s of Mascat, Aden, Zanzibar,
Pemba, and Natal.

[Sidenote: Geographic conditions for brilliant maritime development.]

On the coasts of large fertile areas like China and India, however,
maritime activity comes not as an early, but as an eventual development,
assumes not a dominant, but an incidental historical importance. The
coastlands appearing early on the maritime stage of history, and playing
a brilliant part in the drama of the sea, have been habitable, but their
tillable fields have been limited either in fertility, as in New
England, or in amount, as in Greece, or in both respects, as in Norway.
But if blessed with advantageous location for international trade and
many or even a few fairly good harbors, such coasts tend to develop wide
maritime dominion and colonial expansion.[471]

Great fertility in a narrow coastal belt barred from the interior serves
to concentrate and energize the maritime activities of the nation. The
20-mile wide plain stretching along the foot of the Lebanon range from
Antioch to Cape Carmel is even now the garden of Syria.[472] In ancient
Phoenician days its abundant crops and vines supported luxuriant cities
and a teeming population, which sailed and traded and colonized to the
Atlantic outskirts of Europe and Africa. Moreover, their maritime
ventures had a wide sweep as early as 1100 B. C. Quite similar to the
Phoenician littoral and almost duplicating its history, is the Oman
seaboard of eastern Arabia. Here again a fertile coastal plain sprinkled
with its "hundred villages," edged with a few tolerable harbors, and
backed by a high mountain wall with an expanse of desert beyond,
produced a race of bold and skilful navigators,[473] who in the Middle
Ages used their location between the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea to
make themselves the dominant maritime power of the Indian ocean. With
them maritime expansion was typically wide in its sweep and rapid in its
development. Even before Mohammed's time they had reached India; but
under the energizing influences of Islam, by 758 they had established a
flourishing trade with China, for which they set up way stations or
staple-points in Canton and the Sunda Islands.[474] First as voyagers and
merchants, then as colonists, they came, bringing their wares and their
religion to these distant shores. Marco Polo, visiting Sumatra in 1260,
tells us the coast population was "Saracen," but this was probably more
in religion than in blood.[475]