and dense forests preclude travel by land, and force the wretched inhabitants to live as much in their canoes as in their huts.  The Tlingit and Haida Indians of the mountainous coast of southern Alaska locate their villages on some smooth sheltered beach, with their houses in a single row facing the water, and the ever-ready canoe drawn up on shore in front.  They select their sites with a view to food supply, and to protection in case of attack.  On the treeless shores of Kadiak Island and of the long narrow Alaska Peninsula near by, the Eskimo choose their village location for an accumulation of driftwood, for proximity to their food supply, and a landing-place for their kayaks and bidarkas.  Hence they prefer a point of land or gravel spit extending out into the sea, or a sand reef separating a salt-water lagoon from the open sea.  The Aleutian Islanders regard only accessibility to the shell-fish on the beach and their pelagic hunting and fishing; and this consideration has influenced the Eskimo tribes of the wide Kuskokwin estuary to such an extent, that they place their huts only a few feet above ordinary high tide, where they are constantly exposed to overflow from the sea.[421] Only among the great tidal channels of the Yukon delta are they distributed over the whole wide coastal zone, even to its inner edge.

The coast Chukches of northeastern Siberia locate their tent villages on the sand ramparts between the Arctic Ocean and the freshwater lagoons which line this low tundra shore.  Here they are conveniently situated for fishing and hunting marine animals, while protected against the summer inundations of the Arctic rivers.[422] The whole western side of Greenland, from far northern Upernivik south to Cape Farewell, shows both Eskimo and Danish settlements almost without exception on projecting points of peninsulas or islands, where the stronger effect of the warm ocean current, as well as proximity to the food supply, serve to fix their habitations; although the remains of the old Norse settlements in general are found in sheltered valleys with summer vegetation, striking off from the fiords some 20 miles back from the outer coast.[423] Caesar found that the ancient Veneti, an immigrant people of the southern coast of Brittany, built their towns on the points of capes and promontories, sites which gave them ready contact with the sea and protection against attack from the land side, because every rise of the tide submerged the intervening lowlands.[424] Here a sterile plateau hinterland drove them for part of their subsistence to the water, and the continuous intertribal warfare of small primitive states to the sea-girt asylums of the capes.

[Sidenote:  Outer edge in early navigation.]