Greeks had
reached the Ionian coast of the Aegean and had set up a lonely group of
colonies even on the Bay of Naples. Turning to America, we find that the
Antilles received their population from the only two tribes, first the
Arawaks and later the Caribs, who ever reached the indented northern
coast of South America between the Isthmus of Panama and the mouth of
the Orinoco. Here the small islands of the Venezuelan coast, often in
sight, lured these peoples of river and shore to open-sea navigation,
and drew them first to the Windward Isles, then northward step by step
or island by island, to Hayti and Cuba.[459]

[Sidenote: Offshore islands as vestibules of the mainland.]

In all these instances, offshore islands tempt to expansion and thereby
add to the historical importance of the nearby coast. Frequently,
however, they achieve the same result by offering advantageous footholds
to enterprising voyagers from remote lands, and become the medium for
infusing life into hitherto dead coasts. The long monotonous littoral of
East Africa from Cape Guadafui to the Cape of Good Hope, before the
planting here of Portuguese way-stations on the road to India in the
sixteenth century, was destitute of historical significance, except that
stretch opposite the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, which Arab merchants
in the tenth century appropriated as the basis for their slave and ivory
trade. The East Indies and Ceylon have been so many offshore stations
whence, first through the Portuguese, and later through the Dutch and
English, European influences percolated into southeastern Asia. Asia,
with its island-strewn shores, has diffused its influences over a broad
zone of the western Pacific, and through the agency of its active
restless Malays, even halfway across that ocean. In contrast, the
western coast of the Americas, a stretch nearly 10,000 miles from Tierra
del Fuego to the Aleutian chain, has seen its aboriginal inhabitants
barred from seaward expansion by the lack of offshore islands, and its
entrance upon the historical stage delayed till recent times.

In general it can be said that islandless seas attain a later historical
development than those whose expanse is rendered less forbidding by
hospitable fragments of land. This factor, as well as its location
remote from the old and stimulating civilization of Syria and Asia
Minor, operated to retard the development of the western Mediterranean
long after the eastern basin ha