Note 549 — Chapter IX · —Oceans And Enclosed Seas

Turning from these regions of merely rudimentary navigation and inquiring where the highest efficiency in the art was obtained before the spread of Mediterranean and European civilization, we find that this distinction belongs to the great island world of the Pacific and to the neighboring lands of the Indian Ocean. Sailing vessels and outrigger boats of native design and construction characterize the whole sea-washed area of Indo-Malaysian civilization from Malacca to the outermost isles of the Pacific. The eastern rim of Asia, also, belongs to this wide domain of nautical efficiency, and the coast Indians of southern Alaska and British Columbia may possibly represent an eastern spur of the same,549 thrown out in very remote times and maintained by the advantageous geographic conditions of that indented, mountainous coast. Adjoining this area on the north is the long-drawn Arctic seaboard of the Eskimo, who unaided have developed in their sealskin kayak and bidarka sea-going craft unsurpassed for the purposes of marine hunting and fishing, and who display a fearlessness and endurance born of long and enforced intimacy with the deep. Driven by the frozen deserts of his home to seek his food chiefly in the water, the Eskimo, nevertheless, finds his access to the sea barred for long months of winter by the jagged ice-pack along the shore.