Influences of Geographic Environment Part 32

[Sidenote: Bering Sea.]

If we turn to Asia, we find that even the unfavorable Arctic location of Bering Sea has been unable to rob it entirely of historical significance. This is the one spot where a native American race has transplanted itself by its natural expansion to Asiatic sh.o.r.es. The circular rim and island-dotted surface have guided Eskimo emigrants to the coast of the Chukchian Peninsula, where they have become partly a.s.similated in dress and language to the local Chukches.[562] The same conditions also facilitated the pa.s.sage of a few Chukches across Bering Strait to the Alaskan side. At Pak (or Peck) on East Cape and on Diomed Island, situated in the narrowest part of Bering Strait, are the great intercontinental markets of the polar tribes. Here American furs have for many decades been exchanged for the reindeer skins of northern Siberia and Russian goods from far-away Moscow.[563] Only the enclosed character of the sea, reported by the Danish explorer Vitus Bering, tempted the land-bred Russians, who reached the northeastern coast of Siberia at the middle of the eighteenth century, to launch their leaky boats of unseasoned timber, push across to the American continent, and make this whole Bering basin a Russian sea;[564] just as a few decades before, when land exploration of Kamchatka had revealed the enclosed character of the Sea of Okhotsk, the Russian pioneers took a straight course across the water to their Pacific outpost of Petropavlovsk near the southern end of the peninsula. But even before the coming of the Slavs to its sh.o.r.es, the Sea of Okhotsk seems to have been an area of native commercial and ethnic intercourse from the Amur River in Siberia in a half circle to the east, through Sakhalin, Yezo, the Kurile Islands and southern Kamchatka,[565] noticeably where the rim of the basin presented the scantiest supply of land and where, therefore, its meager resources had to be eked out by fisheries and trade on the sea.

[Sidenote: Red Sea basin.]

On the southwest margin of Asia, the Red Sea, despite its desert sh.o.r.es, has maintained the influence of its intercontinental location and linked the neighboring elements of Africa and Asia. Ident.i.ty of climatic conditions on both sides of this long rift valley has facilitated ethnic exchanges, and made it the center of what Ratzel calls the "Red Sea group of peoples," related in race and culture.[566] The great ethnic solvent here has been Semitic. Under the spur of Islam, the Arabs by 1514 had made the Red Sea an Arabian and Mohammedan sea. They had their towns or trading stations at Zeila on the African side of the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, at Dalaqua, the port of Abyssinia, at Ma.s.sowa, Suakin, and other towns, so that this coast too was called Arabia Felix.[567]

[Sidenote: a.s.similation facilitated by ethnic kins.h.i.+p.]

Vicinal location about an enclosed basin produces more rapidly a unification of race and culture, when some ethnic relations.h.i.+p and affinity already exists among the peoples inhabiting its sh.o.r.es. As in the ancient and medieval Mediterranean, so in the Yellow Sea of Asia, the working of this principle is apparent. The presence along its coasts of divergent but kindred peoples like the Chinese, Koreans and j.a.panese, allowed these to be easily a.s.similated to a Yellow Sea race and to absorb quickly any later infusion, like that of the Tatars and Manchus.

China, by reason of its larger area, long-drawn coast, ma.s.sive population, and early civilization, was the dominant factor in this basin; Korea and j.a.pan were its culture colonies-a fact that justifies the phrase calling "China the Rome of the Far East." Historical j.a.pan began on the island of Kiu-sui, facing the Yellow Sea. Like Korea, it derived its writing, its fantastic medical notions, its industrial methods, some features of its government administration, its Buddhism and its religion of Confucius from the people about the lower Hoangho.[568] Three centuries ago j.a.pan had its colony on Korean soil at Fusan, the Calais of the East.[569] For purposes of piracy and smuggling j.a.panese penetrated far up the rivers of China. Korea has kept in touch with China by an active trade and diplomatic relations through the centuries.

But to-day China is going to school to j.a.pan. Since j.a.pan renounced her policy of seclusion in 1868 along with her antiquated form of government, and since Korea has been forced out of her hermit life, the potency of vicinal location around this enclosed sea has been suddenly restored. The enforced opening of the treaty ports of j.a.pan, Korea and China simply prepared the way for this basin to rea.s.sert its power to unite, and to unite now more closely and effectively than ever before, under the law of increasing territorial areas. The stimulus was first communicated to the basin from without, from the trading nations of the Occident and that new-born Orient rising from the sea on the California sh.o.r.es. j.a.pan has responded most promptly and most actively to these over-sea stimuli, just as England has, of all Europe, felt most strongly the reflex influences from trans-Atlantic lands. The awakening of this basin has started, therefore, from its seaward rim; its star has risen in the east. It is in the small countries of the world that such stars rise. The compressed energies of j.a.pan, stirred by over-sea contact and an improved government at home, have overleaped the old barriers and are following the lines of slight resistance which this land-bound sea affords. Helped by the bonds of geographical conditions and of race, she has begun to convert China and Korea into her culture colonies.

The on-looking world feels that the ultimate welfare of China and Korea can be best nurtured by j.a.pan, which will thus pay its old debt to the Middle Kingdom.

[Sidenote: Chinese expansion seaward.]

Despite the fact that China's history has always had a decidedly inland character, that its political expansion has been landward, that it has practiced most extensively and successively internal colonization, and that its policy of exclusion has tended to deaden its outlook toward the Pacific, nevertheless China's direct intercourse with the west and its westward-directed influence have never, in point of significance, been comparable with that toward the east and south. Here a succession of marginal seas offered easy water-paths, dotted with way stations, to their outermost rim in j.a.pan, the Philippines and remote Australia.

About the South China Sea, the Gulf of Siam, the Sulu, Celebes, and Java Seas, the coastal regions of the outlying islands have for centuries received Chinese goods and culture, and a blend of that obstinately a.s.sertive Chinese blood.

The strength of these influences has decreased with every increase of distance from the indented coasts and teeming, seafaring population of South China, and with every decrease in race affinity. They have left only faint traces on the alien sh.o.r.es of far-away Australia. The divergent ethnic stock of the widespread Malay world has been little susceptible to these influences, which are therefore weak in the remoter islands, but clearly discernible on the coasts of the Philippines,[570]

Borneo, the nearer Sunda Islands, and the peninsula of Malacca, where the Chinese have had trading colonies for centuries.[571] But in the eastern half of Farther India, which is grouped with China by land as well as by sea, and whose race stock is largely if not purely Mongolian, these influences are very marked, so that the whole continental rim of the South China Sea, from Formosa to the Isthmus of Malacca, is strongly a.s.similated in race and culture. Tongking, exposed to those modifying influences which characterize all land frontiers, as well as to coastwise intercourse, is in its people and civilization merely a transcript of China. The coast districts and islands of Annam are occupied by Chinese as far as the hills of Cambodia, and the name of Cochin China points to the origin of its predominant population.

One-sixth of the inhabitants of Siam are Chinese, some of whom have filtered through the northern border; Bangkok, the capital, has a large Chinese quarter. The whole economic life and no small part of the intellectual life of the eastern face of Farther India south to Singapore is centered in the activity of the Chinese.[572]

[Sidenote: Importance of zonal and continental location.]

The historical significance of an enclosed sea basin depends upon its zonal location and its position in relation to the surrounding lands. We observe a steady decrease of historical importance from south to north through the connected series of the Yellow, j.a.pan, Okhotsk, Bering Seas and the Arctic basin, miscalled ocean. The far-northern location of the Baltic, with its long winters of ice-bound ports and its glaciated lands, r.e.t.a.r.ded its inclusion in the field of history, curtailed its important historical period, and reduced the intensity of its historical life, despite the brave, eager activity of the Hanseatic League. The Mediterranean had the advantage, not only of a more favorable zonal situation, but of a location at the meeting place of three continents and on the line of maritime traffic across the eastern hemisphere from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

[Sidenote: Thala.s.sic character of the Indian Ocean.]

These advantages it shares in some degree with the Indian Ocean, which, as Ratzel justly argues, is not a true ocean, at best only half an ocean. North of the equator, where it is narrowed and enclosed like an inland sea, it loses the hydrospheric and atmospheric characteristics of a genuine ocean. Currents and winds are disorganized by the close-hugging lands. Here the steady northeast trade wind is replaced by the alternating air currents of the northeast and southwest monsoons, which at a very early date[573] enabled merchant vessels to break away from their previous slow, coastwise path, and to strike a straight course on their voyage between Arabia or the east coast of Africa and India.[574] Moreover, this northern half of the Indian Ocean looks like a larger Mediterranean with its southern coast removed. It has the same east and west series of peninsulas harboring differentiated nationalities, the same northward running recesses, but all on a larger scale. It has linked together the history of Asia and Africa; and by the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, it has drawn Europe and the Mediterranean into its sphere of influence. At the western corner of the Indian Ocean a Semitic people, the Arabs of Oman and Yemen, here first developed brilliant maritime activity, like their Phoenician kinsmen of the Lebanon seaboard. Similar geographic conditions in their home lands and a nearly similar intercontinental location combined to make them the middlemen of three continents. Just as the Phoenicians, by way of the Mediterranean, reached and roused slumberous North Africa into historical activity and became the medium for the distribution of Egypt's culture, so these Semites of the Arabian sh.o.r.es knocked at the long-closed doors of East Africa facing on the Indian basin, and drew this region into the history of southern Asia. Thus the Africa of the enclosed seas was awakened to some measure of historical life, while the Africa of the wide Atlantic slept on.

[Sidenote: The sea route to the Orient.]

From the dawn of history the northern Indian Ocean was a thoroughfare.

Alexander the Great's rediscovery of the old sea route to the Orient sounds like a modern event in relation to the gray ages behind it. Along this thoroughfare Indian colonists, traders, and priests carried the elements of Indian civilization to the easternmost Sunda Isles; and Oriental wares, sciences and religions moved westward to the margin of Europe and Africa. The Indian Ocean produced a civilization of its own, with which it colored a vast semi-circle of land reaching from Java to Abyssinia, and more faintly, owing to the wider divergence of race, the further stretch from Abyssinia to Mozambique.

Thus the northern Indian Ocean, owing to its form, its location in the angle between Asia and Africa and the lat.i.tude where, round the whole earth, "the zone of greatest historical density" begins, and especially its location just southeast of the Mediterranean as the eastern extension of that maritime track of ancient and modern times between Europe and China, has been involved in a long series of historical events. From the historical standpoint, prior to 1492 it takes a far higher place than the Atlantic and Pacific, owing to its nature as an enclosed sea.[575] But like all such basins, this northern Indian Ocean attained its zenith of historical importance in early times. In the sixteenth century it suffered a partial eclipse, which pa.s.sed only with the opening of the Suez Ca.n.a.l. During this interval, however, the Portuguese. Dutch and English had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and entered this basin on its open or oceanic side. By their trading stations, which soon traced the outlines of its coasts from Sofala in South Africa around to Java, they made this ocean an alcove of the Atlantic, and embodied its events in the Atlantic period of history. It is this open or oceanic side which differentiates the Indian Ocean physically, and therefore historically, from a genuine enclosed sea.

[Sidenote: Limitation of small area in enclosed seas.]

The limitation of every enclosed or marginal sea lies in its small area and in the relatively restricted circle of its bordering lands. Only small peninsulas and islands can break its surface, and short stretches of coast combine to form its sh.o.r.es. It affords, therefore, only limited territories as goals for expansion, restricted resources and populations to furnish the supply and demand of trade. What lands could the Mediterranean present to the colonial outlook of the Greeks comparable to the North America of the expanding English or the Brazil of the Portuguese? Yet the Mediterranean as a colonial field had great advantages in point of size over the Baltic, which is only one-sixth as large (2,509,500 and 431,000 square kilometers respectively), and especially over the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, whose effective areas were greatly reduced by the aridity of their surrounding lands. But the precocious development and early cessation of growth marking all Mediterranean national life have given to this basin a variegated history; and in every period and every geographical region of it, from ancient Phoenicia to modern Spain and Italy, the early exhaustion of resources and dwarfing of political ideals which characterize most small areas become increasingly conspicuous. The history of Sweden, Denmark, and the Hanse Towns in the Baltic tells the same story, the story of a hothouse plant, forced in germination and growth, then stifled in the close air.

[Sidenote: Successive maritime periods in history.]

Growth demands s.p.a.ce. Therefore, the progress of history has been attended by an advance from smaller to larger marine areas, with a constant increase in those manifold relations between peoples and lands which the water is able to establish. Every great epoch of history has had its own sea, and every succeeding epoch has enlarged its maritime field. The Greek had the Aegean, the Roman the whole Mediterranean, to which the Middle Ages made an addition in the North Sea and Baltic. The modern period has had the Atlantic, and the twentieth century is now entering upon the final epoch of the World Ocean. The gradual inclusion of this World Ocean in the widened scope of history has been due to the expansion of European peoples, who, for the past twenty centuries, have been the most far-reaching agents in the making of universal history.

Owing to the location and structure of their continent, they have always found the larger outlet in a western sea. In the south the field widened from the Phoenician Sea to the Aegean, then to the Mediterranean, on to the Atlantic, and across it to its western sh.o.r.es; in the north it moved from the quiet Baltic to the tide-swept North Sea and across the North Atlantic. Only the South Atlantic brought European s.h.i.+ps to the great world highway of the South Seas, and gave them the choice of an eastern or western route to the Pacific. Every new voyage in the age of discovery expanded the historical horizon; and every improvement in the technique of navigation has helped to eliminate distance and reduced intercourse on the World Ocean to the time-scale of the ancient Mediterranean.

It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the larger oceanic horizon has meant a corresponding increase in the relative content and importance of history for the known world of each period. Such an intense, concentrated national life as occurred in those little Mediterranean countries in ancient times is not duplicated now, unless we find a parallel in j.a.pan's recent career in the Yellow Sea basin.

There was something as cosmic in the colonial ventures of the Greeks to the wind-swept sh.o.r.es of the Crimea or barbarous wilds of Ma.s.silia, as in the establishment of English settlements on the br.i.m.m.i.n.g rivers of Virginia or the torrid coast of Malacca. Alexander's conquest of the Asiatic rim of the Mediterranean and Rome's political unification of the basin had a significance for ancient times comparable with the Russification of northern Asia and the establishment of the British Empire for our day.

The ocean has always performed one function in the evolution of history; it has provided the outlet for the exercise of redundant national powers. The abundance of opportunity which it presents to these disengaged energies depends upon the size, location and other geographic conditions of the bordering lands. These opportunities are limited in an enclosed basin, larger in the oceans, and largest in the northern halves of the oceans, owing to the widening of all land-ma.s.ses towards the north and the consequent contraction of the oceans and seas in the same lat.i.tudes.

[Sidenote: Contrasted historical roles of northern and southern hemispheres.]

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 a.s.sumed a distinct role 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 circ.u.m-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 Ca.n.a.l, 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 circ.u.m-mundane waterway, along the line of greatest intercontinental intercourse.

[Sidenote: Size of the oceans]

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 sh.o.r.es 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 s.h.i.+ps designed for local traffic in enclosed seas are in general smaller, as in the Baltic, though the enormous commerce of the Great Lakes, which const.i.tute in effect an inland sea, demands immense vessels.

[Sidenote: Neutrality of the seas, its evolution.]

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 compa.s.sed, enabled them also to be appropriated, controlled and policed. The Greek excluded the Phoenician from the Aegean and made it an h.e.l.lenic 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+ps at their pleasure, a right which after the fall of the Hanseatic power was a.s.sumed 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 sh.o.r.e or within cannon range. The rest of the vast water area remains the un.o.bstructed 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 Inst.i.tute_, 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 Inst.i.tute_, 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.