Influences of Geographic Environment - Ellen Churchill Semple (libby ebook reader .TXT) 📗
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Swamp-bordered regions, as areas of natural isolation, guard and keep intact the people which they hold. Therefore they are regions of survival of race and language. The scattered islets of the Fens of England furnished an asylum to the early British Celts from Teutonic attacks,732 and later protected them against dominant infusion of Teutonic blood. Hence to-day in the Fenland and in the district just to the south we find a darker, shorter people than in the country to the east or west.733 Similarly the White Russians, occupying the poor, marshy region of uncertain watershed between the sources of the Duna, Dnieper and Volga, have the purest blood of all the eastern Slavs, though this distinction is coupled with poverty and retarded culture,734 a combination that anthropo-geography often reveals. Wholly distinct from the Russians and segregated from them by a barrier of swampy forests, we find the Letto-Lithuanians in the Baltic province of Courland, speaking the most primitive form of flectional languages classed as Aryan. The isolation which preserved their archaic speech, of all European tongues the nearest to the Sanskrit, made them the last European people to accept Christianity.735 The great race of the Slavic Wends, who once occupied all northern Germany between the Vistula and Elbe, has left only a small and declining remnant of its language in the swampy forests about the sources of the Spree.736 [See ethnographical map, p. 223.] The band of marshlands stretching through Holland from the shallow Zuyder Zee east to the German frontier, has given to Friesland and the coast islands of Holland a peculiar isolation, which has favored the development and survival of the peculiar Friesian dialect, that speech so nearly allied to Saxon English, and has preserved here the purest type of the tall, blond Teuton among the otherwise mixed stock of the Netherlands.737
Inaccessible to all except those familiar with their treacherous paths and labyrinthine channels, swamps have always afforded a refuge for individuals and peoples; and therefore as places of defense they have played no inconspicuous part in history. What the Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and the cypress swamps of Louisiana were to the run-away slaves, that the Everglades of Florida have been to the defeated Seminoles. In that half-solid, half-fluid area, penetrable only to the native Indian who poles his canoe along its tortuous channels of liquid mud, the Seminoles have set up their villages on the scattered hummocks of solid land, and there maintained themselves, a tribe of 350 souls, despite all efforts of the United States government to remove them to the Indian Territory. The swamps of the Nile delta have been the asylum of Egyptian independence from the time King Amysis took refuge there for fifty years during an invasion of the Ethiopians,738 to the retreat thither of Amyrtaeus, a prince of Sais, after his unsuccessful revolt against the Persian conqueror Artaxerxes I.739 The Isle of Athelney among the marshes of the Parret River afforded a refuge to Alfred the Great and a band of his followers during the Danish invasion of Wessex in 878,740 while the Isle of Ely in the Fenland was another point of sustained resistance to the invaders. It was the Fenland that two hundred years later was the last stronghold of Saxon resistance to William of Normandy. Here on the Isle of Ely the outlawed leader Hereward maintained Saxon independence, till the Conqueror at last constructed a long causeway across the marshes to the "Camp of Refuge."741
The spirit of the marshlands is the spirit of freedom. Therefore these small and scarcely habitable portions of the land assume an historical dignity and generate stirring historical events out of all proportion to their size and population. Their content is ethical rather than economic. They attract to their fastnesses the vigorous souls protesting against conquest or oppression, and then by their natural protection sustain and nourish the spirit of liberty. It was the water-soaked lowlands of the Rhine that enabled the early Batavians,742 Ditmarscher and Frieslanders to assert and to maintain their independence, generated the love of Independence among the Dutch and helped them defend their liberty against the Spanish743 and French. So the Fenland of England was the center of resistance to the despotism of King John, who therefore fixed his headquarters for the suppression of the revolt at Lincoln and his military depôt at Lynn. Later in the conflict of the barons with Henry III, Simon de Montfort and other disaffected nobles entrenched themselves in the islands of Ely and Axholm, till the Provisions of Oxford in 1267 secured them some degree of constitutional rights.744 Four centuries later the same spirit sent many Fenlanders to the support of Cromwell.
A river that spreads out into the indeterminate earthform of a marsh is an effective barrier; but one that gathers waters into a natural basin and forms a lake retains the uniting power of a navigable stream and also, by the extension of its area and elimination of its current, approaches the nature of an enclosed sea. Mountain rivers, characterized by small volume and turbulent flow, first become navigable when they check their impetuosity and gather their store of water in some lake basin. The whole course of the upper Rhone, from its glacier source on the slope of Mount Furca to its confluence with the Saône at Lyon, is unfit for navigation, except where it lingers in Lake Geneva. The same thing is true of the Reuss in Lake Lucerne, the upper Rhine in Lake Constance, the Aare in Thun and Brienze, and the Linth in Lake Zurich. Hence such torrent-fed lakes assume economic and political importance in mountainous regions, owing to the paucity of navigable waterways. The lakes of Alpine Switzerland and Italy and of Highland Scotland form so many centers of intercourse and exchange. Even such small bodies of water as the Alpine lakes have therefore become goals of expansion, so that we find the shores of Geneva, Maggiore, Lugano, and Garda, each shared by two countries. Switzerland, the Austrian Tyrol, and the three German states of Baden, Wurtemberg and Bavaria, have all managed to secure a frontage upon Lake Constance. Lake Titicaca, lying 12,661 feet (3854 meters) above sea level but affording a navigable course 136 miles (220 kilometers) long, is an important waterway for Peru and Bolivia. In the central Sudan, where aridity reduces the volume of all streams, even the variable and indeterminate Lake Chad has been an eagerly sought objective for expanding boundaries. Twenty years ago it was divided among the native states of Bornu, Bagirmi and Kanem; today it is shared by British Nigeria, French Sudan, and German Kamerun. The erratic northern extension of the German boundary betrays the effort to reach this goal.
The uniting power of lakes manifests itself in the tendency of such basins to become the nuclei of states. Attractive to settlement in primitive times, because of the protected frontier they afford—a motive finding its most emphatic expression in the pile villages of the early lake-dwellers—later because of the fertility of their bordering soil and the opportunity for friendly intercourse, they gradually unite their shores in a mesh of reciprocal relations, which finds its ultimate expression in political union. It is a significant fact that the Swiss Confederation originated in the four forest cantons of Lucerne, Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden, which are linked together by the jagged basin of Lake Lucerne or the Lake of the Four Forest Cantons, as the Swiss significantly call it, but are otherwise divided by mountain barriers. So we find that Lake Titicaca was the cradle of the Inca Empire, just as Lake Tezcoco was that of the Toltecs in Mexico and an island in Lake Chalco later that of the Aztec domain.745 The most stable of the short-lived native states of Africa have apparently found an element of strength and permanence in a protected lake frontier. Such are the petty kingdoms of Bornu, Bagirmi and Kanem on Lake Chad, and Uganda on Victoria Nyanza.
Large lakes, which include in their area islands, peninsulas, tides, currents, fiords, inlets, deltas, and dunes, and present every geographical feature of an enclosed sea, approach the latter too in historical importance. Some of the largest, however, have long borne the name of seas. The Caspian, which exceeds the Baltic in area, and the Aral, which outranks Lake Michigan, show the closest physical resemblance to thalassic basins, because of their size, salinity and enclosed drainage systems; but their anthropo-geographical significance is slight. The very salinity which groups them with the sea points to an arid climate that forever deprives them of the densely populated coasts characteristic of most enclosed seas, and hence reduces their historical importance. Their tributary streams, robbed of their water by irrigation canals, like "the shorn and parcelled Oxus", renounce their function of highways into the interior. To this rule the Volga is a unique exception. Finally, cut off from union with the ocean, these salt lakes lose the supreme historical advantage which is maintained by freshwater lakes, like Ladoga, Nyassa, Maracaibo and the Great Lakes of North America, all lying near sea level.
Lakes as part of a system of inland waterways may possess commercial importance surpassing that of many seas. This depends upon the productivity, accessibility and extent of their hinterland, and this in turn depends upon the size and shape of the inland basin. The chain of the five Great Lakes, which together present a coastline of four thousand miles and a navigable course as long as the Baltic between the Skager Rack and the head of the Gulf of Bothnia, constitutes a freshwater Mediterranean. It has played the part of an enclosed sea in American history and has enabled the Atlantic trade to penetrate 1400 miles inland to Chicago and Duluth. Its shores have therefore been a coveted object of territorial expansion. The early Dutch trading posts headed up the Hudson and Mohawk toward Lake Ontario, as did the English settlements which succeeded them. The French, from their vantage point at Montreal, threw out a frail casting-net of fur stations and missions, which caught and held all the Lakes for a time. Later the American shores were divided among eight of our states. The northern boundaries of Indiana and Illinois were fixed by Congress for the express purpose of giving these commonwealths access to Lake Michigan. Pennsylvania with great difficulty succeeded in protruding her northwestern frontier to cover a meager strip of Erie coast, while New York's frontage on the same lake became during the period of canal and early railroad construction, a great factor in her development.
In 1901, the tonnage of our merchant vessels on the Great Lakes was half that of our Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf coasts combined,746 constituting a freshwater fleet greater than the merchant marine of either France or sea-bred Norway. A remote but by no means faint echo of this
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