Influences of Geographic Environment by Ellen Churchill Semple (i love reading books .TXT) 📖
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Not only the accessibility of the coast from the sea, but also its habitability enters as a factor into its historical importance. A sandy desert coast, like that of Southwest Africa and much of the Peruvian littoral, or a sterile mountain face, like that of Lower California, excludes the people of the country from the sea. Saldanha Bay, the one good natural harbor on the west coast of Cape Colony, is worthless even to the enterprising English, because it has no supply of fresh water.465 The slowness of the ancient Egyptians to take the short step forward from river to marine navigation can undoubtedly be traced to the fact that the sour swamps, barren sand-dunes, and pestilential marshes on the seaward side of the Nile delta must have always been sparsely populated as they are to-day,466 and that a broad stretch of sandy waste formed their Red Sea littoral.
On the other hand, where the hem of the continents is fertile enough to support a dense population, a large number of people are brought into contact with the sea, even where no elaborate articulation lengthens the shoreline. When this teeming humanity of a garden littoral is barred from landward expansion by desert or mountain, or by the already overcrowded population of its own hinterland, it wells over the brim of its home country, no matter how large, and overflows to other lands across the seas. The congested population of the fertile and indented coast of southern China, though not strictly speaking a sea-faring people, found an outlet for their redundant humanity and their commerce in the tropical Sunda Islands. By the sixth century their trading junks were doing an active business in the harbors of Java, Sumatra, and Malacca; they had even reached Ceylon and the Persian Gulf, and a little later were visiting the great focal market of Aden at the entrance of the Red Sea.467 A strong infusion of Chinese blood improved the Malay stock in the Sunda Islands, and later in North Borneo and certain of the Philippines, whither their traders and emigrants turned in the fourteenth century, when they found their opportunities curtailed in the archipelago to the south by the spread of Islam.468 Now the "yellow peril" threatens the whole circle of these islands from Luzon to Sumatra.
Similarly India, first from its eastern, later from its western coast, sent a stream of traders, Buddhist priests, and colonists to the Sunda Islands, and especially to Java, as early as the fifth century of our era, whence Indian civilization, religion, and elements of the Sanskrit tongue spread to Borneo, Sumatra, Bali, Lombok, and even to some smaller islands among the Molucca group.469 The Hindus became the dominant commercial nation of the Indian Ocean long before the great development of Arabian sea power, and later shared the trade of the East African coast with the merchants of Oman and Yemen.470 To-day they form a considerable mercantile class in the ports of Mascat, Aden, Zanzibar, Pemba, and Natal.
On the coasts of large fertile areas like China and India, however, maritime activity comes not as an early, but as an eventual development, assumes not a dominant, but an incidental historical importance. The coastlands appearing early on the maritime stage of history, and playing a brilliant part in the drama of the sea, have been habitable, but their tillable fields have been limited either in fertility, as in New England, or in amount, as in Greece, or in both respects, as in Norway. But if blessed with advantageous location for international trade and many or even a few fairly good harbors, such coasts tend to develop wide maritime dominion and colonial expansion.471
Great fertility in a narrow coastal belt barred from the interior serves to concentrate and energize the maritime activities of the nation. The 20-mile wide plain stretching along the foot of the Lebanon range from Antioch to Cape Carmel is even now the garden of Syria.472 In ancient Phoenician days its abundant crops and vines supported luxuriant cities and a teeming population, which sailed and traded and colonized to the Atlantic outskirts of Europe and Africa. Moreover, their maritime ventures had a wide sweep as early as 1100 B. C. Quite similar to the Phoenician littoral and almost duplicating its history, is the Oman seaboard of eastern Arabia. Here again a fertile coastal plain sprinkled with its "hundred villages," edged with a few tolerable harbors, and backed by a high mountain wall with an expanse of desert beyond, produced a race of bold and skilful navigators,473 who in the Middle Ages used their location between the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea to make themselves the dominant maritime power of the Indian ocean. With them maritime expansion was typically wide in its sweep and rapid in its development. Even before Mohammed's time they had reached India; but under the energizing influences of Islam, by 758 they had established a flourishing trade with China, for which they set up way stations or staple-points in Canton and the Sunda Islands.474 First as voyagers and merchants, then as colonists, they came, bringing their wares and their religion to these distant shores. Marco Polo, visiting Sumatra in 1260, tells us the coast population was "Saracen," but this was probably more in religion than in blood.475 Oman ventures, seconded by those of Yemen, reached as far south as east. The trading stations of Madisha and Barawa were established on the Somali coast of East Africa in 908, and Kilwa 750 miles further south in 925. In the seventeenth century the Oman Arabs dislodged the intruding Portuguese from all this coast belt down to the present northern boundary of Portuguese East Africa. Even so late as 1850 their capital, Mascat, sent out fine merchantmen that did an extensive carrying trade, and might be seen loading in the ports of British India, in Singapore, Java, and Mauritius.
Brittany's active part in the maritime history of France is due not only to its ragged contour, its inshore and offshore islands, its forward location on the Atlantic which brought it near to the fisheries of Newfoundland and the trade of the West Indies, but also to the fact that the "Golden Belt," which, with but few interruptions, forms a band of fertility along the coast, has supported a denser population than the sterile granitic soils of the interior,476 while the sea near by varied and enriched the diet of the inhabitants by its abundance of fish, and in its limy seaweed yielded a valuable fertilizer for their gardens.477 The small but countless alluvial deposits at the fiord heads in Norway, aided by the products of the sea, are able to support a considerable number of people. Hence the narrow coastal rim of that country shows always a density of population double or quadruple that of the next density belt toward the mountainous interior, and contains seventeen out of Norway's nineteen towns having more than 5,000 inhabitants.478 It is this relative fertility of the coastal regions, as opposed to the sterile interior, that has brought so large a part of Norway's people in contact with the Atlantic and helped give them a prominent place in maritime history.
Occasionally an infertile and sparsely inhabited littoral bordering a limited zone of singular productivity, especially if favorably located for international trade, will develop marked maritime activity, both in trade and commercial colonization. Such was Arabian Yemen, the home of the ancient Sabæans on the Red Sea, stretching from the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb north-westward for 500 miles. Here a mountain range, rising to 10,000 feet and bordering the plateau desert of central Arabia, condenses the vapors of the summer monsoon and creates a long-drawn oasis, where terraced coffee gardens and orchards blossom in the irrigated soil; but the arid coastal strip at its feet, harboring a sparse population only along its tricking streams, developed a series of considerable ports as outlets for the abundant products and crowded population of the highlands.479 A location on the busy sea lane leading from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, near the meeting place of three continents, made the merchants of the Yemen coast, like the Oman Arabs to the north, middlemen in the trade of Europe with eastern Africa and India.480 Therefore, even in the second century these Sabæans had their trading stations scattered along the east coast of Africa as far south as Zanzibar.481 In 1502 Vasco da Gama found Arabs, either of Oman or Yemen, yet farther south in Sofala, the port for the ivory and gold trade. Some of them he employed as pilots to steer his course to India.482
History makes one fact very plain: a people who dwell by the sea, and to whom nature applies some lash to drive them out upon the deep, command opportunity for practically unlimited expansion. In this way small and apparently ill-favored strips of the earth's surface have become the seats of wide maritime supremacy and colonial empire. The scattered but extensive seaboard possession of little Venice and Genoa in the latter centuries of the Middle Ages are paralleled in modern times by the large oversea dominions of the English and Dutch.
Seaward expansions of peoples are always of great moment and generally of vast extent, whether they are the coastward movements of inland peoples to get a foothold upon the great oceanic highway of trade and civilization, as has been the case with the Russians notably since the early eighteenth century, and with numerous interior tribes of
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