Influences of Geographic Environment Part 43

[Sidenote: The continental base of the peninsulas.]

Peninsulas are accessible from the sea according to the configuration of their coasts, but from their hinterland, according to the length and nature of their connection with the same. This determines the degree of their isolation from the land-ma.s.s. If they hang from the continent by a frayed string, as does the Peloponnesus, Crimea, Malacca, Indian Gutjerat, and Nova Scotia, they are segregated from the life of the mainland almost as completely as if they were islands. The same effects follow where the base of a peninsula is defined by a high mountain barrier, as in all the Mediterranean peninsulas, in the two Indias, and in Korea; or by a desert like that which scantily links Arabia to Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia; or by a blur of swamps and lakes such as half detaches Scandinavia, Courland, Estland and Finland from Russia.

Held to their continents by bonds that often fail to bind, subjected by their outward-facing peripheral location to every centrifugal force, feeling only slightly the pull of the great central ma.s.s behind, peninsulas are often further detached economically and historically by their own contrasted local conditions. A sharp transition in geological formation and therefore in soil, a difference of climate, rainfall, drainage system, of flora or fauna, serve greatly to emphasize the lack of community of interests with the continental interior, and therefore produce an inevitable diversity of historical development.[785] Hence, many peninsulas insulate their people as completely as islands. It is hard to say whether the Pyrenean peninsula or Sicily, Scandinavia or Great Britain, has held itself more aloof from the political history of remaining Europe; whether Korea is not more ent.i.tled to its name of the Hermit Kingdom than island j.a.pan could ever be; whether the Peloponnesus or Euboea was more intimately a.s.sociated with the radiant life of ancient h.e.l.las. These questions lead to another, namely, whether a high mountain wall like the Pyrenees, or a narrow strait like that of Messina is the more effective geographical boundary.

[Sidenote: Continental base a zone of transition.]

Peninsulas not infrequently gain in breadth as they approach the continent; here they tend to abate their distinctive character as lobes of the mainland, together with the ethnic and historical marks of isolation. Here they form a doubtful boundary zone of mingled continental and peninsular development. Such peninsulas fall naturally, therefore, into a continental and a peninsular section, and reveal this segmentation in the differentiated history of the two portions. That great military geographer Napoleon distinguished the Italy of the Po basin as _Italie continentale_, and the Apennine section as _Presqu'ile_. Not only is the former broader, but, expanding like a tree trunk near the ground, it sends its roots well back into the ma.s.sive interior of the continent; it is dominated more by the Alps than by the Apennines; it contains a lowland and a river of continental proportions, for which there is no s.p.a.ce on the long, narrow spur of southern Italy.

If its geographical character approximates that of the mainland, so does its ethnic and historical. The Po basin is a well defined area of race characterization, in which influences have made for intermixture. South of the crest of the Apennines the Italian language in its purity begins, in contrast to the Gallo-Italian of the north. This mountain ridge has also held apart the dark, short dolichocephalic stock of the Mediterranean race from the fairer, taller, broad-headed Celts, who have moved down into the Po basin from the Alps, and the Germans and Illyrians who have entered it from the northeast.[786] Northern Italy is therefore allied ethnically, as it has often been united politically, to the neighboring countries ab.u.t.ting upon the Alps, so that it has experienced only in a partial degree that detachment which has stamped the history of the Apennine section.

[Sidenote: Historical contrast between base and extremity.]

The Balkan Peninsula tells much the same story of contrasted geographic conditions and development in its continental and peninsular sections.

Greece proper, in ancient as in modern times, reached its northern confines where the peninsula suddenly widens its base through Macedonia and Thrace. In this narrow southern section to-day, especially in isolated Peloponnesus, Attica, and the high-walled garden of Thessaly, are found people of the pure, long-headed, h.e.l.lenic type, and here the Greek language prevails.[787] But that broad and alien north, long excluded from the Amphictyonic Council and a stranger to Aegean culture in cla.s.sical times, is occupied to-day by a congeries of Slavs, who form a southwestern spur of the Slav stock covering eastern Europe. Its political history shows how often it has been made a Danubian or continental state, by Alexander of Macedon, by the Romans, Bulgarians, and Ottoman Turks,[788] as it may be some day by Russia; and also how often its large and compact form has enabled it to dominate the tapering peninsular section to the south.

In the same way, the vast Ganges and Indus basins, which const.i.tute the continental portion of India, have received various Tibetan, Scythian, Aryan, Pathan, and Mongol-Tartar ingredients from Central Asia; and by reason of the dense populations supported by these fruitful river plains, it has been able to dominate politically, religiously and culturally the protruding triangle of the Deccan. [See maps pages 8 and 102.] The continental side of Arabia, the Mesopotamian valley which ties the peninsula to the highlands of Persia and Armenia, has received into its Semitic stock constant infiltrations of Turanian and Aryan peoples from the core of Asia. This process has been going on from the ancient Elamite and Persian conquests of Mesopotamia down to the Ottoman invasion and the present periodic visits of Kurdish shepherds to the pastures of the upper Tigris.[789] Here we have the same contrast of geographic conditions as in Italy and India, a wide, populous alluvial plain occupying the continental section of the peninsula, and a less attractive highland or mountainous region in the outlying spur of land.

[Sidenote: Continental base a scene of invasion and war.]

These continental sections of peninsulas become therefore strongly marked as areas of ethnic characterization and differentiated historical development. Their threshold location, by reason of which they first catch any outward migration from the core of the continent, and their fertility, which serves as a perennial lure to new comers, whether peaceful or warlike, combine to give them intense historical activity.

They catch the come and go between their wide hinterland and the projection of land beyond, the stimulus of new arrivals and fresh blood.

But tragedy too is theirs. The Po Valley has been called "the c.o.c.kpit of Europe." Even the little Eider, which marks the base of Jutland, has been the scene of war between Danes and Germans since the tenth century.[790] The Indus Valley has again and again felt the shock of conflict with invading hordes from the central highlands, and witnessed the establishment of a succession of empires. Peace at the gates of the Balkan Peninsula has never been of long duration, and the postern door of Korea has been stormed often enough.

[Sidenote: Peninsular extremities as areas of isolation.]

In contrast to these continental sections which stand in contact with the solid land-ma.s.s behind, the extremities of the peninsulas are areas of isolation and therefore generally of ethnic unity. They often represent the last stand of displaced people pressed outward into these narrow quarters by expanding races in their rear. The vast triangle of the Deccan, which forms the essentially peninsular part of India, is occupied, except in the more exposed northwest corner, by the Dravidian race which once occupied all India, and afterward was pushed southward by the influx of more energetic peoples.[791] Here they have preserved their speech and nationality unmixed and live in almost primitive simplicity.[792] In the peninsular parts of Great Britain, in northern Scotland. Wales and Cornwall, we find people of Celtic speech brought to bay on these remote spurs of the land, affiliating little with the varied folk which occupied the continental side of the island, and resisting conquest to the last.[793] The mountainous peninsula of western Connaught in Ireland has been the rocky nucleus of the largest Celtic-speaking community in the island.[794] Brittany, with a similar location, became the last refuge of Celtic speech on the mainland of Europe,[795] the seat of resistance to Norman and later to English conquest, finally the stronghold of conservatism in the French Revolution.

[Sidenote: Ethnic unity of peninsulas.]

The northern wall of the Apennines and the outpost barrier of the Alps have combined to protect peninsular Italy from extensive ethnic infusions from the direction of the continent. This portion of the country shows therefore, as the anthropological maps attest, a striking uniformity of race. It has been a melting-pot in which foreign elements, filtering through the breaches of the Apennines or along the southern coast, have been fused into the general population under the isolating and cohesive influences of a peninsular environment.[796] The population of the Iberian Peninsula is even more unified, probably the most h.o.m.ogeneous in Europe. Here the long-headed Mediterranean race is found in the same purity as in island Corsica and Sardinia.[797] Spain's short line of contact with France and its sharp separation by the unbroken wall of the Pyrenees robs the peninsula of any distinctly continental section, and consequently of any transitional area of race and culture; hence the unity of Spain as opposed to that twofold balanced diversity which we find in Italy and India. The Balkan Peninsula, on the other hand, owing to the great predominance of its continental section and the confused relief of the country, has not protected its distinctively peninsular or Greek section from the southward migrations of Slavs, Albanians, Wallachians, and other continental peoples.[798] It has been like a big funnel with a small mouth; the pressure from above has been very great. h.e.l.las and even the Peloponnesus have had their peninsularity impaired and their race mixed, owing to the predominant continental section to the north.

[Sidenote: Peninsulas as intermediaries.]

Peninsulas, so far as they project from their continents, are areas of isolation; but so far as they extend also toward some land beyond, they become intermediaries. The isolating and intermediary aspects can be traced in the anthropo-geographical effects of every peninsula, even those which, like Brittany and Cornwall, project into the long uncharted waste of the Atlantic. In the order of historical development, a peninsula first isolates, until in its secluded environment it has molded a mature, independent people; then, as that people outgrows its narrow territory, the peninsula becomes a favorable base for maritime expansion to distant lands, or becomes a natural avenue for numerous reciprocal relations with neighboring lands beyond. Korea was the bridge for Mongolian migration from continental Asia to the j.a.pan islands, and for the pa.s.sage thither of Chinese culture, whether intellectual, esthetic, industrial or religious.[799] It has been the one country conspicuous in the foreign history of j.a.pan. Conquered by the island empire in 1592, it paid tribute for nearly three centuries and yielded to its foreign master the southeastern port of Fusan, the Calais of Korea.[800] Since the treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 made it subject to j.a.pan, it has become the avenue of j.a.panese expansion to the mainland and the unwilling recipient of the modern civilization thrust upon it by these English of the East. In like manner the Pyrenean peninsula has always been the intermediary between Europe and northwest Africa. Its population, as well as its flora and fauna, group with those of the southern continent. It has served as transit land between north and south for the Carthaginians, Vandals and Saracens; and in modern times it has maintained its character as a link by the Portuguese occupation of the Tangiers peninsula in the fifteenth century,[801] and the Spanish possession of Ceuta and various other points along the Moroccan coast from the year 709 A.D. to the present.[802]

[Sidenote: Peninsulas of intercontinental location.]

This role of intermediary is inevitably thrust upon all peninsulas which, like Spain, Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, Arabia, Farther India, Malacca, Chukchian Siberia, and Alaska, occupy an intercontinental location. Arabia especially in its climate, flora, races and history shows the haul and pull now of Asia, now of Africa. From it Asiatic influences have spread over Africa to Morocco and the Niger River on the west, and to Zanzibar on the south, permeated Abyssinia, and penetrated to the great Equatorial Lakes, whether in the form of that Mecca-born wors.h.i.+p of Allah, or the creeping caravans and slave-gangs of Arab trader. Of all such intercontinental peninsulas, Florida alone seems to have had no role as an intermediary. Its native ethnic affinities were wholly with its own continent. It has given nothing to South America and received nothing thence. The northward expansion of Arawak and Carib tribes from Venezuela in historic times ceased at Cuba and Hayti. The Straits drew a dividing line. Local conditions in Florida itself probably furnish the explanation of this anomaly. Extensive swamps made the central and southern portion of the peninsula inhospitable to colonization from either direction, transformed it from a link into a barrier.

[Sidenote: Atlantic peninsulas of Europe]

Peninsulas which conspicuously lack an intercontinental location must long await their intermediary phase of development, but do not escape it. The Cornish, Breton and Iberian peninsulas were all prominent in the trans-Atlantic enterprises of Europe from the end of the fifteenth century. The first French sailors to reach the new world were Breton and Norman fishermen. Plymouth, as the chief port of the Cornish peninsula, figures prominently in the history of English exploration and settlement in America. It seems scarcely accidental that most of Queen Elizabeth's great sea captains were natives of this district--Sir Francis Drake, Sir John Hawkins, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and Sir Walter Raleigh, the latter holding the office of vice-admiral of Cornwall and Devon. It was the peninsula-like projection of South America about Cape St. Roque, twenty degrees farther east than Labrador, that welcomed the s.h.i.+ps of Cabral and Americus Vespucius, and secured to Portugal a foothold in the Western Hemisphere.

NOTES TO CHAPTER XII

[747] Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 336. London, 1896-1898.

[748] D.G. Brinton, The American Race, p. 41. Philadelphia, 1901.

[749] D.G. Brinton, Races and Peoples, pp. 239-240. Philadelphia, 1901.

Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, p. 336. London, 1896-1898.

[750] A.E. Wallace, Island Life, p. 14. New York, 1892.

[751] A. Heilprin, Geographical Distribution of Animals, p. 69, map.

1887.

[752] _Ibid._, pp. 78, 82, 90, 100.

[753] Darwin, Origin of Species, Chap. XII. New York, 1895. A.R.

Wallace, Island Life, p. 6. New York, 1892.

[754] W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, Map on p. 43. New York, 1899.

[755] _Ibid._, pp. 39, 50, 80. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. II, pp.

100-110. London, 1896-1898.

[756] A.H. Keane, Ethnology, pp. 231-232, 362. Cambridge, 1896.

[757] McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, p. 56, Vol. XIX of History of North America. Philadelphia, 1905.

[758] Fiske, Discovery of America, Vol. I, p. 224. Boston, 1893.

[759] For various Asiatic and Oceanic elements, see Franz Boas, The Indians of British Columbia, _Bull. of the Amer. Geog. Society_ Vol. 28, p. 229. The Northwest Coast Tribes, Science, Vol. XII, pp. 194-196.

Niblack, The Indians of the Northwest Coast, p. 385, Was.h.i.+ngton. H.H.

Bancroft, The Native Races, Vol. I, pp. 177, 178, footnote; pp. 210, 225. San Francisco, 1886. W.Z. Ripley, Races of Europe, map p. 42. New York, 1899.

[760] T.W. Higginson and William Macdonald, History of the United States, p. 21. New York and London, 1905.

[761] Edward John Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol.

II, pp. 64-68, 74-77, 305, 388-389. Oxford, 1899.

[762] Justin Winsor, Narrative and Critical History, Vol. I, p. 60.

Boston, 1889.

[763] Cited by E.J. Payne, History of the New World Called America, Vol.

II, p. 292, footnote p. 294. Oxford, 1899.

[764] Waldemar Jochelson, The Mythology of the Koryak, _The American Anthropologist_, Vol. VI, pp. 415-416, 421-425. 1904.

[765] W.D. Dall, Masks, Labrets, and Certain Aboriginal Customs, Third Annual Report of Bureau of Ethnology, pp. 46-147. Was.h.i.+ngton, 1884.

[766] O.T. Mason, Migration and the Food Quest, pp. 275-292. Was.h.i.+ngton, 1894.

[767] McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, pp. 51, 58-82.

Philadelphia, 1905. Ratzel, History of Mankind, Vol. I, pp. 5-7, 145-147, 153-154. London, 1896-1898.