The economy of the water is not confined to its artificial distribution over arid fields, but includes also the exploitation of the mineral and animal resources of the vast world of waters, whether the production of salt from the sea, salt lakes and brine springs, the cultivation of oyster beds, or the whole range of pelagic fisheries. The animal life of the water is important to man owing not only to its great abundance, but also to its distribution over the coldest regions of the globe. It furnishes the chief food supply of polar and sub-polar peoples, and therefore is accountable for the far-northern expansion of the habitable world. Even the reindeer tribes of Arctic Eurasia could hardly subsist without the sea food they get by barter from the fishermen of the coast. Norway, where civilization has achieved its utmost in exploiting the limited means of subsistence, shows a steady increase from south to north in the proportion of the population dependent upon the harvest of the deep. Thus the fisheries engross 44 per cent. of the rural population in Nordland province, which is bisected by the Arctic Circle; over 50 per cent. in Tromso, and about 70 per cent. in Finmarken. If the towns also be included, the percentages rise, because here fishing interests are especially prominent.[621] Proximity to the generous larder of the ocean has determined the selection of village sites, as we have seen among the coast Indians of British Columbia and southern Alaska, among all the Eskimo, and numerous other peoples of Arctic lands. [See map page 153.]
Fisheries as factors in maritime expansion.
Not only in polar but also in temperate regions, the presence of abundant fishing grounds draws the people of the nearest coast to their wholesale exploitation, especially if the land resources are scant. Fisheries then become the starting point or permanent basis of a subsequent wide maritime development, by expanding the geographical horizon. It was the search for the purple-yielding murex that first familiarized the Phoenicians with the commercial and colonial possibilities of the eastern Mediterranean coasts.[622] The royal dye of this marine product has through all the ages seemed to color with sumptuous magnificence the sordid dealings of those Tyrian traders, and constituted them an aristocracy of merchants. The shoals of tunny fish, arriving every spring in the Bosporus, from the north, drew the early Greeks and Phoenicians after them into the cold and misty Euxine, and furnished the original impulse to both these peoples for the establishment of fishing and trading stations on its uncongenial shores.[623] To the fisheries of the Baltic and especially to the summer catch of the migratory herring, which in vast numbers visited the shores of Pomerania and southern Sweden to spawn, the Hanse Towns of Germany owed much of their prosperity. Salt herring, even in the twelfth century, was the chief single article of their exchanges with Catholic Europe, which made a strong demand for the fish, owing to the numerous fast days. When, in 1425, by one of those unexplained vagaries of animal life, the herring abandoned the Baltic and selected the North Sea for its summer destination, a new support was given to the wealth of the Netherlands.[624] There is a considerable amount of truth in the saying that Amsterdam was built on herrings. New England, with an unproductive soil at home, but near by in the sea a long line of piscine feeding grounds in the submarine banks stretching from Cape Cod to Cape Race and beyond, found her fisheries the starting point and base of her long round of exchanges, a constant factor in her commercial and industrial evolution.[625]
Fisheries as nurseries of seamen.
Fisheries have always been the nurseries of seamen, and hence have been encouraged and protected by governments as providing an important element of national strength. The Newfoundland Banks were the training school which supplied the merchant marine and later the Revolutionary navy of colonial New England;[626] ever since the establishment of the Republic, they have been forced into prominence in our international negotiations with the United Kingdom, with the object of securing special privileges, because the government has recognized them as a factor in the American navy. The causal connection between fisheries and naval efficiency was recognized in England in the early years of Elizabeth's reign, by an act aiming to encourage fisheries by the remission of custom duties to native fishermen, by the imposition of a high tariff on the importation of foreign fish in foreign vessels, and finally by a legislative enforcement of fasts to increase the demand for fish, although any belief in the religious efficacy of fasts was frankly disclaimed. Thus an artificial demand for fish was created, with the result that a report on the success of the Fishery Acts stated that a thousand additional men had been attracted to the fishing trade, and were consequently "ready to serve in Her Majesty's ships."[627]
The fishing of the North Sea, especially on the Dogger Bank, is participated in by all the bordering countries, England, the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium; and is valued equally on account of the food supply which it yields and as a school of seamen.[628] The Pomors or "coasters" of Arctic Russia, who dwell along the shores of the White Sea and live wholly by fisheries, have all their taxes remitted and receive free wood from the crown forests for the construction of their ships, on the condition that they serve on call in the imperial navy.[629] The history of Japan affords the most striking illustration of the power of fisheries alone to maintain maritime efficiency; for when by the seclusion act of 1624 all merchant vessels were destroyed, the marine restricted to small fishing and coasting vessels, and intercourse confined to Japan's narrow island world, the fisheries nevertheless kept alive that intimacy with the sea and preserved the nautical efficiency that was destined to be a decisive factor in the development of awakened Japan.
Anthropo-geographic importance of navigation.