s achieved its utmost in exploiting the
limited means of subsistence, shows a steady increase from south to
north in the proportion of the population dependent upon the harvest of
the deep. Thus the fisheries engross 44 per cent. of the rural
population in Nordland province, which is bisected by the Arctic Circle;
over 50 per cent. in Tromso, and about 70 per cent. in Finmarken. If the
towns also be included, the percentages rise, because here fishing
interests are especially prominent.[621] Proximity to the generous larder
of the ocean has determined the selection of village sites, as we have
seen among the coast Indians of British Columbia and southern Alaska,
among all the Eskimo, and numerous other peoples of Arctic lands. [See
map page 153.]

[Sidenote: Fisheries as factors in maritime expansion.]

Not only in polar but also in temperate regions, the presence of
abundant fishing grounds draws the people of the nearest coast to their
wholesale exploitation, especially if the land resources are scant.
Fisheries then become the starting point or permanent basis of a
subsequent wide maritime development, by expanding the geographical
horizon. It was the search for the purple-yielding _murex_ that first
familiarized the Phoenicians with the commercial and colonial
possibilities of the eastern Mediterranean coasts.[622] The royal dye of
this marine product has through all the ages seemed to color with
sumptuous magnificence the sordid dealings of those Tyrian traders, and
constituted them an aristocracy of merchants. The shoals of tunny fish,
arriving every spring in the Bosporus, from the north, drew the early
Greeks and Phoenicians after them into the cold and misty Euxine, and
furnished the original impulse to both these peoples for the
establishment of fishing and trading stations on its uncongenial
shores.[623] To the fisheries of the Baltic and especially to the summer
catch of the migratory herring, which in vast numbers visited the shores
of Pomerania and southern Sweden to spawn, the Hanse Towns of Germany
owed much of their prosperity. Salt herring, even in the twelfth
century, was the chief single article of their exchanges with Catholic
Europe, which made a strong demand for the fish, owing to the numerous
fast days. When, in 1425, by one of those unexplained vagaries of animal
life, the herring abandoned the Baltic and selected the North Sea for
its summer destination, a new support was given to the wealth