390 THE SEA IN THE LIFE OF THE NATIONS. 



that man, whose entire organization points to the fact that his ancestors 

 in the Tertiary age were fruit-eating inmates of the woods, from the 

 beginning lived exclusively on land. The coast line of the Eastern 

 Continent may be considered the uttermost limit of the original home 

 of primitive man. 



Man could have been only affrighted by the sea when it first con- 

 fronted him in all its inhospitality, with its sudden dangers threatening 

 his fostering mother earth through high-tossing breakers, flooding 

 tides, and fearful storms. In the face of this far-superior enemy, 

 attacking him with elemental power, unprotected man in the first place 

 felt himself forced into an attitude of defense, especially along flat 

 coasts, where the rise and fall of the surface of the sea, corresponding 

 to the incoming and outgoing tides, produced the floods that swept up 

 far beyond the low land of the coast. Pliny has given a dramatic 

 picture of a struggle with the ocean such as must have taken place in 

 prehistoric times. He tells of the North Sea at the time of the Roman 

 Empire, when the German coast was still unprotected by dikes. Every 

 day, he says, the flood tide submerged the land of the Chauci, a German 

 tribe. The people, who took refuge in their huts, resembled seafarers, 

 and the setting in of the ebb tide lured them out, like castaways, to 

 catch fish in the receding waters, or to pick up turf washed upon the 

 damp clay ground by the flood. This example does not present the 

 most elementary aspects of man's struggle for existence with the sea, 

 for the means used were in a measure perfected. The Chauci had 

 advanced so far as to provide a secure foundation for their huts by 

 throwing up mounds, Wurten, such as are still used by the inhabitants 

 of the Halligen, marshy islands off the west coast of Sleswick, which, 

 on account of their small size, are not provided with dikes. It needed 

 only the "golden circlet" of the dikes along the coast to secure per- 

 manently to the German mainland the belt of land once the playground 

 of the shifting tides as a heavy marsh land rich in pastures and wheat 

 fields. We know from history what a blessing this triumph has been 

 to the inhabitants of the German and Netherlands coast since the 

 Frisian tossed up his last spadeful of earth, calling out proudly to the 

 sea, the hlanken /fans (gleaming Hans), now held within strong bonds, 

 Trutz nun, I>I nnk Hans (Do ^our worst now, gleaming Hans !). Since 

 then the boast has been tiua: Deus mare, Batavits litora fecit. The 

 success achieved over the opponent hitherto all powerful only con- 

 firmed the people in their pride of freedom. The construction of the 

 dikes had required energetic, self-sacrificing effort of many working 

 for a common end, and the more unremitting the necessity for united 

 labor in order to preserve them, the hardier the growth of the com- 

 munal spirit behind this fortification against the tyrant Okeanos, that 

 spirit which restrains self-seeking individualism and makes for civil 

 order. Thousands of years before, a similar result had been effected 





