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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So intimate is this connection between marine and inland waterways, that the historical and economic importance of seas and oceans is noticeably influenced by the size of their drainage basins and the navigability of their debouching rivers. This is especially true of enclosed seas. The only historical importance attached to the Caspian's inland basin is that inherent in the Volga's mighty stream. The Mediterranean has always suffered from its paucity of long river highways to open for it a wide hinterland. This lack checked the spread of its cultural influences and finally helped to arrest its historical development. If we compare the record of the Adriatic and the Black seas, the first a sharply walled cul de sac, the second a center of long radiating streams, sending out the Danube to tap the back country of the Adriatic and the Dnieper to draw on that of the Baltic, we find that the smaller sea has had a limited range of influence, a concentrated brilliant history, precocious and short-lived as is that of all limited areas; that the Euxine has exercised more far-reaching influences, despite a slow and still unfinished development. The Black Sea rivers in ancient times opened their countries to such elements of Hellenic culture as might penetrate from the Greek trading colonies at their mouths, especially the Greek forms of Christianity. It was the Danube that in the fourth century carried Arianism, born of the philosophic niceties of Greek thought, to the barbarians of southern Germany, and made Unitarians of the Burgundians and Visigoths of southern Gaul.637 The Dnieper carried the religion of the Greek Church to the Russian princes at Kief, Smolensk, and Moscow. Owing to the southward course of its great rivers, Russia has found the crux of her politics in the Black Sea, ever since the tenth century when the barbarians from Kiev first appeared before Constantinople. This sea has had for her a higher economic importance than the Baltic, despite the latter's location near the cultural center of western Europe.
In other seas, too, rivers play the same part of extending their tributary areas and therefore enhancing their historical significance. The disadvantages of the Baltic's smaller size and far-northern location, as compared with the Mediterranean, were largely compensated for by the series of big streams draining into it from the south, and bringing out from a vast hinterland the bulky necessaries of life. Hence the Hanseatic League of the Middle Ages, which had its origin among the southern coast towns of the Baltic from Lubeck to Riga, throve on the combined trade of sea and river.638 The mouths of the Scheldt, Rhine, Weser, Elbe and Thames long concentrated in themselves the economic, cultural and historical development of the North Sea basin. So the White Sea, despite its sub-polar location, is valuable to Russia for two reasons; it affords a politically open port, and it receives the Northern Dwina, which is navigable for river steamers from Archangel south to Vologda, a distance of six hundred miles, and carries the export trade of a large territory.639 Similarly in recent years, Bering Sea has gained unwonted commercial activity because the Yukon River serves as a waterway 1,370 miles long to the Klondike gold fields.
If we compare the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in respect to their rivers, we find that the narrow Atlantic has a drainage basin of over 19,000,000 square miles as opposed to the 8,660,000 square miles of drainage area commanded by the vastly larger Pacific. The Pacific is for the most part rimmed by mountains, discharging into the ocean only mad torrents or rapid-broken streams. The Atlantic, bordered by gently sloping plains of wide extent, receives rivers that for the most part pursue a long and leisurely course to the sea. Therefore, the commercial and cultural influences of the Atlantic extend from the Rockies and Andes almost to the heart of Russia, and by the Nile highway they even invade the seclusion of Africa. Through the long reach of its rivers, therefore, the Atlantic commands a land area twice as great as that of the Pacific; and by reason of this fundamental geographic advantage, it will retain the historical preΓ«minence that it so early secured. The development of the World Ocean will mean the exploitation of the Pacific trade from the basis of the Atlantic, the domination of the larger ocean by the historic peoples of the smaller, because these peoples have wider and more accessible lands as the base of their maritime operations.
The geographic influence of abundant rivers navigable from the sea is closely akin to that of highly articulated coasts. The effect of the Hardanger or Sogne Fiord, admitting ocean steamers a hundred miles into the interior of Norway, is similar to that of the Elbe and Weser estuaries, which admit the largest vessels sixty miles upstream to Hamburg and Bremen. Since river inlets can, to a certain extent, supply the place of marine inlets, from the standpoint of anthropo-geographic theory and of human practice, a land dissected by navigable rivers can be grouped with one dissected by arms of the sea. South America and Africa are alike in the unbroken contour of their coasts, but strongly contrasted in the character of their rivers. Hence the two continents present the extremes of accessibility and inaccessibility. South America, most richly endowed of all the continents with navigable streams, receiving ocean vessels three thousand miles up the Amazon as far as Tabatinga in Peru, and smaller steamers up the Orinoco to the spurs of the Andes, was known in its main features to explorers fifty years after its discovery. Africa, historically the oldest of continents, but cursed with a mesa form which converts nearly every river into a plunging torrent on its approach to the sea, kept its vast interior till the last century wrapped in utmost gloom. China, amply supplied with smaller littoral indentations but characterized by a paucity of larger inlets, finds compensation in the long navigable course of the Yangtze Kiang. This river extends the landward reach of the Yellow Sea 630 miles inland to Hanchow, where ocean-going vessels take on cargoes of tea and silk for Europe and America,640 and pay for them in Mexican dollars, the coin of the coast. Hence it is lined with free ports all the way from Shanghai at its mouth to Ichang, a thousand miles up its course.641
Navigable rivers opening passages directly from the sea are obviously nature-made gates and paths into wholly new countries; but the accessibility with which they endow a land becomes later a permanent factor in its cultural and economic development, a factor that remains constantly though less conspicuously operative when railroads have done their utmost to supplant water transportation. The importance of inland waterways for local and foreign trade and intercourse has everywhere been recognized. The peoples who have long maintained preΓ«minence among the commercial and maritime nations of the world have owed this in no small part to the command of these natural highways, which have served to give the broad land basis necessary for permanent commercial ascendency. This has been the history of England, Holland, France and the recent record of Germany. The medieval League of the Rhine Cities flourished by reason of the Rhone-Rhine highway across western Europe. The Hanseatic League, from Bruges all the way east to Russian Novgorod, owed their brilliant commercial career, not only to the favorable maritime field in the enclosed sea basins in front of them, but also to the series of long navigable rivers behind them from the Scheldt to the Neva and Volchov. Wherefore we find the League, originally confined to coast towns, drawing into the federation numerous cities located far up these rivers, such as Ghent, Cologne, Magdeburg, Breslau, Cracow, Pskof and Novgorod.642
In countries of large area, where commerce and intercourse must cover great distances, these natural and therefore cheap highways assume paramount importance, especially in the forest and agricultural stages of development, when the products of the land are bulky in proportion to their value. Small countries with deeply indented coasts, like Greece, Norway, Scotland, New England, Chile, and Japan, can forego the advantage of big river systems; but in Russia, Siberia, China, India, Canada, the United States, Venezuela, Brazil and Argentine, the history of the country, economic and political, is indissolubly connected with that of its great rivers. The storm center of the French and English wars in America was located on the upper Hudson, because this stream enabled the English colonies to tap the fur trade of the Great Lakes, and because it commanded the Mohawk Valley, the easiest and most obvious path for expansion into the interior of the continent. The Spanish, otherwise confining their activities in South America to the Caribbean district and the civilized regions of the Andean highlands, established settlements at the mouth of the La Plata River, because this stream afforded an approach from the Atlantic side toward the Potosi mines on the Bolivian Plateau. The Yangtze Kiang, that great waterway leading from the sea across the breadth of China and the one valuable river adjunct of maritime trade in the whole Orient, was early appropriated by the discerning English as the British "sphere of influence."
No other equally large area of the earth is so generously equipped by nature for the production and distribution of the articles of commerce as southern Canada and that part of the United States lying east of the Rocky Mountains. The simple build of the North American continent, consisting of a broad central trough between distant mountain ranges, and characterized by gentle slopes to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, has generated great and small rivers with easy-going currents, that everywhere opened up the land to explorer, trader and settler. The rate of expansion from the "Europe-fronting shore" of the continent was everywhere in direct proportion to the length of the rivers first appropriated by the colonists. North of Chesapeake Bay the lure to landward advance was the fur trade. The Atlantic rivers of the coast pre-empted by the English were cut short by the Appalachian wall. They opened up only restricted fur fields which were soon exhausted, so that the migrant trapper was here early converted into the agricultural settler, his shifting camp fire into the hearthstone of the farmhouse. Expansion was slow but solid. The relatively small area rendered accessible by their streams became compactly filled by the swelling tide of immigrants and the rapid natural increase of population. In sharp contrast to this development, the long waterway of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes leading to the still vaster river system of the Mississippi betrayed the fur-trading French into
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