394 THE SEA IN THE LIFE OF THE NATIONS. 



rice-growing" was transported by slave dealers as far as the Kongo. 

 Thus originated the Ki-suahili dialect, the language of the Bantu 

 negroes intermixed with Arabic elements, and the commerce, brisk 

 to this very day, between German East Africa and Bombay. And 

 thus it is explained whj^ Indian capitalists of large means have 

 never ceased to live on the coast under German protection. Finally, 

 what a brilliant series of nautical achievements in the course of 

 ages is summoned before our mind's eye when we recall Greece, 

 Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Atlantic coast lands of Europe. 

 Navigation on the Mediterranean was of earlier date, but navigation 

 on the Atlantic attained to a higher stage of development in antiquity, 

 because it was infinitely more dangerous to wrestle with the ocean 

 than with the sea. Greek or Roman merchant vessels could not pre- 

 sume to enter the lists with the stout vessels of the Veneti, a (3eltic 

 tribe occupying what is now Brittany. They were built of solid oak 

 planks, their anchor chains were of iron, and their sails were of 

 leather. The journeys between Norway and Greenland, accomplished 

 for centuries by the Normans in their great rowboats, their black- 

 tarred "sea horses," were more valiant achievements than the passage 

 of the Colum])us caravels across the quieter southern ocean, with a 

 compass as guide. The latter, to be sure, was fraught, historically 

 considered, with more important results. But it was reserved for 

 modern times and for the four countries of central location — France, 

 the Netherlands, England, and Germany — to derive greatest benefits, 

 in the direction of world-commerce and the establishment of colonies, 

 from their favorable position on the shores of the most frequented of 

 the oceans. To l)ring about this unprecedented rise of seamanship, it 

 was necessar}^ that America should first be revealed to the e3'es of 

 Europe as a stimulating goal. In the New World, again, the greatest 

 attainments in modern naval architecture and sea traffic were reached 

 in those parts in which endless forests supplied shipbuilders with valu- 

 able wood, and especially in those parts in which the indented coast 

 line offered bays, inlets, sheltering ports at the mouths of rivers, and 

 streams navigable many miles inward for moderate-sized vessels; that 

 is to say, in Canada and the northeastern part of the United States — 

 another evidence that a causal relation exists between the natural 

 opportunities granted by coast lands and the nautical activities of their 

 inhabitants. 



To invest this relation with the compelling force of a natural law 

 were inane, pseudogeographic fanaticism. Man is not an automaton, 

 without a will of his own. The suggestions thrown out by the nature 

 of his birthplace sometimes find him a docile, sometimes an indifferent 

 pupil. What is now the world-harbor of New York once served the 

 Indians as nothing but a hunting place for edible mollusks. On the 

 same rock-bound coast that educated the Norwegians into intrepid 



