Chapter X · —Man's Relation To The Water
Reading edition
Protection of a water frontier.
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 answered—fishing 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.
Ancient pile villages.
Present distribution.
Malayan pile dwellings.
In Melanesia.
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.
River dwellers in populous lands.
A far more modern type of river-dwellers is found in the "shanty-boat" people of the western rivers of the United States. They are the gypsies of our streams, nomads who float downstream with the current, tying up at intervals along the bank of some wooded island or city waterfront, then paying a tug to draw their house-boat upstream. The river furnishes them with fish for their table and driftwood for their cooking-stove, and above all is the highway for the gratification of their nomad instincts. There is no question here of trade and overpopulation.
Reclamation of land from the sea.
The struggle with the water.
The fight against the water on the coast begins later than that against rivers and swamps in the interior of the land; it demands greater enterprise and courage, because it combats two enemies instead of one; but its rewards are correspondingly greater. The Netherlands by their struggle have acquired not only territory for an additional half million population, but have secured to themselves a strategic position in the maritime trade of the world.
Mound villages in river flood-plains.
Diking of rivers.
Social gain by control of the water.
In such organized struggles to reduce the domain of the water and extend that of the dry land, the material gain is not all: more significant by far is the power to co-operate that is developed in a people by a prolonged war against overwhelming sea or river. A common natural danger, constantly and even regularly recurring, necessitates for its resistance a strong and sustained union, that draws men out of the barren individualism of a primitive people, and forces them without halt along the path of civilization. It brings a realizing sense of the superiority of common interests over individual preferences, strengthens the national bond, and encourages voluntary subservience to law.
Control of water as factor in early civilizations of arid lands.
The history of Egypt shows a similar effect of the yearly inundation of the Nile Valley. Here, as in all rainless countries where irrigation must be practiced, the water becomes a potent factor of political union and civilization. Its scarcity necessitates common effort in the construction and maintenance of irrigation works, and a central control to secure fair distribution of the water to the fields of the inhabitants. A stimulus to progress is found in the presence of a problem, perennial as the yearly threatenings of the Hoangho, which demands the application of human intelligence and concerted labor for its solution. Additional arable land for the growing population can be secured only by the wider distribution of the fructifying water; this in turn depends upon corporate effort wisely directed and ably controlled. Every lapse in governmental efficiency means an encroachment of the desert upon the alluvial fields and finally to the river bank, as to-day in Mesopotamia.
Cultural areas in primitive America.
Economy of the water: fisheries.
Fisheries as factors in maritime expansion.
Fisheries as nurseries of seamen.
Anthropo-geographic importance of navigation.
The resources of the sea first tempted man to trust himself to its dangerous surface; but their rewards were slight in comparison with the wealth of experiences and influences to which he fell heir, after he learned to convert the barrier of the untrod waste into a highway for his sail-borne keel. It is therefore true, as many anthropologists maintain, that after the discovery of fire the next most important step in the progress of the human race was the invention of the boat. No other has had such far-reaching results. Since water covers three-fourths of the earth's surface and permits the land-masses to rise only as islands here and there, it presents to man for his nautical ventures three times the area that he commands for his terrestrial habitat. On every side, the break of the waves and the swell of the tides block his wanderings, unless he has learned to make the water carry him to his distant goal. Spacially, therefore, the problem and the task of navigation is the most widespread and persistent in the history of mankind. The numerous coaling-stations which England has scattered over the world are mute witnesses to this spacial supremacy of the water, to the length of ocean voyages, and the power of the ocean to divide and unite. But had the proportion of land and water been reversed, the world would have been poorer, deprived of all these possibilities of segregation and differentiation, of stimulus to exchange and far-reaching intercourse, and of ingenious inventions which the isolating ocean has caused. Without this ramifying barrier between the different branches of the human family, these would have resembled each other more closely, but at the cost of development. The mere multiplicity of races and sub-races has sharpened the struggle for existence and endowed the survivors with higher qualities. But it was navigation that released primitive man from the seclusion of his own island or continent, stimulated and facilitated the intercourse of peoples, and enabled the human race to establish itself in every habitable part of the world.
NOTES TO CHAPTER X