A coast region is a peculiar habitat, inasmuch as it is more or less dominated by the sea. It is exposed to inundation by tidal wave and to occupation by immigrant fleets. It may be the base for out-going maritime enterprise or the goal of some oversea movement, the dispenser or the recipient of colonists. The contrast between coast-dwellers and the nearby inland people which exists so widely can be traced not only to a difference of environment, but often to a fundamental difference of race or tribe caused by immigration to accessible shores. The Greeks, crowded in their narrow peninsula of limited fertility, wove an Hellenic border on the skirts of the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean lands, just as the Carthaginians added a fringe of aliens to North Africa, where the Punic people of the coast presented a marked contrast to the Berbers of the interior. [See map page 251.]
An ethnographical map of Russia to-day shows a narrow but almost continuous rim of Germans stretching from the River Niemen north through the Baltic coast of Courland, Livland, and Esthland, as far as Revel; and again, a similar band of Swedes along the seaboard of Finland, from a point east of Helsingfors on the south around to Uleaborg on the north,[483] dating from the time when Finland was a political dependency of Sweden, and influenced by the fact that the frozen Gulf of Bothnia every winter makes a bridge of ice between the two shores. [See map page 225.]
Ethnic contrasts in the Pacific islands.
Everywhere in the Melanesian archipelago, where Papuans and Malays dwell side by side, the latter as the new-comers are always found in possession of the coast, while the darker aborigines have withdrawn into the interior. So in the Philippines, the aboriginal Negritos, pure or more often mixed with Malayan blood, as in the Mangyan tribe of central Mindoro, are found crowded back into the interior by the successive invasions of Malays who have encircled the coasts. [See map page 147.] The Zamboanga peninsula of Mindanao has an inland pagan population of primitive Malayan race called Subanon, who have been displaced from the littoral by the seafaring Samal Moros, Mohammedanized Malays from the east shores of Sumatra and the adjacent islands, who spread northward about 1300 under the energizing impulse of their new religion.[484] Even at so late a date as the arrival of Magellan, the Subanon seem to have still occupied some points of the coast,[485] just as the savage Ainos of the Island of Yezo touched the sea about Sapporo only forty years ago, though they are now surrounded by a seaboard rim of Japanese.[486]
Ethnic contrasts in the Americas.
If we turn to South America, we find that warlike Tupi, at the time of the discovery, occupied the whole Brazilian coast from the southern tropic north to eastern Guiana, while the highlands of eastern Brazil immediately in their rear were populated by tribes of Ges, who had been displaced by the coastwise expansion of the Tupi canoemen.[487] [See map page 101.] And to-day this same belt of coastland has been appropriated by a foreign population of Europeans and Negroes, while the vast interior of Brazil shows a predominance of native Indian stocks, only broken here and there by a lonely enclave of Portuguese settlement. The early English and French territories in America presented this same contrast of coast and inland people—the colonists planting themselves on the hem of the continent to preserve maritime connection with the home countries, the aborigines forced back beyond reach of the tide.
Wherever an energetic seafaring people with marked commercial or colonizing bent make a highway of the deep, they give rise to this distinction of coast and inland people on whatever shores they touch. The expanding Angles and Saxons did it in the North Sea and the Channel, where they stretched their litus Saxonicum faintly along the coast of the continent to the apex of Brittany, and firmly along the hem of England from Southampton Water to the Firth of Forth;[488] the sea-bred Scandinavians did it farther north in the Teutonic fringe of settlements which they placed on the shores of Celtic Scotland and Ireland.[489]