Influences of Geographic Environment eBook

Ellen Churchill Semple
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 789 pages of information about Influences of Geographic Environment.

Influences of Geographic Environment eBook

Ellen Churchill Semple
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 789 pages of information about Influences of Geographic Environment.

[Sidenote:  Swamps as places of refuge.]

Inaccessible to all except those familiar with their treacherous paths and labyrinthine channels, swamps have always afforded a refuge for individuals and peoples; and therefore as places of defense they have played no inconspicuous part in history.  What the Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and the cypress swamps of Louisiana were to the run-away slaves, that the Everglades of Florida have been to the defeated Seminoles.  In that half-solid, half-fluid area, penetrable only to the native Indian who poles his canoe along its tortuous channels of liquid mud, the Seminoles have set up their villages on the scattered hummocks of solid land, and there maintained themselves, a tribe of 350 souls, despite all efforts of the United States government to remove them to the Indian Territory.  The swamps of the Nile delta have been the asylum of Egyptian independence from the time King Amysis took refuge there for fifty years during an invasion of the Ethiopians,[738] to the retreat thither of Amyrtaeus, a prince of Sais, after his unsuccessful revolt against the Persian conqueror Artaxerxes I.[739] The Isle of Athelney among the marshes of the Parret River afforded a refuge to Alfred the Great and a band of his followers during the Danish invasion of Wessex in 878,[740] while the Isle of Ely in the Fenland was another point of sustained resistance to the invaders.  It was the Fenland that two hundred years later was the last stronghold of Saxon resistance to William of Normandy.  Here on the Isle of Ely the outlawed leader Hereward maintained Saxon independence, till the Conqueror at last constructed a long causeway across the marshes to the “Camp of Refuge."[741]

[Sidenote:  The spirit of the marshes.]

The spirit of the marshlands is the spirit of freedom.  Therefore these small and scarcely habitable portions of the land assume an historical dignity and generate stirring historical events out of all proportion to their size and population.  Their content is ethical rather than economic.  They attract to their fastnesses the vigorous souls protesting against conquest or oppression, and then by their natural protection sustain and nourish the spirit of liberty.  It was the water-soaked lowlands of the Rhine that enabled the early Batavians,[742] Ditmarscher and Frieslanders to assert and to maintain their independence, generated the love of Independence among the Dutch and helped them defend their liberty against the Spanish[743] and French.  So the Fenland of England was the center of resistance to the despotism of King John, who therefore fixed his headquarters for the suppression of the revolt at Lincoln and his military depot at Lynn.  Later in the conflict of the barons with Henry III, Simon de Montfort and other disaffected nobles entrenched themselves in the islands of Ely and Axholm, till the Provisions of Oxford in 1267 secured them some degree of constitutional rights.[744] Four centuries later the same spirit sent many Fenlanders to the support of Cromwell.

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Influences of Geographic Environment from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.