They maintained this advantage for more than five hundred years. The steamer succeeded the sailing vessel, but since trade has always been a matter of cheap modes of communication, Europe was able to continue at the head of the procession. And those military authors have been right who maintained that the nation with the biggest navy was also the nation that could dictate its will to the rest of the world. In obedience to this law, the Norsemen had been succeeded by Venice and Genoa, and Venice and Genoa had been succeeded by Portugal, and Portugal as a world-power had been succeeded by Spain, and Spain by Holland, and Holland by England, because each country in turn had had the largest number of battleships. To-day, however, the sea Is rapidly losing its former importance. The ocean as a highroad for commerce is being succeeded by the air.
The son of a Genoese wool-merchant changed the course of history by discovering the unlimited possibilities of the ocean.
The owners of a simple bicycle repair shop in the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, did the same for the air. As a result, the children of a thousand years hence may never have heard of Christopher Columbus, but they will be familiar with the names of Wilbur and Orville Wright.
Chapter VII
* * *
OF THE DISCOVERY OF EUROPE, AND THE SORT OF PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN THAT CONTINENT
There are twice as many people in Europe as there are in North and South America together. There are more people within the confines of that small continent than in America, Africa, and Australia together. Only Asia has a greater number of inhabitants than Europe, 950,000,000 against Europe’s 550,000,000. These figures are more or less accurate, for they were gathered by the International Statistical Institution connected with the League of Nations, a gathering of learned men who are able to consider such matters with a cool and detached eye and who are under no obligation to doctor the returns to please the local pride of any particular country.
According to that same erudite body, the average net increase in population on this planet is 30,000,000 per year. And that is a very serious matter. For at that rate of speed, the population of the world will double itself in about six centuries. And as we still have millions and millions of years to go, I hate to think, what conditions will be later on, in the year 19330 or 193300 or 1933000. “Standing room only” on the underground is bad enough. “Standing room only” on our planet would be absolutely unbearable.
And yet that is the prospect before us unless we are willing to face facts and take certain measures before it is too late.
All that, however, belongs rather to a handbook on political economy. The question that faces us here is the following: Where did these early settlers of the European continent, who were to play such a great role in history, come from, and were they the first to arrive upon the scene? The answer, I regret to say, must he exceedingly vague. Those people probably came from Asia and they probably entered Europe through the gap between the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea, and they probably found that earlier races of immigrants and older forms of civilization had preceded them. But until the anthropologists shall have gathered many more data than are now at their disposal, the story of those pre-prehistoric invaders is still too vague to be incorporated in a popular handbook of geography and we must stick to the later arrivals.
Why did they come? For the same reason that made over a hundred million people move from the Old to the New World during the last hundred years because they were hungry and the lands toward the west offered them a better chance of survival.
These immigrants scrambled all over Europe, as the immigrants of a later day were to scatter all over the great American plains. And in the mad rush for land and for lakes (in those early days a lake was even more valuable than a piece of land) all traces of ‘pure racial stock’ were speedily lost. Here and there along the more inaccessible parts of the Atlantic sea-shore, or in the hidden depths of some obscure mountain valley, a few of the weaker tribes continued to vegetate, proud of their purity of race, but having little else to console them for the loss of touch with the outside world. And therefore when we speak of ‘race’ to-day we have given up all idea of absolute ethnological purity.
We use the expression for the sake of convenience to describe certain large groups of people who happen to speak the same language (more or less); who have a common historical origin (more or less); and who during the last two thousand years of written history have developed certain traits of character and certain modes of thought and social behaviour which have made them conscious of belonging to what, for lack of a better word, we continue to call a racial group.
According to this notion of race (the x of the algebraic equation, invented solely for the sake of cutting through a thousand difficulties) there are three great racial groups in the Europe of to-day and half a dozen smaller ones.
FROM ANIMAL TO MAN
There are, first of all, the Germanic races, which include the English, the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Dutch, the Flemish, and part of the Swiss. Then the Latin race, including the French, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Rumanians. Finally the Slavonic races, consisting mainly of the Russians and the Poles, the Czechs, the Serbians, and the Bulgarians. Together they account for about 93 per cent of the total population.
The rest are a couple of million Magyars or Hungarians, a slightly smaller number of Finns, about a million people of Turkish descent (in the little remnant of the old Turkish Empire around Constantinople) and some three million Jews. Then there are the Greeks, who have been so hopelessly mixed with other ‘races’ that we can only guess at their origin but who are more closely akin to the Germanic group than to any other. Then the Albanians, also probably of Germanic origin, who now seem a thousand years behind the times, but who had been comfortably settled on their present-day farms five or six centuries ere the first of the Romans and Greeks made their appearance on European territory. And finally the Celts of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Brittany, and the Letts and Lithuanians of the Baltic Sea, and the Gypsies, of indefinite number and hazy origin, who are chiefly interesting as an historical warning of what will happen to those who come too late and who arrive just when the last piece of empty land has been occupied by some one else.
So much for the people who populated both mountains and plains of the old continent. Now we must see what they made of their geographical background and what that background in turn made of them. For out of that struggle grew our modern world. Without it, we would still be like the beasts of the fields.
Interlude
* * *
JUST A MOMENT, BEFORE WE GO FURTHER, WHILE I TELL YOU HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
This book should be read with an atlas. There are a large number of excellent atlases and almost any one will do. For atlases are like dictionaries. Even a bad one is better than none at all.
As you will soon discover, there are quite a number of maps in this volume, but these are not meant as a substitute for a regular atlas. I drew them merely to show you the many ways of approach to a subject under discussion and (if I must tell you the truth) to get you personally interested in drawing maps according to your own notion of geographical right and wrong. You see, flat maps, however ingeniously conceived, must be somewhat out of gear. The only approximately correct maps are those pasted on globes, but even our globes are not entirely above suspicion, for they should really be spheroids. We make them spheres merely for the sake of convenience. The earth, of course, is slightly flattened near the poles, but it would take a gigantic globe to show the difference, and so we need not worry about that minor irregularity. Get yourself a globe (I wrote this book with the help of a ten-cent-store globe which was really a pencil-sharpener) and use it to your heart’s content, but remember that it is an ‘approximation’ and not an ‘established fact.’ The ‘established facts’ will only enter into your life if you should try to qualify for a master-mariner’s certificate. But in that case, you would have to spend many years mastering an exceedingly difficult branch of science; and
this book was not written for specialists but for the average reader who wants to get some general ideas about the planet upon which he happens to live.
Now let me tell you one thing. The best and most convenient way to learn geography is to revaluate everything into pictures. Don’t copy me or anybody else. Look at my pictures if you care to do so, but regard them merely as a sort of geographical appetizer, as polite suggestions for the meal you intend to prepare for yourself by and by.
COMPARE THE PROPORTIONS OF GREENLAND AND SOUTH AMERICA ON A GLOBE AND ON A FLAT MAP AND NOTICE WHAT A DIFFERENCE THAT MAKES!
I have tried to give you quite a number of samples according to the geographical notions of the author himself. I have drawn you two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional maps. It will take you some time to get accustomed to these three-dimensional contraptions, but, once you see them, you will no longer like the two-dimensional variety. I have given you maps as seen from mountain tops and according to the different angles from which you are able to contemplate a landscape. And I have given you maps as seen from aeroplanes and zeppelins. I have given you a few maps which are merely pretty and ornamental and others which resemble geometrical patterns. Take your choice, and then draw your own maps according to your own notions of how the thing should be done.
Draw maps… Get yourself a small globe or a large globe and an atlas. Buy yourself a pencil and a pad of paper, and then draw your own pictures.
For there is only one way in which you can learn geography so that you will never forget it—draw pictures.
Chapter VIII
* * *
GREECE, THE ROCKY PROMONTORY OF THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN WHICH ACTED AS THE CONNECTING LINK BETWEEN THE OLD ASIA AND THE NEW EUROPE
Greece is the country that occupies the southernmost part of the much larger Balkan peninsula and the neighbouring islands. This peninsula is bounded on the north by the Danube, on the west by the Adriatic, which separates it from Italy, on the east by the Black Sea, the Sea of Marmora, the Bosporus and the Aegean Sea, which separate it from Asia, and on the south by the Mediterranean, which separates it from Africa.
I have never seen the Balkan peninsula from the air, but it seems to me that from a height it must look like a hand reaching out from Europe to Asia and Africa. Greece is the thumb. Thrace the little linger. Constantinople the nail on the little finger. The other fingers are the mountain-ranges that run from Macedonia and Thessaly to Asia Minor. In some cases only the tops of these mountain-ranges are visible. The lower parts are covered by the waves of the Aegean, but from a great height one would undoubtedly be able to follow them as closely as the fingers of a hand partly submerged by the water in a wash-bowl.
The skin of this hand is stretched across a skeleton of sturdy mountain-ranges. In the main, these run from north-west to south-east, I might almost say, diagonal-wise. They have Bulgarian, Montenegrin, Serbian, Turkish, Albanian, and Greek names, but there are only a few important enough for you to remember.
These are the Dinaric Alps, stretching from the Alps of Switzerland to the Gulf of Corinth, the wide bay which separates the northern half of Greece from the southern half, the triangle which the early Greeks mistook for an island (small wonder, since the isthmus of Corinth which connects it with the mainland is only about four miles wide) and which they called the Peloponnesus or the Island of Pelops, who, according to Greek tradition, was the son of Tantalus and a grandson of Zeus, and who at Olympia was honoured as the father of all good sportsmen.
50,000,000 B.C. AND A.D. 1933
The Venetians who conquered Greece during the Middle Ages were prosaic merchants with no interest in a young man who once upon a time in his career had been served up as a roast at his father’s dinner table. They found that a map of the Peloponnesus looked very much like the leaf of a mulberry-tree. And so they called it the Morea, and that is the name you will find on all modern atlases.
There are two mountain-ranges in this part of the world-which have a separate existence of their own. In the north there are the Balkans which have given their name to the entire peninsula. The Balkans are merely the southern end of a half circle of hills of which the northern part is known as the Carpathians. They are cut off from the rest of the Carpathians by the so-called ‘Iron Gate’—the narrow ravine through which the Danube has dug itself a path on its way to the sea; and they act as a barrier which forces the Danube to run straight from east to west and to lose itself finally in the Black Sea instead of the Aegean Sea, towards which that river seems bound when it leaves the plains of Hungary.
THE OLD CONCEPTION OF THE WORLD WHEN THE EARTH WAS THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE
Unfortunately, this wall separating the peninsula from Rumania is not as high as the Alps and so does not succeed in protecting the Balkan region from the chilly blasts that come blowing down from the great Russian plain. The northern part of the peninsula therefore is quite familiar with snow and ice, but ere the clouds can reach Greece they are stopped by a second wall, the Rhodope Mountains which, by their very name of the ‘rose-covered hills’ (the same word as you will find in rhododendron, the rose-tree, and in Rhodes, the ‘rose-covered island’ of the Aegean), indicate a milder climate.
The Rhodope Mountains reach a height of almost 9000 feet. The highest top in the Balkans, situated near the famous Shipka pass which the Russian armies forced in September of 1877 with a great deal of discomfort, is only 8000 feet. The Rhodope Mountains therefore play a very important part in deciding the climate of the rest of the peninsula, and for good measure there is snow-covered Olympus, nearly 10,000 feet high, which stands sentinel over the plains of Thessaly, where the real Greece begins.
GREECE
This fertile plain of Thessaly was once upon a time an inland sea. But the river Peneus (the Salambria of the modern map) cut itself a road-bed through the famous valley of Tempe, and the vast Thessalian lake emptied itself into the Gulf of Salonika and became dry land. As for Thessaly, the granary of ancient Greece, the Turks neglected it, as they neglected everything, not so much through wickedness of heart as that hopeless Mohammedan inertia which answers all questions of immediate practical importance with a shrug of the shoulder and a brief “What is the use?” And as soon as the Turks had been driven out, the Greek money-lenders got hold of the peasants and continued where the others had left off. To-day Thessaly is growing tobacco. It has one harbour, Volo, from which the Argonauts set forth on their quest of the Golden Fleece. It also has one industrial town and railway centre, Larissa.
As a matter of curiosity and in order to show how strangely people got intermingled in the olden days, I might mention that this city in the heart of the Greek land of Thessaly has a negro quarter of its own. The Turks, who did not care who got killed fighting their battles for them, had imported several regiments of Sudanese natives from their Egyptian possessions to help them suppress the great Greek uprising of 1821–1829. Larissa was their headquarters during that war and after the war the poor Sudanese were forgotten. They remained stranded and they are still there.
But you will meet with stranger things than that ere we get through. You will hear of Red Indians in northern Africa and Jews in eastern China and horses on an uninhabited island in the Atlantic Ocean. This much for the benefit of the ‘pure race’ enthusiasts.
From Thessaly we cross the Pindus Mountains into the Epirus. This mountain-range, as high as the Balkans, has always been a barrier between the Epirus and the rest of Greece. Why Aristotle should have identified this part of the world with the original home of the human race will ever remain a mystery, for it is a poverty-stricken country of high hills and wandering herds of cattle, without harbours or decent roads. Of its early population little remained when the Romans on one of their campaigns sold 150,000 Epirotes into slavery. But two parts of the Epirus, separated from the mainland by narrow stretches of water from the Ionian Sea, are interesting. One is Ithaca, the legendary home of long-suffering Odysseus, and the other is Corfu, the early home of the
Phacacians, whose king, Alcinous, was the father of Nausicaa, one of the loveliest of all women in ancient literature. To-day the island (one of the Ionian islands, occupied first by Venice, later by the French, then by the English until ceded by them to Greece in 1864) is chiefly famous as the place of retreat for the defeated Serbian armies in the year 1916 and as a target for some very loose and useless shooting on the part of the Fascist navy only a few years ago. It may have a great future as a winter resort, but is undoubtedly situated on one of the great European earthquake belts.
The Dinaric Alps have a bad record as earthquake producers, while the neighbouring island of Zante suffered most severely from an earthquake as recently as 1893. But earthquakes have never yet prevented people from going where it was pleasant to be and we can discount the element of danger. We shall meet with a great many volcanoes on our trip around the world and still find their gentle slopes more densely populated than the less energetic parts of the earth’s brittle surface. Explain this who may. I proceed from the Epirus further towards the south, and behold, Boeotia!
I mention this region, which lies like a vast, empty soup-plate between the hills of Attica towards the south and Thessaly and the mountains of the Epirus towards the north, most particularly because it is a classical example of that influence of Nature upon Man which I mentioned in the beginning of this book.
To the average Greek of the good classical days, a Boeotian, although he came from the land of Mount Parnassus, the home of the Muses, on the slopes of which the Delphic Oracle had established its shrine, was a clodhopper, a heavy-witted rustic, a clown, an oaf, a lout, a gawk, a thick-skulled duffer, predestined for all the cheap slap-stick humour of the early stage.
The Home of Mankind Page 7
