Influences of Geographic Environment - Ellen Churchill Semple (libby ebook reader .TXT) 📗
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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The effect of mere current upon the course of trade and political expansion was conspicuous in the early history of the Mississippi Valley, before steam navigation began to modify the geographic influence of a river's flow. The wide forest-grown barrier of the Appalachian Mountains placed the western pioneers under the geographic control of the western waters. The bulkiness of their field and forest products, fitted only for water transportation, and the immense mass of downstream commerce called loudly for a maritime outlet and the acquisition from Spain of some port at the Mississippi mouth. For twenty years the politics of this transmontane country centered about the "Island of New Orleans," and in 1803 saw its dream realized by the Louisiana Purchase.
For the western trader, the Mississippi and Ohio were preeminently downstream paths. Gravity did the work. Only small boats, laden with fine commodities of small bulk and large value, occasionally made the forty day upstream voyage from New Orleans to Louisville. Flat boats and barges that were constructed at Pittsburg for the river traffic were regularly broken up for lumber at downstream points like Louisville and New Orleans; for the traders returned overland by the old Chickasaw Trail to the Cumberland and Ohio River settlements, carrying their profits in the form of gold. The same thing happens today, as it also happened two thousand years ago, on the Tigris and Euphrates. The highlander of Armenia or northern Mesopotamia floats down the current in his skin boat or on his brushwood raft, to sell his goods and the wood forming the frame-work of his primitive craft in timberless Bagdad and Busra, as formerly in treeless Babylon. He dries out his skins, loads them on his shoulders or on a mule brought down for the purpose, and returns on foot to his highland village.656 The same preponderance of downstream traffic appears to-day in eastern Siberia. Pedlers on the Amur start in the spring from Stretensk, 2025 miles up the river, with their wares in barges, and drift down with the current, selling at the villages en route, to the river's mouth at Nikolaievsk. Here they dispose of their remaining stock and also of their barges, the lumber of which is utilized for sidewalks, and they themselves return upstream by steamer. The grain barges of western Siberia, like the coal barges of the Mississippi, even within recent decades, are similarly disposed of at the journey's end.657 The tonnage of downstream traffic on the Ohio and Mississippi to-day greatly exceeds that upstream,. The fleet of 56 coal boats, carrying about 70,000 tons, which the great towboat Sprague takes in a single trip from Louisville down to New Orleans, all return empty. Of the 15,226,805 net tons of freight shipped in 1906 on the Ohio system, 13,980,368 tons of coal, stone, sand and lumber were carried in unrigged craft, fitted chiefly for downstream traffic.658
Owing to the strong pull exerted by a river's mouth upon all its basin, current, commerce and people alike tend to reach the ocean. For a nation holding the terrestrial course of a stream, the political fate of its tidal course or mouth must always be a matter of great concern. To the early westerner of the United States, before the acquisition of the Louisiana country, it was of vital importance whether belligerent France or more amenable Spain or the Republic itself should own the mouth of the Mississippi. Germany, which holds 240 miles (400 kilometers) of the navigable Danube,659 can never be indifferent to the political ownership of its mouth, or to the fact that a great power like Russia has edged forward, by the acquisition of Bessarabia in 1878, to the northern or Kilia debouchment channel.660 Such interest shows itself in sustained efforts either to gain political control of the mouth, or to secure the neutrality of the stream by having it declared an international waterway, and thus partially to deprive the state holding its mouth of the advantages of its transit location.
The only satisfactory solution is undivided political ownership. After France pushed eastward to the Rhine in 1648, she warred for three centuries to acquire its mouth. Napoleon laid claim to Belgium and Holland on the ground that their soil had been built up by the alluvium of French rivers. Germany's conquest of Schleswig-Holstein in 1864 was significant chiefly because it dislodged Denmark from the right bank of the lower Elbe, and secured undivided control of this important estuary. The Rhine, which traverses the Empire from north to south and constitutes its greatest single trade route, gives to Germany a more vital interest in Holland than ever France had. Her most important iron and coal mines and manufacturing industries are located on this waterway or its tributaries, the Ruhr, Mosel, Saar and Main. Hence the Rhine is the great artery of German trade and outlet for her enormous exports, which chiefly reach the sea through the ports of Belgium and Holland. These two countries therefore fatten on German commerce and reduce German profits. Hence the Empire, by the construction of the Emden-Dortmund canal, aims to divert its trade from Rotterdam and Antwerp to a German port, and possibly thereby put the screw on Holland to draw her into some kind of a commercial union with Germany.661 Heinrich von Treitschke, in his "Politik," deplores the fact that the most valuable part of the great German river has fallen into alien hands, and he declares it to be an imperative task of German policy to recover the mouth of that stream, "either by a commercial or political union." "We need the entrance of Holland into our customs union as we need our daily bread."662
When the middle and upper course of a river system are shared by several nations, their common interest demands that the control of the mouth be divided, as in the case of the La Plata between Argentine and Uruguay; or held by a small state, like Holland, too weak to force the monopoly of the tidal course. The Treaty of Paris in 1856 extended the territory of Moldavia at the cost of Russia, to keep the Russian frontier away from the Danube.663 Her very presence was ominous. The temptation to giant powers to gobble up these exquisite morsels of territory is irresistible. Hence the advisability of neutralizing small states holding such locations, as in the case of Roumania; and making their rivers international waterways, as in the case of the Orinoco,664 Scheldt, Waal, Rhine and Danube.665 The Yangtze Kiang mouth, where already the treaty ports cluster thick, will probably be the first part of China to be declared neutral ground, and as such to be placed under the protection of the combined commercial powers,666 as is even now foreshadowed by the International Conservancy Board of 1910.667 The United States, by her treaty with Mexico in 1848, secured the right of free navigation on the lower or Mexican course of the Colorado River and the Gulf of California. The Franco-British convention, which in 1898 confirmed the western Sudan to France, also conceded the principle of making the Niger, the sole outlet of this vast and isolated territory, an international waterway, and created two French enclaves in British Nigeria to serve as river ports.668
The mouth of a large river system is the converging point of many lines of inland and maritime navigation. The interests of commerce, especially in its earlier periods of development, demand that the contact here of river and sea be extensive as possible. Nature suggests the way to fulfill this requirement. The sluggish lowland current of a river, on approaching sea level, throws out distributaries that reach the coast at various points and form a network of channels, which can be deepened and rendered permanent by canalization. In such regions the opportunity for the improvement and extension of waterways has been utilized from the earliest times. The ancient Egyptians, Chaldeans, East Indians, and the Gauls of the lower Po for thousands of years canaled the waters of their deltas and coastal lowlands for the combined purpose of irrigation, drainage, and navigation. The great canal system of China, constructed in the seventh century primarily to facilitate Inland intercourse between the northern and central sections of the Empire, extends from the sea at Hangchow 700 miles northward through the coastal alluvium of the Yangtze Kiang, Hoang-ho and Pie-ho to Tientsin, the port of Peking. Only the canal system of the center, important both for the irrigation of the fertile but porous loess and for the transportation of crops, is still in repair. Here the meshes of the canal network are little more than half a mile wide; farmers dig canals to their barns and bring in their produce in barges instead of hay wagons.669 Holland, where the ancient Romans constructed channels in the Rhine delta and where the debouchment courses of the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt present a labyrinth of waterways, has to-day 1903 miles (3069 kilometers) of canals, which together with the navigable rivers, have been important geographic factors in the historical preëminence of Dutch foreign commerce. So on the lower Mississippi, in the greatest alluvial area of the United States, the government has expended large sums for the improvement of the passes and bayous of the river. The Barataria, Atchafalaya, Terrebonne, Black, Teche and Lafourche bayous have been rendered navigable, and New Orleans has been given canal outlets to the sea through Lakes Salvador, Pontchartrain and Borgne.
As the dividing channels of the lower course point to the feasibility of amplifying the connection with the ocean highway, so the spreading branches of a river's source, which approach other head waters on a low divide, suggest the extension of inland navigation by the union of two such drainage systems through canals. Where the rivers of a country radiate from a relatively low central watershed, as from the Central Plateau of France and the Valdai Hills of Russia, nature offers conditions for extensive linking of inland waterways. Hence we find a continuous passway through Russia from the Caspian Sea to the Baltic by the canal uniting the Volga and Neva rivers; another from the Black Sea up the Dnieper, which by canals finds three different outlets to the Baltic through the Vistula, Niemen and Duna.670 The Northern Dwina, linked, by canals, with the Neva through Lakes Onega and Ladoga, unites the White Sea with the Baltic.671 Sully, the great minister of Henry IV. of France, saw that the relief of the country would permit the linking of the Loire, Seine, Meuse, Saône and Rhine, and the Mediterranean with the Garonne. All his plans were carried out by his successors, but he himself, at the end of the sixteenth century, began the construction of the Briare Canal between the Loire near Orleans and the Seine at Fontainebleau.672 Similarly in the eastern half of the United States, the long, low watershed separating the drainage basin of the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes from that of the Mississippi and the Hudson made feasible the succession of canals completing the "Great Belt" of inland navigation from St. Lawrence and New York bays to the Gulf. Albert Gallatin's famous report of 1808673 pointed out the adaptation of the three low divides to canal communication; but long before this, every line of possible
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