on
Roanoke Island in 1585, and the later one of Popham on the eastern
headland of Casco Bay. The Pilgrims paused at the extremity of Cape Cod,
and again on Clark's Island, before fixing their settlement on Plymouth
Bay. Monhegan Island, off the Maine coast, was the site of an early
English trading post, which, however, lasted only from 1623 to 1626;[439]
and the same dates fix the beginning and end of a fishing and trading
station established on Cape Ann, and removed later to Salem harbor. The
Swedes made their first settlement in America on Cape Henlopen, at the
entrance of Delaware Bay; but their next, only seven years later, they
located well up the estuary of the Delaware River. Thus for the modern
colonist the outer edge of the coast is merely the gateway of the land.
From it he passes rapidly to the settlement of the interior, wherever
fertile soil and abundant resources promise a due return upon his labor.

[Sidenote: Interpenetration of land and sea.]

Since it is from the land, as the inhabited portion of the earth's
surface, that all maritime movements emanate, and to the land that all
oversea migrations are directed, the reciprocal relations between land
and sea are largely determined by the degree of accessibility existing
between the two. This depends primarily upon the articulation of a
land-mass, whether it presents an unbroken contour like Africa and
India, or whether, like Europe and Norway, it drops a fringe of
peninsulas and a shower of islands into the bordering ocean. Mere
distance from the sea bars a country from its vivifying contact; every
protrusion of an ocean artery into the heart of a continent makes that
heart feel the pulse of life on far-off, unseen shores. The Baltic inlet
which makes a seaport of St. Petersburg 800 miles (1,300 kilometers)
back from the western rim of Europe, brings Atlantic civilization to
this half-Asiatic side of the continent. The solid front presented by
the Iberian Peninsula and Africa to the Atlantic has a narrow crack at
Gibraltar, whence the Mediterranean penetrates inland 2,300 miles (3,700
kilometers), and converts the western foot of the Caucasus and the roots
of the Lebanon Mountains into a seaboard. By means of the Arabian Sea,
the Indian Ocean runs northward 1,300 miles (2,200 kilometers) from Cape
Comorin to meet the Indus delta; and then turns westward 700 miles
farther through the Oman and Persian gulfs to receive the boats from the
Tigris and Euphrate