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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In the same way, the vast Ganges and Indus basins, which constitute 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.
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 cockpit 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.
In contrast to these continental sections which stand in contact with the solid land-mass 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.
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 homogeneous 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. Hellas and even the Peloponnesus have had their peninsularity impaired and their race mixed, owing to the predominant continental section to the north.
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 Japan islands, and for the passage thither of Chinese culture, whether intellectual, esthetic, industrial or religious.799 It has been the one country conspicuous in the foreign history of Japan. 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 Japan, it has become the avenue of Japanese 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
This rΓ΄le 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 worship of Allah, or the creeping caravans and slave-gangs of Arab trader. Of all such intercontinental peninsulas, Florida alone seems to have had no rΓ΄le 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.
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 districtβSir 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 ships 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, 1905.757
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, Washington. 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
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