ts have been gradually
depopulated.[457] So in colonial days, when New England was little more
than a cordon of settlements along that rock-bound littoral, almost
every inlet had its port actively engaged in coastwise and foreign
commerce in the West Indies and the Guinea Coast, in cod and mackerel
fisheries, in whaling and shipbuilding, and this with only slight local
variations. This widespread homogeneity of maritime activity has been
succeeded by strict localization and differentiation, and reduction from
many to few ports. So, for the whole Atlantic seaboard of the United
States, evolution of seaports has been marked by increase of size
attended by decrease of numbers.

[Sidenote: Offshore islands.]

A well dissected coast, giving ample contact with the sea, often fails
nevertheless to achieve historical importance, unless outlying islands
are present to ease the transition from inshore to pelagic navigation,
and to tempt to wider maritime enterprise. The long sweep of the
European coast from northern Norway to Brittany has played out a
significant part of its history in that procession of islands formed by
Iceland, the Faroes, Shetland, Orkneys, Great Britain, Ireland and the
Channel Isles, whether it was the navigator of ancient Armorica steering
his leather-sailed boat to the shores of Caesar's Britain, or the modern
Breton fisherman pulling in his nets off the coasts of distant Iceland.
The dim outline of mountainous Cyprus, seen against a far-away horizon
from the slopes of Lebanon, beckoned the Phoenician ship-master thither
to trade and to colonize, just as the early Etruscan merchants passed
from their busy ironworks on the island of Elba over the narrow strait
to visible Corsica.[458] It was on the eastern side of Greece, with its
deep embayments, its valleys opening out to the Aegean, with its 483
islands scattered thickly as stars in the sky, and its Milky Way of the
Cyclades leading to the deep, rich soils of the Asia Minor coast, with
its sea-made contact with all the stimulating influences and dangers
emanating from the Asiatic littoral, that Hellenic history played its
impressive drama. Here was developed the spirit of enterprise that
carried colonies to far western Sicily and Italy, while the western or
rear side had a confined succession of local events, scarce worthy the
name of history. Neither mountain-walled Epirus nor Corcyra had an
Hellenic settlement in 735 B.C., at a date when the eastern