[Sidenote:  Habitability of coasts as factor in maritime development.]

Not only the accessibility of the coast from the sea, but also its habitability enters as a factor into its historical importance.  A sandy desert coast, like that of Southwest Africa and much of the Peruvian littoral, or a sterile mountain face, like that of Lower California, excludes the people of the country from the sea.  Saldanha Bay, the one good natural harbor on the west coast of Cape Colony, is worthless even to the enterprising English, because it has no supply of fresh water.[465] The slowness of the ancient Egyptians to take the short step forward from river to marine navigation can undoubtedly be traced to the fact that the sour swamps, barren sand-dunes, and pestilential marshes on the seaward side of the Nile delta must have always been sparsely populated as they are to-day,[466] and that a broad stretch of sandy waste formed their Red Sea littoral.

On the other hand, where the hem of the continents is fertile enough to support a dense population, a large number of people are brought into contact with the sea, even where no elaborate articulation lengthens the shoreline.  When this teeming humanity of a garden littoral is barred from landward expansion by desert or mountain, or by the already overcrowded population of its own hinterland, it wells over the brim of its home country, no matter how large, and overflows to other lands across the seas.  The congested population of the fertile and indented coast of southern China, though not strictly speaking a sea-faring people, found an outlet for their redundant humanity and their commerce in the tropical Sunda Islands.  By the sixth century their trading junks were doing an active business in the harbors of Java, Sumatra, and Malacca; they had even reached Ceylon and the Persian Gulf, and a little later were visiting the great focal market of Aden at the entrance of the Red Sea.[467] A strong infusion of Chinese blood improved the Malay stock in the Sunda Islands, and later in North Borneo and certain of the Philippines, whither their traders and emigrants turned in the fourteenth century, when they found their opportunities curtailed in the archipelago to the south by the spread of Islam.[468] Now the “yellow peril” threatens the whole circle of these islands from Luzon to Sumatra.

Similarly India, first from its eastern, later from its western coast, sent a stream of traders, Buddhist priests, and colonists to the Sunda Islands, and especially to Java, as early as the fifth century of our era, whence Indian civilization, religion, and elements of the Sanskrit tongue spread to Borneo, Sumatra, Bali, Lombok, and even to some smaller islands among the Molucca group.[469] The Hindus became the dominant commercial nation of the Indian Ocean long before the great development of Arabian sea power, and later shared the trade of the East African coast with the merchants of Oman and Yemen.[470] To-day they form a considerable mercantile class in the ports of Mascat, Aden, Zanzibar, Pemba, and Natal.