its period of
greatest historical significance from the twelfth to the seventeenth
century, the Baltic played the role of a northern Mediterranean.[559] The
countless shuttles of the Hanse ships wove a web of commercial
intercourse between its remotest shores. Novgorod and Aboe were in
constant communication with Luebeck and Stralsund;[560] and Wisby, on the
island of Gotland at the great crossroads of the Baltic,[561] had the
focal significance of the Piraeus in ancient Aegean trade.

[Sidenote: Bering Sea.]

If we turn to Asia, we find that even the unfavorable Arctic location of
Bering Sea has been unable to rob it entirely of historical
significance. This is the one spot where a native American race has
transplanted itself by its natural expansion to Asiatic shores. The
circular rim and island-dotted surface have guided Eskimo emigrants to
the coast of the Chukchian Peninsula, where they have become partly
assimilated in dress and language to the local Chukches.[562] The same
conditions also facilitated the passage of a few Chukches across Bering
Strait to the Alaskan side. At Pak (or Peck) on East Cape and on Diomed
Island, situated in the narrowest part of Bering Strait, are the great
intercontinental markets of the polar tribes. Here American furs have
for many decades been exchanged for the reindeer skins of northern
Siberia and Russian goods from far-away Moscow.[563] Only the enclosed
character of the sea, reported by the Danish explorer Vitus Bering,
tempted the land-bred Russians, who reached the northeastern coast of
Siberia at the middle of the eighteenth century, to launch their leaky
boats of unseasoned timber, push across to the American continent, and
make this whole Bering basin a Russian sea;[564] just as a few decades
before, when land exploration of Kamchatka had revealed the enclosed
character of the Sea of Okhotsk, the Russian pioneers took a straight
course across the water to their Pacific outpost of Petropavlovsk near
the southern end of the peninsula. But even before the coming of the
Slavs to its shores, the Sea of Okhotsk seems to have been an area of
native commercial and ethnic intercourse from the Amur River in Siberia
in a half circle to the east, through Sakhalin, Yezo, the Kurile Islands
and southern Kamchatka,[565] noticeably where the rim of the basin
presented the scantiest supply of land and where, therefore, its meager
resources had to be eked out by fisheries and trade on the