y beach, the natives of
the southern and western coasts keep close to the shore. The straits and
channels yield them all their food, and are the highways for all their
restless, hungry wanderings.[420] The steep slopes and dense forests
preclude travel by land, and force the wretched inhabitants to live as
much in their canoes as in their huts. The Tlingit and Haida Indians of
the mountainous coast of southern Alaska locate their villages on some
smooth sheltered beach, with their houses in a single row facing the
water, and the ever-ready canoe drawn up on shore in front. They select
their sites with a view to food supply, and to protection in case of
attack. On the treeless shores of Kadiak Island and of the long narrow
Alaska Peninsula near by, the Eskimo choose their village location for
an accumulation of driftwood, for proximity to their food supply, and a
landing-place for their kayaks and bidarkas. Hence they prefer a point
of land or gravel spit extending out into the sea, or a sand reef
separating a salt-water lagoon from the open sea. The Aleutian Islanders
regard only accessibility to the shell-fish on the beach and their
pelagic hunting and fishing; and this consideration has influenced the
Eskimo tribes of the wide Kuskokwin estuary to such an extent, that they
place their huts only a few feet above ordinary high tide, where they
are constantly exposed to overflow from the sea.[421] Only among the
great tidal channels of the Yukon delta are they distributed over the
whole wide coastal zone, even to its inner edge.

The coast Chukches of northeastern Siberia locate their tent villages on
the sand ramparts between the Arctic Ocean and the freshwater lagoons
which line this low tundra shore. Here they are conveniently situated
for fishing and hunting marine animals, while protected against the
summer inundations of the Arctic rivers.[422] The whole western side of
Greenland, from far northern Upernivik south to Cape Farewell, shows
both Eskimo and Danish settlements almost without exception on
projecting points of peninsulas or islands, where the stronger effect of
the warm ocean current, as well as proximity to the food supply, serve
to fix their habitations; although the remains of the old Norse
settlements in general are found in sheltered valleys with summer
vegetation, striking off from the fiords some 20 miles back from the
outer coast.[423] Caesar found that the ancient Veneti, an immigrant
people of t