Three geographic stages of maritime development.
The size of a sea or ocean is a definite factor in its power to attract or repel maritime ventures, especially in the earlier stages of nautical development. A broken, indented coast means not only a longer and broader zone of contact between the inhabitants and the sea; it means also the breaking up of the adjacent expanse of water into so many alcoves, in which fisherman, trader and colonist may become at home, and prepare for maritime ventures farther afield. The enclosed or marginal sea tempts earlier because it can be compassed by coastwise navigation; then by the proximity of its opposite shores and its usual generous equipment with islands, the next step to crosswise navigation is encouraged. For the earliest stages of maritime development, only the smaller articulations of the coast and the inshore fringe of sea inlets count. This is shown in the primitive voyages of the Greeks, before they had ventured into the Euxine or west of the forbidding Cape Malia; and in the "inside passage" navigation of the Indians of southern Alaska, British Columbia, and Chile, who have never stretched their nautical ventures beyond the outermost rocks of their skerry-walled coast.
Influence of enclosed seas upon navigation.
A second stage is reached when an enclosed basin is at, hand to widen the maritime horizon, and when this larger field is exploited in all its commercial, colonial and industrial possibilities, as was done by the Phoenicians and Greeks in the Mediterranean, the Hanse Towns in the Baltic, the Dutch and English in the North Sea. The third and final stage is reached when the nursery of the inshore estuary or gulf and the elementary school of the enclosed basin are in turn outgrown, and the larger maritime spirit moves on to the open ocean for its field of operation. It is a significant fact that the Norse, bred to the water in their fiords and channels behind their protecting "skerry-wall," then trained in the stormy basins of the North and Irish Seas, were naturally the first people of Europe to cross the Atlantic, because the Atlantic of their shores, narrowing like all oceans and seas toward the north, assumes almost the character of an enclosed basin. The distance from Norway to Greenland is only 1,800 miles, little more than that across the Arabian Sea between Africa and India. We trace, therefore, a certain analogy between the physical subdivisions of the world of water into inlet, marginal sea and ocean, and the anthropo-geographical gradations in maritime development.
The enclosed or marginal sea seems a necessary condition for the advance beyond coastwise navigation and the much later step to the open ocean. Continents without them, like Africa, except for its frontage upon the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, have shown no native initiative in maritime enterprise. Africa was further cursed by the mockery of desert coasts along most of her scant thalassic shores. In the Americas, we find the native races compassing a wide maritime field only in the Arctic, where the fragmentary character of the continent breaks up the ocean into Hudson's Bay, Davis Strait, Baffin Bay, Gulf of Boothia, Melville Sound and Bering Sea; and in the American Mediterranean of the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. The excellent seamanship developed in the archipelagoes of southern Alaska and Chile remained abortive for maritime expansion, despite a paucity of local resources and the spur of hunger, owing to the lack of a marginal sea; but in the Caribbean basin, the Arawaks and later the Caribs spread from the southern mainland as far as Cuba.[555] [See map page 101.]
Enclosed seas as areas of ethnic and cultural assimilation.
Enclosed or marginal seas were historically the most important sections of the ocean prior to 1492. Apart from the widening of the maritime horizon which they give to their bordering people, each has the further advantage of constituting an area of close vicinal grouping and constant interchange of cultural achievements, by which the civilization of the whole basin tends to become elevated and unified. This unification frequently extends to race also, owing to the rapidity of maritime expansion and the tendency to ethnic amalgamation characteristic of all coast regions. We recognize an area of Mediterranean civilization from the Isthmus of Suez to the Sacred Promontory of Portugal, and in this area a long-headed, brunette Mediterranean race, clearly unified as to stock, despite local differentiations of culture, languages and nations in the various islands, peninsulas and other segregated coastal regions of this sea.[556] The basin appears therefore as an historical whole; for in it a certain group of peoples concentrated their common efforts, which crossed and criss-crossed from shore to shore. Phoenicia's trade ranged westward to the outer coasts of Spain, and later Barcelona's maritime enterprises reached east to the Levant. Greece's commercial and colonial relations embraced the Crimea and the mouth of the Rhone, and Genoa's extended east to the Crimea again. The Saracens, on reaching the Mediterranean edge of the Arabian peninsula, swept the southern coasts and islands, swung up the western rim of the basin to the foot of the Pyrenees, and taught the sluggish Spaniards the art of irrigation practiced on the garden slopes of Yemen. The ships of the Crusaders from Venice, Genoa and Marseilles anchored in the ports of Mohammedanized Syria, brought the symbol of the cross back to its birthplace In Jerusalem, but carried away with them countless suggestions from the finished industries of the East. Here was give and take, expansion and counter-expansion, conquest and expulsion, all together making up a great sum of reciprocal relations embracing the whole basin, the outcome of that close geographical connection which every sharply defined sea establishes between the coasts which it washes.