Chapter XII · —Continents And Their Peninsulas

Insularity of the land-masses.

The division of the earth's surface into 28 per cent. land and 72 per cent. water is an all important fact of physical geography and anthropo-geography. Owing to this proportion, the land-masses, which alone provide habitats for man, rise as islands out of the three-fold larger surface of the uninhabitable ocean. Consequently, the human species, like the other forms of terrestrial life, bears a deeply ingrained insular character. Moreover, the water causes different degrees of separation between the land-masses, according as it appears as inlet, strait, sea, an island-strewn or islandless ocean; it determines the grouping of the habitable areas and consequently the geographic basis of the various degrees of ethnic and cultural kinship between the divisions of land. Finally, since the sea is for man only a highway to some ulterior shore, this geography of the land-masses in relation to the encompassing waters points the routes and goals of human wanderings.

Each fragment of habitable land, large or small, continent or islet, means a corresponding group or detachment of the vast human family. Its size fixes the area at the service of the group which occupies it. Its location, however, may either endow it with a neighborliness like that subsisting between Africa and Europe and involving an interwoven history; or remoteness like that of South America from Australia, so complete that even the close net of intercourse thrown by modern commerce over the whole world has scarcely sufficed to bring them into touch. Therefore the highly irregular distribution of the land areas, here compactly grouped, there remote, deserves especial attention, since it produces far-reaching results. Finally, continents and islands, by their zonal situation, their land forms, rainfall, river systems, flora and fauna, produce for man varied life conditions, which in their turn are partially dependent upon the size and grouping of the land-masses.

Classification of land-masses according to size and location.

A comparison of the large and small land-masses of the from the standpoint of both physical and anthropological geography yields a classification based upon size and location on the one hand, and historical influences on the other. The following table indicates the relation between the two.

I. Independent Land-masses.

A. Continents. Independent by reason of size, which enables them to support a large number of people and afford the conditions for civilization.

(a) Insular continents, whose primitive and modern development are marked by remoteness. Australia.

(b) Neighboring continents, separated by narrow seas and showing community of historical events. Europe and Africa. Asia and North America around Bering Sea.

B. Islands. Independent by reason of location.

(a) Oceanic islands, characterized by greatest remoteness from continents and other islands, and also by independent or detached history. St. Helena and Iceland.

(b) Member of a group of oceanic islands, therefore less independent. Hawaii, Fayal in the Azores, Tongatabu.

(c) Large islands, approaching by reason of size the independence of continents and thereby finding compensation for a less independent location. New Guinea, Borneo, Madagascar; in a cultural sense, Great Britain and Japan.

II. Dependent Land-masses.

(a) Inshore or coast islands, whose history is intimately connected with that of the nearby mainland. Euboea, Long Island, Vancouver, Sakhalin, Ceylon.

(b) Neighboring islands, showing less intimate historical relations. Formosa, the Canaries, Ireland in contrast to Great Britain.

(c) Islands of enclosed or marginal seas, contained in a circle of lands and exposed to constant intercourse from all sides. Jamaica, Java, Crete, Sicily, Zealand, Gotland, St. Lawrence in Bering Sea.

(d) Island groups not to be considered apart from other groups. Samoa, Fiji and Friendly Isles; Philippine, Sulu and Sunda Islands; Greater and Lesser Antilles.

Effect of size of land-masses.

Even the largest islands of the world, such as Borneo, New Guinea and Madagascar, show no such independent ethnic development. This is the distinguishing characteristic of the largest land-masses. Europe, except on the basis of its size and peninsula form, has no title to the name of continent; certainly not on anthropo-geographical grounds. Its classification as a continent arose in the Mediterranean among the Greeks, as a geographical expression of the antagonism between themselves and their Carian, Phoenician and Persian enemies across the Aegean; the idea had therefore a political origin, and was formed without knowledge of that vast stretch of plains between the Black Sea and the Arctic Ocean, where Asia's climate and races lap over into Europe, and where to-day we find the Muscovite Empire, in point of geographic conditions, its underlying ethnic stock and form of government, as much Asiatic as European. The real or western Europe, which the Roman Empire gradually added to the narrow Europe of the Greeks, and which is strikingly contrasted to Asia in point of size, relief, contour, climate and races, only served to maintain the distinction between the two continents in men's minds. But from a geographical standpoint the distinction is an error. It has confused the interpretation of the history of the Greeks and the development of the Russians. It has brought disorder into the question of the European or Asiatic origin of the Aryan linguistic family, which the anthropo-geographer would assign to the single continent of Eurasia. The independent development that falls to the lot of great world islands like the Americas and Australia is impossible in a peninsular continent like Europe, large as it is.

Independence of location versus independence of size.

The independence of a land-mass is based not alone on size: there is also an independence of location. This, owing to the spherical form of the earth, tends to be neutralized by the independence based upon large area. The larger a land-mass is, the nearer it approaches to others. Eurasia, the largest of all the continents, comes into close proximity and therefore close relations with Africa, North America, and even Australia; whereas Australia is at once the smallest and the most isolated of the continents. The remote oceanic islands of the Atlantic Ocean, measuring only a few square miles in area, have a location so independent of other inhabited lands, that before the period of the great discoveries they had never appeared on the horizon of man.

The case of Asia.

Location of hemispheres and ethnic kinship.

Continental convergence and ethnic kinship.

What is true where the hemispheres come together is true also where continents converge. The core of the Old World is found in the Mediterranean basin where Europe, Asia and Africa form a close circle of lands and where they are inhabited by the one white Mediterranean race. Contrast their racial unity about this common center with the extremes of ethnic divergence in their remote peripheries, where Teutons, Mongols, Malays and Negroes differ widely from the Mediterranean stock and from each other. Eastern Australia represents the ethnic antipodes of western Asia, in harmony with the great dividing distance between them, but the sides of these continents facing each other across the bridge of the Sunda Islands are sparsely strewn with a common Malay element.

Africa's location.

Africa's early development was never helped by the fact that the continent lay between Asia and South America. It was subjected to strong and persistent Asiatic Influences, but apparently to no native American ones. From that far-off trans-Atlantic shore came no signs of life. Africa appears in history as an appendage of Asia, a cultural peninsula of the larger continent. This was due not only to the Suez Isthmus and the narrowness of the Red Sea rift, but to its one-sided invasion by Asiatic races and trade from the east, while the western side of the continent lay buried in sleep, unstirred by any voice from the silent shores of America. Semitic influences, in successive waves, spread over the Dark Continent as far as Morocco, the Senegal, Niger, Lake Chad, Nyanza, Tanganyika and Nyassa, and gave it such light as it had before the 16th century. Only after the Atlantic gulf was finally crossed did influences from the American side of the ocean begin to impinge upon the West African coast, first in the form of the slave and rum trade, then in the more humane aspect of the Liberian colony. But with the full development of the Atlantic period in history, we see all kinds of Atlantic influences, though chiefly from the Atlantic states of Europe, penetrating eastward into the heart of Africa, and there meeting other commercial and political activities pressing inland from the Indian Ocean.

The Atlantic abyss.

Atlantic islands uninhabited.

Geographical character of the Pacific.

Pacific affinities of North American Indians.

Polynesian affinities.

The real Orient of the World.

The Atlantic abyss in historic movements of peoples.

This deep, unbridged chasm of the Atlantic, closed only four hundred years ago, must be taken into account in all investigations of the geographical distribution of races, whether in prehistoric or historic times. The influences of those ages when it formed an impassable gulf are still operative in directing the movements of the peoples to-day inhabiting its shores, because that barrier maintained the continents of America as a vast territorial reserve, sparsely inhabited by a Stone Age people, and affording a fresh field for the superior, accumulated energies of Europe.

Races and continents.

Contrast of the northern and southern continents.

Isolation of the southern continents.

This subordination of the southern continents is partly due to the fact that they have only one side of contact or neighborhood with any other land, that is, on the north; yet even here the contact is not close. In Australia the medium of communication is a long bridge of islands; in America, a winding island chain and a mountainous isthmus; in Africa, a broad zone of desert dividing the Mediterranean or Eurasian from the tropical and Negroid part of the continent. Intercourse was not easy, and produced clear effects only in the case of Africa. Enlightenment filtering in here was sadly dimmed as it spread. Moreover it was delayed till the introduction from Asia of the horse and camel, which were not native to Africa, and which, as Ratzel points out, alone made possible the long journey across the Sahara. The opposite or peninsular sides, running out as great spurs from the compacter land-masses of the north, look southward into vacant wastes of water, find no neighbors in those Antarctic seas. Owing to this unfavorable location on the edge of things, they were historically dead until four centuries ago, when oceanic navigation opened up the great sea route of the Southern Hemisphere, and for the first time included them in the world's circle of communication. But even when lifted by the ensuing Europeanizing process, they only emphasize the fundamental dependence of the Southern Hemisphere upon the superior geographical endowments of the Northern.

Effect of continental structure upon historical development.

The build of the land-masses influences fundamentally the movements and hence the development of the races who inhabit them. A simple continental structure gives to those movements a few simple features and a wide monotonous distribution which checks differentiation. A manifold, complex build, varied in relief and ragged in contour, breaks up the moving streams of peoples, turns each branch into a different channel, lends it a distinctive character through isolation, finally brings it up in a cul de sac formed by a peninsula or mountain-rimmed basin, where further movement is checked and the process of local individualization begins. Therefore great simplicity of continental build may result in historical poverty, as in the flat quadrangle of European Russia, the level plateau of Africa, and the smooth Atlantic slope of North America, with its neatly trimmed outline. Complexity, abounding in contrasted environments, tends to produce a varied wealth of historical development. Africa lies on the surface of the ocean, a huge torso of a continent, headless, memberless, inert. Here is no diversity of outward form, no contrast of zonal location, no fructifying variety of geographic conditions. Humanity has forgotten to grow in its stationary soil. Only where the Suez Isthmus formed an umbilical cord uniting ancient Egypt to the mother continent of Asia was Africa vitalized by the pulse of another life. European influences penetrated little beyond the northern coast.

Structure of North and South America.

Cultural superiority of the Pacific slope Indians.

Lack of segregated districts.

Coast articulations of continents.

It is necessary to distinguish two general classes of continental articulations; first, marginal dependences, like the fringe of European peninsulas and islands, resulting from a deeply serrated contour; and second, surface subdivisions of the interior, resulting from differences of relief or defined often by enclosing mountains or deserts, like the Tibetan Plateau, the Basin of Bohemia, the Po River trough, or the sand-rimmed valley of the Nile. The first class is by far the more important, because of the intense historical activity which results from the vitalizing contact with the sea. But in considering coast articulations, anthropo-geography is led astray unless it discriminates between these on the basis of size and location. Without stopping to discuss the obvious results of a contrasted zonal location, such as that between Labrador and Yucatan, the Kola Peninsula and Spain, it is necessary to keep in mind always the effect of vicinal location. An outlying coastal dependency like Ireland has had its history impoverished by excessive isolation, in contrast to the richer development of England, Jutland, and Zealand in the same latitude, because these have profited from the closer neighborhood of other peripheral regions. So from ancient times, Greece has had a similar advantage over the Crimea, the Tunisian Peninsula of North Africa over Spain, the Cotentin Peninsula of France over Brittany, and Kent over Cornwall or Caithness in Great Britain.

Importance of size in continental articulations.

Articulations on a vast scale, like the southern peninsulas of Asia, produce quite different cultural and historical effects from small physical sub-divisions, like the fiord promontories and "skerries" of Norway and southern Alaska, or the finger peninsulas of the Peloponnesus. The significant difference lies in the degree of isolation which the two types yield. Large continental dependencies of the Asiatic class resemble small continents in their power to segregate; while overgrown capes like ancient Attica and Argolis or the more bulky Peloponnesus have their exclusiveness tempered by the mediating power of the small marine inlets between them. Small articulations, by making a coast accessible, tend to counteract the excessive isolation of a large articulation. They themselves develop in their people only minor or inner differentiations, which serve to enrich the life of the island or peninsula as a whole, but do not invade its essential unity. The contrast in the history of Hellas and the Peloponnesus was due largely to their separation from one another; yet neither was able to make of its people anything but Greeks. Wales and Cornwall show in English history the same contrast and the same underlying unity.

Historical contrast of large and small peninsulas.

Peninsular conditions most favorable to historical development.

The most favorable conditions for historical development obtain where the two classes of marginal articulation are combined, and where they occur in groups, as we find them in the Mediterranean and the North Sea-Baltic basin. Here the smaller indentations multiply contact with the sea, and provide the harbors, bays and breakwaters of capes and promontories which make the coast accessible. The larger articulations, by their close grouping, break up the sea into the minor thalassic basins which encourage navigation, and thus insure the exchange of their respective cultural achievements. In other words, such conditions present the pre-eminent advantages of vicinal location around an enclosed sea.

The enormous articulations of southern Asia suffer from their paucity of small indentations, all the more because of their vast size and sub-tropical location. The Grecian type of peninsula, with its broken shoreline, finds here its large-scale homologue only in Farther India, to which the Sunda Islands have played in history the part of a gigantic Cyclades. The European type of articulation is found only about the Yellow-Japan Sea, where the island of Hondo and the peninsulas of Shangtung and Korea reproduce approximately the proportions of Great Britain, Jutland and Italy respectively. Arabia and India, like the angular shoulder of Africa which protrudes into the Indian Ocean, measure an imposing length of coastline, but this length shrinks in comparison with the vast area of the peninsulas. The contour of a peninsula is like the surface of the brain: in both it is convolutions that count. Southern Asia has had lobes enough but too few convolutions. For this reason, the northern Indian Ocean, despite its exceptional location as the eastward extension of the Mediterranean route to the Orient, found its development constantly arrested till the advent of European navigators.

Length of coastline.

Although the peripheral articulations of a continent differ anthropo-geographically according to their size, their zonal and vicinal location, yet large and small, arctic and tropical, are grouped indiscriminately together in the figures that state the length of coastlines. For this reason, statistics of continental coastlines have little value. For instance, the fact that Eurasia has 67,000 miles (108,000 kilometers) and North America 46,500 miles (75,000 kilometers) of contact with the ocean is not illuminating; these figures do not reveal the fact that the former has its greatest coastal length on its tropical and sub-tropical side, while the latter continent has wasted inlets and islands innumerable in the long, bleak stretch from Newfoundland poleward around to Bering Sea.

The continental base of the peninsulas.

Peninsulas are accessible from the sea according to the configuration of their coasts, but from their hinterland, according to the length and nature of their connection with the same. This determines the degree of their isolation from the land-mass. If they hang from the continent by a frayed string, as does the Peloponnesus, Crimea, Malacca, Indian Gutjerat, and Nova Scotia, they are segregated from the life of the mainland almost as completely as if they were islands. The same effects follow where the base of a peninsula is defined by a high mountain barrier, as in all the Mediterranean peninsulas, in the two Indias, and in Korea; or by a desert like that which scantily links Arabia to Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia; or by a blur of swamps and lakes such as half detaches Scandinavia, Courland, Estland and Finland from Russia.

Continental base a zone of transition.

Historical contrast between base and extremity.

Continental base a scene of invasion and war.

Peninsular extremities as areas of isolation.

Ethnic unity of peninsulas.

Peninsulas as intermediaries.

Peninsulas of intercontinental location.

This rôle 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 rôle 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.

Atlantic peninsulas of Europe

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 district—Sir 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