Part 42 (1/2)
Contrast their racial unity about this common center with the extremes of ethnic divergence in their remote peripheries, where Teutons, Mongols, Malays and Negroes differ widely from the Mediterranean stock and from each other. Eastern Australia represents the ethnic antipodes of western Asia, in harmony with the great dividing distance between them, but the sides of these continents facing each other across the bridge of the Sunda Islands are spa.r.s.ely strewn with a common Malay element.
[Sidenote: Africa's location.]
Africa's early development was never helped by the fact that the continent lay between Asia and South America. It was subjected to strong and persistent Asiatic Influences, but apparently to no native American ones. From that far-off trans-Atlantic sh.o.r.e came no signs of life.
Africa appears in history as an appendage of Asia, a cultural peninsula of the larger continent. This was due not only to the Suez Isthmus and the narrowness of the Red Sea rift, but to its one-sided invasion by Asiatic races and trade from the east, while the western side of the continent lay buried in sleep, unstirred by any voice from the silent sh.o.r.es of America. Semitic influences, in successive waves, spread over the Dark Continent as far as Morocco, the Senegal, Niger, Lake Chad, Nyanza, Tanganyika and Nya.s.sa, and gave it such light as it had before the 16th century. Only after the Atlantic gulf was finally crossed did influences from the American side of the ocean begin to impinge upon the West African coast, first in the form of the slave and rum trade, then in the more humane aspect of the Liberian colony. But with the full development of the Atlantic period in history, we see all kinds of Atlantic influences, though chiefly from the Atlantic states of Europe, penetrating eastward into the heart of Africa, and there meeting other commercial and political activities pressing inland from the Indian Ocean.
[Sidenote: The Atlantic abyss.]
The long Atlantic rift between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, which was such a potent factor in the primitive r.e.t.a.r.dation of Africa is, from the standpoint of anthropo-geography, the most important feature in the distribution of the land-ma.s.ses over the globe. Not till the discovery of America bridged this abyss did the known world become a girdle round the earth. Except the Norse ventures to the American continent by way of Iceland and Greenland between 1000 and 1347, no account of pre-Columbian intercourse between the two sh.o.r.es of the Atlantic has ever been substantiated. Columbus found the opposite land unfamiliar in race as in culture. He described the people as neither whites nor blacks, the two ethnic types which he knew on the eastern side of the Atlantic abyss. He and his successors found in the Americas only a Stone Age culture, a stage already outgrown by Europe and Africa.
These continents from Lapland to the Hottentot country were using iron.
Prior to the voyage of the great Genoese, Europe gave nothing to America and received nothing from it, except the Gulf Stream's scanty cargo of driftwood stranded on bleak Icelandic sh.o.r.es. The Tertiary land-bridge across the North Atlantic between Norway and Greenland may possibly have guided a pre-Caucasic migration to America and given that continent part of its aboriginal population.[756] However, no trace of any European stock remains.
[Sidenote: Atlantic islands uninhabited.]
The collapse of the bridge at the close of the Glacial Epoch left the Atlantic abyss effectually dividing the two hemispheres. Its islands, few and far between, were helpless to maintain intercourse between the opposite sh.o.r.es; this is proven by the fact that all of them from Greenland to Tristan da Cunha, excepting only the Canaries, were uninhabited at the time of their discovery. History records when the first bold voyagers came upon them in that unmarked waste of waters, and gave them their first occupants. The political upheavals of Norway in King Harf.a.gr's time (872) sent to the Faroes and Iceland their first settlers, though these islands were previously known to the Celts of Ireland. The Norse colonists who went to Greenland in the year 1000 seem to have been the first regular settlers on those inhospitable coasts.
They found no native inhabitants, but numerous abandoned dwellings, fragments of boats and stone implements,[757] which doubtless recorded the intermittent voyages thither of the Eskimo, preliminary to permanent occupation. The Scandinavians did not encounter natives on the island till the 12th century, when Greenland probably received its first Eskimo immigration.[758]
[Sidenote: Geographical character of the Pacific.]
While the Atlantic thus formed a long north-and-south rift across the inhabited world at the period of the great discoveries, the Pacific, strewn with islands and land-rimmed at its northern extremity by the peninsulas of Alaska and eastern Siberia, spread a nebula of population from the dense centers of Asia across to the outskirts of America. The general Mongoloid character of the American Indians as a race, the stronger Asiatic stamp of the Western Eskimo, the unmistakeable ethnic and cultural affinities of the Northwest Coast tribes both with southern Polynesians and Asiatics,[759] all point to America as the great eastern wing of the Mongoloid or Asiatic area, and therefore as the true Orient of the world.
Geographic conditions have made this possible or even probable. The winds and currents of the North Pacific set from j.a.pan straight toward the American coast. Junks blown out to sea from China or j.a.pan have been carried by the Kuro Siwo and the prevailing westerlies across the Pacific to our continent. There is record of a hundred instances of this occurrence.[760]
[Sidenote: Pacific affinities of North American Indians.]
The broken bridge across Bering Strait formed by East Cape, Cape Prince of Wales and the Diomede Islands between, and further south the natural causeway of the Commander and Aleutian Islands leading from the peninsula of Kamchatka to that of Unalaska, have facilitated intercourse between Asia and America.[761] Justin Winsor says, ”There is hardly a stronger demonstration of such connection between the two continents than the physical resemblances of the peoples now living on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean in these upper lat.i.tudes.”[762] This resemblance is by no means confined to the Eskimo and Chukches, who have exchanged colonists across Bering Sea. Recent investigations have revealed a wider kins.h.i.+p. The population of northern Siberia speaks in general Ural-Altaic languages, but it includes a few scattered tribes whose singular speech excludes them from this linguistic group, and who have therefore been placed by ethnologists in a distinct cla.s.s called ”paleasiatics” or ”hyperboreans.” This cla.s.s is composed of the Ostyak and Kot on the Yenisei River, the Gilyak and Ainos at the mouth of the Amur and on the Kurile, Sakhalin and Yezo islands, the Kamchadal and Koryak of Kamchatka, and the Chukches and Yukaghir of extreme northeastern Siberia. As far back as 1850, the eminent philologist Robert Latham noted a marked linguistic agreement, both in structure and verbal affinity, between our Northwest Coast tribes and the peoples of the islands and peninsulas fringing northeastern Asia. ”Koriak is notably American,” he said.[763] The recent Jesup Expedition to the Northwest Coast of America and the nearby coast of Asia investigated the Koryak, to determine whether in the past there had been any connection between the cultures and ethnic types of the Old and New World. These investigations have proved beyond doubt a kins.h.i.+p of culture, attributable either to a remote common origin or to former contact, long and close, between these isolated Siberian tribes and the American aborigines. They show that the Koryak are one of the Asiatic tribes standing nearest to the northwestern American Indian.[764] [See map page 103.]
[Sidenote: Polynesian affinities.]
W.H. Dall finds the inhabitants of the Pacific slope of North America conspicuously allied with Oceanica in cultural achievements, whose origin he therefore a.s.signs to that vast congeries of islands stretching from Asia toward South America in lat.i.tude 25 south. These islands, closely cl.u.s.tered as far as the Paumota group, straggle along with widening s.p.a.ces between, through Easter Isle, which carries the indestructible memorials of a strange civilization, through Sala-y-Gomez, San Felix, and St. Ambrose almost to the threshold of the Peruvian coast. It is to be noted that these islands lie just outside the westward-bearing Equatorial Current and trade-winds, on the margin of the South Pacific anti-cyclonic winds and a southern current which sets towards the Peruvian coast.[765] A more probable avenue for the introduction of these Polynesian or Malayan elements of culture is found in O.T. Mason's theory, that primitive mariners of the southwestern Pacific, led into migration by the eternal food quest, may have skirted the seaboard of East Asia and Northwest America, pa.s.sing along a great-circle route through the succession of marginal seas and archipelagoes to various ports of entry on the Pacific front of America.
Such a route, favored by the prevailing marine currents and winds from the southwest, and used repeatedly during long periods of time, might have introduced trans-Pacific elements of race and culture into the western side of America.[766]
[Sidenote: The real Orient of the World.]
Moreover, primitive America resembled Oceanica and northern Asia in its ignorance of iron, in its Stone Age civilization, and its r.e.t.a.r.ded social and political development. Such affinities as it shows were predominantly Pacific or trans-Pacific.[767] On its Atlantic side, it stood out in striking contrast to the contemporaneous civilizations and races in Europe and Africa; this was its unneighbored sh.o.r.e, lying on the eastern margin of that broad zone of habitation which stretched hence westward on and on around the world, to the outermost capes of Europe and Africa. The Atlantic abyss formed the single gap in this encircling belt of population, to which Columbus at last affixed the clasp. The Atlantic face of the Americas formed therefore the drowsy unstirred Orient of the inhabited world, which westward developed growing activity--dreaming a civilization in Mexico and Peru, roused to artistic and maritime achievement in Oceanica and the Malay Archipelago, to permanent state-making and real cultural development in Asia, and attaining the highest civilization at last in western Europe. There was the sunset margin of the inhabited world, the area of achievement, the adult Occident, facing across the dividing ocean that infant Orient beyond. Here the Old World, the full-grown world, had acc.u.mulated in Columbus' time the matured forces of a hemisphere; it was searching for some outlet across the sh.o.r.eless distances of the Atlantic, waiting for some call from its voiceless beyond.
[Sidenote: The Atlantic abyss in historic movements of peoples.]
This deep, unbridged chasm of the Atlantic, closed only four hundred years ago, must be taken into account in all investigations of the geographical distribution of races, whether in prehistoric or historic times. The influences of those ages when it formed an impa.s.sable gulf are still operative in directing the movements of the peoples to-day inhabiting its sh.o.r.es, because that barrier maintained the continents of America as a vast territorial reserve, spa.r.s.ely inhabited by a Stone Age people, and affording a fresh field for the superior, acc.u.mulated energies of Europe.
[Sidenote: Races and continents.]
Australia and the double continent of America show each the coincidence of an ethnic realm with an isolated continent. In contrast, when we come to the Old World triad of Europe, Asia and Africa, we find three races, to be sure, but races whose geographical distribution ignores the boundaries of the continents. The White race belongs to all three, and from time immemorial has made the central basin of the Mediterranean the white man's sea. The Mongolian, though primarily at home in Asia, stretches along the coast of the Arctic Ocean to the Atlantic sh.o.r.es of Norway, and in historical times has penetrated up the Danube to the foot of the Alps. Nor was the Negroid stock confined to Africa, though Africa has always been its geographical core. The Indian Peninsula and Malay Archipelago, once peopled by a primitive Negroid race, but now harboring only remnants of them in the Deccan, Malacca, the Philippines and elsewhere, bridge the distance to the other great Negroid center in Melanesia and the derivative or secondary Negroid area of Australia.[768] The Negroid race belongs essentially to the long southern land pendants of the Eastern Hemisphere; and wherever it has bordered on the lighter northern stocks, it has drawn a typical boundary zone of mingled tints which never diverges far from the Equator, from the Atlantic sh.o.r.es of the Sudan to Pacific Fiji.[769] [See map page 105.]
The effort of the old ethnology, as represented by Blumenbach, to make a five-fold division of the races in agreement with the five continents was a mistake. To distinguish between the continents is one thing and to distinguish between the races is another. Neither bio-geography nor anthropo-geography can adopt the continents as geographical provinces, although floras, faunas and races the world over give evidence of partial or temporary restriction to a certain continent, whence they have overflowed to other lands. A ground-plan for the geographical cla.s.sification of races is to be found, as Tylor says, in the fact that they are not found scattered indiscriminately over the earth's surface, but that certain races belong to certain regions, in whose peculiar environment they have developed their type, and whence they have spread to other lands, undergoing modifications from race intermixture and successive changes of environment on the way.[770]
[Sidenote: Contrast of the northern and southern continents.]
From this general law of race movements it follows that certain groups of land-ma.s.ses, favored by location and large area, play a great imperial role, holding other lands as appanages. The Eastern Hemisphere, as we have seen, enjoys this advantage over the Western. Still more the Northern Hemisphere, blessed with an abundance of land and a predominant Temperate Zone location, is able to lord it over the Southern, so insular in its poverty of land. The history of the Northern Hemisphere is marked by far-reaching historical influences and wide control; that of the Southern, by detachment, aloofness and impotence, due to the small area and isolation of its land-ma.s.ses. A subordinate role is its fate. Australia will always follow in the train of Eurasia, whence alone it has derived its incentives and means of progress. Neither the southern half of Africa nor South America has ever in historical times struck out a road to advancement unaided by its northern neighbors.