Influences of Geographic Environment - Ellen Churchill Semple (libby ebook reader .TXT) 📗
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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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.
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.
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.
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
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 Piræus and New York.
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
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