powers soon rendered obsolete in practice the principle of the mare clausum, and introduced that of the mare liberum. The political theory of the freedom of the seas seems to have needed vigorous support even toward the end of the seventeenth century. At this time we find writers like Salmasius and Hugo Grotius invoking it to combat Portuguese monopoly of the Indian Ocean as a mare clausum. Grotius in a lengthy dissertation upholds the thesis that "Jure gentium quibusvis ad quosvis liberam esse navigationem," and supports it by an elaborate argument and quotations from the ancient poets, philosophers, orators and historians.[578] This principle was not finally acknowledged by England as applicable to "The Narrow Seas" till 1805. Now, by international agreement, political domain extends only to one marine league from shore or within cannon range. The rest of the vast water area remains the unobstructed highway of the world.

NOTES TO CHAPTER IX

[528] S.M. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, p. 135. New York, 1900.

[529] A.H. Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains, Vol. I, p. 277; Vol. II, 79-81. New York, 1849.

[530] E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 257, 261. London, 1897.

[531] Col. Lane Fox, Early Modes of Navigation, Journal of Anthropological Institute, Vol. IV, p. 423.

[532] Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. I, p. 167. London; 1907.

[533] Ibid., Vol. I, p. 324.

[534] James H. Breasted, History of Egypt, pp. 89, 91, 97. New York, 1905. Col. Lane Fox, Early Modes of Navigation, Journal of Anthropological Institute, Vol. IV, pp. 414-417.

[535] G. Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa, Vol. I, p. 77. London, 1873.

[536] E. Huntington, The Depression of Sistan in Eastern Persia, Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, Vol. 37, No. 5. 1905.

[537] Schoolcraft, The Indian Tribes of the United States, Vol. I, p. 214. Philadelphia, 1853.

[538] H.H. Bancroft, The Native Races, Vol. I, pp. 382-383, 408, 564. San Francisco, 1886. D. G. Brinton, The American Race, pp. 110, 112. Philadelphia, 1901.

[539] Herodotus, Book 1, Chap. 194.

[540] S.M. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, p. 135. New York, 1900.

[541] Cotterill and Little, Ships and Sailors, pp. ix-x, 38, London, 1868.

[542] M. Hue, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China in 1846, Vol. II, p. 251. Chicago, 1898.

[543] Elliott Coues, History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Vol. I, p. 159. New York, 1893.

[544] Col. Lane Fox, Early Modes of Navigation, Journal of Anthropological Institute, Vol. IV, pp. 423-425.

[545] H.M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, Vol. I, pp. 313-314. New York, 1879.

[546] Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 184, 219-220, 270-272, 300.

[547] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, p. 288. London, 1896-1898.

[548] Ibid., Vol I, pp. 358-359. Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 679-680. London, 1904.

[549] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, pp. 153-154; Vol. II, pp. 91, 100. London, 1896-1898.

[550] Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 166-170.

[551] Captain Winkler, Sea Charts Formerly Used in the Marshall Islands, Smithsonian Report for 1899, translated from the Marine Rundschau. Berlin, 1898.

[552] Captain James Cook, Journal of First Voyage Round the World, pp. 70, 105, 119, 221, 230. Edited by W.J.L. Wharton. London, 1893.

[553] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, pp. 161, 174. London, 1896-1898.

[554] The Commercial and Fiscal Policy of the Venetian Republic, Edinburgh Review, Vol. 200, pp. 352-353. 1904.

[555] H. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 188-189, 193-195. New York, 1902-1906.

[556] G. Sergi, The Mediterranean Race, pp. 29-37. New York, 1901. W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 128-130, 270-273, 387-390, 407, 444, 448. New York, 1899.

[557] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 189-190. London, 1904.

[558] Sydow-Wagner Schul-Atlas, Voelker und Sprachenkarten, No. 13. Gotha, 1905. A. Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, map p. 80. New York, 1897.

[559] Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. VI, pp. 5-17. New York, 1902-1906.

[560] E.C. Semple, The Development of the Hanse Towns in Relation to their Geographical Environment, Bulletin American Geographical Society, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, 1899.

[561] Helen Zimmern, The Hansa Towns, pp. 24-25, 54-55. New York, 1895.

[562] Nordenskiold, The Voyage of the Vega, pp. 365, 588, 591. New York, 1882.

[563] Ibid., pp. 375, 403, 405, 487, 563.

[564] Agnes Laut, The Vikings of the Pacific, pp. 62-105. New York, 1905.

[565] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 446, 449-450. London, 1896-1898.

[566] Ibid., Vol. III, pp. 180-195.

[567] Duarte Barbosa, The Coasts of East Africa and Malabar, pp. 17-18. Hakluyt Society Publications. London, 1866.

[568] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 443-444. London, 1896-1898.

[569] Angus Hamilton, Korea, pp. 130-135. New York, 1904.

[570] Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 318-320, 478, 481-495. Washington, 1903.

[571] Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, pp. 544-545. New York, 1902-1906.

[572] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 407-412. London, 1896-1898.

[573] Pliny, Natural History, Book VI, chap. 26.

[574] Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, Vol. II, pp. 351, 417-418, 470, 471. London, 1883.

[575] For full discussion of Indian Ocean, see Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, pp. 580-584, 602-610. New York, 1902-1906. Duarte Barbosa, The Coasts of East Africa and Malabar, pp. 26-28, 41-42, 59-60, 67, 75, 79-80, 83, 166, 170, 174, 179, 184, 191-194, Hakluyt Society. London, 1866.

[576] Pompeo Molmenti, Venice in the Middle Ages, Vol. I, pp. 117, 121-123, 130. Chicago, 1906. The Commercial and Fiscal Policy of the Venetian Republic, Edinburgh Review, Vol. 200, pp. 341-344, 347. 1904.

[577] H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, p. 24, note. London, 1904.

[578] Hugonis Grotii, Mare Liberum sive de jure quod Batavis competit ad Indicana commercia dissertatio, contained in his De Jure Belli et Pacis. Hagae Comitis, 1680.



CHAPTER X

MAN'S RELATION TO THE WATER

Despite the extensive use which man makes of the water highways of the world, they remain to him highways, places for his passing and repassing, not for his abiding. Essentially a terrestrial animal, he makes his sojourn upon the deep only temporary, even when as a fisherman he is kept upon the sea for months during the long season of the catch, or when, as whaler, year-long voyages are necessitated by the remoteness and expanse of his field of operations. Yet even this rule has its exceptions. The Moro Bajan are sea gypsies of the southern Philippines and the Sulu archipelago, of whom Gannett says "their home is in their boats from the cradle to the grave, and they know no art but that of fishing." Subsisting almost exclusively on sea food, they wander about from shore to shore, one family to a boat, in little fleets of half a dozen sail; every floating community has its own headman called the Captain Bajan, who embodies all their slender political organization. When occasionally they abandon their rude boats for a time, they do not abandon the sea, but raise their huts on piles above the water on some shelving beach. Like the ancient lake-dwellers of Switzerland and Italy, only in death do they acknowledge their ultimate connection with the solid land. They never bury their dead at sea, but always on a particular island, to which the funeral cortege of rude outrigged boats moves to the music of the paddle's dip.[579]

[Sidenote: Protection of a water frontier.]

The margin of river, lake and sea has always attracted the first settlements of man because it offered a ready food supply in its animal life and an easy highway for communication. Moreover, a water front made a comparatively safe frontier for the small, isolated communities which constituted primitive societies. The motive of protection, dominant in the savage when selecting sites for his villages, led him to place them on the pear-shaped peninsula formed by a river loop, or on an island in the stream or off the coast; or to sever his connection with the solid land, whence attack might come, and provide himself with a boundary waste of water by raising his hut on piles above the surface of lake, river or sheltered seacoast, within easy reach of the shore. In this location the occupant of the pile dwelling has found all his needs answered—fishing grounds beneath and about his hut, fields a few hundred feet away on shore, easily reached by his dug-out canoe, and a place of retreat from a land enemy, whether man or wild beast.

[Sidenote: Ancient pile villages.]

Such pile dwellings, answering the primary need of protection, have had wide distribution, especially in the Tropics, and persist into our own times among retarded peoples living in small, isolated groups too weak for effective defence. They were numerous in the lakes of Switzerland[580] and northern Italy down to the first century of our era, and existed later in slightly modified form in Ireland, Scotland, England and southern Wales.[581] In ancient Ireland they were constructed on artificial islands, raised in shallow spots of lakes or morasses by means of fascines weighted down with gravel and clay, and moored to the bottom by stakes driven through the mass. Such groups of dwellings were called Crannogs; they existed in Ireland from the earliest historical period and continued in use down to the time of Queen Elizabeth. In the turbulent twelfth century, the warring lords of the soil adopted them as places of refuge and residence.[582] Herodotus describes a pile village of the ancient Thracians in Lake Prasias near the Hellespont, built quite after the Swiss type, with trap doors in the floor for fishing or throwing out refuse. Its inhabitants escaped conquest by the Persians under King Darius, and avoided the fate of their fellow tribesmen on land, who were subdued and removed as colonists to Asia.[583]

[Sidenote: Present distribution.]

Among Europeans such pile villages belong to primitive stages of development, chiefly to the Stone, Bronze, and early Iron Ages. They are widely distributed in modern times among retarded peoples, who in this way seek compensation for their social and economic weakness. In South America, the small timid tribe of the native Warraus till quite recently built their dwellings on platforms over the water in the river network of the Orinoco delta and along the swamp coast as far as the Essequibo. These pile villages, "fondata sopra l'acqua come Venezia," as Vespuccius says, suggested to him the name of Venezuela or little Venice for this coast.[584] A pile village in Jull Lake, a lacustrine expansion in a tributary of the upper Salwin River, is inhabited by the Inthas, apparently an alien colony in Burma. They have added a detail in their floating gardens, rafts covered with soil, on which they raise tomatoes, watermelons and gourds.[585]

In little Lake Mohrya, located near the upper Lualaba River, a southern headstream of the Congo, Cameron found numerous pile dwellings, whose owners moved about in dug-out canoes and cultivated fields on land,[586] as did their Swiss confreres of twenty centuries ago. Livingstone, in descending from Lake Nyassa by the Shire River, found in the lakelet of Pamalombe, into which the stream widened, similar water huts inhabited by a number of Manganja families, who had been driven from their homes by slave raiders. The slender reeds of the papyrus thicket, lining the shore in a broad band, served as piles, number compensating for the lack of strength; the reeds, bent downward and fastened together into a mat, did indeed support their light dwellings, but heaved like thin ice when the savages moved from hut to hut. The dense forest of papyrus left standing between village and shore effectually screened their retreat, and the abundant fish in the lake provided them with food.[587]

[Sidenote: Malayan pile dwellings.]

In the vast island world of Indonesia, where constant contact with the sea has bred the amphibian Malay race, we are not surprised to find that the typical Malay house is built on piles above the water; and that when the coast Malay is driven inland by new-comers of his own stock and forced to abandon his favorite occupations of trade, piracy and fishing, he takes to agriculture but still retains his sea-born architecture and raises his hut on poles above the ground, beyond the reach of an enemy's spear-thrust. The Moro Samal Laut of the southern Sulu Archipelago avoid the large volcanic islands of the group, and place their big villages over the sea on low coral reefs. The sandy beaches of the shore hold their coco-palms, whose nuts by their milk eke out the scanty supply of drinking water, and whose fronds shade the tombs of the dead.[588] The sea-faring Malays of the Sunda Islands, in thickly populated points of the coast, often dwell in permanently inhabited rafts moored near the pile dwellings. Palembang on the lower swampy course of the River Musi has a floating suburb of this sort. It is called the "Venice of Sumatra," just as Banjarmasin, a vast complex of pile and raft dwellings, is called the "Venice of Borneo," and Brunei to the north is the "Venice of the East."[589] Both these towns are the chief commercial centers of their respective islands. The little town of Kilwaru, situated on a sandbank off the eastern end of Ceram, seems to float on the sea, so completely has it surrounded and enveloped with pile-built houses the few acres of dry land which form its nucleus. It is a place of busy traffic, the emporium for commerce between the Malay Archipelago and New Guinea.[590]

[Sidenote: In Melanesia.]

Farther east in Melanesia, whose coast regions are more or less permeated by Malayan stock and influences, pile dwellings, both over water and on land form a characteristic feature of the scenery. The village of Sowek in Geelvink Bay, on the northern coast of Dutch New Guinea, consists of thirty houses raised on piles above the water, connected with each other by tree trunks but having only boat connection with the shore. Similar villages are found hovering over the lapping waves of Humboldt Bay, all of them recalling with surprising fidelity the prehistoric lake-dwellings of Switzerland.[591] The Papuan part of Port Moresby, on the southern coast of British New Guinea, covers the whole water-front of the town with pile dwellings. In the vicinity are similar native pile villages, such as Tanobada, Hanuabada, Elevara and Hula, the latter consisting of pile dwellings scattered about over the water in a circuit of several miles and containing about a thousand inhabitants. Here, too, the motive is protection against the attacks of inland mountain tribes, with whom the coast people are in constant war.[592]