the number of people who,
though inhabiting well indented coasts, make little use of contact with
the sea. Navigation, unknown to many Australian coast tribes, is limited
to miserable rafts of mangrove branches on the northwest seaboard, and
to imperfect bark canoes with short paddles on the south; only in the
north where Malayan influences are apparent does the hollowed tree-stem
with outrigger appear.[548] This retardation is not due to fear, because
the South Australian native, like the Fuegian, ventures several miles
out to sea in his frail canoe; it is due to that deep-seated inertia
which characterizes all primitive races, and for which the remote,
outlying location of peninsular South America, Southern Africa and
Australia, before the arrival of the Europeans, afforded no antidote in
the form of stimulating contact with other peoples. But the Irish, who
started abreast of the other northern Celts in nautical efficiency, who
had advantages of proximity to other shores, and in the early centuries
of their history sailed to the far-away Faroes and even to Iceland,
peopled southern Scotland by an oversea emigration, made piratical
descents upon the English coast, and in turn received colonies of bold
Scandinavian mariners, suffered an arrested development in navigation,
and failed to become a sea-faring folk.

[Sidenote: Regions of advanced navigation.]

Turning from these regions of merely rudimentary navigation and
inquiring where the highest efficiency in the art was obtained before
the spread of Mediterranean and European civilization, we find that this
distinction belongs to the great island world of the Pacific and to the
neighboring lands of the Indian Ocean. Sailing vessels and outrigger
boats of native design and construction characterize the whole
sea-washed area of Indo-Malaysian civilization from Malacca to the
outermost isles of the Pacific. The eastern rim of Asia, also, belongs
to this wide domain of nautical efficiency, and the coast Indians of
southern Alaska and British Columbia may possibly represent an eastern
spur of the same,[549] thrown out in very remote times and maintained by
the advantageous geographic conditions of that indented, mountainous
coast. Adjoining this area on the north is the long-drawn Arctic
seaboard of the Eskimo, who unaided have developed in their sealskin
kayak and bidarka sea-going craft unsurpassed for the purposes of marine
hunting and fishing, and who display a fearl