Influences of Geographic Environment by Ellen Churchill Semple (i love reading books .TXT) 📖
- Author: Ellen Churchill Semple
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The coast is the natural habitat of the middleman. One strip of seaboard produces a middleman people, and then sends them out to appropriate other littorals, if geographic conditions are favorable; otherwise it is content with the transit trade of its own locality. It breeds essentially a race of merchants, shunning varied production, nursing monopoly by secrecy and every method to crush competition. The profits of trade attract all the free citizens, and the laboring class is small or slave. Expansion landward has no attraction in comparison with the seaward expansion of commerce. The result is often a relative dearth of local land-grown food stuffs. King Hiram of Tyre, in his letter to King Solomon, promised to send him trees of cedar and cypress, made into rafts and conveyed to the coast of Philistia, and asked in return for grain, "which we stand in need of because we inhabit an island." The pay came in the form of wheat, oil, and wine. But Solomon furnished a considerable part of the laborers—30,000 of them—who were sent, 10,000 at a time, to Mount Lebanon to cut the timber, apparently under the direction of the more skilful Sidonian foresters.506 A type of true coast traders is found in the Duallas of the German Kamerun, at the inner angle of the Gulf of Guinea. Located along the lower course and delta of the Mungo River where it flows into the Kamerun estuary, they command a good route through a mountainous country into the interior. This they guard jealously, excluding all competition, monopolizing the trade, and imposing a transit duty on all articles going to and from the interior. They avoid agriculture so far as possible. Their women and slaves produce an inadequate supply of bananas and yams, but crops needing much labor are wholly neglected, so that their coasts have a reputation for dearness of provisions.507
Along the 4,500 miles of West African coast between the Senegal and the Kunene rivers the negro's natural talent for trade has developed special tribes, who act as intermediaries between the interior and the European stations on the seaboard. Among these we find the Bihenos and Banda of Portuguese Benguela, who fit out whole caravans for the back country; the Portuguese of Loanda rely on the Ambaquistas and the Mbunda middlemen. The slave trade particularly brought a sinister and abnormal activity to these seaboard tribes,508 just as it did to the East Coast tribes, and stimulated both in the exploitation of their geographic position as middlemen.509
The Alaskan coast shows the same development. The Kinik Indians at the head of Cook's Inlet buy skins of land animals from the inland Athapascans at the sources of the Copper River, and then make a good profit by selling them to the American traders of the coast. These same Athapascans for a long time found a similar body of middlemen in the Ugalentz at the mouth of the Copper River, till the Americans there encouraged the inland hunters to bring their skins to the fur station on the coast.510 The Chilcats at the head of Lynn Canal long monopolized the fur trade with the Athapascan Indians about Chilkoot Pass; these they would meet on the divide and buy their skins, which they would carry to the Hudson Bay Company agents on the coast. They guarded their monopoly jealously, and for fifty years were able to exclude all traders and miners from the passes leading to the Yukon.511
The same policy of monopoly and exclusion has been pursued by the Moro coast dwellers of Mindanao in relation to the pagan tribes of the interior. They buy at low prices the forest and agriculture products of the inland Malays, whom they do not permit to approach either rivers or seaboard, for fear they may come into contact with the Chinese merchants along the coast. So fiercely is their monopoly guarded by this middleman race, that the American Government in the Philippines will be able to break it only by military interference.512
Differences of occupation, of food supply, and of climate often further operate to differentiate the coast from the inland people near by, and to emphasize the ethnic difference which is almost invariably present, either inconspicuously from a slight infusion of alien blood, or plainly as in an immigrant race. Sometimes the contrast is in physique. In Finisterre province of western Brittany, the people along the more fertile coastal strip are on the average an inch taller than the inhabitants of the barren, granitic interior. Their more generous food supply, further enriched by the abundant fisheries at their doors, would account for this increased stature; but this must also be attributed in part to intermixture of the local Celts with a tall Teutonic stock which brushed along these shores, but did not penetrate into the unattractive interior.513 So the negroes of the Guinea Coast, though not immune from fevers, are better nourished on the alluvial lowlands near the abundant fish of the lagoons, and hence are often stronger and better looking than the plateau interior tribes near by. But here, again, an advantageous blending of races can not be excluded as a contributing cause.514 Sometimes the advantage in physique falls to the inland people, especially in tropical countries when a highland interior is contrasted with a low coast belt. The wild Igorotes, inhabiting the mountainous interior of northern Luzon, enjoy a cooler climate than the lowlands, and this has resulted in developing in them a decidedly better physique and more industrious habits than are found in the civilized people of the coasts encircling them.515
Where a coast people is an immigrant stock from some remote oversea point, it brings to its new home a surplus of energy which was perhaps the basis of selection in the exodus from the mother country. Such a people is therefore characterized by greater initiative, enterprise, and endurance than the sedentary population which it left behind or that to which it comes; and these qualities are often further stimulated by the transfer to a new environment rich in opportunities. Sea-born in their origin, sea-borne in their migration, they cling to the zone of littoral, because here they find the conditions which they best know how to exploit. Dwelling on the highway of the ocean, living in easy intercourse with distant countries, which would have been far more difficult of access by land-travel over territories inhabited by hostile races, exchanging with these both commodities and ideas, food-stuffs and religions, they become the children of civilization, and their sun-burned seamen the sturdy apostles of progress. Therefore it may be laid down as a general proposition, that the coasts of a country are the first part of it to develop, not an indigenous or local civilization, but a cosmopolitan culture, which later spreads inland from the seaboard.
Exceptions to this rule are found in barren or inaccessible coasts like the Pacific littoral of Peru and Mexico, and on shores like those of California, western Africa and eastern Luzon, which occupy an adverse geographic location facing a neighborless expanse of ocean and remote from the world's earlier foci of civilization. Therefore the descent from the equatorial plateau of Africa down to the Atlantic littoral means a drop in culture also, because the various elements of civilization which for ages have uninterruptedly filtered into Sudan from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, have rarely penetrated to the western rim of the highland, and hence never reached the coast. Moreover, this steaming lowland, from the Senegal River to the Kamerun Mountains, has been a last asylum for dislodged tribes who have been driven out by expanding peoples of the plateau. They have descended in their flight upon the original coast dwellers, adding to the general condition of political disruption, multiplying the number of small weak tribes, increasing the occasions for intertribal wars, and furthering the prevailing degradation. The seaboard lowlands of Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Ivory Coast have all suffered thus In historic times.516 All this region was the original home of the low, typical "Guinea Nigger" of the Southern plantation. The coasts of Oregon and California showed a parallel to this in their fragmentary native tribes of retarded development, whose level of culture, low at best, sank rapidly from the interior toward the seaboard. They seem to have been intruders from the central highlands, who further deteriorated in their weakness and isolation after reaching the coast. They bore every mark of degradation in their short stature, linguistic and tribal dismemberment, their low morals and culture, which ranked them little above the brutes. In contrast, all the large and superior Indian groups of North America belonged to the interior of the continent.517
The long, indented coast of the Mediterranean has in all ages up to modern times presented the contrast of a littoral more advanced in civilization than the inland districts. The only exception was ancient Egypt before Psammeticus began to exploit his mud-choked seaboard. This contrast was apparent, not only wherever Phoenicians or Greeks had appropriated the remote coast of an alien and retarded people, but even in near-by Thrace the savage habits of the interior tribes were softened only where these dwelt in close proximity to the Ionian colonies along the coast, a fact as noticeable in the time of Tacitus as in that of Herodotus five hundred years before.518 The ancient philosophers of Greece were awake to the deep-rooted differences between an inland and a maritime city, especially
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