The maritime evolution of all amply embayed coasts, except in Arctic and sub-Arctic regions inimical to all historical development, shows in its highest stage the gradual elimination of minor ports, and the concentration of maritime activity in a few favored ones, which have the deepest and most capacious harbors and the best river, canal, or railroad connection with the interior. The earlier stages are marked by a multiplicity of ports, showing in general activity nearly similar in amount and in kind. England's merchant marine in the fourteenth century was distributed in a large group of small but important ports on the southern coast, all which, owing to their favorable location, were engaged in the French and Flemish trade; and in another group on the east coast, reaching from Hull to Colchester, which participated in the Flemish, Norwegian, and Baltic trade.[456] Most of these have now declined before the overpowering competition of a few such seaboard marts as London, Hull, and Southampton. The introduction of steam trawlers into the fishing fleets has in like manner led to the concentration of the fishermen in a few large ports with good railroad facilities, such as Aberdeen and Grimsby, while the fishing villages that fringed the whole eastern and southern coasts have been gradually depopulated.[457] So in colonial days, when New England was little more than a cordon of settlements along that rock-bound littoral, almost every inlet had its port actively engaged in coastwise and foreign commerce in the West Indies and the Guinea Coast, in cod and mackerel fisheries, in whaling and shipbuilding, and this with only slight local variations. This widespread homogeneity of maritime activity has been succeeded by strict localization and differentiation, and reduction from many to few ports. So, for the whole Atlantic seaboard of the United States, evolution of seaports has been marked by increase of size attended by decrease of numbers.
Offshore islands.
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]
Offshore islands as vestibules of the mainland.
In all these instances, offshore islands tempt to expansion and thereby add to the historical importance of the nearby coast. Frequently, however, they achieve the same result by offering advantageous footholds to enterprising voyagers from remote lands, and become the medium for infusing life into hitherto dead coasts. The long monotonous littoral of East Africa from Cape Guadafui to the Cape of Good Hope, before the planting here of Portuguese way-stations on the road to India in the sixteenth century, was destitute of historical significance, except that stretch opposite the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, which Arab merchants in the tenth century appropriated as the basis for their slave and ivory trade. The East Indies and Ceylon have been so many offshore stations whence, first through the Portuguese, and later through the Dutch and English, European influences percolated into southeastern Asia. Asia, with its island-strewn shores, has diffused its influences over a broad zone of the western Pacific, and through the agency of its active restless Malays, even halfway across that ocean. In contrast, the western coast of the Americas, a stretch nearly 10,000 miles from Tierra del Fuego to the Aleutian chain, has seen its aboriginal inhabitants barred from seaward expansion by the lack of offshore islands, and its entrance upon the historical stage delayed till recent times.
In general it can be said that islandless seas attain a later historical development than those whose expanse is rendered less forbidding by hospitable fragments of land. This factor, as well as its location remote from the old and stimulating civilization of Syria and Asia Minor, operated to retard the development of the western Mediterranean long after the eastern basin had reached its zenith.
Previous habitat of coast-dwellers.