A MAP OF THE PORT OF LIVERPOOL
While Liverpool is much smaller, so far as mere area is concerned, than New York, it handles about the same amount of freight. Freight ships load and unload in the tidal basins while passenger steamers use floating landing stages.
Ships do not make a port. Even a fine harbour will not do that alone. New York is to-day one of the very greatest of the world’s great ports, but had Nature erected a barrier of insurmountable mountains around it, even though the harbour and the entrance from the sea had been left exactly as they are now, it would have been an inconsequential place, important, perhaps, as a naval base, but unimportant as a centre of trade, for communication with the interior would have been rendered difficult or impossible, so that the wheat of the great Northwest, the iron and steel of Pittsburgh, the manufactured products of a thousand centres would have found their way to Baltimore or Philadelphia or Boston or to some other port easier of access.
Thus a port depends on two things—first, ease of access to the sea; second, ease of access to a productive hinterland.
Nor can a port become highly important if its trade is all in one direction. If it imports but does not export, ships can come loaded but must go away empty, and to do that they must charge very high and possibly prohibitive rates for the freight they bring. If the port exports but does not import, then ships must come empty before they can secure their cargoes, and the result is the same. A healthy port, then, must have a constant and steady stream of freight bound in both directions. Montreal would be a more important port than it is if it served a hinterland that bought in larger quantities the goods manufactured in Europe, for Montreal could export very nearly all the wheat that ships could take from her harbour. But her imports are so much less than her possible exports that ships cannot afford to come in sufficient numbers to carry away all that she could send, especially as the wheat can be, and a large part of it is, diverted to Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Portland.
Imagine a rich country, producing goods in large quantities which are salable in foreign lands, and anxious and willing to buy, in equal quantities, the goods of these foreign lands. Imagine such a country without a single harbour—with, perhaps, a long unbroken coast of sandy beach on which relentless surges pound the whole year through. Would such a country long remain without a port? Not so. No matter how difficult and costly the task might be, a port would be built upon that very coast. A harbour would be dredged. Great sea walls would be erected. Vast warehouses, great quays and docks, busy railroad terminals would soon be in operation, and where Nature had made no harbour, man would have one.
But Nature is seldom so unkind. All around the world are natural harbours which need only the clever hand of man to become busy with the transfer of goods. Some, of course, have more natural advantages than others. Some are almost entirely the work of man, as others are almost entirely the work of Nature, but their natural advantages must be many ere it is worth the time of man to improve them.
A MAP OF THE PORT OF RIO DE JANEIRO
Rio Bay is probably the finest in the world, but mountains paralleling the coast form a handicap to the easy transportation of goods inland.