Influences of Geographic Environment - Ellen Churchill Semple (libby ebook reader .TXT) 📗
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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 Schäfer, Die Hansestädte und König Waldemar von Dänemark, 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
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
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