Note 555 — Chapter IX · —Oceans And Enclosed Seas

The enclosed or marginal sea seems a necessary condition for the advance beyond coastwise navigation and the much later step to the open ocean. Continents without them, like Africa, except for its frontage upon the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, have shown no native initiative in maritime enterprise. Africa was further cursed by the mockery of desert coasts along most of her scant thalassic shores. In the Americas, we find the native races compassing a wide maritime field only in the Arctic, where the fragmentary character of the continent breaks up the ocean into Hudson's Bay, Davis Strait, Baffin Bay, Gulf of Boothia, Melville Sound and Bering Sea; and in the American Mediterranean of the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. The excellent seamanship developed in the archipelagoes of southern Alaska and Chile remained abortive for maritime expansion, despite a paucity of local resources and the spur of hunger, owing to the lack of a marginal sea; but in the Caribbean basin, the Arawaks and later the Caribs spread from the southern mainland as far as Cuba.555 [See map page 101.]