Note 746 — Chapter XI · —The Anthropo-Geography Of Rivers
Reading edition
In 1901, the tonnage of our merchant vessels on the Great Lakes was half that of our Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf coasts combined, 746 constituting a freshwater fleet greater than the merchant marine of either France or sea-bred Norway. A remote but by no means faint echo of this fact is found in the five hundred or more boats, equally available for trade or war, which Henry M. Stanley saw the Uganda prince muster on the shore of Victoria Nyanza Lake. Ocean, sea, bay, estuary, river, swamp, lake: here is Nature's great circle returning upon itself, a circle faintly notched into arcs, but one in itself and one in man's uses.