Influences of Geographic Environment by Ellen Churchill Semple (best romantic books to read .txt) π
The protection of a water frontier--Pile villages of ancienttimes--Modern pile dwellings--Their geographicdistribution--River-dwellers in old and popular lands--Man'sencroachment upon the sea by reclamation of land--The struggle with thewater--Mound villages in river flood-plains--Social and political gainby control of the water--A factor in early civilization of aridlands--The economy of the water--Fisheries--Factors in maritimeexpansion--Fisheries as nurseries of seamen--Anthropo-geographicimportance of navigation.
CHAPTER XI.
THE ANTHROPO-GEOGRAPHY OF RIVERS
Rivers as intermediaries between land and sea--Sea navigation mergesinto river navigation--Historical importance of seas and oceansinfluenced by their debouching streams--Lack of coast articulationssupplied by rivers--River highways as basis of commercialpreΓ«minence--Importance of rivers in large countries--Rivers as highwaysof expansion--Determinants of routes in arid or semi-aridlands--Increa
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Pompeo Molmenti, Venice in the Middle Ages, Vol. I, pp. 117, 121-123, 130. Chicago, 1906. The Commercial and Fiscal Policy of the Venetian Republic, Edinburgh Review, Vol. 200, pp. 341-344, 347. 1904.
577.H.J. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, p. 24, note. London, 1904.
578.Hugonis Grotii, Mare Liberum sive de jure quod Batavis competit ad Indicana commercia dissertatio, contained in his De Jure Belli et Pacis. Hagae Comitis, 1680.
Despite the extensive use which man makes of the water highways of the world, they remain to him highways, places for his passing and repassing, not for his abiding. Essentially a terrestrial animal, he makes his sojourn upon the deep only temporary, even when as a fisherman he is kept upon the sea for months during the long season of the catch, or when, as whaler, year-long voyages are necessitated by the remoteness and expanse of his field of operations. Yet even this rule has its exceptions. The Moro Bajan are sea gypsies of the southern Philippines and the Sulu archipelago, of whom Gannett says "their home is in their boats from the cradle to the grave, and they know no art but that of fishing." Subsisting almost exclusively on sea food, they wander about from shore to shore, one family to a boat, in little fleets of half a dozen sail; every floating community has its own headman called the Captain Bajan, who embodies all their slender political organization. When occasionally they abandon their rude boats for a time, they do not abandon the sea, but raise their huts on piles above the water on some shelving beach. Like the ancient lake-dwellers of Switzerland and Italy, only in death do they acknowledge their ultimate connection with the solid land. They never bury their dead at sea, but always on a particular island, to which the funeral cortege of rude outrigged boats moves to the music of the paddle's dip.579
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 constituted 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 shore. In this location the occupant of the pile dwelling has found all his needs answeredβfishing grounds beneath and about his hut, fields a few hundred feet away on shore, easily reached by his dug-out canoe, and a place of retreat from a land enemy, whether man or wild beast.
Such pile dwellings, answering the primary need of protection, have had wide distribution, especially in the Tropics, and persist into our own times among retarded peoples living in small, isolated groups too weak for effective defence. They were numerous in the lakes of Switzerland580 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 morasses by means of fascines weighted down with gravel and clay, and moored to the bottom by stakes driven through the mass. 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 Hellespont, built quite after the Swiss type, with trap doors in the floor for fishing 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
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 retarded 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 confrères of twenty centuries ago. Livingstone, in descending from Lake Nyassa by the Shire 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 shore 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 shore effectually screened their retreat, and the abundant fish in the lake provided them with food.587
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 fishing, 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 shore 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
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 shore. 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 Tanobada, 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 anchored 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.
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 fishing 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.
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