Influences of Geographic Environment, Ellen Churchill Semple [classic novels for teens .txt] 📗
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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Subsidence that brings the beat of the surf against the bolder reliefs of the land produces a ragged, indented coast, deep-water inlets penetrating far into the country, hilly or mountainous tongues of land running far out into the sea and breaking up into a swarm of islands and rocks, whose outer limits indicate approximately the old prediluvial line of shore.451 Such are the fiord regions of Norway, southern Alaska, British Columbia, Greenland, and southern Chile; the Rias or submerged river valley coast of northwestern Spain; and the deeply sunken mountain flank of Dalmatia, whose every lateral valley has become a bay or a strait between mainland and island. All these coasts are characterized by a close succession of inlets, a limited amount of level country for settlement or cultivation, and in their rear a steep slope impeding communication with their hinterland. Inaccessibility from the land, a high degree of accessibility from the sea, and a paucity of local resources unite to thrust the inhabitants of such coasts out upon the deep, to make of them fishermen, seamen, and ocean carriers. The same result follows where no barrier on the land side exists, but where a granitic or glaciated soil in the interior discourages agriculture and landward expansion, as in Brittany, Maine, and Newfoundland. In all these the land repels and the sea attracts. Brittany furnishes one-fifth of all the sailors in France's merchant marine,452 and its pelagic fishermen sweep the seas from Newfoundland to Iceland. Three-fifths of the maritime activity of the whole Austrian Empire is confined to the ragged coast of Dalmatia, which furnishes to-day most of the sailors for the imperial marine, just as in Roman days it manned the Adriatic fleet of the Cæsars.453 The Haida, Tsimshean, and Tlingit Indians of the ragged western coast of British Columbia and southern Alaska spread their villages on the narrow tide-swept hem of the land, and subsist chiefly by the generosity of the deep. They are poor landsmen, but excellent boat-makers and seamen, venturing sometimes twenty-five miles out to sea to gather birds' eggs from the outermost fringe of rocks.
As areas of elevation or subsidence are, as a rule, extensive, it follows that coasts usually present long stretches of smooth simple shoreline, or a long succession of alternating inlet and headland. Therefore different littoral belts show marked contrasts in their degree of accessibility to the sea, and their harbors appear in extensive groups of one type—fiords, river estuaries, sand or coral reef lagoons, and embayed mountain roots. A sudden change in relief or in geologic history sees one of these types immediately succeeded by a long-drawn group of a different type. Such a contrast is found between the Baltic and North Sea ports of Denmark and Germany, the eastern and southern seaboards of England, the eastern and western sides of Scotland, and the Pacific littoral of North America north and south of Juan de Fuca Strait, attended by a contrasted history.
A common morphological history, marked by mountain uplift, glaciation, and subsidence, has given an historical development similar in not a few respects to the fiord coasts of New England, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, the Alaskan "panhandle," and southern Chile. Large subsidence areas on the Mediterranean coasts from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Bosporus have in essential features duplicated each other's histories, just as the low infertile shores of the Baltic from Finland to the Skager Rack have had much in common in their past development.
Where, however, a purely local subsidence, as in Kamerun Bay and Old Calabar on the elsewhere low monotonous stretch of the Upper Guinea coast,454 or a single great river estuary, as in the La Plata and the Columbia, affords a protected anchorage on an otherwise portless shore, such inlets assume increased importance. In the long unbroken reach of our Pacific seaboard, San Francisco Bay and the Columbia estuary are of inestimable value; while, by the treaty of 1848 with Mexico, the international boundary line was made to bend slightly south of west from the mouth of the Gila River to the coast, in order to include in the United States territory the excellent harbor of San Diego. The mere nicks in the rim of Southwest Africa constituting Walfish Bay and Angra Pequena assume considerable value as trading stations and places of refuge along that 1,200-mile reach of inhospitable coast extending from Cape Town north to Great Fish Bay.455 It is worthy of notice in passing that, though both of these small inlets lie within the territory of German Southwest Africa, Walfish Bay with 20 miles of coast on either side is a British possession, and that two tiny islets which commands the entrance to the harbor of Angra Pequena, also belong to Great Britain. On the uniform coast of East Africa, the single considerable indentation formed by Delagoa Bay assumes immense importance, which, however, is due in part to the mineral wealth of its Transvaal hinterland. From this point northward for 35 degrees of latitude, a river mouth, like that fixing the site of Beira, or an inshore islet affording protected harborage, like that of Mombasa, serves as the single ocean gateway of a vast territory, and forms the terminus of a railroad—proof of its importance.
The maritime evolution of all amply embayed coasts, except in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions inimical to all historical development, shows in its highest stage the gradual elimination of minor ports, and the concentration of maritime activity in a few favored ones, which have the deepest and most capacious harbors and the best river, canal, or railroad connection with the interior. The earlier stages are marked by a multiplicity of ports, showing in general activity nearly similar in amount and in kind. England's merchant marine in the fourteenth century was distributed in a large group of small but important ports on the southern coast, all which, owing to their favorable location, were engaged in the French and Flemish trade; and in another group on the east coast, reaching from Hull to Colchester, which participated in the Flemish, Norwegian, and Baltic trade.456 Most of these have now declined before the overpowering competition of a few such seaboard marts as London, Hull, and Southampton. The introduction of steam trawlers into the fishing fleets has in like manner led to the concentration of the fishermen in a few large ports with good railroad facilities, such as Aberdeen and Grimsby, while the fishing villages that fringed the whole eastern and southern coasts have been gradually depopulated.457 So in colonial days, when New England was little more than a cordon of settlements along that rock-bound littoral, almost every inlet had its port actively engaged in coastwise and foreign commerce in the West Indies and the Guinea Coast, in cod and mackerel fisheries, in whaling and shipbuilding, and this with only slight local variations. This widespread homogeneity of maritime activity has been succeeded by strict localization and differentiation, and reduction from many to few ports. So, for the whole Atlantic seaboard of the United States, evolution of seaports has been marked by increase of size attended by decrease of numbers.
A well dissected coast, giving ample contact with the sea, often fails nevertheless to achieve historical importance, unless outlying islands are present to ease the transition from inshore to pelagic navigation, and to tempt to wider maritime enterprise. The long sweep of the European coast from northern Norway to Brittany has played out a significant part of its history in that procession of islands formed by Iceland, the Faroes, Shetland, Orkneys, Great Britain, Ireland and the Channel Isles, whether it was the navigator of ancient Armorica steering his leather-sailed boat to the shores of Cæsar's Britain, or the modern Breton fisherman pulling in his nets off the coasts of distant Iceland. The dim outline of mountainous Cyprus, seen against a far-away horizon from the slopes of Lebanon, beckoned the Phoenician ship-master thither to trade and to colonize, just as the early Etruscan merchants passed from their busy ironworks on the island of Elba over the narrow strait to visible Corsica.458 It was on the eastern side of Greece, with its deep embayments, its valleys opening out to the Aegean, with its 483 islands scattered thickly as stars in the sky, and its Milky Way of the Cyclades leading to the deep, rich soils of the Asia Minor coast, with its sea-made contact with all the stimulating influences and dangers emanating from the Asiatic littoral, that Hellenic history played its impressive drama. Here was developed the spirit of enterprise that carried colonies to far western Sicily and Italy, while the western or rear side had a confined succession of local events, scarce worthy the name of history. Neither mountain-walled Epirus nor Corcyra had an Hellenic settlement in 735 B.C., at a date when the eastern Greeks had reached the Ionian coast of the Aegean and had set up a lonely group of colonies even on the Bay of Naples. Turning to America, we find that the Antilles received their population from the only two tribes, first the Arawaks and later the Caribs, who ever reached the indented northern coast of South America between the Isthmus of Panama and the mouth of the Orinoco. Here the small islands of the Venezuelan coast, often in sight, lured these peoples of river and shore to open-sea navigation, and drew them first to the Windward Isles, then northward step by step or island by island, to Hayti and Cuba.459
In all these instances, offshore islands tempt to expansion and thereby add to the historical importance of the nearby coast. Frequently, however, they achieve the same result by offering advantageous footholds to enterprising voyagers from remote lands, and become the medium for infusing life into hitherto dead coasts. The long monotonous littoral of East Africa from Cape Guadafui to the Cape of Good Hope, before the planting here of Portuguese way-stations on the road to India in the sixteenth century, was destitute of historical significance, except that stretch opposite the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, which Arab merchants in the tenth century appropriated as the basis for their slave and ivory trade. The East Indies and Ceylon have been so many offshore stations whence, first through the Portuguese, and later through the Dutch and English, European influences percolated into southeastern Asia. Asia, with its island-strewn shores, has diffused its influences over a broad zone of the western Pacific, and through the agency of its active restless Malays, even halfway across that ocean. In contrast, the western coast of the Americas, a stretch nearly 10,000 miles from Tierra del Fuego to the Aleutian chain, has seen its aboriginal inhabitants barred from seaward expansion by the lack of offshore islands, and its entrance upon the historical stage delayed till recent times.
In general it can be said that islandless seas attain a later historical development than those whose expanse is rendered less forbidding by hospitable fragments of land. This factor, as well as its location remote from the old and stimulating civilization of Syria and Asia Minor, operated to retard the development of the western Mediterranean long after the eastern basin had reached its zenith.
Coast-dwelling peoples exhibit every degree of intimacy with the water, from the amphibian life of many
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