Note 799 — Chapter XII · —Continents And Their Peninsulas

Peninsulas, so far as they project from their continents, are areas of isolation; but so far as they extend also toward some land beyond, they become intermediaries. The isolating and intermediary aspects can be traced in the anthropo-geographical effects of every peninsula, even those which, like Brittany and Cornwall, project into the long uncharted waste of the Atlantic. In the order of historical development, a peninsula first isolates, until in its secluded environment it has molded a mature, independent people; then, as that people outgrows its narrow territory, the peninsula becomes a favorable base for maritime expansion to distant lands, or becomes a natural avenue for numerous reciprocal relations with neighboring lands beyond. Korea was the bridge for Mongolian migration from continental Asia to the Japan islands, and for the passage thither of Chinese culture, whether intellectual, esthetic, industrial or religious.799 It has been the one country conspicuous in the foreign history of Japan. Conquered by the island empire in 1592, it paid tribute for nearly three centuries and yielded to its foreign master the southeastern port of Fusan, the Calais of Korea.800 Since the treaty of Portsmouth in 1905 made it subject to Japan, it has become the avenue of Japanese expansion to the mainland and the unwilling recipient of the modern civilization thrust upon it by these English of the East. In like manner the Pyrenean peninsula has always been the intermediary between Europe and northwest Africa. Its population, as well as its flora and fauna, group with those of the southern continent. It has served as transit land between north and south for the Carthaginians, Vandals and Saracens; and in modern times it has maintained its character as a link by the Portuguese occupation of the Tangiers peninsula in the fifteenth century,801 and the Spanish possession of Ceuta and various other points along the Moroccan coast from the year 709 A.D. to the present.802