Chapter IX · —Oceans And Enclosed Seas

The water of the earth's surface, viewed from the standpoint of anthropo-geography, is one, whether it appears as atmospheric moisture, spring, river, lake, brackish lagoon, enclosed sea-basin or open ocean. Its universal circulation, from the falling of the dews to the vast sweep of ocean current, causes this inviolable unity. Variations in the geographical forms of water are superficial and constantly changing; they pass into one another by almost imperceptible gradations, shift their unstable outlines at the bidding of the mobile, restless element. In contrast to the land, which is marked by diversity of geologic structure and geographic form, the world of water is everywhere approximately the same, excepting only the difference in the mineral composition of sea water as opposed to that of spring and stream. Therefore, whenever man has touched it, it has moulded him in much the same way, given the same direction to his activities, dictated the use of the same implements and methods of navigation. As maritime trader or colonist, he has sailed to remote, unknown, yet familiar coasts, and found himself as much at home as on his native shores. He has built up maritime empires, the centre of whose dominion, race and commerce, falls somewhere in the dividing yet uniting sea.

The water a factor in man's mobility.

Man must be grouped with the air and water as part of the mobile envelope of the earth's surface. The mobility which maintains the unity of air and water has caused the unity of the human race. Abundant facilities of dispersal often give animal forms a wide or cosmopolitan distribution. Man, by appropriating the mobile forces in the air and water to increase his own powers of locomotion, has become a cosmopolitan being, and made the human race reflect the unity of atmosphere and hydrosphere.

Always the eternal unrest of the moving waters has knocked at the door of human inertia to arouse the sleeper within; always the flow of stream and the ebb of tide have sooner or later stirred the curiosity of the land-born barbarian about the unseen destination of these marching waters. Rivers by the mere force of gravity have carried him to the shores of their common ocean, and placed him on this highway of the world. Then from his sea-girt home, whether island or continent, he has timidly or involuntarily followed the track which headland-dotted coast, or ocean current, or monsoon, or trade wind marked out for him across the pathless waters, so that at the gray dawn of history he appears as a cosmopolite, occupying every part of the habitable earth.

These sporadic oversea wanderings, with intervals of centuries or milleniums between, opened to his occupancy strange and remote lands, in whose isolation and new environment he developed fresh variations of mind, body and cultural achievements, to arm him with new weapons in the struggle for existence. The sea which brought him bars him for a few ages from his old home, till the tradition of his coming even is lost. Then with higher nautical development, the sea loses its barrier nature; movements of people, and trade recross its surface to unite those who have been long severed and much differentiated in their mutual remoteness. The ensuing friction and mingling weed out the less fit variations of each, and combine in the new race the qualities able to fortify a higher type of man. Not only seas and oceans, but also mountains and deserts serve to isolate the migrant people who once has crossed them; but wastes of water raise up the most effective barriers.

Oceans and seas in universal history.

The transformation of the ocean into a highway by the development of navigation is a late occurrence in the history of man and is perhaps the highest phase of his adaptation to environment, because an adaptation which has placed at his disposal that vast water area constituting three-fourths of the earth's surface from which he had previously been excluded. Moreover, it was adaptation to an alien and hostile element, whose violent displays of power recurrently stimulated the human adjustment between attack and defense.

Because adaptation to the sea has been vastly more difficult than to the land, commensurate with the harder struggle it has brought greater intellectual and material rewards. This conquest of the sea is entitled to a peculiarly high place in history, because it has contributed to the union of the various peoples of the world, has formed a significant part of the history of man, whether that history is economic, social, political or intellectual. Hence history has always staged its most dramatic acts upon the margin of seas and oceans; here always the plot thickens and gives promise of striking development. Rome of the seven hills pales before England of the "Seven Seas."

The sea in universal history.

Universal history loses half its import, remains an aggregate of parts, fails to yield its significance as a whole, if it does not continually take into account the unifying factor of the seas. Indeed, no history is entitled to the name of universal unless it includes a record of human movements and activities on the ocean, side by side with those on the land. Our school text-books in geography present a deplorable hiatus, because they fail to make a definite study of the oceans over which man explores and colonizes and trades, as well as the land on which he plants and builds and sleeps.

The striking fact about the great World Ocean to-day is the manifold relations which it has established between the dwellers on its various coasts. Marine cables, steamer and sailing routes combine to form a network of paths across the vast commons of the deep. Over these the commercial, political, intellectual, or even purely migrant activities of human life move from continent to continent. The distinctive value of the sea is that it promotes many-sided relations as opposed to the one-sided relation of the land. France on her eastern frontier comes into contact with people of kindred stock, living under similar conditions of climate and soil to her own; on her maritime border she is open to intermittent intercourse with all continents and climes and races of the world. To this sea border must be ascribed the share that France has taken in the history of North and South America, the West Indies, North and Equatorial Africa, India, China and the South Seas. So we find the great maritime peoples of the world, from the Phoenicians to the English, each figuring in the history of the world of its day, and helping weave into a web of universal history the stories of its various parts.

Origin of navigation.

Man's normal contact with the sea is registered in his nautical achievements. The invention of the first primitive means of navigation, suggested by a floating log or bloated body of a dead animal, must have been an early achievement, of a great many peoples who lived near the water, or who in the course of their wanderings found their progress obstructed by rivers; it belongs to a large class of similar discoveries which answer urgent and constantly recurring needs. It was, in all probability, often made and as often lost again, until a growing habit of venturing beyond shore or river bank in search of better fishing, or of using the easy open waterways through the thick tangle of a primeval forest to reach fresh hunting grounds, established it as a permanent acquisition.

Primitive forms.

Primitive craft in arid lands.

Relation of the river to marine navigation.

Retarded navigation.

Regions of advanced navigation.

Geographic conditions in Polynesia.

Mediterranean versus Atlantic seamanship.

Three geographic stages of maritime development.

The size of a sea or ocean is a definite factor in its power to attract or repel maritime ventures, especially in the earlier stages of nautical development. A broken, indented coast means not only a longer and broader zone of contact between the inhabitants and the sea; it means also the breaking up of the adjacent expanse of water into so many alcoves, in which fisherman, trader and colonist may become at home, and prepare for maritime ventures farther afield. The enclosed or marginal sea tempts earlier because it can be compassed by coastwise navigation; then by the proximity of its opposite shores and its usual generous equipment with islands, the next step to crosswise navigation is encouraged. For the earliest stages of maritime development, only the smaller articulations of the coast and the inshore fringe of sea inlets count. This is shown in the primitive voyages of the Greeks, before they had ventured into the Euxine or west of the forbidding Cape Malia; and in the "inside passage" navigation of the Indians of southern Alaska, British Columbia, and Chile, who have never stretched their nautical ventures beyond the outermost rocks of their skerry-walled coast.

Influence of enclosed seas upon navigation.

A second stage is reached when an enclosed basin is at, hand to widen the maritime horizon, and when this larger field is exploited in all its commercial, colonial and industrial possibilities, as was done by the Phoenicians and Greeks in the Mediterranean, the Hanse Towns in the Baltic, the Dutch and English in the North Sea. The third and final stage is reached when the nursery of the inshore estuary or gulf and the elementary school of the enclosed basin are in turn outgrown, and the larger maritime spirit moves on to the open ocean for its field of operation. It is a significant fact that the Norse, bred to the water in their fiords and channels behind their protecting "skerry-wall," then trained in the stormy basins of the North and Irish Seas, were naturally the first people of Europe to cross the Atlantic, because the Atlantic of their shores, narrowing like all oceans and seas toward the north, assumes almost the character of an enclosed basin. The distance from Norway to Greenland is only 1,800 miles, little more than that across the Arabian Sea between Africa and India. We trace, therefore, a certain analogy between the physical subdivisions of the world of water into inlet, marginal sea and ocean, and the anthropo-geographical gradations in maritime development.

Enclosed seas as areas of ethnic and cultural assimilation.

North Sea and Baltic basins.

Bering Sea.

Red Sea basin.

Assimilation facilitated by ethnic kinship.

But to-day China is going to school to Japan. Since Japan renounced her policy of seclusion in 1868 along with her antiquated form of government, and since Korea has been forced out of her hermit life, the potency of vicinal location around this enclosed sea has been suddenly restored. The enforced opening of the treaty ports of Japan, Korea and China simply prepared the way for this basin to reassert its power to unite, and to unite now more closely and effectively than ever before, under the law of increasing territorial areas. The stimulus was first communicated to the basin from without, from the trading nations of the Occident and that new-born Orient rising from the sea on the California shores. Japan has responded most promptly and most actively to these over-sea stimuli, just as England has, of all Europe, felt most strongly the reflex influences from trans-Atlantic lands. The awakening of this basin has started, therefore, from its seaward rim; its star has risen in the east. It is in the small countries of the world that such stars rise. The compressed energies of Japan, stirred by over-sea contact and an improved government at home, have overleaped the old barriers and are following the lines of slight resistance which this land-bound sea affords. Helped by the bonds of geographical conditions and of race, she has begun to convert China and Korea into her culture colonies. The on-looking world feels that the ultimate welfare of China and Korea can be best nurtured by Japan, which will thus pay its old debt to the Middle Kingdom.

Chinese expansion seaward.

Despite the fact that China's history has always had a decidedly inland character, that its political expansion has been landward, that it has practiced most extensively and successively internal colonization, and that its policy of exclusion has tended to deaden its outlook toward the Pacific, nevertheless China's direct intercourse with the west and its westward-directed influence have never, in point of significance, been comparable with that toward the east and south. Here a succession of marginal seas offered easy water-paths, dotted with way stations, to their outermost rim in Japan, the Philippines and remote Australia. About the South China Sea, the Gulf of Siam, the Sulu, Celebes, and Java Seas, the coastal regions of the outlying islands have for centuries received Chinese goods and culture, and a blend of that obstinately assertive Chinese blood.

Importance of zonal and continental location.

The historical significance of an enclosed sea basin depends upon its zonal location and its position in relation to the surrounding lands. We observe a steady decrease of historical importance from south to north through the connected series of the Yellow, Japan, Okhotsk, Bering Seas and the Arctic basin, miscalled ocean. The far-northern location of the Baltic, with its long winters of ice-bound ports and its glaciated lands, retarded its inclusion in the field of history, curtailed its important historical period, and reduced the intensity of its historical life, despite the brave, eager activity of the Hanseatic League. The Mediterranean had the advantage, not only of a more favorable zonal situation, but of a location at the meeting place of three continents and on the line of maritime traffic across the eastern hemisphere from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Thalassic character of the Indian Ocean.

The sea route to the Orient.

From the dawn of history the northern Indian Ocean was a thoroughfare. Alexander the Great's rediscovery of the old sea route to the Orient sounds like a modern event in relation to the gray ages behind it. Along this thoroughfare Indian colonists, traders, and priests carried the elements of Indian civilization to the easternmost Sunda Isles; and Oriental wares, sciences and religions moved westward to the margin of Europe and Africa. The Indian Ocean produced a civilization of its own, with which it colored a vast semi-circle of land reaching from Java to Abyssinia, and more faintly, owing to the wider divergence of race, the further stretch from Abyssinia to Mozambique.

Limitation of small area in enclosed seas.

The limitation of every enclosed or marginal sea lies in its small area and in the relatively restricted circle of its bordering lands. Only small peninsulas and islands can break its surface, and short stretches of coast combine to form its shores. It affords, therefore, only limited territories as goals for expansion, restricted resources and populations to furnish the supply and demand of trade. What lands could the Mediterranean present to the colonial outlook of the Greeks comparable to the North America of the expanding English or the Brazil of the Portuguese? Yet the Mediterranean as a colonial field had great advantages in point of size over the Baltic, which is only one-sixth as large (2,509,500 and 431,000 square kilometers respectively), and especially over the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, whose effective areas were greatly reduced by the aridity of their surrounding lands. But the precocious development and early cessation of growth marking all Mediterranean national life have given to this basin a variegated history; and in every period and every geographical region of it, from ancient Phoenicia to modern Spain and Italy, the early exhaustion of resources and dwarfing of political ideals which characterize most small areas become increasingly conspicuous. The history of Sweden, Denmark, and the Hanse Towns in the Baltic tells the same story, the story of a hothouse plant, forced in germination and growth, then stifled in the close air.

Successive maritime periods in history.

Growth demands space. Therefore, the progress of history has been attended by an advance from smaller to larger marine areas, with a constant increase in those manifold relations between peoples and lands which the water is able to establish. Every great epoch of history has had its own sea, and every succeeding epoch has enlarged its maritime field. The Greek had the Aegean, the Roman the whole Mediterranean, to which the Middle Ages made an addition in the North Sea and Baltic. The modern period has had the Atlantic, and the twentieth century is now entering upon the final epoch of the World Ocean. The gradual inclusion of this World Ocean in the widened scope of history has been due to the expansion of European peoples, who, for the past twenty centuries, have been the most far-reaching agents in the making of universal history. Owing to the location and structure of their continent, they have always found the larger outlet in a western sea. In the south the field widened from the Phoenician Sea to the Aegean, then to the Mediterranean, on to the Atlantic, and across it to its western shores; in the north it moved from the quiet Baltic to the tide-swept North Sea and across the North Atlantic. Only the South Atlantic brought European ships to the great world highway of the South Seas, and gave them the choice of an eastern or western route to the Pacific. Every new voyage in the age of discovery expanded the historical horizon; and every improvement in the technique of navigation has helped to eliminate distance and reduced intercourse on the World Ocean to the time-scale of the ancient Mediterranean.

It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the larger oceanic horizon has meant a corresponding increase in the relative content and importance of history for the known world of each period. Such an intense, concentrated national life as occurred in those little Mediterranean countries in ancient times is not duplicated now, unless we find a parallel in Japan's recent career in the Yellow Sea basin. There was something as cosmic in the colonial ventures of the Greeks to the wind-swept shores of the Crimea or barbarous wilds of Massilia, as in the establishment of English settlements on the brimming rivers of Virginia or the torrid coast of Malacca. Alexander's conquest of the Asiatic rim of the Mediterranean and Rome's political unification of the basin had a significance for ancient times comparable with the Russification of northern Asia and the establishment of the British Empire for our day.

The ocean has always performed one function in the evolution of history; it has provided the outlet for the exercise of redundant national powers. The abundance of opportunity which it presents to these disengaged energies depends upon the size, location and other geographic conditions of the bordering lands. These opportunities are limited in an enclosed basin, larger in the oceans, and largest in the northern halves of the oceans, owing to the widening of all land-masses towards the north and the consequent contraction of the oceans and seas in the same latitudes.

Contrasted historical rôthe Baltic played theles of northern and southern hemispheres.

A result of this grouping is the abundance of land in the northern hemisphere, and the vast predominance of water in the southern, by reason of which these two hemispheres have each assumed a distinct rôle in history. The northern hemisphere offers the largest advantages for the habitation of man, and significantly enough, contains a population five times that of the southern hemisphere. The latter, on the other hand, with its vast, unbroken water areas, has been the great oceanic highway for circum-mundane exploration and trade. This great water girdle of the South Seas had to be discovered before the spherical form of the earth could be proven. In the wide territory of the northern hemisphere civilization has experienced an uninterrupted development, first in the Old World, because this offered in its large area north of the equator the fundamental conditions for rapid evolution; then it was transplanted with greatest success to North America. The northern hemisphere contains, therefore, "the zone of greatest historical density," from which the track of the South Seas is inconveniently remote. Hence we find in recent decades a reversion to the old east-west path along the southern rim of Eurasia, now perfected by the Suez Canal, and to be extended in the near future around the world by the union of the Pacific with the Caribbean Sea at Panama; so that finally the northern hemisphere will have its own circum-mundane waterway, along the line of greatest intercontinental intercourse.

Size of the oceans

The size of the ocean as a whole is so enormous, and yet its various subdivisions are so uniform in their physical aspect, that their differences of size produce less conspicuous historical effects than their diversity of area would lead one to expect. A voyage across the 177,000 square miles (453,500 square kilometers) of the Black Sea does not differ materially from one across the 979,000 square miles (2,509,500 square kilometers) of the Mediterranean; or a voyage across the 213,000 square miles (547,600 square kilometers) of the North Sea, from one across the three-hundredfold larger area of the Pacific. The ocean does not, like the land, wear upon its surface the evidences and effects of its size; it wraps itself in the same garment of blue waves or sullen swell, wherever it appears; but the outward cloak of the land varies from zone to zone. The significant anthropo-geographical influence of the size of the oceans, as opposed to that of the smaller seas, comes from the larger circle of lands which the former open to maritime enterprise. For primitive navigation, when the sailor crept from headland to headland and from island to island, the small enclosed basin with its close-hugging shores did indeed offer the best conditions. To-day, only the great tonnage of ocean-going vessels may reflect in some degree the vast areas they traverse between continent and continent. Coasting craft and ships designed for local traffic in enclosed seas are in general smaller, as in the Baltic, though the enormous commerce of the Great Lakes, which constitute in effect an inland sea, demands immense vessels.

Neutrality of the seas, its evolution.

NOTES TO CHAPTER IX