Note 447 — Chapter VIII · —Coast Peoples

Its accessibility from the sea depends primarily upon its degree of articulation; and this articulation depends upon whether the littoral belt has suffered elevation or subsidence. When the inshore sea rests upon an uplifted bottom, the contour of the coast is smooth and unbroken, because most of the irregularities of surface have been overlaid by a deposit of waste from the land; so it offers no harbor except here and there a silted river mouth, while it shelves off through a broad amphibian belt of tidal marsh, lagoon, and sand reef to a shallow sea. Such is the coast of New Jersey, most of the Gulf seaboard of the United States and Mexico, the Coromandel coast of India, and the long, low littoral of Upper Guinea. Such coasts harbor a population of fishermen living along the strands of their placid lagoons,447 and stimulate a timid inshore navigation which sometimes develops to extensive coastwise intercourse, where a network of lagoons and deltaic channels forms a long inshore passage, as in Upper Guinea, but which fears the break of the surf outside.448