Influences of Geographic Environment by Ellen Churchill Semple (best romantic books to read .txt) 📕

The outer edge finds its greatest significance, which is for the most part ephemeral, in the earlier stages of navigation, maritime colonization, and in some cases of original settlement. But this importance persists only on steep coasts furnishing little or no level ground for cultivation and barred from interior hunting or grazing land; on many coral and volcanic islands of the Pacific Ocean whose outer rim has the most fertile soil and furnishes the most abundant growth of coco palms, and whose limited area only half suffices to support the population; and in polar and sub-polar districts, where harsh climatic conditions set a low limit to economic development. In all these regions the sea must provide most of the food of the inhabitants, who can therefore never lose contact with its waters. In mountainous Tierra del Fuego, whose impenetrably forested slopes rise directly from the sea, with only here and there a scanty stretch of stony beach, the natives of the southern and western coasts keep close to the shore. The straits and channels yield them all their food, and are the highways for all their restless, hungry wanderings.420 The steep slopes and dense forests preclude travel by land, and force the wretched inhabitants to live as much in their canoes as in their huts. The Tlingit and Haida Indians of the mountainous coast of southern Alaska locate their villages on some smooth sheltered beach, with their houses in a single row facing the water, and the ever-ready canoe drawn up on shore in front. They select their sites with a view to food supply, and to protection in case of attack. On the treeless shores of Kadiak Island and of the long narrow Alaska Peninsula near by, the Eskimo choose their village location for an accumulation of driftwood, for proximity to their food supply, and a landing-place for their kayaks and bidarkas. Hence they prefer a point of land or gravel spit extending out into the sea, or a sand reef separating a salt-water lagoon from the open sea. The Aleutian Islanders regard only accessibility to the shell-fish on the beach and their pelagic hunting and fishing; and this consideration has influenced the Eskimo tribes of the wide Kuskokwin estuary to such an extent, that they place their huts only a few feet above ordinary high tide, where they are constantly exposed to overflow from the sea.421 Only among the great tidal channels of the Yukon delta are they distributed over the whole wide coastal zone, even to its inner edge.

The coast Chukches of northeastern Siberia locate their tent villages on the sand ramparts between the Arctic Ocean and the freshwater lagoons which line this low tundra shore. Here they are conveniently situated for fishing and hunting marine animals, while protected against the summer inundations of the Arctic rivers.422 The whole western side of Greenland, from far northern Upernivik south to Cape Farewell, shows both Eskimo and Danish settlements almost without exception on projecting points of peninsulas or islands, where the stronger effect of the warm ocean current, as well as proximity to the food supply, serve to fix their habitations; although the remains of the old Norse settlements in general are found in sheltered valleys with summer vegetation, striking off from the fiords some 20 miles back from the outer coast.423 Cæsar found that the ancient Veneti, an immigrant people of the southern coast of Brittany, built their towns on the points of capes and promontories, sites which gave them ready contact with the sea and protection against attack from the land side, because every rise of the tide submerged the intervening lowlands.424 Here a sterile plateau hinterland drove them for part of their subsistence to the water, and the continuous intertribal warfare of small primitive states to the sea-girt asylums of the capes.