Note 458 — Chapter VIII · —Coast Peoples

A well dissected coast, giving ample contact with the sea, often fails nevertheless to achieve historical importance, unless outlying islands are present to ease the transition from inshore to pelagic navigation, and to tempt to wider maritime enterprise. The long sweep of the European coast from northern Norway to Brittany has played out a significant part of its history in that procession of islands formed by Iceland, the Faroes, Shetland, Orkneys, Great Britain, Ireland and the Channel Isles, whether it was the navigator of ancient Armorica steering his leather-sailed boat to the shores of Cæsar's Britain, or the modern Breton fisherman pulling in his nets off the coasts of distant Iceland. The dim outline of mountainous Cyprus, seen against a far-away horizon from the slopes of Lebanon, beckoned the Phoenician ship-master thither to trade and to colonize, just as the early Etruscan merchants passed from their busy ironworks on the island of Elba over the narrow strait to visible Corsica.458 It was on the eastern side of Greece, with its deep embayments, its valleys opening out to the Aegean, with its 483 islands scattered thickly as stars in the sky, and its Milky Way of the Cyclades leading to the deep, rich soils of the Asia Minor coast, with its sea-made contact with all the stimulating influences and dangers emanating from the Asiatic littoral, that Hellenic history played its impressive drama. Here was developed the spirit of enterprise that carried colonies to far western Sicily and Italy, while the western or rear side had a confined succession of local events, scarce worthy the name of history. Neither mountain-walled Epirus nor Corcyra had an Hellenic settlement in 735 B.C., at a date when the eastern Greeks had reached the Ionian coast of the Aegean and had set up a lonely group of colonies even on the Bay of Naples. Turning to America, we find that the Antilles received their population from the only two tribes, first the Arawaks and later the Caribs, who ever reached the indented northern coast of South America between the Isthmus of Panama and the mouth of the Orinoco. Here the small islands of the Venezuelan coast, often in sight, lured these peoples of river and shore to open-sea navigation, and drew them first to the Windward Isles, then northward step by step or island by island, to Hayti and Cuba.459