Let us consider the interplay of the forces of land and sea apparent in every country with a maritime location.

In some cases a small, infertile, niggardly country conspires with a beckoning sea to drive its sons out upon the deep; in others a wide territory with a generous soil keeps its well-fed children at home and silences the call of the sea.

In ancient Phoenicia and Greece, in Norway, Finland, New England, in savage Chile and Tierra del Fuego, and the Indian coast district of British Columbia and southern Alaska, a long, broken shoreline, numerous harbors, outlying islands, abundant timber for the construction of ships, difficult communication by land, all tempted the inhabitants to a seafaring life.

While the sea drew, the land drove in the same direction.

There a hilly or mountainous interior putting obstacles in the way of landward expansion, sterile slopes, a paucity of level, arable land, an excessive or deficient rainfall withholding from agriculture the reward of tillage--some or all of these factors combined to compel the inhabitants to seek on the sea the livelihood denied by the land.