Atlantic Health, Wealth and Sanity : 451 



Man's desires are not always favored by nature even by the fortunes 

 of the Atlantic, and human determination too has been essential 

 to the utilization of the ocean. The estabUshment of the northern sea 

 routes in the latitudes of the prevailing westerlies represents a hard- 

 won but successful compromise between human inventiveness and 

 natural environment. Once established, the difference between the 

 northern and the southern sea routes across the Atlantic had an 

 important bearing on the whole pattern of human migration to the 

 Western World and had a bearing even on the routes that the mi- 

 grants followed on their western penetration of the continent. The 

 North and the South were separated not only by the Mason and 

 Dixon Line but also by the Gulf Stream, and the Gulf Stream came 

 first. 



The Atlantic routes that were followed by the explorers and colo- 

 nists became at once the routes of transport and communication 

 between the colonists and those who had remained behind in Europe. 

 The colonists needed trade as well as the homeland and despite dis- 

 agreements on matters of politics, religion and ways of life, trade grew 

 and persisted. With few exceptions the early routes became the strong 

 threads in a web of trade and communication that knits the Atlantic 

 nations into a community of reciprocal interests. 



Among the powers and capacities with which the Atlantic Ocean 

 has endowed mankind, one of the most fundamental is the power of 

 transport. The map of Basic World Transport presented on page 409 

 should now have a fuller meaning for us. The map illustrates how 

 central to human undertaking and how important in volume is the 

 network of transatlantic transport. Air transport is not included in 

 this map because we are talking about major transport activities 

 which can be represented on a tonnage basis. On a tonnage basis, air 

 transport at the present time would be represented by something con- 

 siderably less than i per cent. Our picture, therefore, of combined 

 service transport represents rather more than 99 per cent of all world 

 transport. 



Land transportation, of course, is important to and within each 

 country but for the most part it is the water transport that is interna- 

 tional and intercontinental. The ordinary cargo vessel is the cheapest 

 and most effective means of transport that man has ever devised in 

 cost per ton of pay load. This could be illustrated with many lengthy 

 and complicated schedules but here a characteristic example must 

 serve. A bale of crude rubber weighs 250 pounds. It can be moved by 

 freighter from Singapore to New York City for a cost of approxi- 



