The geographic influence of abundant rivers navigable from the sea is closely akin to that of highly articulated coasts.  The effect of the Hardanger or Sogne Fiord, admitting ocean steamers a hundred miles into the interior of Norway, is similar to that of the Elbe and Weser estuaries, which admit the largest vessels sixty miles upstream to Hamburg and Bremen.  Since river inlets can, to a certain extent, supply the place of marine inlets, from the standpoint of anthropo-geographic theory and of human practice, a land dissected by navigable rivers can be grouped with one dissected by arms of the sea.  South America and Africa are alike in the unbroken contour of their coasts, but strongly contrasted in the character of their rivers.  Hence the two continents present the extremes of accessibility and inaccessibility.  South America, most richly endowed of all the continents with navigable streams, receiving ocean vessels three thousand miles up the Amazon as far as Tabatinga in Peru, and smaller steamers up the Orinoco to the spurs of the Andes, was known in its main features to explorers fifty years after its discovery.  Africa, historically the oldest of continents, but cursed with a mesa form which converts nearly every river into a plunging torrent on its approach to the sea, kept its vast interior till the last century wrapped in utmost gloom.  China, amply supplied with smaller littoral indentations but characterized by a paucity of larger inlets, finds compensation in the long navigable course of the Yangtze Kiang.  This river extends the landward reach of the Yellow Sea 630 miles inland to Hanchow, where ocean-going vessels take on cargoes of tea and silk for Europe and America,[640] and pay for them in Mexican dollars, the coin of the coast.  Hence it is lined with free ports all the way from Shanghai at its mouth to Ichang, a thousand miles up its course.[641]

[Sidenote:  River highways as basis of commercial preeminence.]

Navigable rivers opening passages directly from the sea are obviously nature-made gates and paths into wholly new countries; but the accessibility with which they endow a land becomes later a permanent factor in its cultural and economic development, a factor that remains constantly though less conspicuously operative when railroads have done their utmost to supplant water transportation.  The importance of inland waterways for local and foreign trade and intercourse has everywhere been recognized.  The peoples who have long maintained preeminence among the commercial and maritime nations of the world have owed this in no small part to the command of these natural highways, which have served to give the broad land basis necessary for permanent commercial ascendency.  This has been the history of England, Holland, France and the recent record of Germany.  The medieval League of the Rhine Cities flourished by reason of the Rhone-Rhine highway across western Europe.  The Hanseatic League, from Bruges all the way east