heir fiords and channels behind their protecting "skerry-wall," then
trained in the stormy basins of the North and Irish Seas, were naturally
the first people of Europe to cross the Atlantic, because the Atlantic
of their shores, narrowing like all oceans and seas toward the north,
assumes almost the character of an enclosed basin. The distance from
Norway to Greenland is only 1,800 miles, little more than that across
the Arabian Sea between Africa and India. We trace, therefore, a certain
analogy between the physical subdivisions of the world of water into
inlet, marginal sea and ocean, and the anthropo-geographical gradations
in maritime development.

The enclosed or marginal sea seems a necessary condition for the advance
beyond coastwise navigation and the much later step to the open ocean.
Continents without them, like Africa, except for its frontage upon the
Mediterranean and the Red Sea, have shown no native initiative in
maritime enterprise. Africa was further cursed by the mockery of desert
coasts along most of her scant thalassic shores. In the Americas, we
find the native races compassing a wide maritime field only in the
Arctic, where the fragmentary character of the continent breaks up the
ocean into Hudson's Bay, Davis Strait, Baffin Bay, Gulf of Boothia,
Melville Sound and Bering Sea; and in the American Mediterranean of the
Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. The excellent seamanship developed in
the archipelagoes of southern Alaska and Chile remained abortive for
maritime expansion, despite a paucity of local resources and the spur of
hunger, owing to the lack of a marginal sea; but in the Caribbean basin,
the Arawaks and later the Caribs spread from the southern mainland as
far as Cuba.[555] [See map page 101.]

[Sidenote: Enclosed seas as areas of ethnic and cultural assimilation.]

Enclosed or marginal seas were historically the most important sections
of the ocean prior to 1492. Apart from the widening of the maritime
horizon which they give to their bordering people, each has the further
advantage of constituting an area of close vicinal grouping and constant
interchange of cultural achievements, by which the civilization of the
whole basin tends to become elevated and unified. This unification
frequently extends to race also, owing to the rapidity of maritime
expansion and the tendency to ethnic amalgamation characteristic of all
coast regions. We recognize an area of Mediterranean civilization fro