Influences of Geographic Environment Part 36

539-547. San Francisco, 1886.

[621] Norway, Official Publication, pp. 99-100. Christiania, 1900.

[622] Ernst Curtius, History of Greece, Vol. I, pp. 49-50. New York.

[623] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 440.

[624] Dietrich Schaefer, _Die Hansestadte und Konig Waldemar von Danemark_, pp. 255-257. Jena, 1879. Helen Zimmern, Story of the Hansa Towns, pp. 26-27. New York, 1895.

[625] W.B. Weeden, Social and Economic History of New England, Vol. I, pp. 17, 18, 90, 91, 128-135, 139. Boston, 1899.

[626] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 245.

[627] H.D. Traill, Social England, Vol. III, pp. 363-364, 540. London and New York, 1895.

[628] J. Partsch, Central Europe, p. 311. London, 1903.

[629] Alexander P. Engelhardt, A Russian Province of the North, pp.

54-71. From the Russian. London, 1899.

CHAPTER XI

THE ANTHROPO-GEOGRAPHY OF RIVERS

[Sidenote: Rivers as intermediaries between land and sea.]

To a large view, rivers appear in two aspects. They are either part of the general water envelope of the earth, extensions of seas and estuaries back into the up-hill reaches of the land, feeders of the ocean, roots which it spreads out over the surface of the continents, not only to gather its nourishment from ultimate sources in spring and glacier, but also to bring down to the coast the land-born products of the interior to feed a sea-born commerce; or rivers are one of the land forms, merely water filling valley channels, serving to drain the fields and turn the mills of men. In the first aspect their historical importance has been both akin and linked to that of the ocean, despite the freshness and smaller volume of their waters and the unvarying direction of their currents. The ocean draws them and their trade to its vast basin by the force of gravity. It unites with its own the history of every log-stream in Laurentian or Himalayan forest, as it formerly linked the beaver-dammed brooks of wintry Canada with the current of trade following the Gulf Stream to Europe.

Where sea and river meet, Nature draws no sharp dividing line. Here the indeterminate boundary zone is conspicuous. The fresh water stream merges into brackish estuary, estuary into saltier inlet and inlet into briny ocean. Closely confined sea basins like the Black and Baltic, located in cool regions of slight evaporation and fed from a large catchment basin, approach in their reduced salinity the fresh water lakes and coastal lagoons in which rivers stretch out to rest on their way to the ocean. The muddy current of the Yangtze Kiang colors the Yellow Sea, and warns incoming Chinese junks of the proximity of land many hours before the low-lying sh.o.r.es can be discerned.[630] Columbus, sailing along the Caribbean coast of South America off the Orinoco mouth, found the ocean waters brackish and surmised the presence of a large river and therefore a large continent on his left.[631]

The transitional form between stream and pelagic inlet found in every river mouth is emphasized where strong tidal currents carry the sea far into these channels of the land. The tides move up the St. Lawrence River 430 miles (700 kilometers) or half way between Montreal and Quebec, and up the Amazon 600 miles (1,000 kilometers). Owing to their resemblance to pelagic channels, the estuaries of the American rivers with their salty tide were repeatedly mistaken, in the period of discoveries, for the Northwest Pa.s.sage to the Pacific. Newport in 1608 explored the broad sluggish course of the James River in his search for a western ocean. Henry Hudson ascended the Hudson River almost as far as Albany, before he discovered that this was no maritime pathway, like the Bosporus or Dardanelles, leading to an ulterior sea. The long tidal course of the St. Lawrence westward into the heart of the continent fed La Salle's dream of finding here a water route to the Pacific, and fixed his village of "La Chine" above the rapids at Montreal as a signpost pointing the way to the Indies and Cathay. In the same way a tidal river at the head of Cook's Inlet on the Alaskan coast was mistaken for a Northeast Pa.s.sage, not by Captain Cook but by his fellow officers, on his Pacific voyage of 1776-1780; and it was followed for several days before its character as a river was established.[632]

[Sidenote: Sea navigation merges into river navigation.]

Rivers have always been the great intermediaries between land and sea, for in the ocean all find their common destination. Until the construction of giant steamers in recent years, sea navigation has always pa.s.sed without break into river navigation. Sailing vessels are carried by the trade wind 600 miles up the Orinoco to San Fernando.

Alexander's discovery of the Indus River led by almost inevitable sequence to the rediscovery of the Eastern sea route, which in turn ran from India through the Strait of Oman and the Persian Gulf up the navigable course of the Euphrates to the elbow of the river at Thapsacus. Enterprising sea folk have always used rivers as natural continuations of the marine highway into the land. The Humber estuary and its radiating group of streams led the invading Angles in the sixth century into the heart of Britain.[633] The long navigable courses of the rivers of France exposed that whole country to the depredations of the piratical Northmen in the ninth and tenth centuries. Up every river they came, up the Scheldt into Flanders, the Seine to Paris and the Marne to Meaux; up the Loire to Orleans, the Garonne to Toulouse and the Rhone to Valence.[634] So the Atlantic rivers of North America formed the lines of European exploration and settlement. The St. Lawrence brought the French from the ocean into the Great Lakes basin, whose low, swampy watershed they readily crossed in their light canoes to the tributaries of the Mississippi; and scarcely had they reached the "Father of Waters" before they were planting the flag of France on the Gulf of Mexico at its mouth. The Tupi Indians of South America, a genuine water-race, moved from their original home on the Paraguay headstream of the La Plata down to its mouth, then expanded northward along the coast of Brazil in their small canoes to the estuary of the Amazon, thence up its southern tributary, the Tapajos, and in smaller numbers up the main stream to the foot of the Andes, where detached groups of the race are still found.[635]

So the migrations of the Carib river tribes led them from their native seats in eastern Brazil down the Xingu to the Amazon, thence out to sea and along the northern coast of South America, thence inland once more, up the Orinoco to the foot of the Andes, into the lagoon of Maracaibo and up the Magdalena. Meanwhile their settlements at the mouth of the Orinoco threw off spores of pirate colonies to the adjacent islands and finally, in the time of Columbus, to Porto Rico and Haiti.[636] [See map page 101.]

[Sidenote: Historical importance of seas and oceans influenced by their debouching streams.]

So intimate is this connection between marine and inland waterways, that the historical and economic importance of seas and oceans is noticeably influenced by the size of their drainage basins and the navigability of their debouching rivers. This is especially true of enclosed seas. The only historical importance attached to the Caspian's inland basin is that inherent in the Volga's mighty stream. The Mediterranean has always suffered from its paucity of long river highways to open for it a wide hinterland. This lack checked the spread of its cultural influences and finally helped to arrest its historical development. If we compare the record of the Adriatic and the Black seas, the first a sharply walled _cul de sac_, the second a center of long radiating streams, sending out the Danube to tap the back country of the Adriatic and the Dnieper to draw on that of the Baltic, we find that the smaller sea has had a limited range of influence, a concentrated brilliant history, precocious and short-lived as is that of all limited areas; that the Euxine has exercised more far-reaching influences, despite a slow and still unfinished development. The Black Sea rivers in ancient times opened their countries to such elements of h.e.l.lenic culture as might penetrate from the Greek trading colonies at their mouths, especially the Greek forms of Christianity. It was the Danube that in the fourth century carried Arianism, born of the philosophic niceties of Greek thought, to the barbarians of southern Germany, and made Unitarians of the Burgundians and Visigoths of southern Gaul.[637] The Dnieper carried the religion of the Greek Church to the Russian princes at Kief, Smolensk, and Moscow. Owing to the southward course of its great rivers, Russia has found the crux of her politics in the Black Sea, ever since the tenth century when the barbarians from Kiev first appeared before Constantinople. This sea has had for her a higher economic importance than the Baltic, despite the latter's location near the cultural center of western Europe.

[Sidenote: Baltic and White Sea rivers.]

In other seas, too, rivers play the same part of extending their tributary areas and therefore enhancing their historical significance.

The disadvantages of the Baltic's smaller size and far-northern location, as compared with the Mediterranean, were largely compensated for by the series of big streams draining into it from the south, and bringing out from a vast hinterland the bulky necessaries of life. Hence the Hanseatic League of the Middle Ages, which had its origin among the southern coast towns of the Baltic from Lubeck to Riga, throve on the combined trade of sea and river.[638] The mouths of the Scheldt, Rhine, Weser, Elbe and Thames long concentrated in themselves the economic, cultural and historical development of the North Sea basin. So the White Sea, despite its sub-polar location, is valuable to Russia for two reasons; it affords a politically open port, and it receives the Northern Dwina, which is navigable for river steamers from Archangel south to Vologda, a distance of six hundred miles, and carries the export trade of a large territory.[639] Similarly in recent years, Bering Sea has gained unwonted commercial activity because the Yukon River serves as a waterway 1,370 miles long to the Klondike gold fields.

[Sidenote: Atlantic and Pacific rivers.]

If we compare the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in respect to their rivers, we find that the narrow Atlantic has a drainage basin of over 19,000,000 square miles as opposed to the 8,660,000 square miles of drainage area commanded by the vastly larger Pacific. The Pacific is for the most part rimmed by mountains, discharging into the ocean only mad torrents or rapid-broken streams. The Atlantic, bordered by gently sloping plains of wide extent, receives rivers that for the most part pursue a long and leisurely course to the sea. Therefore, the commercial and cultural influences of the Atlantic extend from the Rockies and Andes almost to the heart of Russia, and by the Nile highway they even invade the seclusion of Africa. Through the long reach of its rivers, therefore, the Atlantic commands a land area twice as great as that of the Pacific; and by reason of this fundamental geographic advantage, it will retain the historical preeminence that it so early secured. The development of the World Ocean will mean the exploitation of the Pacific trade from the basis of the Atlantic, the domination of the larger ocean by the historic peoples of the smaller, because these peoples have wider and more accessible lands as the base of their maritime operations.

[Sidenote: Lack of coast articulations supplied by rivers.]

The geographic influence of abundant rivers navigable from the sea is closely akin to that of highly articulated coasts. The effect of the Hardanger or Sogne Fiord, admitting ocean steamers a hundred miles into the interior of Norway, is similar to that of the Elbe and Weser estuaries, which admit the largest vessels sixty miles upstream to Hamburg and Bremen. Since river inlets can, to a certain extent, supply the place of marine inlets, from the standpoint of anthropo-geographic theory and of human practice, a land dissected by navigable rivers can be grouped with one dissected by arms of the sea. South America and Africa are alike in the unbroken contour of their coasts, but strongly contrasted in the character of their rivers. Hence the two continents present the extremes of accessibility and inaccessibility. South America, most richly endowed of all the continents with navigable streams, receiving ocean vessels three thousand miles up the Amazon as far as Tabatinga in Peru, and smaller steamers up the Orinoco to the spurs of the Andes, was known in its main features to explorers fifty years after its discovery. Africa, historically the oldest of continents, but cursed with a mesa form which converts nearly every river into a plunging torrent on its approach to the sea, kept its vast interior till the last century wrapped in utmost gloom. China, amply supplied with smaller littoral indentations but characterized by a paucity of larger inlets, finds compensation in the long navigable course of the Yangtze Kiang. This river extends the landward reach of the Yellow Sea 630 miles inland to Hanchow, where ocean-going vessels take on cargoes of tea and silk for Europe and America,[640] and pay for them in Mexican dollars, the coin of the coast. Hence it is lined with free ports all the way from Shanghai at its mouth to Ichang, a thousand miles up its course.[641]

[Sidenote: River highways as basis of commercial preeminence.]

Navigable rivers opening pa.s.sages directly from the sea are obviously nature-made gates and paths into wholly new countries; but the accessibility with which they endow a land becomes later a permanent factor in its cultural and economic development, a factor that remains constantly though less conspicuously operative when railroads have done their utmost to supplant water transportation. The importance of inland waterways for local and foreign trade and intercourse has everywhere been recognized. The peoples who have long maintained preeminence among the commercial and maritime nations of the world have owed this in no small part to the command of these natural highways, which have served to give the broad land basis necessary for permanent commercial ascendency. This has been the history of England, Holland, France and the recent record of Germany. The medieval League of the Rhine Cities flourished by reason of the Rhone-Rhine highway across western Europe.

The Hanseatic League, from Bruges all the way east to Russian Novgorod, owed their brilliant commercial career, not only to the favorable maritime field in the enclosed sea basins in front of them, but also to the series of long navigable rivers behind them from the Scheldt to the Neva and Volchov. Wherefore we find the League, originally confined to coast towns, drawing into the federation numerous cities located far up these rivers, such as Ghent, Cologne, Magdeburg, Breslau, Cracow, Pskof and Novgorod.[642]

[Sidenote: Importance of rivers in large countries.]

In countries of large area, where commerce and intercourse must cover great distances, these natural and therefore cheap highways a.s.sume paramount importance, especially in the forest and agricultural stages of development, when the products of the land are bulky in proportion to their value. Small countries with deeply indented coasts, like Greece, Norway, Scotland, New England, Chile, and j.a.pan, can forego the advantage of big river systems; but in Russia, Siberia, China, India, Canada, the United States, Venezuela, Brazil and Argentine, the history of the country, economic and political, is indissolubly connected with that of its great rivers. The storm center of the French and English wars in America was located on the upper Hudson, because this stream enabled the English colonies to tap the fur trade of the Great Lakes, and because it commanded the Mohawk Valley, the easiest and most obvious path for expansion into the interior of the continent. The Spanish, otherwise confining their activities in South America to the Caribbean district and the civilized regions of the Andean highlands, established settlements at the mouth of the La Plata River, because this stream afforded an approach from the Atlantic side toward the Potosi mines on the Bolivian Plateau. The Yangtze Kiang, that great waterway leading from the sea across the breadth of China and the one valuable river adjunct of maritime trade in the whole Orient, was early appropriated by the discerning English as the British "sphere of influence."

[Sidenote: Rivers as highways of expansion.]

No other equally large area of the earth is so generously equipped by nature for the production and distribution of the articles of commerce as southern Canada and that part of the United States lying east of the Rocky Mountains. The simple build of the North American continent, consisting of a broad central trough between distant mountain ranges, and characterized by gentle slopes to the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, has generated great and small rivers with easy-going currents, that everywhere opened up the land to explorer, trader and settler. The rate of expansion from the "Europe-fronting sh.o.r.e" of the continent was everywhere in direct proportion to the length of the rivers first appropriated by the colonists. North of Chesapeake Bay the lure to landward advance was the fur trade. The Atlantic rivers of the coast pre-empted by the English were cut short by the Appalachian wall. They opened up only restricted fur fields which were soon exhausted, so that the migrant trapper was here early converted into the agricultural settler, his s.h.i.+fting camp fire into the hearthstone of the farmhouse.

Expansion was slow but solid. The relatively small area rendered accessible by their streams became compactly filled by the swelling tide of immigrants and the rapid natural increase of population. In sharp contrast to this development, the long waterway of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes leading to the still vaster river system of the Mississippi betrayed the fur-trading French into excessive expansion, and enabled them to appropriate but not to hold a vast extent of territory. A hundred years after the arrival of Champlain at Montreal, they were planting their fur stations on Lake Superior and the Mississippi, 1,400 miles (2,300 kilometers) back from the coast, at a time when the English settlements had advanced little beyond tide-water.

And when after 1770 the westward movement swept the backwoodsmen of the English colonies over the Appalachian barrier to the Ohio, c.u.mberland and Tennessee, these long westward flowing streams carried them rapidly on to the Mississippi, communicated the mobility and restlessness of their own currents to the eager pioneer, and their capacity to master great distances; so that in forty short years, by 1810, settlements were creeping up the western tributaries of the Mississippi. The abundant water communication in the Mississippi Valley, which even for present large river craft contains 15,410 miles of navigable streams and which had therefore a far greater mileage in the day of canoe and flatboat, afforded outlet for bulky, backwoods produce to the sea at New Orleans.

When the English acquired Canada in 1763, they straightway fell under the sway of its harsh climate and long river systems, taking up the life of the fur trader; they followed the now scarcer pelts from the streams of Superior westward by Lake Winnipeg and along the path of the Saskatchewan River straight to the foot of the Rockies.

[Sidenote: Siberian rivers and Russian expansion.]

Rivers have played the same part in expediting Russian expansion across the wide extent of Siberia. Here again a severe climate necessitated reliance on furs, the chief natural product of the country, as the basis of trade. These, as the outcome of savage economy, were gathered in from wide areas which only rivers could open up. Therefore, where the Siberian streams flatten out their upper courses east and west against the northern face of the Asiatic plateau, with low watersheds between, the Russian explorer and sable hunter struck their eastward water trail toward the Pacific. The advance, which under Yermak crossed the Ural Mountains in 1579, reached the Yenisei River in 1610 and planted there the town of Turuchansk as a sort of milestone, almost on the Arctic Circle opposite the mouth of the Lower Tunguska, a long eastern tributary. Up this they pa.s.sed to the Lena in 1627, thence to Bering Sea by the Kolima and Anadyr rivers, because these arctic fields yielded sable, beaver and fox skins in greatest quant.i.ty.[643] The Lena especially, from its source down to its eastern elbow at Yakutsk, that great rendezvous of Siberian fur traders, was a highway for trapper and Cossack tribute-gatherer.[644] From the sources of the Yenisei in Lake Baikal to the navigable course of the Amur was a short step, taken in 1658, though the control of the river, which was claimed by China, was not secured till two hundred years later.[645] [See map page 103.]

As the only highways in new countries, rivers const.i.tute lines of least resistance for colonial peoples encroaching upon the territory of inferior races. They are therefore the geographic basis of those streamers of settlement which we found making a fringe of civilization across the boundary zone of savagery or barbarism on the typical colonial frontier. Ethnic islands of the expanding people cl.u.s.ter along them like iron filings on a magnetized wire. Therefore in all countries where navigable rivers have fixed the lines of expansion, as in the United States, the northern part of the Russian Empire, and the eastern or colonial border of Germany and Austria, there is a strong anthropo-geographic resemblance in the frontiers of successive decades or centuries. But in arid or semi-arid regions like South Africa, the western plains of North America, the steppes of Russian and Chinese Turkestan, the river highway _motif_ in expansion is lost in a variety of other geographic and geologic factors, though the water of the streams still attracts trail and settlement.

[Sidenote: Determinants of routes in arid or semi-arid lands.]

A river like the Nile, lower Volga, Irtysh or Indus, rising in highlands of abundant rainfall but traversing an arid or desert land, acquires added importance because it furnishes the sole means of water travel and of irrigation. The Nile has for ages const.i.tuted the main line of intercourse between the Mediterranean and Equatorial Africa. The Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, and the Niger where it makes its great northern bend into the Sahara near Timbuctoo,[646] attest the value to local fertility and commerce inherent in these rivers of the deserts and steppes. Such rivers are always oasis-makers, whether on their way to the sea they periodically cover a narrow flood-plain like that of the Nile, or one ninety miles wide, like that of the Niger's inland delta above Timbuctoo;[647] or whether they emerge into a silent sea of sand, like the Murghab of Russian Turkestan, which spreads itself out to water the gardens of Merv.

Even where such rivers have a volume too scanty to float a raft, they yet point the highway, because they alone supply water for man and beast across the desert tract. The Oxus and Sir Daria have from time immemorial determined the great trade routes through Turkestan to Central Asia. The Platte, Arkansas, Cimarron and Canadian rivers fixed the course of our early western trails across the arid plains to the foot of the Rockies; and beyond this barrier the California Trail followed the long-drawn oasis formed by the Humboldt River across the Nevada Desert, the Gila River guided the first American fur-trapping explorers across the burning deserts of Arizona to the Pacific, and the succession of water-holes in the dry bed of the Mohave River gave direction to the Spanish Trail across the Mohave Desert towards Los Angeles. In the same way, Livingstone's route from the Orange River in South Africa to Lake Ngami, under the direction of native guides, ran along the margin of the Kalahari Desert up the dry bed of the Mokoko River, which still retained an irregular succession of permanent wells.[648]

[Sidenote: Wadi routes in arid lands.]

In the trade-wind regions of the world, which are characterized by seasons of intense drought, we find rivers carrying a scant and variable amount of water but an abundance of gravel and sand; they are known in different localities as wadis, fiumares and arroyos. Their beds, dry for long periods of the year, become natural roads, paved with the gravel which the stream regularly deposits in the wet season. Local travel in Sicily, Italy[649] and other Mediterranean countries uses such natural roads extensively. Trade routes across the plateau of Judea and Samaria follow the wadis, because these give the best gradient and the best footing for the ascent.[650] Wadis also determine the line of caravan routes across the highlands of the Sahara. In the desert of Southwest Africa, the Khiuseb Is the first river north of the Orange to reach the Atlantic through the barrier dunes of the coast. Hence it has drawn to its valley the trade routes from a wide circle of inland points from Ottawe to Windhoek and Rehobeth, and given added importance to the British coast of Walfish Bay, into which it debouches.[651] But just to the north, the broad dry bed of the Swakop offered a natural wagon route into the interior, and has been utilized for the railroad of German Southwest Africa.

[Sidenote: Increasing historical importance from source to mouth.]

The historical importance of a river increases from its source toward its mouth. Its head springs, gus.h.i.+ng from the ground, and the ramifying brooks of its highland course yield a widely distributed water supply and thereby exercise a strong influence in locating the dwellings of men; but they play no part in the great movements and larger activities of peoples. Only when minor affluents unite to form the main stream, enlarge it in its lower course by an increasing tribute of water, and extend constantly its tributary area, does a river a.s.sume real historical importance. It reaches its fullest significance at its mouth, where it joins the world's highway of the ocean. Here are combined the best geographical advantages--partic.i.p.ation in the cosmopolitan civilization characteristic of coastal regions, opportunity for inland and maritime commerce, and a fertile alluvial soil yielding support for dense populations. The predominant importance of the debouchment stretch of a river is indicated by the presence of such cities as London, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Bremen, Bordeaux, Odessa, Alexandria, Calcutta, Rangoon, Bangkok, Hongkong, Canton, Nanking and Shanghai, Montreal and Quebec, New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Buenos Ayres and Montevideo. This debouchment stretch gains in practical value and hence in permanent historical importance if it is swept by a scouring tide, which enables the junction of inland and maritime routes to penetrate into the land. Even Strabo recognized this value of tidal reaches.[652]

Hence in tideless basins like the Baltic and Caribbean, the great river ports have to advance coastward to meet the sea; and the lower course of even mighty streams like the Volga and Nile achieve a restricted importance.[653]

The control of a river mouth becomes a desideratum or necessity to the upstream people. Otherwise they may be bottled up. Though history shows us countless instances of upstream expansion, nevertheless owing to the ease of downstream navigation and this increasing historical importance from source to mouth, the direction of a river's flow has often determined the course of commerce and of political expansion.

[Sidenote: Location at hydrographic centers.]