Influences of Geographic Environment by Ellen Churchill Semple (i love reading books .TXT) 📖
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A result of this grouping is the abundance of land in the northern hemisphere, and the vast predominance of water in the southern, by reason of which these two hemispheres have each assumed a distinct rôle in history. The northern hemisphere offers the largest advantages for the habitation of man, and significantly enough, contains a population five times that of the southern hemisphere. The latter, on the other hand, with its vast, unbroken water areas, has been the great oceanic highway for circum-mundane exploration and trade. This great water girdle of the South Seas had to be discovered before the spherical form of the earth could be proven. In the wide territory of the northern hemisphere civilization has experienced an uninterrupted development, first in the Old World, because this offered in its large area north of the equator the fundamental conditions for rapid evolution; then it was transplanted with greatest success to North America. The northern hemisphere contains, therefore, "the zone of greatest historical density," from which the track of the South Seas is inconveniently remote. Hence we find in recent decades a reversion to the old east-west path along the southern rim of Eurasia, now perfected by the Suez Canal, and to be extended in the near future around the world by the union of the Pacific with the Caribbean Sea at Panama; so that finally the northern hemisphere will have its own circum-mundane waterway, along the line of greatest intercontinental intercourse.
The size of the ocean as a whole is so enormous, and yet its various subdivisions are so uniform in their physical aspect, that their differences of size produce less conspicuous historical effects than their diversity of area would lead one to expect. A voyage across the 177,000 square miles (453,500 square kilometers) of the Black Sea does not differ materially from one across the 979,000 square miles (2,509,500 square kilometers) of the Mediterranean; or a voyage across the 213,000 square miles (547,600 square kilometers) of the North Sea, from one across the three-hundredfold larger area of the Pacific. The ocean does not, like the land, wear upon its surface the evidences and effects of its size; it wraps itself in the same garment of blue waves or sullen swell, wherever it appears; but the outward cloak of the land varies from zone to zone. The significant anthropo-geographical influence of the size of the oceans, as opposed to that of the smaller seas, comes from the larger circle of lands which the former open to maritime enterprise. For primitive navigation, when the sailor crept from headland to headland and from island to island, the small enclosed basin with its close-hugging shores did indeed offer the best conditions. To-day, only the great tonnage of ocean-going vessels may reflect in some degree the vast areas they traverse between continent and continent. Coasting craft and ships designed for local traffic in enclosed seas are in general smaller, as in the Baltic, though the enormous commerce of the Great Lakes, which constitute in effect an inland sea, demands immense vessels.
The vast size of the oceans has been the basis of their neutrality. The neutrality of the seas is a recent idea in political history. The principle arose in connection with the oceans, and from them was extended to the smaller basins, which previously tended to be regarded as private political domains. Their limited area, which enabled them to be compassed, enabled them also to be appropriated, controlled and policed. The Greek excluded the Phoenician from the Aegean and made it an Hellenic sea. Carthage and Tarentum tried to draw the dead line for Roman merchantmen at the Lacinian Cape, the doorway into the Ionian Sea, and thereby involved themselves in the famous Punic Wars. The whole Mediterranean became a Roman sea, the mare nostrum. Pompey's fleet was able to police it effectively and to exterminate the pirates in a few months, as Cicero tells us in his oration for the Manilian Law. Venice, by the conquest of the Dalmatian pirates in 991 prepared to make herself dominatrix Adriatici maris, as she was later called. By the thirteenth century she had secured full command of the sea, spoke of it as "the Gulf," in her desire to stamp it as a mare clausum, maintained in it a powerful patrol fleet under a Capitan in Golfo, whose duty it was to police the sea for pirates and to seize all ships laden with contraband goods. She claimed and enforced the right of search of foreign vessels, and compelled them to discharge two-thirds of their cargo at Venice, which thus became the clearing house of the whole Adriatic. She even appealed to the Pope for confirmation of her dominion over the sea.576 Sweden and Denmark strove for a dominum maris Baltici; but the Hanse Towns of northern Germany secured the maritime supremacy in the basin, kept a toll-gate at its entrance, and levied toll or excluded merchant ships at their pleasure, a right which after the fall of the Hanseatic power was assumed by Denmark and maintained till 1857. "The Narrow Seas" over which England claimed sovereignty from 1299 to 1805, and on which she exacted a salute from every foreign vessel, included the North Sea as far as Stadland Cape in Norway, the English Channel, and the Bay of Biscay down to Cape Finisterre in northern Spain.577
At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Indian Ocean was a Portuguese sea. Spain was trying to monopolize the Caribbean and even the Pacific Ocean. But the immense areas of these pelagic fields of enterprise, and the rapid intrusion into them of other colonial powers soon rendered obsolete in practice the principle of the mare clausum, and introduced that of the mare liberum. The political theory of the freedom of the seas seems to have needed vigorous support even toward the end of the seventeenth century. At this time we find writers like Salmasius and Hugo Grotius invoking it to combat Portuguese monopoly of the Indian Ocean as a mare clausum. Grotius in a lengthy dissertation upholds the thesis that "Jure gentium quibusvis ad quosvis liberam esse navigationem," and supports it by an elaborate argument and quotations from the ancient poets, philosophers, orators and historians.578 This principle was not finally acknowledged by England as applicable to "The Narrow Seas" till 1805. Now, by international agreement, political domain extends only to one marine league from shore or within cannon range. The rest of the vast water area remains the unobstructed highway of the world.
NOTES TO CHAPTER IX
528.
S.M. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, p. 135. New York, 1900.
529.A.H. Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains, Vol. I, p. 277; Vol. II, 79-81. New York, 1849.
530.E.F. Knight, Where Three Empires Meet, pp. 257, 261. London, 1897.
531.Col. Lane Fox, Early Modes of Navigation, Journal of Anthropological Institute, Vol. IV, p. 423.
532.Boyd Alexander, From the Niger to the Nile, Vol. I, p. 167. London; 1907.
533.Ibid., Vol. I, p. 324.
534.James H. Breasted, History of Egypt, pp. 89, 91, 97. New York, 1905. Col. Lane Fox, Early Modes of Navigation, Journal of Anthropological Institute, Vol. IV, pp. 414-417.
535.G. Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa, Vol. I, p. 77. London, 1873.
536.E. Huntington, The Depression of Sistan in Eastern Persia, Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, Vol. 37, No. 5. 1905.
537.Schoolcraft, The Indian Tribes of the United States, Vol. I, p. 214. Philadelphia, 1853.
538.H.H. Bancroft, The Native Races, Vol. I, pp. 382-383, 408, 564. San Francisco, 1886. D. G. Brinton, The American Race, pp. 110, 112. Philadelphia, 1901.
539.Herodotus, Book 1, Chap. 194.
540.S.M. Zwemer, Arabia the Cradle of Islam, p. 135. New York, 1900.
541.Cotterill and Little, Ships and Sailors, pp. ix-x, 38, London, 1868.
542.M. Hue, Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China in 1846, Vol. II, p. 251. Chicago, 1898.
543.Elliott Coues, History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Vol. I, p. 159. New York, 1893.
544.Col. Lane Fox, Early Modes of Navigation, Journal of Anthropological Institute, Vol. IV, pp. 423-425.
545.H.M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, Vol. I, pp. 313-314. New York, 1879.
546.Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 184, 219-220, 270-272, 300.
547.Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, p. 288. London, 1896-1898.
548.Ibid., Vol I, pp. 358-359. Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 679-680. London, 1904.
549.Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, pp. 153-154; Vol. II, pp. 91, 100. London, 1896-1898.
550.Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 166-170.
551.Captain Winkler, Sea Charts Formerly Used in the Marshall Islands, Smithsonian Report for 1899, translated from the Marine Rundschau. Berlin, 1898.
552.Captain James Cook, Journal of First Voyage Round the World, pp. 70, 105, 119, 221, 230. Edited by W.J.L. Wharton. London, 1893.
553.Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, pp. 161, 174. London, 1896-1898.
554.The Commercial and Fiscal Policy of the Venetian Republic, Edinburgh Review, Vol. 200, pp. 352-353. 1904.
555.H. Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. I, pp. 188-189, 193-195. New York, 1902-1906.
556.G. Sergi, The Mediterranean Race, pp. 29-37. New York, 1901. W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, pp. 128-130, 270-273, 387-390, 407, 444, 448. New York, 1899.
557.H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, pp. 189-190. London, 1904.
558.Sydow-Wagner Schul-Atlas, Völker und Sprachenkarten, No. 13. Gotha, 1905. A. Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars, map p. 80. New York, 1897.
559.Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. VI, pp. 5-17. New York, 1902-1906.
560.E.C. Semple, The Development of the Hanse Towns in Relation to their Geographical Environment, Bulletin American Geographical Society, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, 1899.
561.Helen Zimmern, The Hansa Towns, pp. 24-25, 54-55. New York, 1895.
562.Nordenskiold, The Voyage of the Vega, pp. 365, 588, 591. New York, 1882.
563.Ibid., pp. 375, 403, 405, 487, 563.
564.Agnes Laut, The Vikings of the Pacific, pp. 62-105. New York, 1905.
565.Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 446, 449-450. London, 1896-1898.
566.Ibid., Vol. III, pp. 180-195.
567.Duarte Barbosa, The Coasts of East Africa and Malabar, pp. 17-18. Hakluyt Society Publications. London, 1866.
568.Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 443-444. London, 1896-1898.
569.Angus Hamilton, Korea, pp. 130-135. New York, 1904.
570.Census of the Philippine Islands, Vol. I, pp. 318-320, 478, 481-495. Washington, 1903.
571.Hans Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, pp. 544-545. New York, 1902-1906.
572.Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. III, pp. 407-412. London, 1896-1898.
573.Pliny, Natural History, Book VI, chap. 26.
574.Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography, Vol. II, pp. 351, 417-418, 470, 471. London, 1883.
575.For full discussion of Indian Ocean, see Helmolt, History of the World, Vol. II, pp. 580-584, 602-610. New York, 1902-1906. Duarte Barbosa, The Coasts of East Africa and Malabar, pp. 26-28, 41-42,
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