Note 633 — Chapter XI · —The Anthropo-Geography Of Rivers

Rivers have always been the great intermediaries between land and sea, for in the ocean all find their common destination. Until the construction of giant steamers in recent years, sea navigation has always passed without break into river navigation. Sailing vessels are carried by the trade wind 600 miles up the Orinoco to San Fernando. Alexander's discovery of the Indus River led by almost inevitable sequence to the rediscovery of the Eastern sea route, which in turn ran from India through the Strait of Oman and the Persian Gulf up the navigable course of the Euphrates to the elbow of the river at Thapsacus. Enterprising sea folk have always used rivers as natural continuations of the marine highway into the land. The Humber estuary and its radiating group of streams led the invading Angles in the sixth century into the heart of Britain.633 The long navigable courses of the rivers of France exposed that whole country to the depredations of the piratical Northmen in the ninth and tenth centuries. Up every river they came, up the Scheldt into Flanders, the Seine to Paris and the Marne to Meaux; up the Loire to Orleans, the Garonne to Toulouse and the Rhone to Valence.634 So the Atlantic rivers of North America formed the lines of European exploration and settlement. The St. Lawrence brought the French from the ocean into the Great Lakes basin, whose low, swampy watershed they readily crossed in their light canoes to the tributaries of the Mississippi; and scarcely had they reached the "Father of Waters" before they were planting the flag of France on the Gulf of Mexico at its mouth. The Tupi Indians of South America, a genuine water-race, moved from their original home on the Paraguay headstream of the La Plata down to its mouth, then expanded northward along the coast of Brazil in their small canoes to the estuary of the Amazon, thence up its southern tributary, the Tapajos, and in smaller numbers up the main stream to the foot of the Andes, where detached groups of the race are still found.635 So the migrations of the Carib river tribes led them from their native seats in eastern Brazil down the Xingu to the Amazon, thence out to sea and along the northern coast of South America, thence inland once more, up the Orinoco to the foot of the Andes, into the lagoon of Maracaibo and up the Magdalena. Meanwhile their settlements at the mouth of the Orinoco threw off spores of pirate colonies to the adjacent islands and finally, in the time of Columbus, to Porto Rico and Haiti.636 [See map page 101.]