the fishermen of the coast.  Norway, where civilization has 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 of the Netherlands.[624] There is a considerable amount of truth in the saying that Amsterdam was built on herrings.  New England, with an unproductive soil at home, but near by in the sea a long line of piscine feeding grounds in the submarine banks stretching from Cape Cod to Cape Race and beyond, found her fisheries the starting point and base of her long round of exchanges, a constant factor in her commercial and industrial evolution.[625]