Note 725 — Chapter XI · —The Anthropo-Geography Of Rivers

The need of protection felt by all colonists in new countries amid savage or barbarous people whom encroachment sooner or later makes hostile, leads them if possible to place their first trading posts and settlements on river islands, especially at the mouth of the streams, where a delta often affords the site required, and where the junction of ocean and river highway offers the best facilities for trade. A river island fixed the location of the English settlement at Jamestown in Virginia, the French at Montreal and New Orleans, the Dutch at Manhattan and Van Renssellær Island in the Hudson, the Swedes at Tinicum Island in the Delaware River a few miles below the mouth of the Schuylkill.725 St. Louis, located on a delta island of the Senegal River, is one of the oldest European towns in West Africa;726 and Bathurst, founded in 1618 on a similar site at the mouth of the Gambia, has for centuries now been the safe outlet for the trade of this stream.727 Such island settlements at river mouths are a phenomenon of the outer edge of every coastal region; but inland stations for trade or military control also seek the protection of an island site. The Russians in the seventeenth century secured their downstream conquest of the Amur by a succession of river island forts,728 which recall Colonel Byrd's early frontier post on an island in the Holston River, and George Rogers Clark's military stockade on Corn Island in the Ohio, which became the nucleus of the later city of Louisville.