Lingua franca of coasts.
The cosmopolitanism and the commercial activity that characterize so many seaboards are reflected in the fact that, with rare exceptions, it is the coast regions of the world that give rise to a lingua franca or lingua geral. The original lingua franca arose on the coast of the Levant during the period of Italian commercial supremacy there. It consisted of an Italian stock, on which were grafted Greek, Arabic, and Turkish words, and was the regular language of trade for French, Spanish, and Italians.[500] It is still spoken in many Mediterranean ports, especially in Smyrna, and in the early part of the nineteenth century was in use from Madagascar to the Philippines.[501] From the coastal strip of the Zanzibar Arabs, recently transferred to German East Africa, the speech of the Swahili has become a means of communication over a great part of East Africa, from the coast to the Congo and the sources of the Nile. It is a Bantu dialect permeated with Arabic and Hindu terms, and sparsely sprinkled even with English and German words.[502] "Pidgin English" (business English) performs the function of a lingua franca in the ports of China and the Far East. It is a jargon of corrupted English with a slight mixture of Chinese, Malay, and Portuguese words, arranged according to the Chinese idiom. Another mongrel English does service on the coast of New Guinea. The "Nigger English" of the West African trade is a regular dialect among the natives of the Sierra Leone coast. Farther east, along the Upper Guinea littoral, the Eboe family of tribes who extend across the Niger delta from Lagos to Old Calabar have furnished a language of trade in one of their dialects.[503] The Tupi speech of the Brazilian coast Indians, with whom the explorers first came into contact, became, in the mouth of Portuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries, the lingua geral or medium of communication between the whites and the various Indian tribes throughout Brazil.[504] The Chinook Indians, located on our Pacific coast north and south of the Columbia River, have furnished a jargon of Indian, French, and English words which serves as a language of trade throughout a long stretch of the northwest Pacific coast, not only between whites and Indians, but also between Indians of different linguistic stocks.[505]
Coast-dwellers as middlemen.
The coast is the natural habitat of the middleman. One strip of seaboard produces a middleman people, and then sends them out to appropriate other littorals, if geographic conditions are favorable; otherwise it is content with the transit trade of its own locality. It breeds essentially a race of merchants, shunning varied production, nursing monopoly by secrecy and every method to crush competition. The profits of trade attract all the free citizens, and the laboring class is small or slave. Expansion landward has no attraction in comparison with the seaward expansion of commerce. The result is often a relative dearth of local land-grown food stuffs. King Hiram of Tyre, in his letter to King Solomon, promised to send him trees of cedar and cypress, made into rafts and conveyed to the coast of Philistia, and asked in return for grain, "which we stand in need of because we inhabit an island." The pay came in the form of wheat, oil, and wine. But Solomon furnished a considerable part of the laborers—30,000 of them—who were sent, 10,000 at a time, to Mount Lebanon to cut the timber, apparently under the direction of the more skilful Sidonian foresters.[506] A type of true coast traders is found in the Duallas of the German Kamerun, at the inner angle of the Gulf of Guinea. Located along the lower course and delta of the Mungo River where it flows into the Kamerun estuary, they command a good route through a mountainous country into the interior. This they guard jealously, excluding all competition, monopolizing the trade, and imposing a transit duty on all articles going to and from the interior. They avoid agriculture so far as possible. Their women and slaves produce an inadequate supply of bananas and yams, but crops needing much labor are wholly neglected, so that their coasts have a reputation for dearness of provisions.[507]
Along the 4,500 miles of West African coast between the Senegal and the Kunene rivers the negro's natural talent for trade has developed special tribes, who act as intermediaries between the interior and the European stations on the seaboard. Among these we find the Bihenos and Banda of Portuguese Benguela, who fit out whole caravans for the back country; the Portuguese of Loanda rely on the Ambaquistas and the Mbunda middlemen. The slave trade particularly brought a sinister and abnormal activity to these seaboard tribes,[508] just as it did to the East Coast tribes, and stimulated both in the exploitation of their geographic position as middlemen.[509]
Monopoly of trade with the hinterland.
The Alaskan coast shows the same development. The Kinik Indians at the head of Cook's Inlet buy skins of land animals from the inland Athapascans at the sources of the Copper River, and then make a good profit by selling them to the American traders of the coast. These same Athapascans for a long time found a similar body of middlemen in the Ugalentz at the mouth of the Copper River, till the Americans there encouraged the inland hunters to bring their skins to the fur station on the coast.[510] The Chilcats at the head of Lynn Canal long monopolized the fur trade with the Athapascan Indians about Chilkoot Pass; these they would meet on the divide and buy their skins, which they would carry to the Hudson Bay Company agents on the coast. They guarded their monopoly jealously, and for fifty years were able to exclude all traders and miners from the passes leading to the Yukon.[511]