Part 26 (1/2)
The early history of maritime colonization shows in general two geographic phases: first, the appropriation of the islet and headland outskirts of the seaboard, and later--it may be much later--an advance toward the inner edge of the coast, or yet farther into the interior.
Progress from the earlier to the maturer phase depends upon the social and economic development of the colonizers, as reflected in their valuation of territorial area. The first phase, the outcome of a low estimate of the value of land, is best represented by the Phoenician and earliest Greek colonies, whose purposes were chiefly commercial, and who sought merely such readily accessible coastal points as furnished the best trading stations on the highway of the Mediterranean and the adjacent seas. The earlier Greek colonies, like those of the Triopium promontory forming the south-western angle of Asia Minor, Chalcidice, the Thracian Chersonesus, Calchedon, Byzantium, the Pontic Heraclea, and Sinope, were situated on peninsulas or headlands, that would afford a convenient anchor ground; or, like Syracuse and Mitylene, on small insh.o.r.e islets, which were soon outgrown, and from which the towns then spread to the mainland near by. The advantages of such sites lay in their accessibility to commerce, and in their natural protection against the attack of strange or hostile mainland tribes. For a nation of merchants, satisfied with the large returns but also with the ephemeral power of middlemen, these considerations sufficed. While the Phoenician trading posts in Africa dotted the outer rim of the coast, the inner edge of the zone was indicated by Libyan or Ethiopian towns, where the inhabitants of the interior bartered their ivory and skins for the products of Tyre.[436] So that commercial expansion of the Arabs down the east coast of Africa in the first and again in the tenth century seized upon the offsh.o.r.e islands of Zanzibar, Pemba, and Mafia, the small insh.o.r.e islets like Mombasa and Lamu, and the whole outer rim of the coast from the equator southward to the Rovuma River.[437] The Sultan of Zanzibar, heir to this coastal strip, had not expanded it a decade ago, when he had to relinquish the long thread of his continental possessions.
[Sidenote: Inland advance of colonies.]
But when a people has advanced to a higher conception of colonization as an outlet for national as well as commercial expansion, and when it sees that the permanent prosperity of both race and trade in the new locality depends upon the occupation of larger tracts of territory and the development of local resources as a basis for exchanges, their settlements spread from the outer rim of the coasts to its inner edge and yet beyond, if alluvial plains and river highways are present to tempt inland expansion. Such was the history of many later colonies of the Greeks[438] and Carthaginians, and especially of most modern colonial movements, for these have been dominated by a higher estimate of the value of land.
After the long Atlantic journey, the outposts of the American coast were welcome resting-places to the early European voyagers, but, owing to their restricted area and therefore limited productivity, they were soon abandoned, or became mere bases for inland expansion. The little island of Cuttyhunk, off southern Ma.s.sachusetts, was the site of Gosnold's abortive attempt at colonization in 1602, like Raleigh's attempt on Roanoke Island in 1585, and the later one of Popham on the eastern headland of Cas...o...b..y. The Pilgrims paused at the extremity of Cape Cod, and again on Clark's Island, before fixing their settlement on Plymouth Bay. Monhegan Island, off the Maine coast, was the site of an early English trading post, which, however, lasted only from 1623 to 1626;[439]
and the same dates fix the beginning and end of a fis.h.i.+ng and trading station established on Cape Ann, and removed later to Salem harbor. The Swedes made their first settlement in America on Cape Henlopen, at the entrance of Delaware Bay; but their next, only seven years later, they located well up the estuary of the Delaware River. Thus for the modern colonist the outer edge of the coast is merely the gateway of the land.
From it he pa.s.ses rapidly to the settlement of the interior, wherever fertile soil and abundant resources promise a due return upon his labor.
[Sidenote: Interpenetration of land and sea.]
Since it is from the land, as the inhabited portion of the earth's surface, that all maritime movements emanate, and to the land that all oversea migrations are directed, the reciprocal relations between land and sea are largely determined by the degree of accessibility existing between the two. This depends primarily upon the articulation of a land-ma.s.s, whether it presents an unbroken contour like Africa and India, or whether, like Europe and Norway, it drops a fringe of peninsulas and a shower of islands into the bordering ocean. Mere distance from the sea bars a country from its vivifying contact; every protrusion of an ocean artery into the heart of a continent makes that heart feel the pulse of life on far-off, unseen sh.o.r.es. The Baltic inlet which makes a seaport of St. Petersburg 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) back from the western rim of Europe, brings Atlantic civilization to this half-Asiatic side of the continent. The solid front presented by the Iberian Peninsula and Africa to the Atlantic has a narrow crack at Gibraltar, whence the Mediterranean penetrates inland 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers), and converts the western foot of the Caucasus and the roots of the Lebanon Mountains into a seaboard. By means of the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean runs northward 1,300 miles (2,200 kilometers) from Cape Comorin to meet the Indus delta; and then turns westward 700 miles farther through the Oman and Persian gulfs to receive the boats from the Tigris and Euphrates. Such marine inlets create islands and peninsulas; which are characterized by proximity to the sea on all or many sides; and in the interior of the continents they produce every degree of nearness, shading off into inaccessible remoteness from the watery highway of the deep.
The success with which such indentations open up the interior of the continents depends upon the length of the inlets and the size of the land-ma.s.s in question. Africa's huge area and unbroken contour combine to hold the sea at arm's length, Europe's deep-running inlets open that small continent so effectively that Kazan, Russia's most eastern city of considerable size, is only 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) distant from the nearest White Sea, Baltic, and Azof ports. Asia, the largest of all the continents, despite a succession of big indentations that invade its periphery from Sinai peninsula to East Cape, has a vast inland area hopelessly far from the surrounding oceans.
[Sidenote: Ratio of sh.o.r.eline to area.]
In order to determine the coast articulation of any country or continent, Carl Ritter and his followers divided area by sh.o.r.eline, the latter a purely mathematical line representing the total contour length.
By this method Europe's ratio is one linear mile of coast to 174 square miles of area, Australia's 1:224, Asia's 1:490, and Africa's 1:700. This means that Europe's proportion of coast is three times that of Asia and four times that of Africa; that a country like Norway, with a sh.o.r.eline of 12,000 miles traced in and out along the fiords and around the larger islands,[440] has only 10 square miles of area for every mile of seaboard, while Germany, with every detail of its littoral included in the measurement, has only 1,515 miles of sh.o.r.eline and a ratio of one mile of coast to every 159 square miles of area.
The criticism has been made against this method that it compares two unlike measures, square and linear, which moreover increase or decrease in markedly different degrees, according as larger or smaller units are used. But for the purposes of anthropo-geography the method is valid, inasmuch as it shows the amount of area dependent for its marine outline upon each mile of littoral. A coast, like every other boundary, performs the important function of intermediary in the intercourse of a land with its neighbors; hence the length of this sea boundary materially affects this function. Area and coastline are not dead mathematical quant.i.ties, but like organs of one body stand in close reciprocal activity, and can be understood only in the light of their persistent mutual relations.
The division of the area of a land by the length of its coastline yields a quotient which to the anthropo-geographer is not a dry figure, but an index to the possible relations between seaboard and interior. A comparison of some of these ratios will ill.u.s.trate this fact.
Germany's sh.o.r.eline, traced in contour without including details, measures 787 miles; this is just one-fifth that of Italy and two-fifths that of France, so that it is short. But since Germany's area is nearly twice Italy's and a little larger than that of France, it has 267 square miles of territory for every mile of coast, while Italy has only 28 square miles, and France 106. Germany has towns that are 434 miles from the nearest seaboard, but in Italy the most inland point is only 148 miles from the Mediterranean.[441] If we turn now to the United States and adopt Mendenhall's estimate of its general or contour coastline as 5,705 miles, we find that our country has 530 square miles of area dependent for its outlet upon each mile of seaboard. This means that our coast has a heavy task imposed upon it, and that its commercial and political importance is correspondingly enhanced; that the extension of our Gulf of Mexico littoral by the purchase of Florida and the annexation of Texas were measures of self-preservation, and that the unbroken contour and mountain-walled face of our Pacific littoral is a serious national handicap.
[Sidenote: Criticism of this formula.]
But this method is open to the legitimate and fundamental criticism that, starting from the conception of a coast as a mere line instead of a zone, it ignores all those features which belong to every littoral as a strip of the earth's surface--location, geologic structure, relief, area, accessibility to the sea in front and to the land behind, all which vary from one part of the world's seaboard to another, and serve to differentiate the human history of every littoral. Moreover, of all parts of the earth's surface, the coast as the hem of the sea and land, combining the characters of each, is most complex. It is the coast as a human habitat that primarily concerns anthropo-geography. A careful a.n.a.lysis of the multifarious influences modifying one another in this mingled environment of land and water reveals an intricate interplay of geographic forces, varying from inland basin to marginal sea, from marginal sea to open ocean, and changing from one historical period to another--an interplay so mercurial that it could find only a most inadequate expression in the rigid mathematical formula of Carl Ritter.
[Sidenote: Accessibility of coasts from hinterland.]
As the coast, then, is the border zone between the solid, inhabited land and the mobile, untenanted deep, two important factors in its history are the accessibility of its back country on the one hand, and the accessibility of the sea on the other. A littoral population barred from its hinterland by mountain range or steep plateau escarpment or desert tract feels little influence from the land; level or fertile soil is too limited in amount to draw inland the growing people, intercourse is too difficult and infrequent, transportation too slow and costly. Hence the inhabitants of such a coast are forced to look seaward for their racial and commercial expansion, even if a paucity of good harbors limits the accessibility of the sea; they must lead a somewhat detached and independent existence, so far as the territory behind them is concerned.
Here the coast, as a peripheral organ of the interior, as the outlet for its products, the market for its foreign exchanges, and the medium for intercourse with its maritime neighbors, sees its special function impaired. But it takes advantage of its isolation and the protection of a long sea boundary to detach itself politically from its hinterland, as the histories of Phoenicia, the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, Dalmatia, the republics of Amalfi, Venice, and Genoa, the county of Barcelona, and Portugal abundantly prove. At the same time it profits by its seaboard location to utilize the more varied fields of maritime enterprise before it, in lieu of the more or less forbidden territory behind it. The height and width of the landward barrier, the number and practicability of the pa.s.sways across it, and especially the value of the hinterland's products in relation to their bulk, determine the amount of intercourse between that hinterland and its mountain or desert barred littoral.
[Sidenote: Mountain-barred hinterlands.]
The interior is most effectively cut off from the periphery, where a mountain range or a plateau escarpment traces the inner line of the coastland, as in the province of Liguria in northern Italy, Dalmatia, the western or Malabar coast of India, most parts of Africa, and long stretches of the Pacific littoral of the Americas. The highland that backs the Norwegian coast is crossed by only one railroad, that pa.s.sing through the Trondhjem depression; and this barrier has served to keep Norway's historical connection with Sweden far less intimate than with Denmark. The long inlet of the Adriatic, bringing the sea well into the heart of Southern Europe, has seen nevertheless a relatively small maritime development, owing to the wall of mountains that everywhere shuts out the hinterland of its coasts. The greatness of Venice was intimately connected with the Brenner Pa.s.s over the Alps on the one hand, and the trade of the eastern Mediterranean on the other. Despite Austro-Hungary's crucial interest in the northeast corner of the Adriatic as a maritime outlet for this vast inland empire, and its herculean efforts at Trieste and Fiume to create harbors and to connect them by transmontane railroads with the valley of the Danube, the maritime development of this coast is still restricted, and much of Austria's trade goes out northward by German ports.[442] Farther south along the Dalmatian and Albanian coasts, the deep and sheltered bays between the half-submerged roots of the Dinaric Alps have developed only local importance, because they lack practicable connection with the interior. This was their history too in early Greek and Roman days, for they found only scant support in the few caravans that crossed by the Roman road to Dyrrachium to exchange the merchandise of the Aegean for the products of the Ionian Isles. Spain has always suffered from the fact that her bare, arid, and unproductive tableland almost everywhere rises steeply from her fertile and densely populated coasts; and therefore that the two have been unable to cooperate either for the production of a large maritime commerce or for national political unity.
Here the diverse conditions of the littoral and the wall of the great central terrace of the country have emphasized that tendency to defection that belongs to every periphery, and therefore necessitated a strong centralized government to consolidate the restive maritime provinces with their diverse Galician, Basque, Catalonian, and Andalusian folk into one nation with the Castilians of the plateau.[443]
[Sidenote: Accessible hinterlands.]
Where mountain systems run out endwise into the sea, the longitudinal valleys with their drainage streams open natural highways from the interior to the coast. This structure has made the Atlantic side of the Iberian Peninsula far more open than its Mediterranean front, and therefore contributed to its leaders.h.i.+p in maritime affairs since 1450.
So from the sh.o.r.es of Thrace to the southern point of the Peloponnesus, all the valleys of Greece open out on the eastern or Asiatic side. Here every mountain-flanked bay has had its own small hinterland to draw upon, and every such interior has been accessible to the civilization of the Aegean; here was concentrated the maritime and cultural life of h.e.l.las.[444] The northern half of Andean Colombia, by way of the parallel Atrato, Rio Cauco, and Magdalena valleys, has supported the activities of its Caribbean littoral, and through these avenues has received such foreign influences as might penetrate to inland Bogota. In like manner, the mountain-ridged peninsula of Farther India keeps its interior in touch with its leading ports through its intermontane valleys of the Irawadi, Salwin, Menam, and Mekong rivers.
Low coasts rising by easy gradients to wide plains, like those of northern France, Germany, southern Russia, and the Gulf seaboard of the United States, profit by an accessible and extensive hinterland.
Occasionally, however, this advantage is curtailed by a political boundary reinforced by a high protective tariff, as Holland, Belgium, and East Prussia[445] know to their sorrow.