480 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
Acapulco on the Pacific coast of Mexico.1 It had been only in the course
of the nineteenth century that this one sixteenth-century thread of Trans-
pacific maritime commercial traffic had been multiplied in consequence
of the intervention of other Western Powers. From the eighteen-forties
onwards, the Western World's frontage on the American shores of the
Pacific had been extended northwards as a result of the overland expan-
sion of both the United States and Canada from coast to coast. The
Mexican port of Acapulco had been reinforced by San Francisco, Port-
land, Seattle, and Vancouver, while, on the East Asian shores of the
Ocean, the Spanish port of Manila, the Portuguese settlement at Macao,
and the Dutch commercial establishment on Deshima2 had been eclipsed
by Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tientsin, Nagasaki, Yokohama, and Dairen.
Yet, even when the one tenuous thread, linking Manila with the Spanish
dominions in the Americas, to which the Modern Western maritime
traffic across the Pacific had been confined for the first three hundred
years, had thus been transformed, during the nineteenth century, into
a multiple skein, the Oikoumend had still retained, for practical purposes,
the flat and finite shape that it had worn since the days of Ptolemy,
Eratosthenes, and Hecataeus, and indeed since the pre-Hellenic dawn
of Civilization.

In the Old World, all civilizations of all generations up to date had
risen and fallen within a festoon-shaped zone that had been slung like
a hammock between a north-eastern peg in Eastern Asia slightly to the
north of the 45th parallel of northern latitude and a north-western peg
in Western Europe slightly to the north of the 6oth parallel, with the
festoon's pendulous mid-point brushing the Equator at the Straits of
Malacca and sagging below it in Java. The divers sections of this
elongated home of the civilizations of the Old World had communicated
with one another through two socially and culturally conductive media
—a waterless inland sea, consisting of a chain of steppes and deserts
extending from Eastern Mongolia to the Western Sudan3 via the Sha-
miyah and the Desert of Sinai, and a chain of coastal and land-locked
waters extending from the Western Pacific to the Eastern Atlantic via
the Straits of Malacca, the portage linking the heads of the Persian Gulf
and Red Sea with the eastern extremity of the Mediterranean, and the
Straits of Gibraltar—and this pristine shape of the OikoumenS had not
been changed when the western terminal of the longitudinal water-route
had been pushed westward, across the relatively narrow waters of the
Atlantic, from the west coast of the Continent to the two large off-shore
islands of North America and South America, or when the portage
previously interrupting the continuity of the voyage between the Con-
tinent's Atlantic and Pacific coasts had been circumvented in AJD. 1498
by da Gama and breached in A.D. 1869 by de Lesseps. At the turn of the
nineteenth and twentieth, centuries of the Christian Era an OikoumenS
whose eastern selvage had been extended southward from the east coast

1 A.D. 1593 was the date at -which the eastern terminal of the Spanish annual Trans-
pacific voyage had been transferred to Acapulco from Callao. Officially the traffic had
been limited to this single sailing per annum. In practice there seems to have been a. good
deal of illicit Transpacific trade after, as well as before, this date.

2 See II, iL 332-3. s See I. i. 64 and III. iii. 7-8.