Influences of Geographic Environment Part 34

The margin of river, lake and sea has always attracted the first settlements of man because it offered a ready food supply in its animal life and an easy highway for communication. Moreover, a water front made a comparatively safe frontier for the small, isolated communities which const.i.tuted primitive societies. The motive of protection, dominant in the savage when selecting sites for his villages, led him to place them on the pear-shaped peninsula formed by a river loop, or on an island in the stream or off the coast; or to sever his connection with the solid land, whence attack might come, and provide himself with a boundary waste of water by raising his hut on piles above the surface of lake, river or sheltered seacoast, within easy reach of the sh.o.r.e. In this location the occupant of the pile dwelling has found all his needs answered--fis.h.i.+ng grounds beneath and about his hut, fields a few hundred feet away on sh.o.r.e, easily reached by his dug-out canoe, and a place of retreat from a land enemy, whether man or wild beast.

[Sidenote: Ancient pile villages.]

Such pile dwellings, answering the primary need of protection, have had wide distribution, especially in the Tropics, and persist into our own times among r.e.t.a.r.ded peoples living in small, isolated groups too weak for effective defence. They were numerous in the lakes of Switzerland[580]

and northern Italy down to the first century of our era, and existed later in slightly modified form in Ireland, Scotland, England and southern Wales.[581] In ancient Ireland they were constructed on artificial islands, raised in shallow spots of lakes or mora.s.ses by means of fascines weighted down with gravel and clay, and moored to the bottom by stakes driven through the ma.s.s. Such groups of dwellings were called _Crannogs_; they existed in Ireland from the earliest historical period and continued in use down to the time of Queen Elizabeth. In the turbulent twelfth century, the warring lords of the soil adopted them as places of refuge and residence.[582] Herodotus describes a pile village of the ancient Thracians in Lake Prasias near the h.e.l.lespont, built quite after the Swiss type, with trap doors in the floor for fis.h.i.+ng or throwing out refuse. Its inhabitants escaped conquest by the Persians under King Darius, and avoided the fate of their fellow tribesmen on land, who were subdued and removed as colonists to Asia.[583]

[Sidenote: Present distribution.]

Among Europeans such pile villages belong to primitive stages of development, chiefly to the Stone, Bronze, and early Iron Ages. They are widely distributed in modern times among r.e.t.a.r.ded peoples, who in this way seek compensation for their social and economic weakness. In South America, the small timid tribe of the native Warraus till quite recently built their dwellings on platforms over the water in the river network of the Orinoco delta and along the swamp coast as far as the Essequibo.

These pile villages, "_fondata sopra l'acqua come Venezia_," as Vespuccius says, suggested to him the name of Venezuela or little Venice for this coast.[584] A pile village in Jull Lake, a lacustrine expansion in a tributary of the upper Salwin River, is inhabited by the Inthas, apparently an alien colony in Burma. They have added a detail in their floating gardens, rafts covered with soil, on which they raise tomatoes, watermelons and gourds.[585]

In little Lake Mohrya, located near the upper Lualaba River, a southern headstream of the Congo, Cameron found numerous pile dwellings, whose owners moved about in dug-out canoes and cultivated fields on land,[586]

as did their Swiss confreres of twenty centuries ago. Livingstone, in descending from Lake Nya.s.sa by the s.h.i.+re River, found in the lakelet of Pamalombe, into which the stream widened, similar water huts inhabited by a number of Manganja families, who had been driven from their homes by slave raiders. The slender reeds of the papyrus thicket, lining the sh.o.r.e in a broad band, served as piles, number compensating for the lack of strength; the reeds, bent downward and fastened together into a mat, did indeed support their light dwellings, but heaved like thin ice when the savages moved from hut to hut. The dense forest of papyrus left standing between village and sh.o.r.e effectually screened their retreat, and the abundant fish in the lake provided them with food.[587]

[Sidenote: Malayan pile dwellings.]

In the vast island world of Indonesia, where constant contact with the sea has bred the amphibian Malay race, we are not surprised to find that the typical Malay house is built on piles above the water; and that when the coast Malay is driven inland by new-comers of his own stock and forced to abandon his favorite occupations of trade, piracy and fis.h.i.+ng, he takes to agriculture but still retains his sea-born architecture and raises his hut on poles above the ground, beyond the reach of an enemy's spear-thrust. The Moro Samal Laut of the southern Sulu Archipelago avoid the large volcanic islands of the group, and place their big villages over the sea on low coral reefs. The sandy beaches of the sh.o.r.e hold their coco-palms, whose nuts by their milk eke out the scanty supply of drinking water, and whose fronds shade the tombs of the dead.[588] The sea-faring Malays of the Sunda Islands, in thickly populated points of the coast, often dwell in permanently inhabited rafts moored near the pile dwellings. Palembang on the lower swampy course of the River Musi has a floating suburb of this sort. It is called the "Venice of Sumatra," just as Banjarmasin, a vast complex of pile and raft dwellings, is called the "Venice of Borneo," and Brunei to the north is the "Venice of the East."[589] Both these towns are the chief commercial centers of their respective islands. The little town of Kilwaru, situated on a sandbank off the eastern end of Ceram, seems to float on the sea, so completely has it surrounded and enveloped with pile-built houses the few acres of dry land which form its nucleus. It is a place of busy traffic, the emporium for commerce between the Malay Archipelago and New Guinea.[590]

[Sidenote: In Melanesia.]

Farther east in Melanesia, whose coast regions are more or less permeated by Malayan stock and influences, pile dwellings, both over water and on land form a characteristic feature of the scenery. The village of Sowek in Geelvink Bay, on the northern coast of Dutch New Guinea, consists of thirty houses raised on piles above the water, connected with each other by tree trunks but having only boat connection with the sh.o.r.e. Similar villages are found hovering over the lapping waves of Humboldt Bay, all of them recalling with surprising fidelity the prehistoric lake-dwellings of Switzerland.[591] The Papuan part of Port Moresby, on the southern coast of British New Guinea, covers the whole water-front of the town with pile dwellings. In the vicinity are similar native pile villages, such as Tan.o.bada, Hanuabada, Elevara and Hula, the latter consisting of pile dwellings scattered about over the water in a circuit of several miles and containing about a thousand inhabitants. Here, too, the motive is protection against the attacks of inland mountain tribes, with whom the coast people are in constant war.[592]

The Malay fisherman, trader and pirate, with the love of the sea in his blood, by these pile dwellings combines security from his foe and proximity to his familiar field of activity. The same objects are achieved by white traders on the west coast of Africa by setting up their dwellings and warehouses on the old hulks of dismasted vessels, which are anch.o.r.ed for this purpose in the river mouths. They afford some protection against both fever and hostile native, and at the same time occupy the natural focus of local trade seeking foreign exchanges.

[Sidenote: River dwellers in populous lands.]

When advancing civilization has eliminated the need for this form of protection, water-dwellers may survive or reappear in old and relatively over-populated countries, as we find them universally on the rivers of China and less often in Farther India. Here they present the phenomenon of human life overflowing from the land to the streams of the country; because these, as highways of commerce, afford a means of livelihood, even apart from the food supply in their fish, and offer an unclaimed bit of the earth's surface for a floating home. Canton has 250,000 inhabitants living on boats and rafts moored in the river, and finding occupation in the vast inland navigation of the Empire, or in the trade which it brings to this port of the Si-kiang. Some of the boats accommodate large families, together with modest poultry farms, crowded together under their low bamboo sheds. Others are handsome wooden residences ornamented with plants, and yet others are pleasure resorts with their professional singing girls.[593] In the lakes and swamp-bordered rivers of southern Shantung, a considerable fis.h.i.+ng population is found living in boats, while the land shows few inhabitants. This population enjoys freedom from taxation and unrestricted use of the rivers and fisheries. To vary their scant and monotonous diet, they construct floating gardens on rafts of bamboo covered with earth, on which they plant onions and garlic and which they tow behind their boats. They also raise hundreds of ducks, which are trained to go into the water to feed and return at a signal,[594] thus expanding the resources of their river life. Bangkok has all its business district afloat on the Menam River--shops, lumber yards, eating-houses and merchants' dwellings. Even the street vendor's cart is a small boat, paddled in and out among the larger junks.[595]

A far more modern type of river-dwellers is found in the "shanty-boat"

people of the western rivers of the United States. They are the gypsies of our streams, nomads who float downstream with the current, tying up at intervals along the bank of some wooded island or city waterfront, then paying a tug to draw their house-boat upstream. The river furnishes them with fish for their table and driftwood for their cooking-stove, and above all is the highway for the gratification of their nomad instincts. There is no question here of trade and overpopulation.

[Sidenote: Reclamation of land from the sea.]

Pile dwellings and house-boats are a paltry form of encroachment upon the water in comparison with that extensive reclamation of river swamps and coastal marshes which in certain parts of the world has so increased the area available for human habitation. The water which is a necessity to man may become his enemy unless it is controlled. The alluvium which a river deposits in its flood-plain, whether in some flat stretch of its middle course or near the r.e.t.a.r.ding level of the sea, attracts settlement because of its fertility and proximity to a natural highway; but it must be protected by dikes against the very element which created it. Such deposits are most extensive on low coasts at or near the river's mouth, just where the junction of an inland and oceanic waterway offers the best conditions for commerce. Here then is a location destined to attract and support a large population, for which place can be made only by steady encroachment upon the water of both river and sea. Diking is necessitated not only by the demand for more land for the growing population, but also by the constant silting up of the drainage outfalls, which increases the danger of inundation while at the same time contributing to the upbuilding of the land. Conditions here inst.i.tute an incessant struggle between man and nature;[596] but the rewards of victory are too great to count the cost. The construction of sea-walls, embankment of rivers, reclamation of marshes, the cutting of ca.n.a.ls for drains and pa.s.sways in a water-soaked land, the conversion of lakes into meadow, the rectification of tortuous streams for the greater economy of this silt-made soil, all together const.i.tute the greatest geographical transformation that man has brought about on the earth's surface.[597]

[Sidenote: The struggle with the water.]

Though the North Sea lowland of Europe has suffered from the serious encroachment of the sea from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, when the Zuyder Zee, the Dollart and Jade Bay were formed, nevertheless the counter encroachment of the land upon the water, accomplished through the energy and intelligence of the inhabitants, has more than made good the loss. Between the Elbe and Scheldt more than 2,000 square miles (5,000 square kilometers) have been reclaimed from river and sea in the past three hundred years. Holland's success in draining her large inland waters, like the Haarlem Meer (70 square miles or 180 square kilometers) and the Lake of Ij, has inspired an attempt to recover 800 square miles (2,050 square kilometers) of fertile soil from the borders of the Zuyder Zee and reduce that basin to nearly one-third of its present size.[598] One-fourth of the Netherlands lies below the average of high tides, and in 1844 necessitated 9,000 windmills to pump the waste water into the drainage ca.n.a.ls.[599]

The Netherlands, with all its external features of man's war against the water, has its smaller counterpart in the 1,200 square miles of reclaimed soil about the head of the Wash, which const.i.tute the Fenland of England. Here too are successive lines of sea-wall, the earliest of them attributed to the Romans, straightened and embanked rivers, drainage ca.n.a.ls, windmills and steam pumps, dikes serving as roads, lines of willows and low moist pastures dotted with grazing cattle. No feature of the Netherlands is omitted. The low southern part of Lincolns.h.i.+re is even called Holland, and Dutch prisoners from a naval battle of 1652 were employed there on the work of reclamation, which was begun on a large scale about this time.[600] In the medieval period, the increase of population necessitated measures to improve the drainage and extend the acreage; but there was little co-operation among the land owners, and the maintenance of river dikes and sea-walls was neglected, till a succession of disasters from flooding streams and invading tides in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries led to severe measures against defaulters. One culprit was placed alive in a breach which his own neglect or criminal cutting had caused, and was built in, by way of educating the Fenlanders to a sense of common responsibility.[601]

The fight against the water on the coast begins later than that against rivers and swamps in the interior of the land; it demands greater enterprise and courage, because it combats two enemies instead of one; but its rewards are correspondingly greater. The Netherlands by their struggle have acquired not only territory for an additional half million population, but have secured to themselves a strategic position in the maritime trade of the world.

[Sidenote: Mound villages in river flood-plains.]

The abundant fertility of river flood-plains inevitably attracts population and necessitates some kind of artificial protection against inundation. The most primitive form of this protection is obvious and widespread, restricted in neither locality nor race. When the flood season converts the flat plain of the White Nile below Gondokora (7 N.

Lat.) into an extensive marsh, countless hills of the white ant emerge over the waters. During the dry season, the ants build up their hills to about ten feet, and then live in safety in the upper section during the flood. They greatly surpa.s.s in intelligence and constructive ability the human occupants of the valley, the low and wretched Kytch tribe of the d.i.n.ka Negroes, who like the ants are attracted by the natural vegetation of the flood-plain, and who use the ant-hills as refuge stations for themselves and their cattle during the flood.[602] Elsewhere in Africa the natives are more intelligent, for flood-plain villages built on artificial mounds have existed from the earliest times. Diodorus Siculus tells us that those of ancient Egypt, when the Nile was high, looked like the Cyclades Islands.[603] Similar ones are constructed by the Barotse tribe on the upper Zambesi.[604] The Niger River, rising in the Foota Jallon and Kong Mountains which form a region of heavy rainfall from February to July, inundates a plain of several thousand square miles for a distance of 250 miles above Timbuctoo. Here again the villages of the agricultural Song-hoi duplicate those of Egypt, built on the same clay mounds, wreathed in the same feathery palms, and communicating with one another only by small boats.[605] The same picture is presented by the Yangtze Kiang plain during the summer overflow--low artificial hills rising from the expanse of muddy water and topped with trees and villages, while sampans moored to their base show the means of communication.[606] In the broad flood-plain of the lower Mississippi River, the chronicles of the De Soto expedition state that the Indian villages visited stood "on mounds made by art." The Yazoo River Indians, at the commencement of the eighteenth century, had their cabins dispersed over the low deltaic land on earthen mounds made by their own hands. There is also strong evidence that some of the works of the Mound-builders in the "bottoms" of the middle and lower Mississippi served as protected sites for the dwellings of their chiefs.[607]

[Sidenote: Diking of rivers.]

Such meager provisions against inundation suffice for the spa.r.s.e population characterizing the lower stages of civilization, but they must be supplemented for the increasing density of higher stages by the embankment of the stream, to protect also the adjacent fields. Hence the process of confining rivers within dikes goes back into gray antiquity.

Those of the Po and its tributaries were begun before the political history of the Lombardy plains commenced. Strabo mentions the ca.n.a.ls and dikes of Venetia, whereby a part of the country was drained and rendered tillable.[608] The main Po has been embanked for centuries as far up as Cremona, a distance of 600 miles, and the Adige to Verona.[609] But the most gigantic dike system in the world is that of the Hoangho, by which a territory the size of England is won from the water for cultivation.[610] The cost of protecting the far spread crops against the autumn floods has been a large annual expenditure and unceasing watchfulness; and this the Chinese have paid for two thousand years, but have not always purchased immunity. Year by year the Yellow River mounts higher and higher on its silted bed above the surrounding lowlands, increasing the strain on the banks and the area of destruction, when its fury is uncaged. The flood of 1887 covered an area estimated at 50,000 square miles, wiped out of existence a million people, and left a greater number a prey to famine.[611] So the fertile Chengtu plain of the Min River, supporting four millions of people on its 2,500 square miles of area, owes its prosperity to the embanking and irrigating works of the engineer heroes, Li Ping and his son, who lived before the Christian era. On the temple in their honor in the city of Kuan Hsien is Li Ping's motto, incised in gold: "Dig the bed deep, keep the banks low." For twenty-one centuries these instructions have been carried out. The stone dikes are kept low to permit a judicious amount of flooding for fertilization, and every year five to six feet of silt are removed from the artificial channel of the Min. To this work the whole population of the Chengtu plain contributes.[612] [See map page 8.]

[Sidenote: Social gain by control of the water.]

In such organized struggles to reduce the domain of the water and extend that of the dry land, the material gain is not all: more significant by far is the power to co-operate that is developed in a people by a prolonged war against overwhelming sea or river. A common natural danger, constantly and even regularly recurring, necessitates for its resistance a strong and sustained union, that draws men out of the barren individualism of a primitive people, and forces them without halt along the path of civilization. It brings a realizing sense of the superiority of common interests over individual preferences, strengthens the national bond, and encourages voluntary subservience to law.

This is the social or political gain; but this is not all. The danger emanating from natural phenomena has its discoverable laws, and therefore leads to a first empirical study of winds, currents, seasonal rainfall and the whole science of hydraulics. With deep national insight, the Greeks embodied in their mythology the story of Perseus and his destruction of the sea monster who ravaged the coast, and Hercules'

killing of the many-headed serpent who issued from the Lernean Marshes to lay waste the country of Argos. Even so early a writer as Strabo states that yet earlier authorities interpreted Hercules' victory over the river G.o.d of the Achelous as the embankment of that stream and the draining of its inundated delta tract by the national benefactor.[613] So the Chinese, whose land abounds in swamps and devastating rivers, have a long list of engineer heroes who embanked and drained for the salvation and benefit of mankind. It is highly probable that the communal work involved in the construction of dikes and ca.n.a.ls for the control of the Hoangho floods cemented the Chinese nationality of that vast lowland plain, and supplied the cohesive force that developed here at a very remote period a regularly organized state and an advancing civilization.

[Sidenote: Control of water as factor in early civilizations of arid lands.]

The history of Egypt shows a similar effect of the yearly inundation of the Nile Valley. Here, as in all rainless countries where irrigation must be practiced, the water becomes a potent factor of political union and civilization. Its scarcity necessitates common effort in the construction and maintenance of irrigation works, and a central control to secure fair distribution of the water to the fields of the inhabitants. A stimulus to progress is found in the presence of a problem, perennial as the yearly threatenings of the Hoangho, which demands the application of human intelligence and concerted labor for its solution. Additional arable land for the growing population can be secured only by the wider distribution of the fructifying water; this in turn depends upon corporate effort wisely directed and ably controlled.

Every lapse in governmental efficiency means an encroachment of the desert upon the alluvial fields and finally to the river bank, as to-day in Mesopotamia.

The fact that the earliest civilizations have originated in the sub-tropical rainless districts of the world has been ascribed solely to the regular and abundant returns to tillage under irrigation, as opposed to the uncertain crops under variable meteorological conditions; to the consequent acc.u.mulation of wealth, and the emanc.i.p.ation of man for other and higher activities, which follows his escape from the agricultural vicissitudes of an uncertain climate. When Draper says: "Civilization depends on climate and agriculture," and "the civilization of Egypt depended for its commencement on the sameness and stability of the African climate," and again, "agriculture is certain in Egypt and there man first became civilized,"[614] he seizes upon the conspicuous fact of a stable food supply as the basis of progress, failing to detect those potent underlying social effects of the inundations--social and political union to secure the most effective distribution of the Nile's blessings and to augment by human devices the area accessible to them, the development of an intelligent water economy, which ultimately produced a long series of intellectual achievements.[615]

[Sidenote: Cultural areas in primitive America.]

This unifying and stimulating national task of utilizing and controlling the water was the same task which in various forms prompted the early civilization of the Hoangho and Yangtze basins, India, Mesopotamia, Persia, Peru, Mexico, and that impressive region of prehistoric irrigation ca.n.a.ls found in the Salt, Gila River, and upper Rio Grande valleys.[616] Here the arid plateaus of the Cordilleras between the Pueblo district and Central America had no forests in which game might be found; so that the Indian hunter had to turn to agriculture and a sedentary life beside his narrow irrigated fields.

Here native civilization reached its highest grade in North America.

Here desert agriculture achieved something more than a reliable food supply. It laid the foundation of the first steady integration of wandering Indian hordes into a stable, permanently organized society.

Elsewhere throughout the North American continent, we see only s.h.i.+fting groups of hunter and fisher folk, practising here and there a half nomadic agriculture to supplement the chase.

The primitive American civilization that arose among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Arizona, the only strictly sedentary tribes relying exclusively on agriculture north of the Mexican plateau, was primarily a result of the pressure put upon these people by a restricted water supply.[617] Though chiefly offshoots of the wild Indians of the northern plains, they have been markedly differentiated from their wandering Shoshone and Kiowa kindred by local environment.[618] Scarcity of water in those arid highlands and paucity of arable land forced them to a carefully organized community life, made them invest their labor in irrigation ditches, terraced gardens and walled orchards, whereby they were as firmly rooted in their scant but fertile fields as were their cotton plants and melon vines;[619] while the towering mesas protected their homes against marauding Ute, Navajo and Apache.[620] This thread of a deep underlying connection between civilization and the control of water can be traced through all prehistoric America, as well as through the earliest cultural achievements in North Africa and Asia.

[Sidenote: Economy of the water: fisheries.]

The economy of the water is not confined to its artificial distribution over arid fields, but includes also the exploitation of the mineral and animal resources of the vast world of waters, whether the production of salt from the sea, salt lakes and brine springs, the cultivation of oyster beds, or the whole range of pelagic fisheries. The animal life of the water is important to man owing not only to its great abundance, but also to its distribution over the coldest regions of the globe. It furnishes the chief food supply of polar and sub-polar peoples, and therefore is accountable for the far-northern expansion of the habitable world. Even the reindeer tribes of Arctic Eurasia could hardly subsist without the sea food they get by barter from the fishermen of the coast.

Norway, where civilization has achieved its utmost in exploiting the limited means of subsistence, shows a steady increase from south to north in the proportion of the population dependent upon the harvest of the deep. Thus the fisheries engross 44 per cent. of the rural population in Nordland province, which is bisected by the Arctic Circle; over 50 per cent. in Tromso, and about 70 per cent. in Finmarken. If the towns also be included, the percentages rise, because here fis.h.i.+ng interests are especially prominent.[621] Proximity to the generous larder of the ocean has determined the selection of village sites, as we have seen among the coast Indians of British Columbia and southern Alaska, among all the Eskimo, and numerous other peoples of Arctic lands. [See map page 153.]

[Sidenote: Fisheries as factors in maritime expansion.]

Not only in polar but also in temperate regions, the presence of abundant fis.h.i.+ng grounds draws the people of the nearest coast to their wholesale exploitation, especially if the land resources are scant.

Fisheries then become the starting point or permanent basis of a subsequent wide maritime development, by expanding the geographical horizon. It was the search for the purple-yielding _murex_ that first familiarized the Phoenicians with the commercial and colonial possibilities of the eastern Mediterranean coasts.[622] The royal dye of this marine product has through all the ages seemed to color with sumptuous magnificence the sordid dealings of those Tyrian traders, and const.i.tuted them an aristocracy of merchants. The shoals of tunny fish, arriving every spring in the Bosporus, from the north, drew the early Greeks and Phoenicians after them into the cold and misty Euxine, and furnished the original impulse to both these peoples for the establishment of fis.h.i.+ng and trading stations on its uncongenial sh.o.r.es.[623] To the fisheries of the Baltic and especially to the summer catch of the migratory herring, which in vast numbers visited the sh.o.r.es of Pomerania and southern Sweden to sp.a.w.n, the Hanse Towns of Germany owed much of their prosperity. Salt herring, even in the twelfth century, was the chief single article of their exchanges with Catholic Europe, which made a strong demand for the fish, owing to the numerous fast days. When, in 1425, by one of those unexplained vagaries of animal life, the herring abandoned the Baltic and selected the North Sea for its summer destination, a new support was given to the wealth of the Netherlands.[624] There is a considerable amount of truth in the saying that Amsterdam was built on herrings. New England, with an unproductive soil at home, but near by in the sea a long line of piscine feeding grounds in the submarine banks stretching from Cape Cod to Cape Race and beyond, found her fisheries the starting point and base of her long round of exchanges, a constant factor in her commercial and industrial evolution.[625]

[Sidenote: Fisheries as nurseries of seamen.]

Fisheries have always been the nurseries of seamen, and hence have been encouraged and protected by governments as providing an important element of national strength. The Newfoundland Banks were the training school which supplied the merchant marine and later the Revolutionary navy of colonial New England;[626] ever since the establishment of the Republic, they have been forced into prominence in our international negotiations with the United Kingdom, with the object of securing special privileges, because the government has recognized them as a factor in the American navy. The causal connection between fisheries and naval efficiency was recognized in England in the early years of Elizabeth's reign, by an act aiming to encourage fisheries by the remission of custom duties to native fishermen, by the imposition of a high tariff on the importation of foreign fish in foreign vessels, and finally by a legislative enforcement of fasts to increase the demand for fish, although any belief in the religious efficacy of fasts was frankly disclaimed. Thus an artificial demand for fish was created, with the result that a report on the success of the Fishery Acts stated that a thousand additional men had been attracted to the fis.h.i.+ng trade, and were consequently "ready to serve in Her Majesty's s.h.i.+ps."[627]

The fis.h.i.+ng of the North Sea, especially on the Dogger Bank, is partic.i.p.ated in by all the bordering countries, England, the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium; and is valued equally on account of the food supply which it yields and as a school of seamen.[628] The Pomors or "coasters" of Arctic Russia, who dwell along the sh.o.r.es of the White Sea and live wholly by fisheries, have all their taxes remitted and receive free wood from the crown forests for the construction of their s.h.i.+ps, on the condition that they serve on call in the imperial navy.[629] The history of j.a.pan affords the most striking ill.u.s.tration of the power of fisheries alone to maintain maritime efficiency; for when by the seclusion act of 1624 all merchant vessels were destroyed, the marine restricted to small fis.h.i.+ng and coasting vessels, and intercourse confined to j.a.pan's narrow island world, the fisheries nevertheless kept alive that intimacy with the sea and preserved the nautical efficiency that was destined to be a decisive factor in the development of awakened j.a.pan.

[Sidenote: Anthropo-geographic importance of navigation.]

The resources of the sea first tempted man to trust himself to its dangerous surface; but their rewards were slight in comparison with the wealth of experiences and influences to which he fell heir, after he learned to convert the barrier of the untrod waste into a highway for his sail-borne keel. It is therefore true, as many anthropologists maintain, that after the discovery of fire the next most important step in the progress of the human race was the invention of the boat. No other has had such far-reaching results. Since water covers three-fourths of the earth's surface and permits the land-ma.s.ses to rise only as islands here and there, it presents to man for his nautical ventures three times the area that he commands for his terrestrial habitat. On every side, the break of the waves and the swell of the tides block his wanderings, unless he has learned to make the water carry him to his distant goal. s.p.a.cially, therefore, the problem and the task of navigation is the most widespread and persistent in the history of mankind. The numerous coaling-stations which England has scattered over the world are mute witnesses to this s.p.a.cial supremacy of the water, to the length of ocean voyages, and the power of the ocean to divide and unite. But had the proportion of land and water been reversed, the world would have been poorer, deprived of all these possibilities of segregation and differentiation, of stimulus to exchange and far-reaching intercourse, and of ingenious inventions which the isolating ocean has caused. Without this ramifying barrier between the different branches of the human family, these would have resembled each other more closely, but at the cost of development. The mere multiplicity of races and sub-races has sharpened the struggle for existence and endowed the survivors with higher qualities. But it was navigation that released primitive man from the seclusion of his own island or continent, stimulated and facilitated the intercourse of peoples, and enabled the human race to establish itself in every habitable part of the world.

NOTES TO CHAPTER X