Influences of Geographic Environment Part 8

[120] Prescott, Conquest of Peru, Vol. I, p. 47. New York, 1848.

[121] McGee and Thomas, Prehistoric North America, Vol. XIX, pp.

151-161, of _The History of North America_, edited by Francis W. Thorpe, Philadelphia, 1905.

[122] Ratzel, _Anthropo-geographie_, Vol. II, pp. 264-265.

[123] Malthus, Principles of Population, Chapters V and VII. London, 1878.

[124] Nathaniel Shaler, Nature and Man in America, pp. 147-151. W.Z.

Ripley, Races of Europe, Chap. I, New York, 1899.

[125] Justus Perthes, _Taschen-Atlas_, pp. 44, 47. Gotha, 1910.

CHAPTER IV

THE MOVEMENTS OF PEOPLES IN THEIR GEOGRAPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE

[Sidenote: Universality of these movements.]

The ethnic and political boundaries of Europe to-day are the residuum of countless racial, national, tribal and individual movements reaching back into an unrecorded past. The very names of Turkey, Bulgaria, England, Scotland and France are borrowed from intruding peoples. New England, New France, New Scotland or Nova Scotia and many more on the American continents register the Trans-Atlantic nativity of their first white settlers. The provinces of Galicia in Spain, Lombardy in Italy, Brittany in France, Ess.e.x and Suss.e.x in England record in their names streams of humanity diverted from the great currents of the Volkerwanderung. The Romance group of languages, from Portugal to Roumania, testify to the sweep of expanding Rome, just as the wide distribution of the Aryan linguistic family points to many roads and long migrations from some unplaced birthplace. Names like Cis-Alpine and Trans-Alpine Gaul in the Roman Empire, Trans-Caucasia, Trans-Caspia and Trans-Baikalia in the Russian Empire, the Transvaal and Transkei in South Africa, indicate the direction whence the advancing people have come.

[Sidenote: Stratification of races]

Ethnology reveals an east and west stratification of linguistic groups in Europe, a north and south stratification of races, and another stratification by alt.i.tude, which reappears in all parts of the world, and shows certain invading dominant races occupying the lowlands and other displaced ones the highlands. This definite arrangement points to successive arrivals, a crowding forward, an intrusion of the strong into fertile, accessible valleys and plains, and a dislodgment of the weak into the rough but safe keeping of mountain range or barren peninsula, where they are brought to bay. Ethnic fragments, linguistic survivals, or merely place names, dropped like discarded baggage along the march of a retreating army, bear witness everywhere to tragic recessionals.

[Sidenote: The name Historical Movement.]

Every country whose history we examine proves the recipient of successive streams of humanity. Even sea-girt England has received various intruding peoples from the Roman occupation to the recent influx of Russian Jews. In prehistoric times it combined several elements in its population, as the discovery of the "long barrow" men and "round barrow" men by archaeologists, and the identification of a surviving Iberian or Mediterranean strain by ethnologists go to prove.[126] Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India tell the same story, whether in their recorded or unrecorded history. Tropical Africa lacks a history; but all that has been pieced together by ethnologists and anthropologists, in an effort to reconstruct its past, shows incessant movement,--growth, expansion and short-lived conquest, followed by shrinkage, expulsion or absorption by another invader.[127] To this constant s.h.i.+fting of races and peoples the name of historical movement has been given, because it underlies most of written history, and const.i.tutes the major part of unwritten history, especially that of savage and nomadic tribes. Two things are vital in the history of every people, its ethnic composition and the wars it wages in defense or extension of its boundaries. Both rest upon historical movements,--intrusions, whether peaceful or hostile, into its own land, and encroachments upon neighboring territory necessitated by growth. Back of all such movements is natural increase of population beyond local means of subsistence, and the development of the war spirit in the effort to secure more abundant subsistence either by raid or conquest of territory.

[Sidenote: Evolution of the Historical Movement.]

Among primitive peoples this movement is simple and monotonous. It involves all members of the tribe, either in pursuit of game, or following the herd over the tribal territory, or in migrations seeking more and better land. Among civilized peoples it a.s.sumes various forms, and especially is differentiated for different members of the social group. The civilized state develops specialized frontiersmen, armies, explorers, maritime traders, colonists, and missionaries, who keep a part of the people constantly moving and directing external expansion, while the ma.s.s of the population converts the force once expended in the migrant food-quest into internal activity. Here we come upon a paradox.

The nation as a whole, with the development of sedentary life, increases its population and therewith its need for external movements; it widens its national area and its circle of contact with other lands, enlarges its geographical horizon, and improves its internal communication over a growing territory; it evolves a greater mobility within and without, which attaches, however, to certain cla.s.ses of society, not to the entire social group. This mobility becomes the outward expression of a whole complex of economic wants, intellectual needs, and political ambitions. It is embodied in the conquests which build up empires, in the colonization which develops new lands, in the world-wide exchange of commodities and ideas which lifts the level of civilization, till this movement of peoples becomes a fundamental fact of history.

[Sidenote: Nature of primitive movements.]

This movement is and has been universal and varied. When most un.o.btrusive in its operation, it has produced its greatest effects. To seize upon a few conspicuous migrations, like the _Volkerwanderung_ and the irruption of the Turks into Europe, made dramatic by their relation to the declining empires of Rome and Constantinople, and to ignore the vast sum of lesser but more normal movements which by slow increments produce greater and more lasting results, leads to wrong conclusions both in ethnology and history. Here, as in geology, great effects do not necessarily presuppose vast forces, but rather the steady operation of small ones. It is often a.s.sumed that the world was peopled by a series of migrations; whereas everything indicates that humanity spread over the earth little by little, much as the imported gypsy moth is gradually occupying New England or the water hyacinth the rivers of Florida. Louis Aga.s.siz observed in 1853 that "the boundaries within which the different natural combinations of animals are known to be circ.u.mscribed upon the surface of the earth, coincide with the natural range of distinct types of man."[128] The close parallelism between Australian race and flora, Eskimo race and Arctic fauna, points to a similar manner of dispersion.

Wallace, in describing how the Russian frontier of settlement slowly creeps forward along the Volga, encroaching upon the Finnish and Tartar areas, and permeating them with Slav blood and civilization, adds that this is probably the normal method of expansion.[129] Thucydides describes the same process of encroachment, displacement, and migration in ancient h.e.l.las.[130] Strabo quotes Posidonius as saying that the emigration of the Cimbrians and other kindred tribes from their native seats was gradual and by no means sudden.[131] The traditions of the Delaware Indians show their advance from their early home in central Canada southward to the Delaware River and Chesapeake Bay to have been a slow zigzag movement, interrupted by frequent long halts, leaving behind one laggard group here and sending out an offshoot there, who formed new tribes and thereby diversified the stock.[132] It was an aimless wandering, without destination and purpose other than to find a pleasanter habitat. The Vandals appear first as "a loose aggregation of restless tribes who must not be too definitely a.s.signed to any precise district on the map,"

somewhere in central or eastern Prussia.[133] Far-reaching migrations aiming at a distant goal, like the Gothic and Hunnish conquests of Italy, demand both a geographical knowledge and an organization too high for primitive peoples, and therefore belong to a later period of development.[134]

[Sidenote: Number and range.]

The long list of recorded migrations has been supplemented by the researches of ethnologists, which have revealed a mult.i.tude of prehistoric movements. These are disclosed in greater number and range with successive investigation. The prehistoric wanderings of the Polynesians a.s.sume far more significance to-day than a hundred years ago, when their scope was supposed to have its western limit at Fiji and the Ellice group. They have now been traced to almost every island of Melanesia; vestiges of their influence have been detected in the languages of Australia, and the culture of the distant coasts of Alaska and British Columbia. The western pioneers of America knew the Shoshone Indians as small bands of savages, constantly moving about in search of food in the barren region west of the Rocky Mountains, and occasionally venturing eastward to hunt buffalo on the plains. Recent investigation has identified as offshoots of this r.e.t.a.r.ded Shoshonean stock the sedentary agriculturalists of the Moqui Pueblo, and the advanced populations of ancient Mexico and Central America.[135] Here was a great human current which through the centuries slowly drifted from the present frontier of Canada to the sh.o.r.es of Lake Nicaragua. Powell's map of the distribution of the linguistic stocks of American Indians is intelligible only in the light of constant mobility. Haebler's map of the South American stocks reveals the same restless past. This cartographical presentation of the facts, giving only the final results, suggests tribal excursions of the nature of migrations; but ethnologists see them as the sum total of countless small movements which are more or less part of the normal activity of an unrooted savage people. [Map page 101.]

Otis Mason finds that the life of a social group involves a variety of movements characterized by different ranges or scopes. I. The daily round from bed to bed. II. The annual round from year to year, like that of the Tunguse Orochon of Siberia who in pursuit of various fish and game change their residence within their territory from month to month, or the pastoral nomads who move with the seasons from pasture to pasture. III. Less systematic outside movements covering the tribal sphere of influence, such as journeys or voyages to remote hunting or fis.h.i.+ng grounds, forays or piratical descents upon neighboring lands eventuating usually in conquest, expansion into border regions for occasional occupation or colonization. IV. Partic.i.p.ation in streams of barter or commerce. V. And at a higher stage in the great currents of human intercourse, experience, and ideas, which finally compa.s.s the world.[136] In all this series the narrower movement prepares for the broader, of which it const.i.tutes at once an impulse and a part.

[Sidenote: Importance of such movements in history.]

The real character and importance of these movements have been appreciated by broad-minded historians. Thucydides elucidates the conditions leading up to the Peloponnesian War by a description of the semi-migratory population of h.e.l.las, the exposure of the more fertile districts to incursions, and the influence of these movements in differentiating Dorian from Ionian Greece.[137] Johannes von Muller, in the introduction to his history of Switzerland, a.s.signs to federations and migrations a conspicuous role in historical development. Edward A.

Ross sees in such movements a thorough-going selective process which weeds out the unfit, or rather spares only the highly fit. He lays down the principle that repeated migrations tend to the creation of energetic races of men. He adds, "This principle may account for the fact that those branches of a race achieve the most brilliant success which have wandered the farthest from their ancestral home.... The Arabs and Moors that skirted Africa and won a home in far-away Spain, developed the most brilliant of the Saracen civilizations. Hebrews, Dorians, Quirites, Rajputs, Hovas were far invaders. No communities in cla.s.sic times flourished like the cities of Asia created by the overflow from Greece.

Nowhere under the Czar are there such vigorous, progressive communities as in Siberia."[138] Brinton distinguishes the a.s.sociative and dispersive elements in ethnography. The latter is favored by the physical adaptability of the human race to all climates and external conditions; it is stimulated by the food-quest, the pressure of foes, and the resultant restlessness of an unstable primitive society.[139]

The earth's surface is at once factor and basis in these movements. In an active way it directs them; but they in turn clothe the pa.s.sive earth with a mantle of humanity. This mantle is of varied weave and thickness, showing here the simple pattern of a primitive society, there the intricate design of advanced civilization; here a closely woven or a gauzy texture, there disclosing a great rent where a rocky peak or the ice-wrapped poles protrude through the warm human covering. This is the magic web whereof man is at once woof and weaver, and the flying shuttle that never rests. Given a region, what is its living envelope, asks anthropo-geography. Whence and how did it get there? What is the material of warp and woof? Will new threads enter to vary the color and design? If so, from what source? Or will the local pattern repeat itself over and over with dull uniformity?

[Sidenote: Geographical interpretation of historical movement.]

It was the great intellectual service of Copernicus that he conceived of a world in motion instead of a world at rest. So anthropo-geography must see its world in motion, whether it is considering English colonization, or the westward expansion of the Southern slave power in search of unexhausted land, or the counter expansion of the free-soil movement, or the early advance of the trappers westward to the Rockies after the retreating game, or the withdrawal thither of the declining Indian tribes before the protruding line of white settlement, and their ultimate confinement to ever shrinking reservations. In studying increase of population, it sees in Switzerland chalet and farm creeping higher up the Alp, as the lapping of a rising tide of humanity below; it sees movement in the projection of a new dike in Holland to reclaim from the sea the land for another thousand inhabitants, movement in j.a.pan's doubling of its territory by conquest, in order to house and feed its redundant millions.

The whole complex relation of unresting man to the earth is the subject matter of anthropo-geography. The science traces his movements on the earth's surface, measures their velocity, range, and recurrence, determines their nature by the way they utilize the land, notes their transformation at different stages of economic development and under different environments. Just as an understanding of animal and plant geography requires a previous knowledge of the various means of dispersal, active and pa.s.sive, possessed by these lower forms of life, so anthropo-geography must start with a study of the movements of mankind.

[Sidenote: Mobility of primitive peoples.]

First of all is to be noted an evolution in the mobility of peoples. In the lower stages of culture mobility is great. It is favored by the persistent food-quest over wide areas incident to r.e.t.a.r.ded economic methods, and by the loose attachment of society to the soil. The small social groups peculiar to these stages and their innate tendency to fission help the movements to ramify. The consequent scattered distribution of the population offers wide interstices between encampments or villages, and into these vacant s.p.a.ces other wandering tribes easily penetrate. The rapid decline of the Indian race in America before the advancing whites was due chiefly to the division of the savages into small groups, scattered spa.r.s.ely over a wide territory.

Hunter and pastoral peoples need far more land than they can occupy at any one time. Hence the temporarily vacant spots invite incursion.

Moreover, the slight impedimenta carried by primitive folk minimize the natural physical obstacles which they meet when on the march. The lightly equipped war parties of the Shawnee Indians used gorges and gaps for the pa.s.sage of the Allegheny Mountains which were prohibitive to all white pioneers except the lonely trapper. Finally, this mobility gets into the primitive mind. The _Wanderl.u.s.t_ is strong. Long residence in one territory is irksome, attachment is weak. Therefore a small cause suffices to start the whole or part of the social body moving. A temporary failure of the food supply, cruelty or excessive exaction of tribute on the part of the chief, occasions an exodus. The history of every negro tribe in Africa gives instances of such secessions, which often leave whole districts empty and exposed to the next wandering occupant. Methods of preventing such withdrawals, and therewith the diminution of his treasury receipts and his fighting force, belong to the policy of every negro chieftain.

[Sidenote: Natural barriers to movement.]

The checks to this native mobility of primitive peoples are two: physical and mental. In addition to the usual barriers of mountains, deserts, and seas before the invention of boats, primeval forests have always offered serious obstacles to man armed only with stone or bronze axe, and they rebuffed even man of the iron age. War and hunting parties had to move along the natural clearings of the rivers, the tracks of animals, or the few trails beaten out in time by the natives themselves.

Primitive agriculture has never battled successfully against the phalanx of the trees. Forests balked the expansion of the Inca civilization on the rainy slope of the Andes, and in Central Africa the negro invaded only their edges for his yam fields and plantain groves. The earliest settlements in ancient Britain were confined to the natural clearings of the chalk downs and oolitic uplands; and here population was chiefly concentrated even at the close of the Roman occupation. Only gradually, as the valley woodlands were cleared, did the richer soil of the alluvial basins attract men from the high, poor ground where tillage required no preliminary work. But after four centuries of Roman rule and Roman roads, the clearings along the river valleys were still mere strips of culture mid an encompa.s.sing wilderness of woods. When the Germanic invaders came, they too appropriated the treeless downs and were blocked by the forests.[140] On the other hand, gra.s.slands and savannahs have developed the most mobile people whom we know, steppe hunters like the Sioux Indians and Patagonians. Thus while the forest dweller, confined to the highway of the stream, devised only canoe and dugout boat in various forms for purposes of transportation, steppe peoples of the Old World introduced the use of draft and pack animals, and invented the sledge and cart.

[Sidenote: Effect of geographical horizon.]

Primitive peoples carry a drag upon their migrations in their restricted geographical outlook; ignorance robs them of definite goals. The evolution of the historical movement is accelerated by every expansion of the geographical horizon. It progresses most rapidly where the knowledge of outlying or remote lands travels fastest, as along rivers and thala.s.sic coasts. Rome's location as toll-gate keeper of the Tiber gave her knowledge of the upstream country and directed her conquest of its valley; and the movement thus started gathered momentum as it advanced. Caesar's occupation of Gaul meant to his generation simply the command of the roads leading from the Mediterranean to the northern sources of tin and amber, and the establishment of frontier outposts to protect the land boundaries of Italy; this represented a bold policy of inland expansion for that day. The modern historian sees in that step the momentous advance of history beyond the narrow limits of the Mediterranean basin, and its gradual inclusion of all the Atlantic countries of Europe, through whose maritime enterprise the historical horizon was stretched to include America. In the same way, mediaeval trade with the Orient, which had familiarized Europe with distant India and Cathay, developed its full historico-geographical importance when it started the maritime discoveries of the fifteenth century. The expansion of the geographical horizon in 1512 to embrace the earth inaugurated a widespread historical movement, which has resulted in the Europeanization of the world.

[Sidenote: Civilization and mobility.]

Civilized man is at once more and less mobile than his primitive brother. Every advance in civilization multiplies and tightens the bonds uniting him with his soil; makes him a sedentary instead of a migratory being. On the other hand every advance in civilization is attended by the rapid clearing of the forests, by the construction of bridges and interlacing roads, the invention of more effective vehicles for transportation whereby intercourse increases, and the improvement of navigation to the same end. Civilized man progressively modifies the land which he occupies, removes or reduces obstacles to intercourse, and thereby approximates it to the open plain. Thus far he facilitates movements. But while doing this he also places upon the land a dense population, closely attached to the soil, strong to resist incursion, and for economic reasons inhospitable to any marked accession of population from without. Herein lies the great difference between migration in empty or spa.r.s.ely inhabited regions, such as predominated when the world was young, and in the densely populated countries of our era. As the earth grew old and humanity multiplied, peoples themselves became the greatest barriers to any ma.s.sive migrations, till in certain countries of Europe and Asia the historical movement has been reduced to a continual pressure, resulting in compression of population here, repression there. Hence, though political boundaries may s.h.i.+ft, ethnic boundaries scarcely budge. The greatest wars of modern Europe have hardly left a trace upon the distribution of its peoples. Only in the Balkan Peninsula, as the frontiers of the Turkish Empire have been forced back from the Danube, the alien Turks have withdrawn to the shrinking territory of the Sultan and especially to Asia Minor.

[Sidenote: Diffusion of culture.]

Where a population too great to be dislodged occupies the land, conquest results in the eventual absorption of the victors and their civilization by the native folk, as happened to the Lombards in Italy, the Vandals in Africa and the Normans in England. Where the invaders are markedly superior in culture though numerically weak, conquest results in the gradual permeation of the conquered with the religion, economic methods, language, and customs of the new-comers.[141] The latter process, too, is always attended by some intermixture of blood, where no race repulsion exists, but this is small in comparison to the diffusion of civilization. This was the method by which Greek traders and colonists h.e.l.lenized the countries about the eastern Mediterranean, and spread their culture far back from the sh.o.r.es which their settlements had appropriated. In this way Saracen armies soon after the death of Mohammed Arabized the whole eastern and southern sides of the Mediterranean from Syria to Spain, and Arab merchants set the stamp of their language and religion on the coasts of East Africa as far as Mocambique. The handful of Spanish adventurers who came upon the relatively dense populations of Mexico and Peru left among them a civilization essentially European, but only a thin strain of Castilian blood. Thus the immigration of small bands of people sufficed to influence the culture of that big territory known as Latin America.

[Sidenote: Ethnic intermixture.]

That vast sum of migrations, great and small, which we group under the general term of historical movement has involved an endless mingling of races and cultures. As Professor Petrie has remarked, the prevalent notion that in prehistoric times races were pure and unmixed is without foundation. An examination of the various forms of the historical movement reveals the extent and complexity of this mingling process.

In the first place, no migration is ever simple; it involves a number of secondary movements, each of which in turn occasions a new combination of tribal or racial elements. The transference of a whole people from its native or adopted seat to a new habitat, as in the _Volkerwanderungen_, empties the original district, which then becomes a catchment basin for various streams of people about its rim; and in the new territory it dislodges a few or all of the occupants, and thereby starts up a fresh movement as the original one comes to rest.

Nor is this all. A torrent that issues from its source in the mountains is not the river which reaches the sea. On its long journey from highland to lowland it receives now the milky waters of a glacier-fed stream, now a muddy tributary from agricultural lands, now the clear waters from a limestone plateau, while all the time its racing current bears a burden of soil torn from its own banks. Now it rests in a lake, where it lays down its weight of silt, then goes on, perhaps across an arid stretch where its water is sucked up by the thirsty air or diverted to irrigate fields of grain. So with those rivers of men which we call migrations. The ethnic stream may start comparatively pure, but it becomes mixed on the way. From time to time it leaves behind laggard elements which in turn make a new racial blend where they stop. Such were the six thousand Aduatici whom Caesar found in Belgian Gaul. These were a detachment of the migrating Cimbri, left there in charge of surplus cattle and baggage while the main body went on to Italy.[142]

[Sidenote: Complex currents of migration.]

A migration rarely involves a single people even at the start. It becomes contagious either by example or by the subjection of several neighboring tribes to the same impelling force, by reason of which all start at or near the same time. We find the Cimbri and Teutons combined with Celts from the island of Batavia[143] in the first Germanic invasion of the Roman Empire. Jutes, Saxons and Angles started in close succession for Britain, and the Saxon group included Frisians.[144] An unavoidable concomitant of great migrations, especially those of nomads, is their tendency to sweep into the vortex of their movement any people whom they brush on the way. Both individuals and tribes are thus caught up by the current. The general convergence of the central German tribes towards the Danube frontier of the Roman Empire during the Marcomannic War drew in its train the Lombards from the lower Elbe down to the middle Danube and Theiss.[145] The force of the Lombards invading Italy in 568 included twenty thousand Saxons from Swabia, Gepidae from the middle Danube, Bulgarians, Slavs from the Russian Ukraine, together with various tribes from the Alpine district of Noric.u.m and the fluvial plains of Pannonia. Two centuries later the names of these non-Lombard tribes still survived in certain villages of Italy which had formed their centers.[146] The army which Attila the Hun brought into Gaul was a motley crowd, comprising peoples of probable Slav origin from the Russian steppes, Teutonic Ostrogoths and Gepidae, and numerous German tribes, besides the Huns themselves. When this horde withdrew after the death of Attila, Gepidae and Ostrogoths settled along the middle Danube, and the Slavonic contingent along the Alpine courses of the Drave and Save Rivers.[147] The Vandal migration which in 409 invaded Spain included the Turanian Alans and the German Suevi. The Alans found a temporary home in Portugal, which they later abandoned to join the Vandal invasion of North Africa, while the Suevi settled permanently in the northwestern mountains of Spain. The Vandals occupied in Spain two widely separated districts, one in the mountain region of Galicia next to the Suevi, and the other in the fertile valley of Andalusia in the south, while the northeastern part of the peninsula was occupied by intruding Visigoths.[148] Add to these the original Iberian and Celtic stocks of the peninsula and the Roman strain previously introduced, and the various elements which have entered into the Spanish people become apparent.[149]