Hanuman Geography The World

PHILIPS' t

HUMAN- GEOGRAPHIES

PRIMARY SERIES
By JAMES FAIRGRIEVE, M.A., and ERNEST YOUNG, E.Sc.

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HUMAN GEOGRAPHIES

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HEMISPHERE.* 3s.
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'TKese three books are also obtainable bound, in one volume, entitled

I A COURSE IN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

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^ J-

FIRST EDITION
SECOND EDITION
Reprinted .
Reprinted . .
THIRD EDITION
Reprinted . .

. June, 1920

. . July, 1921
. January, 1922
. September, 1922
. . March, 1923
. September, 1923

FOURTH EDITION
FIFTH EDITION
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SIXTH EDITION
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January, 1924
- July, 1924
November, 1924
. June, 1925
January, 1926

...
Reprinted ..... July, 1926

, WANTED IN GJREAT BRITAIN BY GEORGE PHILIP AND SON, LIMITED, LONDON.

- * /"

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ) , PAGE

I. THE EMIGRANT r"" 1

II. THE INDIANS OF THE PLAINS \ . . .11

" III. THE FUR TRADERS . .... 22

IV. THE HIGHLANDS OF THE WEST ... 33

V. COLUMBUS AND THE WEST INDIES . . 39

VI. THE LOWLANDS OF THE AMAZON AND THE-

HIGHLANDS OF THE ANDES . .46

VII. THE ARGENTINE AND CATTLE ... 55

VIII. THE PATAGONIAN INDIANS .... 66

IX. THE WAY TO THE INDIES .... 75

f X. TEA CLIPPERS TO INDIA .... 83

XL THE WAY FROM INDIA TO-DAY . . . 87

XII. THE PYGMIES OF THE FOREST ... 95

XIII. THE NEGROES OF THE SUDAN AND THE

ZULUS OF SOUTH AFRICA. THE GRASS

LANDS .... ... 104

XIV. THE AEABS^OF THE DESERT . . . 112
XV. THE NILE AND EGYPT . 121

XVI. INDIA, WHERE TEA GROWS ..... 128

XVII. THE PEOPLES OF INDIA . , . . 137

XVIII. CHINA 150

XIX. JAP IN 166

XX. THE LAND WAY FROM CHINA . . . I'M.

XXI. STEPPES AND STEPPE DWELLERS . . . 181

XXII. THE CHRISTMAS PUDDING . . . 188

XXIII. THE Swiss ON THE ALPS . ., . 198

SXIV. THE SAILORS OF THE NORTH . . . 206

XXV. THE BRITISH EMPIRE . . . ^ . . 217

IUMAN GEOGRAPHY

THE

J. FAIJ3LGRIEVE, M.A., F.R.G.S.

1U5COGNISF.D TEACHER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON- IN THE THEOK7
AND PRACTICE OF EDUCATION; FORMERLY GEOGRAPHY MASTER

WILLIAM ELLIS' SCHOOL
AUTHOR OF " GEOGRAPHY AND WORLD POWER," ETC.

ERNEST YOUNG, B.Sc., F.R.G.S.

FORMERLY HEADMASTER OF THE COUNTY "

AUTHOR OF "A RATIONAL

WITH NUMEROUS MAPS AND

SIXTH E

LONDON

GKORGK PHILIP & SON, LTD, 32 FLEET STREET

.Liverpool : PHILIP, SON vSc NEPHEW, Ltd., 20 Church Street

1926

(All Kinhts Reserved)

IXTEODUCTOET NOTE

THIS book is intended for children of about the ages oi
11 or 12.. It covers the whole world in broad outline
and can be used independently of any other series of books,
but perhaps most effectively as an introduction to the
Human Geographies, Secondary Series. These latter
books deal with the world on a regional basis and in
considerable detail. The present book gives the frame-
work into which all other subsequent studies can be fitted,
This book follows the lines of the Human Geographies,
Primary Series inasmuch as it lays emphasis everywhere,
not on* place-names and statistics, but on the interaction
between man and his environment. It is full of pictures
of human life, lived under many varying conditions.

At the same time care has been taken that all essential
geographical ideas are introduced and that practically al]
important places and areas are referred to as settings tc
the pictures. By this means geographical fa^s are seei]
not only in their proper relations, but in their proper
perspective. An attempt has been made to introduce
geographical ideas gradually and in such a way tKafc a
picture of the world as a whole is eventually built np.

The authors have a wider aim than the mere teaching oi
a certain number of geographical facts. They believe that
only by a^ sympathetic understanding of the conditions
cinder which other peoples live can the modern demo-
cracies realise their own position in the scale of things,
and extend that tolerance towards other peoples which
they expect other peoples to extend towards themselves.
And this conception of the world as one big cooperative!
society canned be taught too early or too often.

HUMAN

THE WORLD

CHAPTER I

THE EMIGRANT

OCCASIONALLY we hear a great deal about
emigration, and there can be few of us who
have not some friend who has left the mother-
land to live in another part of the world. Men
emigrate for different reasons ; perhaps the
commonest is the desire to farm. In the
British Isles farms are few and dear. In
America, and in some other parts of the world,
land is plentiful and can be had for little or
nothing. * So* adrenturous spirits go off to seek
a life in the open air a hard life, it is true, but
one where hard work brings a due reward.

It is fortunate for those of us who stay at
home that so many of our countrymen wish to
go abroad, because we do not grow nearly
enough food for our own use and we require
abundant supplies from over the seas. The
most important food-stuff we import in large
quantities is wheat. And some of the biggest,
cheapest and most fertile wheat fends are in

2 THE. WORLD

America. Let us "Imagine", then, that one of
us wishes to go to America to grow wheat.

America is away to the west, and is separated
from Britain by miles of ocean, so^we must
make the journey by ship. Suppose we start
from Liverpool, 011 the estuary of the Mersey.*
This estuary is sheltered from all winds except
the north-west, and is cleaned out twice a day
"by the rush of a swift tide that rises as much as
26 feet at the mouth. Dredgers are always at

EMIGRANT VESSEL AT LIVERPOOL DOCKS.

%

work to help the tide to keep a deep clear channel.
There are 35 miles of quays at the port, and
there are huge warehouses where the goods that
go in and out of the port are stored.

The wheat lands of America lie near the
centre of the continent,, and before we can
reach them we must leave the ship and take to
the railway. There are several sea-routes by
which we may travel and several points afc
which we n?ay land.

THE EMIGRANT 3

Look at a globe and yo*a will see that the
shortest way of all is round the southern end
of the ice-clad island of Greenland, through
Hudson $trait and into Hudson Bay. But we
cannot go' by this route, for there are few steamers
to Hudson Bay and no railways from Hudson
Bay to the wheat lands. Hudson Strait and
Hudson Bay and the northern seas generally
are frozen over for the greater part of the year.
The farther north we go the colder is the climate

FlG. 1. MAP TO SHOW THAT THE SHORTEST WAY TO THE WHEAT

LANDS IS BY HUDSON BAY.
/*

and the longer the period of the year during
which the sea is frozen. At the North Pole
there is ice for twelve months. In Hudson
Strait there is ice for nine months, from
November to July.

An easier way is by the River St. Lawrence.

If we choose this route we pass Newfoundland

nearly 2000 miles from Liverpool, about five

; days after we lose sight of the Irish coast.

Newfoundland lies at the entrance to the Gulf

Quebe
Montreal^

4 THE WORLD

of Sfc, Lawrence, wiiere the entrance is so wide
' that it looks like an arm of the sea. After a
while, however, the gulf narrows and densely
wooded hills are seen on either sidp. Little
white villages with tinned church spires and
dark woods drive past, and presently the boat is *
drawn up in the dock at
Quebec.

The shores of the St. Law-
rence are also frozen over in
winter for three months, and
so we should be more likely
to sail to a port still farther
south. But farther south a
new difficulty appears. It is
easy enough to land on the
east coast of America, but it
is not so easy to get inland,
for, not far from the coast,
there is a long stretch of hilly
land the Appalachian Moun-
tains. It was these mountains

,,,. ..-,_ w ^ uw that ke P* the earl ,7 settlers
THE APPALACHIANS AND from reaching the plains The

THE MOHAWK GAP. , -. . X --.*iv~>

land is not really very high,
but it was densely covered with forests and
infested with wild animals and wilder Indians.
The only possible roads were along the valleys
of the rivers and the smaller streams, and they
were mostly difficult. But at one point, and ;
one point oniy, the mountains are cut through

FIG. 2.

THE EMIGRANT 5

from north to south by the^rivers* Hudson and
Richelieu., giving an easy route f*om the St.
Lawrence to the ice-free sea. And at one
point on he Hudson, the valley of the Mohawk
river give's another easy road to the west and

the western plains.

At the door of these only easy wavs across
the Appalachians stands the city of New York,
and because it is at the
door, it has become the
principal city of North
America ; more than
half the foreign trade of
the United States passes
through it. As we sail
into the harbour we are
surrounded by forests of
masts and steamboat fun-
nels; steamers are pass-
ing out laden with grain,
meat,tolaacco,per6leum, -^ Lower Bay
and many other things. FlG ' 3 "~ PLAN OF NEW YORK -
In front of us rise huge buildings called
" sky scrapers " ; much of New York is built
at the southern end of Manhattan Island, and
as the space is small the buildings have to
climb heavenwards instead of spreading out
sideways. In the city itself we shall find miles
of streets of shops, some of them small, but

some of them big enough to employ several
hundred clerks and shop-assistants^ The people

8 THE WORLD -

who lire in the ciy have to live in flats, and
because land is so valuable, there are no froix
gardens or backyards, and the only playground.!
for the children are the streets. T^o escape
the crowded city tens of thousands of mar
travel ten to forty miles into the country everj
day. Part of the journey is made upon elevatec
railways that are raised high over head on iror
columns.

We leave New York by train and pass througl:
the Hudson-Mohawk gap only to find tb.a.1
something else is in the direct way a group oJ
five enormous lakes. To avoid these the train
may make for the southern end of lake Michigan.,
after which we are free to travel north-west,
west, or south-west as we please. You can
see from a map that all the roads from New
England and from the states round about New
York must go through this point before they
can pass round the Great Lakes and away to
the west. Here then we should expect to find
another big city, and we find what we expect.
It is Chicago, the greatest railway centre in
the world.

From Chicago we make our way to Winnipeg.,
in the centre of the Canadian wheat fields.
After leaving the train we go to the Government
Land Office and are shown a plan like that in.
Fig. 4. It is divided into blocks, six miles
square, and is called a township. Each town-
ship is divided into thirty-six sections, and eacli

THE EMIGRAXT 7

section into quarter-sections, ff a man be.

over eighteen years of age, lie can* choose any
even-numbered quarter-section he pleases, and
it will bq given to him for nothing if he will live
on it . and farm it for three years. Sections
11 and 29 are, however, kept to provide money
for the schools that will be wanted later on,
and Sections S and 26 belong to the Hudson
Bay Company.

We nnd our quarter-section, with the help

PLAN OF TOWNSHIP
DIVIDED INTO SECTIONS

31

32

33

34

35

36

30

29

28

27

26

25

19

20

21

22

23

24

18

17

16

15

14

13

7

S

9

10

J!

12

6

5

4

3

2

\

PLAN OF SECTION

DIVIDED INTO

QUARTER SECTIONS

Township 6 Miles Square

FlG. 4. A TOWNSHIP

of a guide, and then the pleasure and the
trouble begin. The first thing is to build a
wooden house and put in a stove with which
to warm it in winter when the weather will be
very cold. Then we dig the garden and put
up the fence, after which we set to work upon
the farm itself.

Ploughing begins in the autumn and
"goes on steadily until stopped by frost in
November or December. In April the land is

8

THE WORLD

seeded with wheat? after which the ploughing
is completed and the oats and otlier crops put
in. Then the farmer waits for the harvest.,
busying himself meanwhile with his dajiry cattle
and the cultivating of the potatoes and other
roots, or in breaking up fresh prairie lands. In.
July the hay is cut, dried in the sun, and stored
in the barns or in stacks. If many cattle are
kept, the green Indian corn is cut and stored^
to be pressed and used as winter food for the
milch cows. As the wheat begins to head out,

ie^...^ . <, -/^ """''WWibWfM

. tw*lsii--c asi/ A .;

"4*^
...... ,,..., i .^sSsSstiS

' ''*"""" ^ ^Vxi,..,,,,,,.,^,,.,,...^.

CANADIAN WHEAT FIELDS.

the western farmer casts many -an ..anxious
glance at the weather probabilities,. ..for occasion-
ally a late night-frost comes at this season and
damages his crop. In August the wheat is ripe
and the harvest begins. The grain is rapidly
cut and bound into sheaves by machines called
binders. In the east it is stored in barns to bo
threshed later, but the crop is too large for this
in the west, so it is hauled to a stack and piled
ready for the threshers. Just before cuttino-
the western ^eat-fields present a lovely picture'

THE EMIGRANT 9

As far as the eye can reacfe, the "grain waves
and ripples to the warm summer breeze like a
sea of gold.

" As soon as the grain has been cut and
stacked, domes the threshing a most important
part of the work. In the west the people live
far apart, so a threshing gang goes with the
mill. They sleep in a large conveyance some-
what, like a car, which is drawn from place to
place by the traction engine which draws the
threshing machine and supplies the driving
power when the mill is at work. As the hum
of the threshing machine begins the scene is a
lively one and worth the watching. Every
man has his appointed place, and the stack of
grain grows rapidly smaller as the pile of straw
heaps up and the bags are filled with bright
clean grain. As soon as threshing is over, the
farmer hauls the grain to the nearest railway
station, where it is sold and stored in the
elevator^ ready, for shipment to the east over
the Canadian Pacific Railway." *

It will be seen that we must expect to be
kept pretty busy throughout the whole year.
And the women will have to work as hard or
even harder. They can rarely get domestic
servants and have to do all their own house
work cleaning, cooking, and baking. They are
far from any doctor, and must be nurse and
, physician. These are no shops, and they must

* Canada, E. Peacock. *

10 WORLD

be ready tc make their own clothes and make
fc or repair these of the men as well. And in the
busiest times they must help on the farm itself,
tend the chickens, milk the cows, hpe, make
hay, and even drive the plough. The* wife of a,
Canadian farmer works a great deal harder
than any domestic servant in the mother-land.

As we stand upon the land that is to be
ours and think that it cost nothing, that we
are to live a free life in the fresh air, the life of
the wilderness, and that perhaps in due time
we shall have made a fortune, it all sounds very
attractive. But the work is hard, and if we
are not active, strong, and industrious we shall
soon be disappointed. The cold of the coming
winter will be severe. There are no neighbours
near at hand and we shall suffer loneliness. If
we want to travel we shall find few roads and
most of those bad ones. There will be no amuse-
ments such as we know in towns ; there will be
little comfort and few friendly calls by visitors.
But we shall be free men and women, and
freedom is worth a great deal to some people.

CHAPTER II

THE ISDIA2sS OF THE PLAINS

AT the time when the Spaniards discovered
America, the continent was inhabited by various
native tribes from north to south and east to
west. The natives lived chiefly near to water,
but many of them roamed over the plains,
hunting and fighting. Except for a few in the
north they all belonged to various tribes of
Red Indians, and these tribes were grouped
togther into nations. Some were savages, others
were barbarians. They did not all live alike :
there were fishermen and hunters, and there
were a fe^v who had learned to till the ground.

In the centre of North America where the
land is flat and w r here the farmers we spoke of
in the last chapter now raise miles and miles of
golden grain, there was then nothing but grass
which varied very much in length. In places
it was so short that it looked like velvet ;
elsewhere it might be six or seven feet high.
On these grassy plains or prairies there were
S ew trees, except along the watercourses. During
the winter the land is so cold th$t the rivers

n

12 THE WORLD

freeze and snow falls to a considerable depth.
In the spring the snow melts, the grass covers
the earth as with a carpet, upon which great
masses of red, blue, . and yellow flowers weave
bright and fanciful patterns. The rain ceases
in the early part of the summer and then the
flowers wither and the grass turns brown.

Upon the prairies lived the bison, in such
numbers that they often made big black patches"
on the landscape. The bison is a very curious -
looking animal The shoulders and chest are

HERD OF BISON".

massive and strong, but the hind quarters are
small and smooth and quite out of proportion
to the rest of the animal. The hind legs are
small and stand close together; the forelegs
are thick, short, and far apart. The head is
huge, hangs low down, and is covered with long
shaggy hair matted together .and hiding the
face. Out of the hair peep the tips of the
crescent-shaped horns. There is a big hair-
covered hump at the front end of the body and
a short tail with a tuft on it at the other
end.

THE INDIANS OF THE PLAINS 13

There were other animals on* the prairie
besides the bison ; amongst these were the
antelope, the prairie-dog, and various kinds of
deer.

The Indians who lived on the plains
depended on these animals for their exist-
ence. They made their
clothes from the skins of
the deer and the mountain
goat. The skins were
washed in wood ashes and
water and the hair scraped
off. They were then pegged
out on the ground or on
a frame and well rubbed
with* animals' brains. Finally
they were carefully scraped
and pressed with a bone knife
and held for several days in
the smoke from a w r ood fire.
At the end of this time they
were soft and waterproof.
All this work was done by

, i

the women.

The usual garments were a long coat, long
leggings reaching from the ankle to the hips,
and soft shoes or moccasins. They were com-
monly decorated with beads and porcupine
quills. If a man had killed any enemies he
stuck a few tufts of their hair in his leggings
and his sleeves, and if he were a great warrior

B

14

WORLD

he painted 4he story of his wonderful deeds

upon his coat.

The dress of the women was very much like

that of the men, but the cloak was longer.

Both sexks usually
possessed a big robe
of bison skin for use
in cold weather.

The constant pur-
suit of animals pre-
vented the Indians
from building stone

or wooden houses.
They were obliged
to have a house
that they could carry with them on their never-
ending wanderings. This was the wigwam, a
kind of tent made of poles and skins. The
poles were spread out at the base, but they met

A RED INDIAN WIGWAM.

A RED INDIAN WOMAN AND HER CHILDREN ON THE MARCH.

and were tied together at the top. The skin
covering was often ornamented with paintings
showing the brave deeds of the man who lived
in the tent and with tufts of hair from the

THE INDIANS OF THE PLAINS 15

scalps of his enemies. There were no roads, and
carts with wheels could not be used, but when
the camp was moved, a horse was harnessed
to the poles of the wigwam ; the skins were
placed on the poles and the women and children
sat on top of the bundles.

The weapons of the Indian were wooden
clubs, round shields made of bison hide, bows,
arrows with stone points, and tomahawks or stone
axes. To-day they have guns and steel knives.

The chief food was the flesh of animals,
birds, and fishes. Deer, bears, caribou, bison,
antelope, fish, oysters, turkeys, grouse, and
pigeons gave a fairly good choice of animal food.
Then there were berries at certain seasons-
raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries and
such fruits as the wild cherry, small plums and
walnuts, while the maple provided sweet juice
and sometimes sugar.

The flesh of the bison was the commonest
food and jit was eaten in tender juicy steaks, in
long dry strips, and as a fatty mess called
pemmican. Pemmican is made by drying strips
of bison meat and then pounding it up into a
solid mass with equal quantities of melted
fat. The tongue of the bison was the special
dainty and the animals were slaughtered in
hundreds simply for the sake of this tit-bit ;
the rest of the body was left as food for birds of
prey.

Until the Europeans brought tjie horse to

16 THE WORLD

America that anirpal was unknown ami when
the Indians wanted to move on land they hud
to go on foot. On their winter excursions,
when the ground was covered with snow, 1- un-
used snow-shoes. A snow-shoe is somethu ig li ko
a tennis racket but much larger; tho lai^e
surface supports the wearer and prevents him
sinking into the snow.

For journeys on the rivers they had various
kinds of canoe, ; the chief kind was made of

A <2ANOE MADE OF BIRC'II - 1 1 A It K .

birch-bark fastened to a light wooden frame.
It was lined with thin strips of cedar wood, and
was both paddled and steered by one oar,

After the introduction of tin*, //or.sr 1 he.
Indians became clever horsernou and used (his
animal not only for hunting and riding, hut also
to drag their wigwams and families from one<
camp to anQther.

THE INDIANS OF THE PLAINS 17

means of the canoes the Indians travelled
in many directions and for long distances,,
because there are many navigable lakes and
rivers in North America. If waterfalls or rapids
interfered with the journey, the light canoes
were carried along the portages or trails that
led from one safe piece of water to another.

From the St. Law-
rence they could get
to lake Ontario.
Betweenlakes Ontario
and Erie are the
famous Niagara Falls,
a mile wide and 160
feet high. These are
avoided now by a
canal, but the Indians
had to make a port-
age. At the western
end of lake Erie they
turned te the north
and reached lake
Huron. Another way
of reaching this lake
from the St. Lawrence was to go up the Ottawa
river and make a portage over to a river that
flowed down to lake Huron. At the north-western
end of this lake there is a rapid river, but canals
to-day enable a ship to pass forward and arrive
in lake Superior, a lake as big as Ireland. From
lake Michigan, which is really part of lake

v\

INDIAN MAKING A PORTAGE.

IS

WOBLD

r Huron, a portage ^ould be made to the Illinois
river which flows to the Mississippi.

It was possible also to paddle up the Nelson
river to lake Winnipeg, cross this, lake and
enter the Red river in the heart of what is
now the golden wheat country. The river

gradually gets nar-
rower and a little
lake is reached.
Prom this lake there
is a stream leading
to another small lake
and thence into the
Minnesota. Men

could descend the
Minnesota, carr y 11115
the canoe past rapids
and shallow places
and, in due time.

near the great trad-
ing town of St. Pan!

_ wje^kvwsss, y=g ^^ .(.<<.

*IG O. 3UP TO SHOW THE CENTRAL UllCC Oil tllC Mi.SS.LS-

" TH AMERICA * sippi they could sail
almost anywhere on the vast plains.

A x-v -r- _ JI _ . 1 ^ . -^

At sp

fl* f ? f Paul 7 we could ^ow travel by a <,,,,(,
flat-bot-Lomed river-steamer and begin a, iotu'ncv
do^-n one of the most crooked riverain thoworM

i^lT the river turns and twist - : ;

tLatitmakas a journey of 1300 miles bctvvvcn

THE INDIANS OF THE PLAINS 19

two points that are, in a straight line, only 625
miles apart. The Mississippi receives over fifty
rivers which are navigable by steamboats, and
hundreds that are navigable by ordinary boats.
The area it drains would hold the greater part
of Europe, and nearly all of it is fertile. The
river brings
down millions
of tons of mud
and deposits
it near the
mouth, where,
as there is no
tide to sweep it
away, it forms
a delta.

The water
passages
through the
delta are often
shallow - and
made danger-
ous by banks
of sand and
mud. Before dredgers were used, sailors avoided
these dangerous passages and landed 011 an
arm of the Gulf of Mexico at a point where a
big bend in the river brings the river and the
sea quite close together.

On the bend is New Orleans. The river at
this point is too wide for a bridge and the

] S halloa/ Wata
i ". ] POOD Water

FIG. G.~

-MAP TO SHOW TUT DFLTA O3'" THE
MlSSISbU'PI.

20

THE WOKLD

, trains are carried r- across on ferries. French
names to the streets, French houses in the
town, and the nse of the French language by
many people remind us that New Orleans was
once French. The French came in canoes via
the St. Lawrence and lake Michigan and then

CHICAGO STOCKYARDS.

by the Illinois river to the Mississippi. AH
Montreal stands at the northern door, and
JNew lork at the eastern door, so New Orleans
stands at the southern door to the continent

Just as the canoe has given place to tho
steamer and the Indian to the white mar, so to
bzson has gx.en way to cattle. The cattle arc

THE INDIANS OF THE PLAINS 21

reared on the Great Plains* at the foot of the
Rocky Mountains, and are sent to the eastern
parts of the States, there to be eaten or to be
sent still farther east to Europe, where popula-
tion is dense and meat much in demand. The
animals are exported alive or dead, and the
most central spot for collecting them is Chicago.
The railways from all the coast ports can reach
this place more easily than any other, and
Chicago is the biggest meat market in the world.
More than 150,000 animals are daily turned
into beef, mutton, and pork. The stockyards
contain miles of streets and over fifty miles
of food troughs. The meat is exported frozen
or turned into meat extracts. Margarine is
made from the fat, buttons from the bones,
combs from the horns and hoofs, and leather
from the hides.

CHAPTER III

THE FUB TBADEBS

WE have seen that North America was peopled
chiefly by Indians who got their living fox-
hunting. " Part of the old hunting grounds IK
now covered with wheat fields and cattlo
ranches, but the northern half is still the homo
of the hunter.

Owing to the intense cold of the winter -tho
animals that live in Canada have very thick
skins and a covering of warm fur. White men,
however, set great value by this fur on account*
of its beauty and warmth, and there are many
men, both Indians and whites, who spend their
lives hunting and trapping the wild f upbearing
animals of the north.

The hunting grounds differ in their climate,
their vegetation, and the animals they produce.
If we begin in the far north, on the shores of tho
frozen sea, we find men and animals who depend
entirely on the sea for their living. The people
who live in this frozen wilderness are the
Eskimo, and they get everything they need from
the sea, for, though it freezes on the surface,
it does not freeze below, and in the unfrozen

22

THE FUR TRADERS

23

a/fcer there are always plenty of fish, and plenty .
"fche little creatures on which fish feed,
that we think of as living on land

AN ESKIMO ET HIS KAYAK.

to the sea. There is the polar bear, for
3"fca/nce. It can walk, but it can swim much

The seal is much more at
in the water than on the
mcL The whale, wiiich looks like
fish, is not really a fish at all.
Tbreathes like a land animal, and
tiially has legs, though these
n. "be seen only in the skeleton,
.most* the only land animal is
o fox ; but it lives on birds that
3<3L on fish, so that the fox, too,
a,lly gets its food from the sea.
The hunter of the icy wastes
Eskimo. He eats seal,
, and whale. From the fat
-fclxese animals he gets oilf or light ESKIMO HARPOONS.
d lieat ; from their skins he gets his clothes.
LO only wood he ever sees is that which is drifted
from other lands. He husats in canoes

I (

,/

1

24

THE WOELD

made of whalebone, or driftwood and covered
with skins. His chief weapon is. the harpoon.
made of driftwood and fitted with a sharp point
of bone or stone. The chief fur-bearing animal

ESKIMO HUNTING THE SEAi.

of this region is the seal, though the skins of
the Arctic fox and the polar bear are also valu-
able. In summer, when the sea is open, the
Eskimo goes out in a canoe to hunt the seal, but

ESKIMO CREEPING OUT OF HIS SNOW^OUSM.

in winter, when the sea is frozen over, ho lies

by the side of the holes where the seals col up

to breathe, and kills them with a spear P

South of the frozen ocean is a district called

THE FUR TRADERS 25

tundra in Europe and Asia^ but known as the
Barren Grounds in North America. In the
winter it is frozen into a barren wilderness ; in
the summer it thaws into a swamp and is then
alive with flowers and mosquitoes. The chief
plants are mosses and lichens which do not die
in winter and are therefore available for any
animals that can manage to face the icy gales
of that season. Almost the only land animal
that can remain on the tundra at all seasons is
the music-ox, which finds its food by scraping
away the thin layer of snow. It is stoutly
built, and is covered with long brown hair that
reaches nearly to the ground. Beneath this is
the^ thick layer of fur for which it is hunted.
The fur is shed in summer, and therefore the
hunter must set about his business in the
winter, when the weather and the loneliness of
the region are at their worst. Only the hardiest,
the strongest, and the most experienced Indians
ever go .to the Barren Grounds in the winter,
and to be a musk-ox hunter is the ambition of
all those who think themselves possessed of
unusual courage, skill, and endurance. The
hunters travel on snow-shoes and take all their
equipment on dog-drawn sledges. As there are
no trees on the tundra, there is no wood for
fuel, and sufficient supplies of either oil or wood
must be taken if hot food or drink is required.

Another animal of the tundra is the caribou,
a kind of reindeer. But the carifyou, like most

26 THE WORLD

of the other land inhabitants of the tundra,
' leaves in the winter, as it is unable to $tand the
cold.

South of the tundra is a belt of pine forest
stretching from Newfoundland and Labrador to
Alaska. It is 600 miles broad and over 3000
miles wide, and is one of the biggest forests in

$

v

MLJ 'Coniferous Forests Jv'-X| Tundra.

FIG. 7. KJTB FORESTS AND TUNDRA OB" NORTH AMERICA.

the world. In aU this area there are only
about eight different kinds of trees, most of
which are coniferous trees with needle-shaped
leaves. The soil is poor, the winters cold, and
the supply of moisture small. But as the coni-
ferous trees grow slowly the poor soil does not
matter much.. The water taken in at the roots

THE FUR TRADERS 27

cannot easily escape on account of the small
thick-skilled leaves, so that the small amount
of moisture also does not matter much, and
during the winter no moisture is needed, for the
tree then* stops growing. This forest is the
home of thousands of valuable animals and is
the real home of the man who traps for his
living.

The animals of the far north obtain their
food from the sea ; the animals of the forest
live on plants and, fortunately, the trees of
the Canadian forest keep their leaves all the
year round, so that there is always food. No
matter how deep the snow, the branches are
never quite covered and their berries, nuts, and
twigs are available all the winter. The forest,
too, gives shelter, and it is therefore sought by a
number of animals that live in other places in
the summer. The caribou goes to the tundra
in the summer but is at home in the forest in
the winter. It cannot go into dense thickets, as
it must have room, for its broad antlers ; it
lives therefore in the more open spaces. It
cats mosses and lichens and does not depend
on grass, of which there is practically none in
the forest. It can live either on the tundra or
in the forest, for in both places it can find its food.

Then there are the bears, brown, black, and
grizzly, which can climb trees and eat large
amounts of vegetable food. Some of them are
particularly fond of pine seeds, but will eat fish

28 THE WORLD

and even insects. Bears, like caribou, are
usually shot.

The animals specially hunted for their fur
are the ermine, sable, fox, mink, and beaver.
The beaver is the most interesting of them all.
It lives in the numerous streams that thread
the forest, and it fells trees and dams up rivers.
The trapper goes alone or with a few friends,
and when he arrives at the hunting grounds he
carefully examines the creeks and the streams.
He puts Ms traps in the runs, hiding them under
water and attaching them by stout chains to
bushes on the banks. A float is fastened to
each trap to show where it is if the beaver
manages to carry it away. Early in the morning
the captured animals are killed and skinned,
and the skins are dried and packed in bundles
of ten or twenty. If the water is frozen over
the homes of the beaver are destroyed and dogs
are sent to discover the retreats of the frightened
animals. At a spot indicated by the^dog, the
hunter cuts a hole in the ice and pokes about
with a stick to see if the beaver is there. If it is,
the man thrusts his bare arm into the hole,
drags the beaver out on to the ice and kills
it with a spear.

The life of the trapper is a hard and dangerous
one. It is true that most of the creatures he
hunts are small, but even some of these small
creatures can be fierce when irritated, and the
bear and the lynx are big and powerful enough

THE FUR TRADERS 29

to be quite formidable enemies. In summer big
black clouds of mosquitoes attack him ; animals
like the wolverine steal his bait and his prey ;
in winter the cold is intense and food is scarce.
Houses are few and far between, and in time of
trouble there is no one at hand to help. To lose
the way or become benighted in the lonely forest
is almost certain death. Very often the trapper
has no shelter but the shanty that he erects for
himself out of a number of poles and pieces of
bark. One side of the shanty is left open, and
in front of the opening the fire is built that
keeps him warm.

The trapper, whether Indian or white, sets
his traps in a long line perhaps ten to fifteen miles
in length, and must visit them regularly to bring
home the catch and re-set the traps with fresh
bait. The Indian trapper wears, to protect
himself from the cold, a large leather coat, a
rat-skin cap, blue cloth leggings, large moccasins,
two or tl^ree pairs of blanket socks, and deer-
skin mittens.

He carries in his belt an axe and a large
hunting knife, and over his shoulder his gun or
rifle. He walks on snow-shoes and drags a small
hand sledge behind him. This sledge is a flat
slip of wood from five to six feet long and one
foot broad, and is turned up at one end. It is
extraordinarily light, and Indians invariably
use it when visiting their traps for the purpose
of dragging home the animals or .game they

o

so

WORLD

have caught. The trapper walks over the deep
snow with long, regular firm steps, winds his
way through the steins of the surrounding trees
or pushes aside the smaller bushes. Tiiongh
there be no track he goes swiftly forward as sure
of his way as if a broad road lay before him. lie

AN INDIAN TRAPPER WITH SLEDGE.

moves on for miles examining the newlv mado
tracks of the animals ; suddenly a noiso attract
his attention and a smile passes over his faro
for the noise comes from one of his tr.ap.s, and
he knows that something has been kuhf,
He enters the bushes, finds perhaps a ba,,5r,,I
black fox m the snare, hits it over the ncwo will

THE FUR TRADERS 31

the handle of his axe and ties the dead body
to his sledge. In a few minutes more the trap
is re-set, and so covered with snow that it is
almost impossible to tell that anything is there.

During the winter and early spring the
trapper stores his furs, but when the ice begins
to melt he sets oS to carry his goods to one of
the stations belonging to the Hudson Bay
Company. From trapping ground to trading
post is often a hundred miles or more. Some-
times five or six men travel together and pick
up their wives and children en route. Then the
women help to draw the sledge, and the babies
are cradled on the bundles of furs.

When they arrive at the station the trapper
exchanges the skins. All the bartering is done
by reckoning in beaver skins ; so many martens,
so many foxes, etc., are equal to one beaver.
For each " beaver " the Indian gets a brass
token which he carries to the store. There, for
one * c beaver " he can get two fish-hooks or
one pound of shot ; five " beavers " will pur-
chase an axe or one pound of gunpowder, while
a pistol costs ten, a blanket twelve, and a gun
twenty-five.

At the post there is a house for the manager
with a well-kept yard and fence, a huge gate,
a small garden, and some outbuildings for cows
and chickens. At the store there is everything
from pork and fish-hooks to sewing machines
and gramophones.

32 THE WORLD

It *ome centra^ point stands the tall flag-
-faff from which the Hudson Bay flag is flown
^enever a visitor arrives or departs. The
f'oippanv controls a number of posts, each usually
near the mouth of a river. At every station
there are a manager, foreman and from two to
twenty servants. Most people are to be met
with in the summer, when the Indians come in
to barter the furs. During the winter the
place is almost deserted.

The managers are usually chosen when quite
young men and are sent out on the annual ship.
They"get no holiday for eight years, and not
always then. Twenty-five years' service with-
out leave is not at all uncommon. The .pay
is small, but most of it can be saved, for the
Company provides houses, food, and servants, *
and there is little on which to spend money in
these out-of -the- world stations.

The emigrant who grows wheat in the
prairies or tends cattle on the drier plains
farther west may have a hard and lonely life,
but the emigrant who seeks his living trapping
the fur-bearing animals of the cold north, has a
much lonelier and harder life than either of the
others.

CHAPTER IV

THE HIGHLANDS OF THE WEST

WHEN our supposed emigrant wanted to enter
North America he found on the eastern side a
highland barrier, the Appalachian Mountains.
Had he tried to enter North America from the
western side, he would have found a highland
barrier very much longer and higher than
anything in the east, and without any easy
way from one side to the other. It is an
enormous plateau more than a mile high and
a thousand miles wide. The eastern edge of
the plateau is the Rocky Mountains., and it
stretches from the cold lands of the far north
to the .hot lands of Central America. The
western edge of the plateau is also composed
of high mountains the Sierra Nevada and the
Cascade Mountains. Between the mountains
on the east and those on the west is the plateau,
broadest in that part known as the Or eat
Basin.

What a person sees who crosses the Rockies
depends very much on whereabouts he tries to
get across. If he begins the ascent at some
point in the United States, he smarts from a

3S

34

THE WORLD

grassy plain. A little higher up ho conies to
forests of trees that have broad. J oaves, such
as the oak. Higher still would ho the forests
of trees having needle-shaped leaves like t lu-
pines and firs; then there would eoine small
bushes, and, finally, nothing but snow and ice.

Having got to
the top of the
Hookies he would
descend into the
Groat Basin, so
called because it is
shut in by ridges
on all sides. The
word /WA'msuggvst s
a hollow, but. this
basin is really a
high plateau
crossed as well as
bordered by moun-
tains. Tiro ( Jreat
Basin is a very
dry region. Most

FlQ. 8. MAP TO SHOW THE HIGH GROUND of t,1 \ P W 1 I H 1 ^ t>t \ m I *
IN THE WEST OF NORTH AMKHICA. W IIIUH l,OMU>

from the land and

are dry to begin with, and any winds, no
matter from which direction they come, must
first cross the mountain edges. In crossing
they are cooled and deposit their moisture
as rain before they get over. There are
vast stretchos of the Great Basin where one

THE HIGHLANDS OF THE WEST 35

can ride for miles and ne^er see a busli or
tree.

On the farther side the traveller would
descend the steep slopes of the Sierra Nevada
and enter a deep valley, the Calif omian valley.
On the other side _, _____ %

of this valley and /

close to the sea are
the Coast Ranges.

If, instead of
climbing the
mountains, a man
travelled north
from the prairies
he . would pass
through belts of
plants very much
like those he had
reached by going
up the sides of the
mountains. North
of the grasslands
he would find
forests, and still
farther north the
wildernessof snow. MOTOT SI * DCWALD '
But he would have to travel many hundred
miles along the earth to get from the prairies
to the snows, whereas by going up the side
of the mountains he can reach the snows in
a few miles. *

ROCKIES '

36 THE WORLD

The west is certainly not a place where
we should expect "to find many people living.
In the north there are a few hunters, and in
the dry south there are a few Indians who
are quite different from the Indians who used
to lire on the plains.

Here rain seldom falls, and the Indians
live in houses made of stones and sun-dried
bricks. The houses are called Tiogans and the
bricks adobe. There is only one room in the
hogan, but it is fairly comfortable, for it is
wind-proof and cold-proof, and a fire can be
lit in the middle. The adobe houses are, if
possible, built near to good pasturage and
water supply. The building of a new house
is an easy matter, and the people can move
about as they need, perhaps almost as easily
as the dwellers in tents. This particular tribe
of Indians raises sheep and goats and a small
amount of agricultural produce. Their real
wealth is sheep. From sheep they get food
and wool, and the wool they make into beautiful
blankets, which they exchange with the white
man for many other things that they need.

The most important part of the western
region is, however, the valley of California. It is
filled with soil washed down from the mountains
and is very fertile. The northern part of the
Western Highlands is in the belt of westerly
winds and gets rain all the year round ; but
in the valley of California rain falls only in

THE HIGHLANDS OF THE WEST 37
the winter The summer is dry, warm, and
sunny This ls the kind o! climate that is
suitable for fruit, and the valley is one
ot the greatest fruit-growing districts in the
world.

There are acres and acres of orange and
lemon groves, peach, plum, and olive orchards,
and millions of grape vines. There are also

.- . .^

^"^$=^^^

A FRUIT FARM IN CALIFORNIA.

vast fields filled with almonds, walnuts, figs,
apricots and many other varieties of fruit,
Fields, hundreds of acres in extent, are covered
with trays filled with apricots, peaches, and
figs drying in the sun, plums changing into
prunes and grapes into raisins. Because the
air is hot and dry the fruit dries without de
caying. Thousands of pounds of juried fruit

38 THE WORLD

including great quantities of raisins, are
every year to other parts of the world.

Only a few years ago these fertile farms*
were desert wastes. The soil was rich enough.*
but there was no water. By canals and ditcher
streams have been led from the mountains and
the desert has given way to a land of plenty
dotted with prosperous homes.

We saw that there was only one easy way
through the eastern highlands, and that at th.o
entrance to it stood the port of New York*
On the west there is also only one break in
the Coast Range all the way from Vancouver
to the end of the peninsula of Lower California,-
Everywhere else roads would have to, crosss
these mountains to get to the sea ; here they need
not do so. The railways from the north, south,
and east come to this place to get to the Pacific,
and here is San Francisco. It has a magnificent/
harbour called the Golden Gate.

Not many people live among the western
highlands, for the land is high, dry, and far
from the markets of Europe. The California**
valley is the largest area fit for settlement, and
its biggest city is San Francisco. Wherever lifo
is difficult, few people will care to live, and that,
is why the north and the west of America have *
such a small population. But in the east and
the south-east, where men can "live well," aro
most of the inhabitants of North America.

CHAPTER V

COLUMBUS AND THE WEST INDIES

THE emigrants who wish to cross the Atlantic
to-day, whether to trap animals, to grow wheat,
or to rear cattle, find no difficulty in making
the journey. But this was not always the
case ; there was a time when the ocean was
looked upon with fear, and the sailor or fisher-
man who found himself so far from land that
he could see nothing but sea and sky was apt
to fancy that he was lost. There were even
people who said that if a man went far enough
across the water he would come to the edge
of the world and fall off. The first sailors who
chose to go so far from land that they could
no longer see it were men of real courage.

One of these was Columbus. For many
years men had gone, partly by land and partly
by water, to seek the riches of the Indies and
bring them back to trade with in Europe. But
much of this trade was interfered with by the
Arabs, and men. set their minds to work to
discover new ways to the East. Columbus
believed what no one else did, that the world was
round, and that if ships sailed to the west they
would, in time, come to the lands of the east,,

39

40

THE WORLD

to the Indies, so called because they were Hear-
to India.

As Columbus was not a rich man he was not>
able to hire a vessel or crew with which to
make the attempt to find the new route. HO
went to the King of Portugal, but got no help
from him ; then he went to the King of Spam,,
and this king promised to find ships and money*

for the expedition on.
^" ^ condition that all new

\.^ lands that might be dis-
covered should belong to
him. Columbus agreed
and got three ships with,
their crews, provisions.,
and tackle.

He set sail from the
south of Spain in 1492
and crossed the ocean
in a direction that Is
best understood by
reference to the map in.
Fig. 9. This shows the route he took and.
the winds he met with. He first sailed south
because the winds from the south of Spain
blow in that direction. Then the vessels wero
headed towards the south-west because the
wind_s were from the north-east. The steady
winds carried him quickly and smoothly west-
wards, very much to the distress of the crew,
who begapi to fear that they would never bo

OLD VESSEL OF THE TIME OP
COLUMBUS.

(30LUMBUS AND THE WEST INDIES 41

able to sail home again against such constant
winds. The men tried to persuade him to
turn back, but he soothed their fears, and, in
two months, he reached the other side of the
Atlantic, where no one had ever been before.

The ships of Columbus were sailing ships,
and whether they went fast or slow, or whether
they went backwards or forwards, all depended
on the wind. The winds from the north-east,

Q m 9. MAP TO SHOW HOW COLUMBUS WENT TO THE WEST INDIES
AND CAME HOME AGAIN.

that blew him swiftly across the Atlantic, are
steady winds that blow all the year round and
almost seem to tread out a path for themselves ;
hence they are called the Trade Winds. There
are two such belts of Trade Winds the North-
East Trades on the north side of the equator,
and the South-East Trades on the south side
of the equator.

The first land reached by Columbus was one
of that group of islands that we now call the

42 THE WORLD

Bahamas. When he landed he knelt and re-
turned thanks to God for his safe journey?
and took possession of the island in the name
of the King of Spain. The natives came down.
to the shore to look in astonishment at theso
wonderful men with white skins and beautiful
clothes and at their strange boats with white
sails. They thought the ships were some kind
of monstrous bird and that the visitors had
come from another world. The natives were
big and strong. They had coarse black hair ;
they wore no clothes, but their bodies were
painted in brilliant colours. They had spears
tipped with fishbone, and canoes made out of
a single tree trunk and capable of holding from
forty to fifty men.

From the Bahamas Columbus sailed south.
and came to the large island of Cuba, of which
he wrote : " It is very fertile, as in truth all
the other islands are. One sees many high
mountains covered with trees of great size.
These trees are green in all seasons', for when
I saw them they were as beautiful as the trees
of Spain in May. Some of the trees were in
blossom, while others were bearing fruit. Birds
were singing in the forests in countless numbers,
even though it was the month of November!
The palm trees, of which there are seven or
eight different kinds, are higher and more
beautiful than any I have ever seen before."
Columbus was surprised at the size and

COLUMBUS AND THE WEST INDIES 43

beauty of the trees. He was used to colder
countries where, during the Winter season, the
trees leave oS growing. He had now reached
a land where it is always hot, and where the
rains brought by the damp trade winds make
the climate always wet. And where there is
a constant supply of heat and rain the trees
do not stop growing at any season, but grow

A POREST IN CUBA.

all the yeftr round, produce fruit and blossom
at all seasons, and reach a great size.

It is not difficult to picture to ourselves the
appearance of these islands as Columbus saw
them, for there are many stretches of the ancient
forest left and many of the trees and flowers
are of the same kind to-day coco-nut, cala-
bash, prickly pear, arrowroot, the papaw with
its straight stem and fruits like pumpkins
hanging just beneath the crown of leaves, and

44 THE WORLD

masses of yellow, blue, pink, scarlet, and orange
flowers.

From Cuba Columbus went south again and
discovered Haiti. Then he turned back. But
he knew, from the outward journey, that
if lie tried to return by the waj r he came he
would have the winds against him all the way.
The belief of Columbus that the world was
round held led him to cross the Atlantic.
Ar.ot her belief led him to find the proper way
home. He felt sure that as there was one belt
of wind blowing westwards all the time, there
would probably be another belt blowing east-
wards all the time, and, with this idea in his
mind, he sailed a little way to the north and
found what he expected, a belt of westerly
winds. These are stormier than the steady
trade winds, and Columbus had a more tem-
pestuous voyage, but the west winds brought
him back to Europe again in about the same
time as it took the east winds to send him across
the Atlantic.

Columbus had not found & new way to the
riches of the Indies : he had found something
more important, a new land of which Europeans
had never heard. But lie, himself, had no idea
that this new land was part of a new continent.
He thought he had really arrived at those very
Indies that he set out to reach by a westerly
route. And when the mistake was discovered
the islands^ on the other side of the Atlantic

COLUMBUS AND THE WEST INDIES 45

were called the West Indies to distinguish
them from the East Indies.

Once Columbus had shown the way there
were plenty of people who were brave enough
to follow his example. They did not all sail
in the same direction, but whether they went
to the west, the north-west, or the south-west,
they always reached land, so that in time men
came to believe that all these different lands
were only parts of one big continent the
continent we call America.

CHAPTER VI

THE AMAZON AND THE A1ST

RUBBER, or india-rubber as it is
is important not only for reiru
marks but also in the manufactr
for bicycles and motor-cars and In
with much electrical work. It is
a tree, and as such large quantiti
are used the tree must grow wb
plenty of moisture. We have se
trees in the West Indies are big ax
because of the heat and the w
south, in the valley of the Amazo-
warmer and wetter and the forest
and denser. The valley of the A
huge flat plain covered with a:
forest called the selvas. This is the
rubber tree.

In this forest the trees grow
like thousands of pillars. Over
the pillars is spread a green roof f c
topmost branches and their leaves.
an aeroplane, this would look like a
sea, dotted here and there with,
beautiful flowers like so many coloi
Underneath the thick green roof t>]

46

THE AMAZON AND THE ANDES 47

light, and from tree to tree pass creepers,
as thick as ropes, that seem *to tie the whole
forest up into a big, thick mass of wood that
one cannot get through. In this gloomy place
it is always hot, moist, stuffy, and dark. There
are hundreds of different kinds of trees. This
is quite different from the Canadian forest,
where there are only eight different kinds of

EH*

: orest3

FlG. 10. MAP TO SHOW THE EQUATORIAL, RAIN FORESTS OF SOUTH
AMERICA.

trees, and where it is possible to travel for miles
and miles and see only one kind.

Many kinds of trees provide the Juice from
which rubber is made : the most important has
leaves and bark something like those of the ash
and grows to a great height before throwing
off branches. The man who collects the sap
goes to a tree and makes cuts in the bark.

43 THE WORLD

The juice oozes put and is collected in cups ol
tin or clay. The next day the juice is heated
and so hardened.

The life of the rubber collector is a very
hard one. He lives alone, or with one com-
panion, in a rough hut made with pieces of
palixi wood and roofed with leaves and fibres.
When he finds the trees he
^ ^ ? cuts paths from one to tlie

"~ v ' ~ other. He begins his work

at four in the morning.
When he gets up he drinks
a cup of coffee, shoulders
his rifle, and, taking his
small axe and some little
tin cups, he starts out oil
his morning round, visiting
each tree in turn, making
cuts in the bark, and fixing
one of the cups underneath,
to catch the white milk.
After all his trees have been
visited, he returns to his
hut, cooks and eats his mid-
day meal of dried meat and beans, and at once,
if he is alone, starts out to collect the milk from
each of the little cups. Returning home, ho
lights the furnace in the rubber hut, the atmo-
sphere of which, after five minutes, is stifling 9
pours the milk into a large pan, and slowly
heats it ; r when hot enough he smoke-dries it

A RUBBER TREE BEING
TAPPED.

this
BY

THE AMAZON AND THE AXDES 49

on to his rubber ball, which js mounted on a
long pole or stick, by pouring it over the ball,
which is held in the smoke of the furnace, and
must be kept revolving.

He needs a special kind of fuel for
work, and he must collect it beforehand.
the time he has dried the sap, it is dark ; he
eats his supper and goes to bed. He "gets
fever and rheumatism, and is often poisoned bv
bad food. He
can have no
fresh meat un-
less he kills it
for himself, and
that is not easy.

The animals
that live in such
a forest as we
have been de-
scribing must be
specially suited
to live in such a
home. First of all on the damp, messy ground
there are all kinds of " creepy crawly 5J things
like snakes and leeches. They can live in the
mud and wriggle in and out amongst the trees.
There are ant s every where, black, white, yellow,
and red. Some of them are one and a half inches
long, and have a bite like the touch of a hot iron.
All kinds of stinging things are found, and there
are hairy spiders whose bite is poisoctous.

A SLOTH.

50

THE WORLD

Next there aie the animals that can live in
the trees. There are the birds that fly about
in the more open spaces and live in the tops of
the trees. Nothing can live above the ground
unless it can fly, or climb and hang on to
trees. There is the sloth. It sleeps in the

daytime, hanging down-
wards from a branch
which it clasps with
claws that are fashioned
like hooks. It wakes
up in the evening and
then moves quickly
from tree to tree, catch-
ing hold of each branch
with its twisted feet and
using its long arms to
tear off tender shoots,
which it stuffs into its
mouth. If it has to
walk on the* ground it
finds its claws of little
use, and is as awkward
as a man would be who
was forced to live in its place.

Then there is the jaguar, a kind of tiger.,
It cannot run well like the true, long-legged
tiger, but it moves quietly and secretly from
tree to tree, and drops on its prey from the
overhanging branches. And there are monkeys
that use their tails as well as their hands and

A JAGUAR UP A TREE.

THE AMAZON AND THE ANDES 51

feet when they move about, 3tnd can hang on
to a branch with the tail and so swing easily
from one tree to the next.

The only way to get from one part of the
country to another is by the rivers, and of
these there are a great many. The trade
winds are always bringing plenty of moisture,
and rain falls every day. As it is always
raining a great deal of water is always draining
off and the rivers are always full.

The longest river is the Amazon ; it is
longer than the distance across the Atlantic.

VIEW ON THE AMAZON.

It has many tributaries flowing into it on both
sides, and the basin, that is, the land drained
by the river and its tributaries, is as big as the
whole of Canada. The estuary is big enough
to hold almost the whole of Scotland. When
the tide rushes up the river it raises a wall of
water from five to twelve feet in height, which
moves forward at the rate of about ten miles
an hour. Since it is so long the Amazon |svth
main road of the forest and ships cant get ^ it
for a distance of 3000 miles, and rubber cak be
loaded on them a long distance from tl|e|Ba;
A map of South America shows jtftat" the

52 THE WORLD

greater part of the basin of the Amazon is in
the lowland, but that the beginnings of the
main stream and of its tributaries are in the
mountains. The part of the basin in the
mountains seems very small, if compared with
the part in the lowlands ; but it is really very
large, as may be seen ~by measuring its length
by means of the scale on the map.

The western highland of South America is
called the Andes. It runs north and south
through the continent from the Isthmus of
Panama to Cape Horn. Towards the southern
end the range gets lower and lower and much
closer to the sea, and in the far south it rises
steeply from the shore. The passes are. at a
great height, some of them at 15,000 feet, and
the journey across the mountains is everywhere
difficult and dangerous. Often there is 110
proper road, not even a mule-track.

Up the side of the mountains we get the
usual belts of different lands of plants accord-
ing to the height. If we begin the ascent
somewhere near the equator, we first pass
through forest so dense that. we can see only
a little way into it. In these forests grow
bananas, india-rubber, cocoa, and palm trees.
Farther up the air is cooler, and tobacco,
cotton, and maize are grown. Higher still it is
cool enough to grow wheat and most European
fruits and vegetables. Then it becomes too
cold for farming, though there is a good deal

THE AMAZON AND THE ANDES 53

of coarse grass, and then, higher still, are the ice
and the everlasting snows. The highest parts of
the Andes rise everywhere above the snow-line.
The passes are so high that animals like
the horse and the mule cannot breathe. Their

FlQ. 11. MAP TO sHOW THE HIGH

Or SOTJTH AMEP.ICA.

place is taken by the llama, and the alpaca.
The llama is a dwarf camel. Its body 1=
covered with a soft grey wool that protects
it from the cold, and can be used for making
clothes. The bodies of the young are good

54 THE WORLD

to eat, and the milk is good to drink. Llamas
can live on almost anything, and thrive on
the coarse grass that grows everywhere on
the Andes, right up to the snow-line. Llamas
can carry a load of 100 Ibs., and are said to
be so cunning that, if over-loaded, they will
lie down and refuse to move till the proper
weight is reached.

The alpaca is another animal of the same
kind and is almost as useful. Without these
two animals there could have been no trade
and no travelling over the passes of the Andes.

The western highlands of South America
are interesting to write and read about, but
we must not give them too much importance.
For, after all, by far the greater part of the
continent is not highland but lowland. And
through this lowland flow long rivers like the
Amazon, the Orinoco, and the Parana, with
numerous tributaries, also of great length.
Owing to the lowness of the land thepe are few-
waterfalls or rapids, and boats can make their
way very far inland. Of the forest-covered low-
land through which the Amazon flows we have
just learned; of the lowland through which the
Parana flows we shall learn in the next chapter.

CHAPTER VII

THE ARGENTINE AXD CATTLE

CATTLE feed on grass ; therefore the big cattle-
rearing lands are the grass lands. Imagine, for
a moment, that a piece of country where it is
hot and where there is plenty of rain is left to
itself. At first, both grass and trees will grow,
but, after a time, owing to the heat and the
moisture, the trees will be much taller than
the grass, the branches will shut out the sun-
light and the grass will wither. Hence we have
to look for grass where it is fairly dry. But
this is a condition required for growing wheat,
and it follows that wheat lands and grass
lands are usually close together, though grass
will grow in places where there is not enough
rain for wheat.

In the north of North America we have
seen wheat-growing in the central plains and
cattle-rearing in the drier plains farther west,
at the foot of the Kockies. In the south of
South America we have a similar region the
open plains of Argentine and Uruguay. These
plains lie in the west wind belt, but as the west
winds have to come over the Andss, they lose

55

56

THE WORLD

most of their mo^ture on the way and the
plains are rather dry.

The great plains of South America, those
which correspond to the prairies of North
America, are called pampas. In most places
the grass grows to a height of three or four
feet, and remains of a deep green colour all
the year round; it crowds out most of the

other plants, and
flowers are few. On
the moist clayey parts
flourishes the stately
pampas grass, which
often attains a height
of eight or nine feet.
It is possible to ride
for miles and miles
with the feathery
spikes of the grass
reaching to the rider's
head or even higher.
"It would/' says the
naturalist Hudson,
" be impossible for me to give anything like an
adequate idea of the exquisite loveliness, at
certain times and seasons, of this queen of
grasses, the chief glory of the solitary pampas.
In some places, where scarcely any other
kind exists, it covers large areas with a sea of
fleecy white plumes ; in late summer and in
autumn the tints are seen, varying from the

,//. W. Winds
fteauy Rain

FlG. 12. MAP TO SHOW WHERE
THERE IS MOST RAIN IN THE
SOUTH OF SOUTH AMERICA.

THE ARGENTINE AND CATTLE 57

most delicate rose, tender as the blush on the
white under-plumage of some gulls, to purple
and violaceous. At no time does it. look so
perfect as in the evening, before and after
sunset, when the softened light- imparts a
mistiness to the crowning plumes, and the
traveller cannot help fancying that the tints.
which then seem
richest, are caught
from the level rays of
the sun, or reflected
from the coloured ray
of the after-glow."

The plains are not
equally dry in all
parts, and on the

eastern side there is

a moderate rainfall

in the spring. Spring

rain, fertile soil, and

a dry summer make

wheat a paying crop.

But we have seen Fi&

something of the

work of the wheat farmer when studying the

prairies of North America; on the pampas of

South America we can turn our attention to the

cattle. .,

The ranches vary in size, but are ail ex-
tremely large. The days of unenclosed land,
when the cattle wandered where .they wou,a,

58

THE WOELD

are now over, and the ranches are surrounded
by stockades. A*G the farms there are no
barns or stables as there are at home with us.
There is just the simple house of the owner
of the ranch, one or two open sheds to shield
the riding horses from the sun in summer, and
a few miserable cottages where the peons or
labourers live. These cottages have numerous
holes in the roof, but nobody troubles, for it

GAUCHOS IN PAMPAS GRASS.

seldom rains. In front of the ranch is the
corral or enclosure, made by driving strong
posts into the ground; some of the enclosures
are big enough to hold 5000 head of cattle at
the same time. It is to these corrals that the
cattle are driven when they are to be branded
or sold.

The cowboys are called gauchos. They wear
big wide-brimmed hats, wide trousers, tight

THE AKGENTINE AND CATTLE 59

boots, and brightly coloured ponchos. The
poncho is practically a blanket," and is very
commonly worn in the form of a robe-like
garment.

The work of collecting and bringing in the
herds of half -wild cattle is a work that requires
a life-long training and the highest skill in the
management of the lasso, the bolas, and the
horse.

The lasso is a very strong, thin, well-plaited
rope, made of raw hide. One end is fastened
to the saddle, the other terminates in a noose.
The gaucho whirls it round and round his head,
and can cause it to fall on any particular spot
he chooses.

The bolas consists of three round stones
covered with leather and joined, by thin plaited
thongs about eight feet long, to a common
centre. The gaucho holds the smallest of the
three balls in his hand, whirls the other two
round his head, takes aim and hits the mark.
As soon as the balls strike an object they wind
round it, cross each other, and become firmly

The education of the gaucho begins at a
very early age. When quite a little boy he
may be seen pursuing the chickens, a lasso
revolving round his head. As he gets older
he tries his hand on the dogs. " He then, 55
says ChristisorLj, " ascends to colts and calves,
and at last the glorious day arrives when,

60 THE WORLD

from horseback, he can arrest the most savage
bull in its mad course, or lasso on foot the
swiftest horse as it gallops from the corral by
whatever leg he chooses. Meanwhile he has
learned to kill, cut up, and cook sheep and
cattle, to make horse gear from raw hide, and
his education is complete."

The gaucho practically spends his life on
horseback. He rests on two legs and travels
on four. On the fence in front of the farm
there is always a number of saddles ready
for use, for no one ever walks if he can help
it. A man springs on a horse to go a hundred
yards, and even the beggars do their begging
on horseback. The horse is not a mere luxury ;
it is a necessity, for the ranches are so large
and the distances from place to place are
so great, that travelling on foot would be
quite impossible ; and the animals, whether
cattle or the beasts of the chase, are so fleet
of foot that they could never be caught
except by men mounted on the" swiftest
steeds.

For months together the gauchos eat nothing
but beef, but they eat a very large proportion
of fat. It is perhaps due to the meat diet that
they can go so long without food. It is said
that some gaucho soldiers once, voluntarily,
pursued a party of Indians for three days
without eating or drinking.

From time to time the cattle must be

THE ARGENTINE AND CATTLE 61

collected in order to mark, the calves and
select the fat ones for sale and for other pur-
poses. The gauchos gallop off in different
directions and first collect the animals in small
groups on the open plains. If they tried to
drive them directly forward, the animals would
bolt in all directions, so the riders circle round
and round and cause the group also to move
round and round and, at the same time, to go
gently forwards in the desired direction. When
the herd is within a hundred yards of the corral

CATTLE ON THE PAMPAS.

it begins to get suspicious, but its fears are
quietened by the sight of a few old cart oxen
lazily chewing the cud. When the herd is
within fifty yards, a man on horseback urges
the three old bullocks towards the mouth of
the corral and then slips away. The three
traitors trot off to the corral and the wild cattle
follow at a canter. The animals press upon
each other and, as the entrance is narrow, the
crush soon becomes quite terrifying ; some of
the cattle break loose, and they a:&e pursued

E

62 THE WORLD

and either driven back or towed back by the
lasso. Some, with their feet hopelessly en-
tangled by the bolas, are just left till the
gauchos have time to come to recapture
them.

In the morning the cattle are let out and
then caught again, and this goes on, over and
over again, till the animals are quite tame and
will allow themselves to be driven into the
corral by a man and a few boys. The process
of taming is to allow the animals to get fat,
which they rarely do as long as they are in a
state of continual terror.

At one time it was impossible to send the
flesh of the cattle to Europe, as it would have
gone bad on the way. The animals were
valued only for their hides and for the tallow
that was made from their fat. The cattle
were driven to the coast and there killed and
boiled down, but the sheep could not be driven
such long distances, and they were slaughtered
and boiled down on the farms of the interior.
A big farm would deal with as many as 8000
to 10,000 sheep in a year. The fleshy parts,
those that are best to eat, were thrown
away, and it was no uncommon sight to see
thousands of legs of mutton lying rotting on
the plains.

To-day the carcasses can be frozen and sent
to Europe on ships fitted with refrigerating
chambers. When they arrive in our markets

THE ARGENTINE AND CATTLE 63

the flesh is quite fresh and,, fit for food. In
1830, when the process of freezing meat to
preserve it was introduced into South America,
only 17,000 sheep were exported. Less than
twenty years later the refrigerating chambers
were stocked with no fewer than 120,000 cattle
and 3,000,000 sheep in one year.

The flesh is also exported in other forms
"jerked" or dried beef, corned beef, tinned
tongue and various extracts. The factories
where this kind of work is carried on are called
saladerps* The biggest are at Fray Bentos,
where Liebig's extract and Oxo are made, and
at Paysandu, where the celebrated tongues are
tinned.

Near to Fray Bentos there are large corrals
with long lanes bordered with posts, leading to
the slaughtering yard. The cattle are driven
to the yard and, as they enter, they are lassoed
by a man standing on the stockade. One end
of the lasso is fastened to a steam ^yinch and
the animal is dragged along to a spot where
it is killed instantaneously by a blow from a
special kind of knife. The body drops on to
a small iron truck and is drawn to a shed.
Then the carcase is skinned and cut up, and the
parts sorted out and taken in different direc-
tions. The meat is hung on rails, the skins put
into brine baths, and the blood saved for
manure. The meat is stewed in tanks, and a
thin liquid strained off and skimmed -to remove.

64

THE WORLD

all the grease. Tfeis thin liquid passes through
other processes until it will turn to a jelly when
cooled. The jelly, which is Liebig's extract
of meat, is then ' sent to Antwerp in large tins
each holding about 110 IBs. It is examined
by chemists to see if it is pure, packed
up in the smaller bottles with which we are

. . ... HaiTiuayjS
ARGENTINE RAILWAYS.

all so familiar, and sent to almost every market
in the world.

In lands like the Argentine and Uruguay,
lands of wide plains and no roads, the rivers
are of the greatest use, especially as the crops
and animals produced for export are bulky to
carry and land carriage is expensive. The
biggest rivers of the lowlands run into a wide
estuary called the Plate, and on its banks are

THE ARGENTINE AND CATTLE 65

the two chief ports, Buenos Ayres and Monte-
video. The words " Buenos Ayres " mean
"good air." This port was founded by the
Spaniards, who placed it as far inland as
possible, in order that they might travel far
into the interior in their ships. The estuary
is shallow, but this did not matter to the
Spaniards, for their ships were small. As ocean
steamers are now very large, it has been found
necessary to deepen the harbour. This has
cost a great deal of money, but if it had not
been spent the trade of the port would have
gone. Owing to the flatness of the land it has
been an easy matter to connect Buenos Ayres
by rail with other parts of the country, and
railways radiate from the port, in all directions,
like the spokes of a wheel.

The plains of the Argentine and Uruguay
are then very different from the plains of the
Amazon, and there are good reasons why they
should be.different.

CHAPTER VIII

THE PATAGCXNTIAN INDIANS

AT the equator it is warm and damp, as we have
seen in the valley of the Amazon. Farther
north and farther south it is cooler and drier,
and there we find the wheat and cattle lands
prairies in North America and pampas in South
America. Farther north still in North America
it is cold and damp and there live the Eskimos ;
farther south still in South America it is also
cold and damp and there live various tribes of
Indians.

The district south of the Rio Negro is known
as Patagonia ; it varies very much in character
from east to west. On the east coast there is a
narrow strip of grassy land now inhabited by a
few settlers, chiefly Europeans, who rear sheep
and cattle. West of this is a higher region which
is practically a desert of sand and shingle, but
the thin soil bears a scanty crop of grass on which
feed the guanaco and the rhea.

The guanaco is something like the llama,
half sheep and half camel. It lives where the
herbage is- thin and thorny and it provides

66

THE PATAGONIAN INDIANS

67

the Indians of this area with most of what they
need. The flesh gives them meat, the skin
is made into a poncho, and the hoof, with part
of the skin attached, is made into a boot. These

A T L A N T / C
; . o c A /V

PACIFIC

<o Euator ,

OCEAN

Much Rain

Less Ram

Little Rain

:::::: Hardly any Rain

FlG. 14. RAINFALL OP THE NEW WORLD.

boots leave very big footprints, so that when the
Spaniards first visited the country and saw, on
the sands of the beach, a number of huge foot-
prints, they said that they must have been made

68

THE WORLD

GUAKACO.

of the sight of man.

by the feet of giants and they called the country
" Patagonia/ 3 which means " big feet."

The rhea is a kind of ostrich ; it lives nearer
to the mountains, where
there is tall grass and
lakes of water. Like
most of the birds of the
steppe and the desert, it
can run swiftly, but it
has no power of flight.
In such districts there
are no trees and there-
fore no safe places upon
which birds can rest, out
Their flesh and eggs are
eaten and their feathers are used for ornaments
and worn in .the hair.

As the Patagonians had
no sheep and cattle and no
land fit for farming, they
were obliged , to hunt
animals for a living, and it
was they who invented the.
bolas as a weapon, using
the pebbles of the desert
for ammunition and a thin
strip of guanaco hide for a
sling. At the time when
fchese people were discovered by the Spaniards,
they used bows and arrows, and they had to get
very near to their prey before they could shoot

THE PATAGONIAN INDIANS 69

It. They did not invent the^ bolas until they
had learned the use of the horse.

In September and October the Indians gather
the eggs of the rhea. These are laid in holes
scooped out of the ground, and as usually several
females use the same nest, forty or fifty eggs may
be found in a single spot. From November to
February the young guanaco is hunted for the
sake of the tender skin. Only the animals under
two months old are taken and the best bedding
and clothing are made from the skins of these
very young animals. The killing and skinning
are the work of the men ; the women dry and
cure the skins and make the garments.

The Patagonian Indian is a wanderer, ever
in search of prey, and therefore, like other
wandering tribes, he needs a movable home a
kind of wigwam. His tent is called a toldo and
it is made of a number of guanaco skins sewn
together and fitted over a framework of poles.
As the wind is almost always from the west the
tent is pitched with the open end to the east.
In front of the wide open doorway several
stakes are driven into the ground, and to these
skins are fastened to form a kind of screen which
keeps out any winds that may come, from time
to time, from the east.

Farther south, in Tierra del Fuego, there is
another tribe of Indians who, like the other
Indians of Patagonia, depend for their food and
clothing upon the guanaco. When the white

70

THE WORLD

men settled on the plains of the islands and
brought sheep with them, the natives thought
that the sheep were " white guanaco/ 5 and
because these new guanaco w r ere easier to catch
and nicer to eat than those which had usually
been hunted, the Indians began to kill and eat
them. The white man grew angry and a war
commenced which ended in the death of most
of the native people ; the few that escaped fled

WOLLASTON ISLAND, TIERRA DEL Jb'CJJUQO.

into the mountainous forested country at the
southern end of the island, and there some of
their descendants are still to be found.

In the islands that lie farthest south of all
there is yet another tribe of Indians who may
be compared, in many ways, to the Eskimo of
'the farthest north. The climate is cold because
the islands lie far south, and wet because they
lie right in the track of the westerly winds.

THE PATAGONIAN INDIANS 71

Gale succeeds gale, with rain, hail, and sleet
day after day. At least three hundred days
in each year are cloudy. It is not easy to
live for ever under a dull sky, in a land where
the tops of the mountains are crowned with snow
and their sides are drenched with rain, and where
the winds wail and the surf beats violently OD
the shore from month's end to month's end.

The islanders have no leisure, for it takes
them all their time to obtain food ; this food
consists chiefly of shell-fish. As soon as they
have consumed all the shell-fish on one part of
the shore they must move to another in search
of the next meal. From time to time they
return to the old spots and then add to the piles
of old shells, so that in time these piles may
amount to many tons in weight. Very often they
suffer from famine. Darwin, in that interesting
book of travel, The Voyage of the " Beagle" tells a
story of one hundred and fifty natives who lived
on the wast coast who were very thin and in
great distress. There had been a succession
of gales that had prevented the women from
getting shell-fish on the rocks and they could
not go out in their canoes to catch seals. A
small party of them set out on a four days'
journey for food, and when they returned, their
harvest was a great square piece of rotten whale
blubber with a hole in the middle through which
they put their heads as through a hole in a
blanket.

72 THE WORLD

In summer they get a few berries; and in
winter they may perhaps add a few roots to their
scanty diet. They have baskets and water
vessels made from bark, but they have no kitchen
utensils; or pottery. As food in anyone place
is very scarce, there are never many people living
together; their groups hardly ever exceed
twenty or thirty persons in number.

Because they move often, they build no houses
of wood or stone. Their tent or wigwam is
something like a haycock in shape. It consists
of a few broken branches stuck in the ground
and very badly thatched on one side with
tufts of grass and rushes. It takes only about
an hour to build this wretched habitation, but
it is only used for a few days, and sometimes
the people, almost or completely naked, actually
have to sleep in the rain and the snow, out in
the cold and the wet, and on the sodden ground
with no shelter at all.

Clothing must be made of skins. On the
east coast guanaco cloaks are worn ; on the west,
sealskin is obtainable. But in the centre the
only clothing is a small otter skin or some small
scrap about as large as a pocket-handkerchief.
It is laced across the breast and is shifted from
side to side according to the wind. For orna-
ments- and most people, however savage, like
to "dress up" the native make necklaces of
bone and shells and they stick a few feathers in
the hair.

THE PATAGONIAN INDIANS 73

The greater part of the time is spent in small
narrow canoes made of birch-bark or wood;
there is plenty of these materials in the forests'
Travel by land is difficult and the canoe is the
common means of communication. Tn these
canoes the natives hunt the sea-lion and catch
large fish, using harpoons and spears of wood
fitted with sharp pointed heads of bone or stone.

TIERKA DEL XfUEGO : NATIVE BOAT WITH EIRE BURNING ON STONE

HEARTH.

In the centre of each boat there is a clay fire-
place where the fire is always kept burning if
possible, for it is very difficult to light a new fire
in a land where the wood is all damp and there
are no matches. It was the sight of these fires
burning in the boats that caused Magellan, the
discoverer of this part of the world, to call it
Ticrra del Fuego, that is, "Land of Fire."
Though shell-fish are usually eaten raw and no

74 THE WORLD

cooking is needed, the fires are useful for stewi
or frying the other kinds of fish.

One wonders what it is that tempts tl
people to stay where they do. They live abo
the most miserable life of any race on eart
Yet they do not decrease in numbers, and thei
fore, says Darwin, "we must suppose that tli<
enjoy a sufficient share of happiness, of whatev
kind it may be, to render life worth having/ 7

CHAPTER IX

THE WAY TO THE ESTDIES

FOUR hundred years ago the use of root crops
for feeding cattle during the winter months was
unknown. The farmers, therefore, were in the
habit of killing most of their cattle and pigs in
the autumn and preserving the meat by salting
and drying it. People got very tired of dry
and tough salt meat, day after day, for break-
fast, dinner, and supper, and in order to make it
a little pleasanter to the taste they added, if they
could get them, different kinds of spices, particu-
larly pepper. The spices came from the Indies
and the trade in them was a very important one.
This trade was chiefly in the hands of the
Arabs. They carried their precious cargoes from
India through the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf,
unloaded the boats, and took the goods across
land to the Mediterranean, where the Venetians
and Gonooso put them on boats again and finally
landed thorn at some European port, chiefly
at Venice. When Columbus went off across the
Atlantic he discovered America, as we have seen,
by accident. He was not looking for a new
continent, but for a new way to the Indies so

75

76 THE WORLD

that the " riches of the Indies " might be brought
to Europe without having to depend on the
Arabs. One way had already partly been found,
the one that goes east past Africa. But that had
been discovered by the Portuguese, who looked
upon it as their own. Had Columbus, on behalf
of Spain, tried to go by the Portuguese route
there would have been trouble.

The Portuguese were not the first people to
sail south along the coast of Africa, but they were
the first to reach the southern end of it. There
was a very wise and brave Portuguese prince,
known as Prince Henry the Navigator, and it
was the great desire of his life to find a road
round Africa to the Indies. So he collected
together map-drawers, ship-builders, sea-captains
and sailers, and, year by year, he sent ships to
explore the coast. Each one, on its return., had
some story to tell of new islands, new lands, and
new peoples, but none of them got far enough
south to find the road they were looking for,
and Prince Henry died before the road was
discovered.

A year or two before Columbus crossed the
Atlantic, Bartholomew Diaz sailed away to the
south to see if he could write another page in
the book of African discovery. He kept the
land in sight, on his left hand, and came to the
barren coast where the Sahara desert reaches
the sea. In this part of the world the north-
east trades sweep on over wide stretches of

THE WAY TO THE INDIES 77

land, losing moisture as they go till at last they
reach the sea with no moisture left, Nothing
is to be seen but brown stretches of sand and
rock bathed in the fierce rays of a sun that dries
and bakes the ground. Next he came to Cape
Verde, or the " Green Cape/' so called by an
earlier explorer because here green trees greeted
his eyes after the wearisome brown of the
desert. This fertile cape is at the beginning
of land like an English park where grass and
trees are both to be found.

Some time afterwards Diaz was near the
equator. The heat was intense and there was
rain day after day ; here were found forests
like those in the valley of the Amazon. Diaz
kept on, always with the land on his left hand,
and after a while it began to get cooler again,
for he was going away from the equator, and it
began to get stormier, for he was reaching that
belt of westerly winds that brings so much rain
and so majjy gales to the southern part of South
America. He kept out to sea because he did not
wish to be driven on the rocky shore. But he
sailed on southwards, and because he had had
land always to the east of him he thought that
it must still be to the east of him, and by- and- by
he sailed eastwards to look for it. Going east
was easy enough as there were strong winds
behind him, but he sailed on and on and found no
land to the east, so he turned once more to the
north. After a time he reached the land, stiE

78 THE WORLD

on his left hand. But he was now sailing north,
whereas he had before been sailing south. There-
fore he must have turned round a corner, round
some big cape. He -went back to look for it,
found it, and called it the " Cape of Storms/ 5
but when the king heard all the news he changed
the name to the " Cape of Good Hope" because
there was now every good hope that a sea-way
to the Indies would be found.

Six years later Columbus discovered what he
called the "Indies, 55 but they were not the Indies
where the spices came from. Still, nobody
knew that America stretched from the north to
the south, and the Portuguese were very much
afraid that if they were not quick, the Spaniards,
with Columbus as a leader, would get to the spice
lands by a westerly route before they could
reach them by the easterly route that they had
already partly explored. And, of course, the
trade would belong to those who arrived first.

So, in 1497, the King of Portugal gave Vasco
da Gama three ships and a store-ship and sent
him off to complete, if possible, the work of
Bartholomew Diaz. In an earlier chapter we
have pointed out how the winds helped or
hindered Columbus during his journey. It is
interesting to see how they also helped or
hindered Vasco da Gama. He left Lisbon at
the beginning of July and, with the help of the
north-east trades, he reached the Cape Verde
Islands by the end of the month.

THE WAY TO THE INDIES 79

Shortly after that he met the south-east trades
and they were against him, so'that he was three
months before he reached the coast of Africa, near
to^the Cape of Good Hope. Here he turned east,
sailed first along the south coast and then
turned northwards and eastwards along the

JULYS 1497

Outward journey -

Homeward journey (K;

' UI NOV. 2 MAR.2CKH)

FlG. 15. MAP TO SHOW VASCO DA GAMA*S VOYAGE TO INDIA A^D
BACK AGAIN.

east coast of Africa, past a pleasant land of
woods and meadows. On Christmas Day (1497),
Christ's natal day or birthday, he landed at a
spot to which he gave the name of Port Natal
Going northwards he began to notice fine park -
lands again with fine big trees, and on March 1,

80 THE WORLD

1498 ? lie reach eel Ifozambique, the most southerly
of the Arab trading towns on that coast.

Here the Portuguese landed. They were,
at first, treated in a friendly manner, but when
the chief man of the town found that they were
Portuguese he refused to give them provisions
or to find them, a pilot to show them the way to
India. Moreover, he attacked a party of sailors
that had landed to get water. Da Gama left,
but kept still to the north, calling first at one

spot and then at another

, . .

and always meeting with
hostility. He and his crew
were hated because they
were Christians and per-
haps even more because
the Arabs could see that if
the Portuguese found the
. way to get to the riches

FlG. 16. - MAP TO SHOW HOW r ,-, ? T

THE W2XDS BLOW IX SUMMER. OI the InGlCS, til OH til 6

Arab control of this rich

trade would be for ever over. Hatred and
hostility had no power to stop da Gama, and he
went as far north as Zanzibar and beyond to
Mombasa. This northerly journey was leadino 1
towards the equator again and the weather
once more became unpleasantly hot. When
they were near the equator, they managed to
get an Indian pilot, and then they turned east
and sailed to India.

We have seen that in America, and on the

THE WAY TO THE INDIES 81

west coast of Africa, there are certain belts of
steady winds, and we might have expected that
on the east coast of Africa we should have found
the same arrangements. South of the equator
the arrangement of the winds is pretty much
the same in the Atlantic, Pacific, and" Indian
Oceans, but in the Indian Ocean, north of the
equator, there is a great difference. There,
from May to October, the south-east trade
crosses the equator, turns round and blows
from the south-west. It
was this south-west mon-
soon that took da Gama
across the Indian Ocean
in less than a month.

When the Portuguese
arrived in India they
tried to make friends with
the natives and to get / /

1 FlG. 17. MAP TO SHOW HOW

some cinnamon, cloves, THE WINDS BLOW ^ WEsrTEIfc .
and other. kinds of spices

to take back with them to Portugal in order
to prove to the king that they really had been to
India. Later on there was quarrelling with
the natives and da Gama nearly lost his life,
but the ships got away safely and steered for
the coast of Africa. The south-west monsoon
was now against them and it took them three
months to reach Africa again.

At last they arrived at the Cape of Good Hope.
Once they were round the corner the south-east

84 THE WORLD

Ships were built which would sail faster.
The vessels of the older sailors were short and
" tubby," and the wind could not push them
quickly through the water. Now a special kind
of long narrow vessel called a clipper was built
to go to India quickly to bring home tea. The
clippers made the journey once a year and sailed
with considerable speed. They set off, as

A TEA CLIPPER.

Columbus did, with the north-east trades and
crossed the Atlantic towards South America,
There they picked up the south-east winds and,
with these " on their beam/' they sailed almost
along the east coast of South America till they
reached the southerly belt of westerly winds.
These carried them, as they had carried Diaz,
beyond Africa. Then the clippers caught the
south-west monsoon as did Vasco da Gama, and

TEA CLIPPERS TO INDIA

S5

->

so got to India. This outward journey was made
in the summer, when winds are blowing towards
India from the sea.

The return jour-
ney was made in the
winter months, when
the wind blows in the
opposite
This
wind is

strong

FlG * 18 --~ MAP T0 SHOW HOW THE TEA
CLIPPERS WENT TO INDIA.

direction.
winter
called the
north-east monsoon.
A monsoon is a wind
that blows for six
months in one direction and then for the
next six months in the opposite direction.
Monsoon winds are found in other parts of the
world, but nowhere
are they of such
strength and import-
ance as in the Indian
Ocean.

Coming home, the
clippers sailed first
with the winter mon-
soon behind them till
they got to the FlG<
south-east trades.
This wind was now " on the beam," but 5
beyond the Cape of Good Hope, it was be-
hind, and so gave a speedy voyage across the
Atlantic in a northerly and westerly direction

_> >

SHOW HOW THE TE^
CLIPPERS CAME FROM INDIA.

S6 WORLD

After a time they reached the belt of north-east
trades and had them on their beam, but finally
they reached the belt of westerly winds and these
blew them home. On the map the way looks
a very long one, but it was really much quicker
than the shorter route followed by the Portu-
guese.

Every year there were " tea races " home,
each ship trying to get back first. On one
occasion five such vessels left China on the same
day, and though they lost sight of one another
on the voyage, they all arrived in the Thames
within a few hours of each other. Some of the
fastest clippers, taking advantage of the winds,
could do 330 miles a day, and at that time fast
steamers could not go more quickly.

CHAPTER XI

THE WAY FROM INDIA TO-DAY

WE have seen that the spices of India came,
long years ago, partly by land and partly by
water, and that the tea, in later years, was
brought all the way by sea round the southern
end of Africa. Tea and spices still come to us
from the Far East, but they do not come by either
of the routes that we have already described.
And, to-day, the ships bring us not only spices
and tea, but also rice, wheat, timber, and many
other useful and valuable things.

The Arab trade was partly over the land,
and the great difficulty was to carry the goods.
It would have cost a great deal of money and
trouble to have carried, say, timber overland
on the backs of animals, and therefore bulky
stuff like timber was not carried at all. Spices
and precious stones were smaller, lighter, worth
more, and more easily carried, and the cost of
carriage was nob so very great when compared
with the value of the things carried. Hence
the early trade was in goods that were Kght but
worth a great deal of money. It was for this

87

88 WORLD

reason that people thought " the Indies 5? were
rich.

When a sea route between India and Europe
was discovered it was possible to bring goods all
the way by ship, and that made a great deal of
difference in the things that could be carried.
In the first place it is much easier to move goods
on the water than on the land ; one horse, for
instance, can pull more coal in a barge on a
canal than many horses can pull in carts on the
land. Then, too, the surface of the water
does not wear out like the surface of the land and
there is no road-repairing to pay for at sea. And
so it happens that, for both these reasons,
carriage by water is much cheaper than carriage
by land. When the cost of carriage became so
much smaller it was possible to bring the bulky
things like wheat and timber, and sell them at a
profit, and yet at prices which ordinary people
could afford to pay.

How do the bulky things come to p.s ? First
of all they are mostly brought to us by steam-
ships, and steamships are not affected very much
by the wind belts. They can take the shortest
routes and are not greatly hindered by the
winds. And, secondly, the shortest routes from
India all pass through the Red Sea and the Suez
Canal. There was no Suez Canal in the days
when Vasco da Gama set sail from Portugal.

As water carriage is cheaper than land carri-
age it pays best to carry goods, as far as possible,

THE WAY FROM INDIA TO-DAY 89

all the way they have to go by water. So tea,
wheat, rice, timber or whatever conies to us from
India is loaded up at the big Indian ports
Calcutta, Madras, Colombo, or Karachi, which-
ever is the most convenient and then sent by
the route we shall presently describe straight
to the ports of Europe.

Travelling on the sea is slow, and if a man has
to come from India to London he does not usually
wish to spend a long while sailing, say, from

. 20. MAP TO SHOW HOW STEAMERS BRING GOODS FROM INDIA NOW.

Calcutta right to the south of India to get round
the corner of the peninsula into the sea road to
Europe. He goes straight across India to
Bombay by railway. This makes the cost of
travelling greater but the time taken is shorter,
and time is money to many a business man.
Letters also have to go as quickly as possible,
and so it is usually from Bombay that Indian
passengers travel and letters are shipped.

But, whether the steamship brings goods or

90

WOELD

passengers, it will, sooner or later, pass into the
Gulf of Aden, near whose western end is the little
British settlement of Aden, in one of the most
barren districts on earth. There are no trees or
grass and the heat is intense. Rain only falls once
in about three years, and nearly all the drinking
water is obtained by distilling sea-water. In
the market the women will, for a few cents,

ADEN.

Notice the flat roofs.

provide the thirsty with a drink of water from
skins which they carry on their backs. Outside
the town there are huge water tanks hewn out of
the solid rock, one of which can hold 4,500,000
gallons, but there is very seldom any water in
them. Aden is a coaling station, that is, a place
where the steamers go to get fresh supplies of
coal. There are no coal mines in or near to

THE WAY FROM INDIA TO-DAY 91

Aden and the coal has to be taken there from
Britain in ships that carry little or nothing else.
All round the world there is a chain of these
coaling stations, and most of them belong to
the British.

After leaving Aden the ship passes through
the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, the "Gate of
Tears/ 5 so called because of the many ship-
wrecks that have occurred there, and enters
the Eed Sea. The journey through the Red Sea
is a most uncomfortable one. The land is out
of sight most of the way, and overhead is the
fierce sun pouring out blinding burning rays that
make the decks too hot for one to walk about
with bare feet and the brass work of the vessel
too hot to be touched by the hand. And if,
in addition to the heat, there be a sandstorm
blowing across from the desert, then the air
is filled with a mist of fine hot particles of sand
that blind and choke you at one and the same
time.

At the' north-western end of the sea is the
Gulf of Suez, Here the land comes into view
again, but the view is not pleasant, for whether
we look to the right, to the peninsula of Sinai,
or to the left, to the coast of Egypt., we see nothing
but rusty-red rocks and sand. At the northern
end of the Gulf of Suez is the little town of
Suez. The journey from Aden to Suez is over
1500 miles just a little less than the distance
from Ireland to Newfoundland.

9 2 THE WORLD

At Suez we enter the Suez Canal, a big ditch
du<* to connect the Mediterranean and the Red
Seas. The canal is only about 100 miles long,
and of this about 24 miles is merely a deepened
channel made through a number of shallow lakes.
It varies in width from 240 to 360 feet and, in
places, is not wide enough to allow two vessels
to pass each other, so that very often one vessel

SUEZ CANAL, AT A PASSING PLACE.

has to draw up at a wider spot in order that
any vessel that is in a narrower part can go by.
The waiting is very tiresome as there is little to
see but sand, and as soon as the ship stops the
breeze made by its motion stops also. On
either side there is, however, a slight border of
trees and other vegetation where the water has
brought life to the thirsty land. Elsewhere

WAY FROM INDIA TO-DAY 93

everything is red-brown at midday but grey,
pink, or gold in the evening when the snn gets
low in the west. If there is no delay the passage
through the canal from Suez to Port Said takes
about seventeen hours. The ships are obliged
to go slowly or the wash would destroy the
banks. At night the way is illuminated by big
electric lights, so that traffic goes on by night and
day.

Port Said is another coaling station, and more
than a million tons of coal are taken there every
year. Coaling never stops. There are always
crowds of men, women, and even little children
filling baskets with coal and passing them on
to the barges to be taken to the steamer. No
matter what time the vessel arrives at Port
Said the passengers go ashore, for the ship is
soon black with fine coal dust, and, as every door
and porthole is closed to prevent the dust getting
into the cabins, the vessel is most unpleasantly
hot and dir,ty.

The next stage of the journey is through the
Mediterranean Sea, a journey of about 2000
miles. The vessel makes for Malta, where,
at the capital Valetta, there is a strongly fortified
harbour for the use of the British navy in these
waters. Malta lies south of Sicily, and the island
of Sicily together with the peninsula of Italy
divides the Mediterranean into two basins.
Hence, when we leave Malta we have to go either
between Sicily and Italy or between Sicily and the

a

94 THE WORLD

northern coast of Africa. At the western end of
the Mediterranean Sea is the Strait of Gibraltar,
another British fortified naval station. The
strait is only a few miles wide and it used to be
said that the fort " commanded " the strait,
but the guns never really prevented the passage
of hostile ships and they were quite unable,
during the Great War, to prevent submarines
passing in or out of the Mediterranean, deep
down under the surface.

Once we have passed through the Strait
of Gibraltar, a more or less northerly journey
round Spain and through the Bay of Biscay
brings us to Cornwall, where the sea roads divide.
Turn to the right for Falmouth, Plymouth,
Southampton, and London and to the left for
Bristol, Liverpool, and Glasgow.

We see that there have been three ways to
India : there will be two more one by railway
and one by the air.

CHAPTER XII

THE PYGMIES OF THE FOREST

PEOPLE were so anxious to get to the Indies
that, for a long time, they did not trouble to
find out anything about the land they had to sail
round and past, and yet in Africa there were
and are to be found a number of very inter-
esting people. Some of them have been known
for a long time, while of others we have learned
only in recent years, and there are most likely
others of whom we yet know nothing at all. In
this chapter we have to learn about the pygmies
who live in the forest.

This forest is just like the big forest in South
America which was described in Chapter VI.
In this part of the world, as in South America,
there is great heat and great moisture, and here
too we find majestic trees rising 200 feet up into
the air and so interlacing their leaves and
branches that the rays of the sun are shut out,
while the whole is linked together with creepers
from two inches to a foot in diameter. The
ground is strewn with dead leaves, branches, and
rotting trunks.

The continual rain makes the ground sloppy,

95

96 THE WORLD

and the only creatures that can live here are
monkeys, birds, and " crawlies " of all descrip-
tions that make their homes in the mud or on
the branches deadly snakes hang from the
branches of the trees, "huge black adders, pythons,,
bright green snakes with wicked red eyes, and
whipcord snakes that look like green twigs."

lli forest
FIG. 21. MAP OF A3TRICA TO SHOW WHERE THE .FORKST GROWS.

There are crocodiles, hippopotamuses, and water-
snakes in the rivers, and there are birds of every
description and hue, amongst which the parrots
make the brightest splashes of colour.

Insects drop from above, crawl on the earth
and fly in the open spaces. Every stick has
insects on it ; every tree has beetles and ants.
Cockroaches, centipedes, and crickets abound.

THE PYGMIES OF FOREST 97

But there are also big animals,, such as the
elephant, that are not found In the forests of
America. They are so strong that they can
smash their way through the trees.

The trees are of great value, some of them for
medicine, some for timber for houses and boats,
others for food,
indiarubber and
other things. And
yet there are but
few people in the
forest, for though
the land is full of
riches it is hard to
reach them. The
paths are few and
narrow and when
left for a short
while are rapidly
overgrown and
lost. Even the
wild animals come
and go by paths
which they keep
open by travelling along them time after
time.

Both the forests, American and African, are
just where the equator is, halfway between the
North and South Poles, and both forests have
big rivers that drain off the tremendous amount
of rain that falls. The inhabitants of the

AFRICAN ELEPHANT.

08 WORLD

African forests are the pygmies dwarfs, or little
men.

Because the heat is so great they wear but
little clothing. The men have a strip of cloth
and the women a bunch of leaves. They wear
no ornaments, not even flowers and feathers,
but they are particularly fond of " dressing up "
in any fragments of European clothing if only
they can obtain them.

Food, of a kind, is always at hand. Nothing
is cultivated, but there are animals and fish.
Roots are grubbed up, trees are climbed for
fruits and berries, mushrooms are hunted for,
and the 'honey of the wild bees is a great delight.
In hunting animals the chief weapons are bows
and arrows, made from the wood that is so
plentiful. The pygmies are very clever with the
bow and arrow and it is said that they can shoot
four arrows, one after the other, so quickly
that the last arrow has left the bow before the
first hits the mark. If the archer ipisses that
at which he aims he loses his temper and smashes
both bow and arrows. With their tiny arrows
they kill the biggest animals, even elephants.
They first shoot the animal in the eye to blind
it and then follow it with spear and arrow till
it dies. They hunt only for the flesh, and if they
kill an elephant, they usually throw away the
tusks that we think so valuable. Besides
arrows they have short light spears, but no
shields. They catch fish without fish hooks,

THE PYGMIES OF THE FOREST 99

merely using a bit of meat and a piece of string.
They dig large pits in the forest and cover them
with leaves, and into these pits large animals fall
and are killed. They have little idea of cooking
and both flesh and vegetable foods are usually
eaten raw, though they occasionally roast o"r
smoke their meat over a wood fire in the open.

They are particularly fond of bananas and
occasionally make a kind of small village near
the home of some tribe that lives on the edge of
the forest and cultivates the ground. There they
know there will be plenty of bananas. When they
want any of the fruit they cut up one of the ani-
mals they have killed and tie the pieces of flesh
to the tree. This they call paying for the
bananas, and they then take as many as they
want. At times they shoot an arrow into an
unripe banana tree to say that they want the
bananas on that particular tree as soon as ever
they are ripe. The owners of the tree are so
afraid of the little men that they leave the tree
undisturbed till the fruit is ripe, when the
pygmies come to remove both it and the arrow.

During eight months of the year the forest
is a swamp, for the rain falls every day. It is
then very hard to get food at all, and the pygmies
eat anything they can find, rats, mice, and
frogs.

They do no work except hunting and making
arrows, nets, and traps. If they want fruit,
roots, tobacco, knives, or weapons they buy them

100

WORLD

from other tribes with the meat, skins, ivory, or
feathers that they have 'obtained in the forest.
As they grow nothing to eat and as they are
always killing animals or frightening them away,
they are always on the move to somewhere else.
Seldom do they stay in one spot for more than

three or four months. So
they do not build strong
houses. Instead they
make a kind of shelter
like a large beehive.
Thin branches are first
stuck in the ground and
then bent over at the top
and fastened together.
This framework is covered
with creepers and plan-
tains and plastered with
mud. There is plenty of
both leaves and mud in
the great damp forest
where they live.

In each hut there are
about eight or nine
people who obey one whom they call their chief.
It is his business to settle quarrels and to say,
when the next move is made, where the new
camp shall be pitched. There is nothing in
the way of furniture in the huts. Men who
move often and carry all they possess do not
want to be bothered with much property, and

(#

PYGMY HUT

THE FOREST.

PYGMIES OF THE FOREST- 101

all they own is a few pots of clay, a few gourds
in which to hold water, and the weapons with
which they hunt. They carry most of their
small possessions in a string bag made of fibres.

The pygmies are very tiny people, only about
four feet high, but they are strong and" brave.
In fact they have to be strong and brave to live
at all. They spend their time wandering about
on land and so have never learned to swim,
although there are plenty of streams and rivers.
They get so much water from the rain that
they want no more of it, if they can help it, and
they neither use it for washing nor drinking
Because they are always in danger they have
keen eyes and quick ears and are wonderful
trackers of wild animals.

" They give their opinion as to age of tracks,
fresh or otherwise, in a low whisper, and follow
on with almost catlike stealth, careful to make no
sudden movement, peering in front but missing
nothing on the ground. They are alert for the
least sound ahead. . . . When two are working
together the pace is quicker than with one. If
the leader is at fault the smallest gesture tells the
man behind in which direction to look. The
front man from the corner of his eye tells instantly
if the second man finds the track and he follows
in that direction, and so on, first one leading,
and then the other. If both are at fault one
man trots ahead along the most likely spaces
in the undergrowth, while the second man makes

102 THE WORLD

a sort of cast round where the tracks ceased,
working like a ferret, with nose to the ground,
turning over a leaf here or feeling with the
flat hand there for any depression made by
hoofs, all the while on the alert and watching
for any sign from the man in front if he can see
him. If nothing is found, on he goes, pretty
sure that the other one has picked up the tracks.
If out of sight of each other they communicate
by low whistles, short low notes, imitating those
of a bird common in the forest.

" When close to one another they beckon
with the fingers over the shoulder, or if it is
more urgent will make a sharp tap or two on
their chest or a little slap on the thigh to attract
attention. If one of them has to look back it
is pretty to see how carefully he first takes stock
of everything in front before he slowly turns his
head to see what is happening, feeling his foot-
steps so as not to break sticks or catch his feet
in creepers, and doing his utmost not to knock
against anything which would bring down a
shower of drops on the dead leaves below with
noise enough to be heard by every animal
within a hundred yards. If a stick is cracked
or a noise made the little fellows instantly stop,
standing on one leg if the other foot is not down,
knowing that any animal within hearing is
listening intently in the same manner for some
explanation of the noise."

Life is so very hard for the pygmies that they

, THE PYGMIES OF 'FOREST 103

do not live long, and a man of forty years of age
is very old indeed. They have many habits
which we do not like and they live in ways which
do not seem very pleasant to us ? "but they do their
best with the conditions in which they live, and
though they are very uncivilised we cannot blame
them. In their places we should do no better,
perhaps not so well

CHAPTER XIII

THE NEGROES OF THE SUDAN" AND THE ZULUS
OF SOUTH AFRICA. THE GRASS LANDS

THE pygmies live in the great forest. North and
south of this forest there are lands of quite
another kind where people live far differently
from the pygmies. Forests only grow where
there is rain all the year round. Where there is
not rain all the year round there are either no
trees or else trees that do not grow well in the
dry season.

North of the big African forest there is a
region called the Sudan ; it stretches from the
Atlantic on the west to the Red Sea on the
east. Here it is always hot, but it is not always
wet. The year is divided not into winter and
summer seasons, but into wet and dry seasons,
and, during the dry season, the trees cease
growing and the leaves drop off. In colder
countries, such as England, it is during the cold
season that growth ceases and leaves fall.
Instead of forest the Sudan has grass lands with
trees scattered here and there. This kind of
grass land is called savana and is something

104

THE NEGROES OF SUDAN 105

like a huge park, but the grass is as high as a
man and grows in tufts.

The Sudan is the land of the civilised negroes.
People often make the mistake of thinking of
all black people as either barbarians or savages.
In the forest to the south there are negroes who
are not civilised, but even these men are not

IG 22. MAP OI 1 AFRICA TO SHOW WHERE THE FORESTS AND

GRASS LANDS ARE.

savages, and the negroes of the Sudan, as we
shall see presently, are in many ways a com-
paratively civilised race.

There are many tribes of negroes differing
from each other in their ways of dressing and
living, and it is not possible, in this chapter, to
deal with all of them. Most of the following
account refers to tribes of negroes living in

100 WORLD

Nigeria, the land through which flows another of
the great African rivers, the Niger.

As there is an abundance of grass, herds of
cattle, sheep, goats, horses, asses, and camels are
reared. Some of the negroes are cattle-raisers.
Owing to the presence of the lion and other
beasts of prey in the savana the animals cannot
be left out at night, as they are on the prairies
of America. They are driven home every evening
to be penned in an enclosure surrounded by a
high wooden fence.

As the trees are scattered it is possible to
break up the ground in between, to make fields,
and to cultivate them. Hence some of the
negroes are farmers. They grow chiefly rice,
maize, wheat, bananas and other kinds of fruit,
vegetables, cotton, and tobacco. The monkey
is the chief enemy of the crops, and many of the
children are employed to bang drums and make
other fearful noises in order to drive away the
thieves.

In the Sudan there is no lack of good food.
A man can have 'beef and mutton, though cattle
are not often killed for food. Eice is eaten
boiled, in cakes and in many other ways.
Porridge made from maize is a favourite dish and
milk is a common drink.

Very little clothing is worn on account of
the heat. Most of it is home made and of
cotton. When the cotton plant is ripe, it is
brought to the huts in bundles and the seeds

THE NEGROES OF THE SUDAN 107

are picked out of the white fluffy part by the

women and children. The cotton is then woven

on hand looms into long narrow strips which are

finally made into such clothing as is worn or

else sent away to be sold elsewhere. The

commonest ornaments

are necklaces of beads,

or anklets and bracelets

of brass or iron. The

negroes possess iron and

a number of other

metals and they are

good blacksmiths. They

use hammers and anvils and blow up their fires

with big bellows. Out of the iron they make

swords, daggers, scissors, knives, spears, hoes,

rings, and ornaments for wear. From the skins

of their flocks and herds they get leather, and

from this they make bridles, sandals, and

TOOLS AND ORNAMENTS.

WEAPONS.

harness. They also make leather jars in which
they keep fat, melted butter, honey, and bees-
wax. From clay they make earthenware vessels.
We can say, therefore, that the negro is a manu-
facturer.

Further, he is a trader. Through the savana

108

THE WORLD

pass

r .~~ long caravans carrying things from the
forests of the south to the lands much farther
north. Where the caravan roads meet men
settle to trade and we have towns. One of
these, Kano, is surrounded by a high wall of
clay fifteen miles in circumference. It is pro-
vided with gates of wood plated with iron ; these

1ST A NEGBO TOWN, KANO.

are closed every evening at sunset and not re-
opened till the dawn. In the markets of Kano
only one kind of thing is sold in one place.
Here yon can buy leather goods, sandals,
slippers, straps, and dyed sheep-skins ; there
you can purchase manufactured goods from
Europe. Buying and selling may be carried on
by barter and not by the exchange of money.

THE NEGROES OP SUDAN 109

If money Is used at all it may be thin flat pieces
of iron shaped like a T or even nothing but a
handful of cowrie shells.

It is easy to understand that the negro does
not wander about like the Eskimo or the pygmy.
His farms, his markets, and his blacksmith's
forges keep him at home. He can, therefore,
have a house to live in and not a tent. The
house is of grass and the bark of trees and is
roofed with leaves. There are two doors but
no windows, so that the interior is dark ; if there
were windows they would let in the sun's rays
and the house would be very hot. On the wall
hang a number of baskets ; on the floor is a
stone on which grain can be ground. The beds
are of poles and the spoons and dishes of
wood. The negro cleverly uses the things
that Nature has given him in abundance, in
order to make himself comfortable. He even
chews a bit of soft wood to get a toothbrush
and he sleeps the floor with a bundle of

When man builds a house and settles down he
gathers around him a number of things that he
would not bo bothered with if he had to be
continually on the move. He has more furniture,
more comforts, more of the things he calls " his
own," that is, he has more property. And
because he lives in a place where there are many
people he can talk to them and learn from them,
and so he has more ideas. He becomes more

HO THE WORLD

civilised. It is clear then that the negroes we
have been describing are civilised.

Now south of the big wet forest there is
another grass land very much like the Sudan,
and there live other dark-coloured people,
among them the Zulus. Some of them have
cattle, while others cultivate crops maize,
tobacco, and millet. The men look after the
cattle and the women work in the fields. Few

ZULU KRAAL, SHOWING OUTER FENCE AND CATTLE CORRAL.

clothes are worn, but bead ornaments and
bronze rings and bangles are common. Houses
are made of pointed laths, stuck in a circle in
the ground, bound together at the top, and
covered with grass or reeds so that they resemble
beehives. Again, there are no windows ; the
entrance is a small opening, so narrow that one
has to crawl through it on hands and knees,
and closed at night with a door of basket work.
The huts are built in a circle and a collection

- THE ZULUS OF SOUTH AFRICA 111

of huts forms a village or Jcraal. This is sur-
rounded by a strong circular hedge of thorns
provided with one gate which is closed at night.
The Zulus live under conditions much the
same as those in the Sudan. Both climate and
vegetation resemble each other. And there-
fore, though negro and Zulu are hundreds of
miles apart and separated by the big forest
through which neither of them can pass, they
both live in very much the same kind of way*
But the Zulus are not quite so civilised as the
negroes. They have no big towns and they are
not manufacturers. Still, because they stay at
home and till the ground they can have houses,
they can make certain things, and they are
more civilised than those of their African
brethren who are for ever wandering in the
mazes of the forest.

CHAPTER XIV

THE ARABS OF THE DESERT

As we come north from the forest where It is
always wet, less and less rain falls and there are
fewer and fewer trees, but it still keeps hot.

WM. Forest
!. , ''Grasslands

EZ3 Desert

FlG. 23. MAP OF AFRICA TO SHOW WHERE THE FORESTS
GRASS 3LANDS, AND DESERTS ARE.

First the trees f ail altogether and there is nothing
left but grass, and at last there is no rain at all
and we reach the desert. As we go south from
the equator the same kind of thing happens and

112

THE ARABS OF DESERT 113

in time we reach another desert. The desert
of North Africa the Saharais very large;
the desert of South Africa the Kalahari is
much smaller. In this chapter we deal with the
Sahara desert and its inhabitants, the Arabs.

The Sahara is a broad tract of country covered
with sand grey, golden, or whitish and not
all of one colour like that on the sea-shore of

A SANDSTORM IN THE DESERT.

England. It is not flat, but rises and falls in
little hills. The heat at midday is intense, and
at that time men often rest and sleep, -For
miles and miles nothing is to be seen but sand
and rocks. Sometimes a sand-storm blows and
the air is hot like fire. The sand sweeps onwards
like a burning mist, filling the eyes and ears with
hot, stinging grains. The only way to escape

114 THE WOBLD

death is to cover the head with some part of
one's clothing and fall flat on the ground. Even
the camel learns to bury its head in the sand at
such times.

There are very few plants in the desert, but
there are prickly acacias, thorny plants and coarse
grasses, that prevent the loss of any moisture
they contain by means of their thick skins, and
there are other plants that store up moisture in
bulbous roots. But all these plants are few
and hardly any of them are of much use to man.

As no one can grow things in the desert and
as there is no grass or enough of any other kind
of vegetation on which animals can be reared,
the land is, as its name explains, deserted. Here
and there in the lower-lying parts of the desert
water is to be found. Rain falls in the countries
far to the south and the west ; some of this
flows a long way underground and leaks out in
these lower spots. Here there are gardens and
fields, for the desert is fertile eixough when
water is obtainable. A great part of the c c sand 5 '
is not really sand at all, but dust, in which
plants grow well if the soil is kept wet. The
fertile spots in the desert are called oases, and
if it were not for the oases, it would be utterly
impossible for man ever to cross the wide sandy
wastes.

Two kinds of life can be lived in the desert,
one by the people who make their homes at the
oasis, and another by those who spend their

THE ARABS OF DESERT 115

time in the desert itself. At the oasis sheep and
cattle and goats are reared ; the Arab is a stock-
raiser. Fruit, rice, and millet are grown ; he
is a small farmer. The chief tree at the oasis
is the date palm. It is a tall straight tree whose
stem can be used for timber and whose leaves
can be used for making huts.
The dates grow in bunches at
the top and are used for food.
The Arabs eat them fresh,
dried, and cooked in many
different ways. A handful
of dates is a meal in itself,
and dates are among the
most important things that
are sold in the little markets.

The Arab is also a trader ;
he sells to the people who
pass through the oases as
they make their way across
the desert ^ and buys from
them. Besides growing grain
and rearing animals, the
dwellers at the oasis dry
dates, make leather out of goat-skins, pottery-
out of clay, and blankets and carpets out of
the hair and wool of the animals they rear.

The houses are of stone or clay, without
windows, to keep out the heat. They have flat
roofs where the inhabitants sleep in order to be
cool. The poorest people of all live in huts

DATE PALM.

116 THE WORLD

made of palm leaves. An oasis is not always
the small place shown in some pictures, with
two palm trees and a camel. It is often thirty
miles across and may contain many small towns
or villages.

The Bedouin Arabs who wander about in
the desert live a very different kind of life. They
have flocks and herds, and because there is little
water and grass at any one place, and what there
is is soon used up, they are always moving from
one spot to another. Their chief animal is the
camel, which is called the Ship of the Desert.
The camel can carry a load of 400 Ibs. and
travel 30 miles a day. It has a long neck, so
that it can reach the grass as it goes along ;
it has a hard mouth, so that it can eat the
prickly plants that grow here and there amongst
the sand. It can close its nostrils when a
sand-storm comes, and it has long eyelashes
to shade its eyes from the glare of the sun.
It must kneel to be loaded, and has hard
pads on its knees. It can store up* fat in its
hump and water in its stomach, and so can
go several days without anything to eat or
drink. All that happens is that its hump
gets smaller and smaller. Without the camel,
trade and travel in the desert would be
impossible.

The camel provides its owner with milk
to drink, hair for making ropes, cloth, and rugs,
and sometimes flesh to eat.

THE ARABS OF THE DESERT 117

In order to live his wandering life the Arab
must have a tent. This is made of cloth woven
from the hair of the goats and it has a large
number of poles. The ends of the cloth are
fastened into the ground with pegs. Across
the inside of the tent, cloth is stretched to divide
it into two parts, one for the women and another
for the men. The floor is of clean sand, but
at night rugs and carpets are put down on which
to sleep. Inside the tent are the saddle-bags,
boxes of clothes, beautiful mats, rugs and
cushions.

ARAB TENT.

When it is time to move to another well or
oasis, the tent is taken down in a few minutes,
the tent poles are tied together, the covers are
rolled up, and the pegs and rugs are made into
bundles. One camel kneels in the sand and is
loaded with the tent and the poles ; another is
loaded with mats, cushions, and bags of dates.
A third carries water in bags made of camel-
skin, and milk in smaller bags made of goat-
skin. The women and the children ride on the
camels, the servants walk, and the masters go
on horses.

The Arab horse is a fine animal, brave,

118 THE WORLD

swift, gentle, and beautiful An Arab will part
with anything rather than with his horse ; and
at noon, when all must stop because of the heat,
the horse is taken into the tent to be shielded
from the scorching raj^s of the sun.

Because the supply of water and grass is
small, men often fight for water at the wells ;
the wandering Arab is a fighter and very often,
out in the lonely desert, where there is no
policeman to see him or to catch him, he often
attacks and robs some other wanderer less strong
than himself ; he is a thief.

There is no change in the desert ; it is to-day
as it was thousands of years ago, and the Arab
is like the land in which he lives. He does not
alter ; he learns nothing new. There is no one
to learn from. He is brave, strong, and proud.
He is clever enough to be able to live in a land
where you and I would die. He can find his
way for days where we should be lost in a very-
short time. He can see things afar off and hear
sounds at a great distance that we should not
notice. He loves his wild, free, hard life, and
looks down with contempt on the men who live
in the small towns that grow up round the
oases.

The desert gives him little, and to satisfy
his wants he becomes a trader. He parts with
his young horses and he sells butter and also
salt, of which there are supplies in the desert.
In exchange for these things he gets flour,

THE ARABS OF DESERT 119

coffee, and clothes for himself and barley for Ms
horse.

A Bedouin Arab can get Ms living also by
acting as a guide and by driving camels. When
people have to cross the desert they fear to lose
the way and so miss the wells, and they are
equally afraid to meet with robbers and so lose
their lives. Because of the robbers they travel
together, and long strings of camels may some-
times be seen marching across the sands. These

A CARAVAN IN THE DESERT.

parties of men and beasts are called caravans.
The leader of the caravan, the Arab guide, has
to be able to find his way swiftly and surely,
and he is well paid for his work. If he misses
the way all die. When he sets out, he is king of
the caravan, and when he has brought it safely-
home men thank him as one who has saved their
lives.

We see, then, that it is necessary to settle
down in one place if man is to produce anything,

120 THE WORLD

but that it is necessary to move from place to
place if man is to trade. The negro settles to
produce things : the Arab moves from place to
place to take things that are produced from
one place to another.

We have now taken a look at a large part of
Africa and we find that there is a big forest in
the centre round the equator ; that north and
south and east of this there are grass lands ;
and that north and south of the grass lands there
are deserts. Also we have noticed that forest,
grass land, and desert have different kinds of
people in them eating different food, wearing
different clothes, living in different houses, and,
when you are older, you will know and under-
stand that they even think differently.

CHAPTEE XV

THE KILE AND EGYPT

WE have seen that the north of Africa is largely
a desert where man cannot live except in certain
favoured spots called oases. Now Egypt is a
country that is really nothing else but a long
narrow oasis stretching across the desert from
south to north. Only because water comes to
it in a curious way can anything be grown
there. If it were not for this regular supply
of water Egypt would just be desert like the land
on either side of it. But water has always been
brought to the Nile and, therefore, for thousands
of years p,eople have been able to settle and raise
crops and Egypt has long been civilised.

There is always some water in the Nile because
the river begins in Victoria Nyanza, a big lake
lying on the equator, in that part of the world
where it is wet at all times. Hence the Nile
flows steadily all the year round, although part
of its course lies through a waterless region.
In its upper course it is joined by two rivers from
the mountains of Abyssinia, the Blue Nile and
the Afbara. Abyssinia, like the Sudan, receives

121

122

THE WORLD

rain in summer, and when the snows on the high
mountains have melted and the heavy rains
have fallen the Blue Nile becomes a rushing
torrent. It pours down what were dry courses
in winter and causes the floods that do duty for
rain in Egypt in bringing water to the fields.
But the flood water has such a long distance to
go that it takes several weeks to travel from the
mountains of Abyssinia to
the plains of Egypt.

From Khartum to the sea,
during the winter, the amount
of water in the Nile steadily
1 decreases. Much is lost by
|r] evaporation owing to the
j|S heat, for of course it is still
jfefi: hot in winter, and immense
litlf quantities are pumped up to
be distributed, by means of
hundreds of canals, to the
thirsty fields. The floods begin

Fia. 24. MAP TO SHOW . ^ -11 r . .

WHERE BAIN PALLS IN in J une ana trie river rises

than this rise takes place there is a shortage of
water and scanty or no crops. If the rise be
greater, then the homes which are built on the
slightly raised parts are flooded and whole
hamlets may suffer serious damage. From the
Atbara to the sea there is no tributary at all,
for from that place to the sea the river flows
through a land where there is no rain. The

THE NILE AND EGYPT

123

valley of the Nile is simply a big trough first
cut in the rocks by the river itself and then
filled with the fertile soil alluvium brought
from the mountains of Abyssinia.

This oasis is 700 miles long and from 5 to 10
miles wide. Like all oases, it is below the level
of the rest of the ground. Tall cliffs come fairly
close on either side and the native boats have
high sails to catch whatever
breezes blow. Crops can be
grown where the land has
been wet by the Nile, and if
we could look down upon
the landscape from an aero-
plane, we should see in the
centre of the picture the long
thin line of the chocolate-
coloured Nile glistening like
a mirror in the sun, on either
side of it a narrow strip of
green where the water has

& * FIG. 25. MAP TO snow

brought life llltO the Waste. WHERE BAIN FALLS IN

and then, as far as the eye WINTEB -

could reach, nothing but the parched yellow soil

of the barren desert.

It is clear that the Egyptians must, for the
most part, get their living by farming, and so
there is not much need for towns. Egypt
possesses two large cities Cairo, the modern
capital, and Alexandria, the chief port but the
number of towns is very few. The fellaheen, as

124

WORLD

the peasants are called, live in villages near to
the river but usually on ground high enough, to
escape the floods. Occasionally the villages are
built on flat land and protected from the rising
water by thick walls. In the centre of the
village is an open space with the house of the
sheikh or chief on one side of it.

The houses are mere huts one story high, and
built of bricks made of the mud of the Nile and
dried in the sun. Such bricks could only be

DISTANT VIEW ACROSS THE NILE VAXLEY.

used in a country where it does not rain, for a
few heavy showers would soften the walls and
cause them to fall. The roofs are flat and covered
with a pile of cotton-stalks and other litter.
There are no windows, but light and air are
sometimes admitted through a few small holes.
The only furniture consists of one or two mats,
water-pots and cooking utensils.

When the Nile overflows its banks it brings
not only water to fill the canals and reservoirs,

THE NILE AND EGYPT

125

but also a supply of rich fertile mud in which
seeds are afterwards sown. In this soil two and
even three crops a year can be raised. No land
is wasted on either grass or wild flowers, but all
is under cultivation. The plants largely grown
are those common to many hot countries cotton,
rice, and palms, and, in the cooler season, maize,
barley, flax, and wheat. The inhabitants of the

THE GREAT COTTON CROP IN EGYPT.

valley are clever farmers and work hard from
morning to night. They have a soil and a
climate well suited to agriculture ; their only
need is water. This is obtained from the river,
and from the very earliest times Egypt has
understood and practised the art of irrigation.
There are canals in all directions and the banks
of the canals are the roads. The Nile floods do
not cover the whole of the land and big canals

i

128

THE WORLD

have been made throughout the country. These'
have smaller branches that carry the water
wherever it is wanted and take the place of
hedges as boundaries to many of the fields.
To raise the water to the higher levels shaduf s
and water-wheels or sakias are employed.

The shaduf consists of a
long pole with a leather
bucket at one end and a
heavy lump of mud at the
other. It is balanced on a
short beam supported on two
pillars about four or five feet
high. The bucket hangs over
a small pool that is connected
with the river by a narrow
channel. The fellah pulls on
a rope or pole, lowers the
bucket into the pool and fills
it. He then lets go and the
mud weight lifts the bucket ;
this is then emptied into the
canal. When the level of
the river has fallen some
distance it cannot supply the little pool, and
another shaduf is built below the first one to
lift the water into the pool and keep it full.
Sometimes there may be as many as four of these
shadufs. one above the other lifting the water
step by step to the higher drier land above.
The work is exceedingly hard, the heat is

SHADUF.

NILE AND EGYPT 127

excessively great, and the toilers wear little or no
clothing while they perform their task.

The water-wheels or sakias are of two kinds,
but each consists of a horizontal wheel turned
by bullocks. The spokes stick out like cogs and
so turn another wheel placed at right angles
below it. The wheel used in the fields has a
hollow rim ^divided up into little boxes that pick
up the water when the rim is in the water and
discharge it into a narrow ditch when they
reach the top. " Those used on the river bank,
however, are too far from the water for such
a wheel to be of use, so in place of the hollow
rim the second wheel has also cogs, on which
revolves an endless chain of rope to which
earthen pots are attached, and whose length may
be altered to suit the varying levels of the river. 53

The ancient Egyptians did not know what it
was that caused the river to rise every year and
bring them soil and water. To them this annual
gift of a new life to the fields was a very wonderful
thing, and *they worshipped the river that was
so kind to them ; the Nile was regarded as a god.
We, in our times, understand quite well w^hat
causes the river to rise, but it is none the less
wonderful because we know how it happens.

CHAPTER XVI

IN T DIA, WHERE TEA GROWS

IN previous chapters we have shown how the
Portuguese brought spices from India, how tea
was and is still brought, and how, to-day, wheat
is an important export. In another chapter we
have found out that wheat grows best where
the climate is warm but not too hot and where
the summer is dry. We may now inquire what
are the conditions best suited for growing tea.

A glance inside a tea-pot shows us a mass
of tea-Zeaves. When the tea is obtained from
the. grocer, in a packet, it does not look much like
leaves, and it is only when we have poured hot
water on it that we can see plainly r that what
we are dealing with is leaves, and sometimes
stalks. The chief part of the tea plant, then,
is leaves, and the great idea of a tea-planter is
to get as many of them as he can.

But the forests of the Congo and the Amazon,
where the trees are in leaf all the year round,
teach us that plenty of rain and plenty of heat
are required in order to obtain plenty of leaves.
At the same time, the tea-plant does not thrive
if water is allowed to stand about its roots, so

128

INDIA, TEA GROWS 129

it cannot be grown in these hot wet plains.
To get the water away from the roots it must
be grown on a hill-side in order that the water
can drain away. Hence the places where tea
grows best are hot, wet, and hilly. Wheat is
grown in places where it is dry, warm, flat. If,.
then, both tea and wheat come in large quantities
from India, India must be a country where

A T L

FlQ. 26. MAP TO SHOW HOW BIG INDIA IS.

India is supposed to be lifted up and placed in the Atlantic. It
stretches from Ireland to Newfoundland.

there are very different kinds of climate and
different kinds of surface.

India is a very big country indeed. If it
were placed in the Atlantic between America
and Europe, the Himalayas, that form its
northern boundary, would stretch almost from
Ireland to Newfoundland. In a land of this
size there are many different kinds of country.

130

THE WORLD

A map of India shaded to show the high land
is fairly simple to understand. In the north
there is a belt of very high land, the Hima-
layas ; south of this, and running across the
land from east to west, is a low plain consisting
of the basins of the two big rivers, the Indus

\CeyIon
Colombo^

FlG. 27. MAP TO SHOW THE HIGH GROUND IN INDIA.

and the Ganges. In the southern triangular
part of the peninsula there is a high tableland,
the DekJcan, whose steep western edge forms the
Western Ghats.

If we look for the wheat lands we look for
the warm, dry, level lands. Now, all India is

INDIA, TEA 131

warm at sea-level, and there are no really cold
parts except high, up on the summits of the
mountains. The level lands are in the plains and
on the plateau, and wheat is grown in many
places in these regions, but the chief wheat
district is in the north-west, in the Punjab
and the North-West Frontier Province, Here
the land is level enough, and the temperature

WT7\ Little
FlO. 28. MAP TO SHOW WLfcJttJB THERE IS MOST RAIN IN" I3TDIA IH

SUMMER.

in February or March, when the wheat ripens,
is only about as hot as the summer temperature
in some of the wheat lands of the United States
of America. Moreover, the north-west is fairly
dry. In fact, it is so dry at times that rain
fails when it is most needed, and the land has
to be irrigated.

Rain is brought to India chiefly in the
summer and by the south-west monsoon. From

132

WOBLD

May onwards to December the air is damp,
and heavy rains often fall, but they are heaviest
from June to October. The wind crosses the
Arabian Sea and meets the hills of Ceylon and
the Western Ghats, where the yearly rainfali
is very heavy. By the time the winds have
crossed the mountains they have lost a great

FlG. 29. MAP TO SHOW WHERE TEA GROWS IN INTDIA.

deal of their moisture, and the rainfall is only
about a quarter of what it is on the west.

From the Bay of Bengal the air current
reaches the Khasia Hills in Assam and brings
tremendous downpours. This current of air is
then turned to the west ; it meets the Himalayas
and heavy rains fall on the plain of the Ganges.

INDIA, 6KOWS 133

One part of India is low and sandy and
therefore very hot in the summer. The wind
reaches it from the west, and is a dry wind,
not a damp one. Hence there is little or no
rain, and we have the Thar or Indian Desert.

If we look for the tea plantations we must
look for them on the warm,
wet hill-sides, and we find
them chiefly in the Western
Ghats, the hills of Assam,
other parts of the Hima-
layas, and in Ceylon. The
tea plantations are situated
on the sides of those hills
from which the forest has
been cleared, and they vary
in size from a few score to
many hundreds of acres in
extent. They usually have
railway connections with the
larger towns, good roads and
drains, and well-equipped
factories for the manufacture
of tea.

The tea shrub is planted in long, neat rows,
and each shrub is so pruned as to keep it broad,
flat, and under four feet in height, in order that
the leaves may easily be plucked. Amongst
the bushes coolies or labourers, both men and
women, are always hard at work. There is
much work to be done, not only in gathering

TEA PLANTATION.

134

THE WORLD

the leaves but also in weeding,, for in jhis land
of sun and rain weeds spring up rapidly and,
if they were allowed to flourish, they would
interfere with the growth of the shrubs. The
coolies are thin, weak-looking people, for the
heat is trying and fever is common. Some-
times, after heavy
rains, the coolies may
be seen working al-
most knee-deep in
water and mud with
a scorching sun over-
head.

Only the buds and
the smallest leaves
are used, and they are
picked, one, at a time,
chiefly by women and
children ; neat quick
fingers are necessary
for this kiQ.d of work.
As the leaves are
taken from the shrubs
they are put into
baskets and carried to the factory. Here the
baskets are weighed, for the coolie is paid
according to the amount he has gathered.
Then they are taken to the withering-room and
the leaves are left to wither, all the night, on
shallow canvas trays. The next morning they
are rolled for half an hour in a rolling machine

TEA-PLANTING: WITHERING LEAVES.

INDIA, WHERE TEA GROWS 135

and converted into a huge wet- mass. This
mass is broken up, spread on trays, and left
to ferment. It must be carefully watched and
the fermentation stopped at just the right
moment or the aroma of the tea will be spoiled.
The tea is then thrown into a machine and
dried by hot air. It is next sorted, by means
of sieves, into tea
of different quali-
ties. The best kind
consists of nothing
but the little leaf
buds, the next
variety includes
some of the young
leaves, and the
cheapest quality of
all includes coarse
leaves. In Ceylon
practically every-
thing is done by
machinery from

the time the tea TEA CTJ]LTIJBE : TURNING THE

reaches the factory till it is shipped to the
foreign markets, but in the Himalayas the
sieves merely sift the tea roughly into large
and small leaves, and the final sorting is by
hand ; nimble fingers pick out quickly the
finest sorts of tea. The tea is dried yet once
more, then taken to the warehouse, packed
in lead-lined boxes and sent to Britain.

136 THE WORLD

What with planting, weeding, picking, wither-
ing, fermenting, drying, sorting and packing there
is plenty to be done before we can get a pound
of tea for half a crown. And we only get it for
half a crown because labour in India is very-
cheap. If the workers in the tea plantations
received as high wages as the ordinary British ,
working man, tea would be so dear that only
rich people could afford to drink it.

CHAPTER XVII

THE PEOPLES OF INDIA

IN the last chapter we showed how big India
Is ; it is really very much like a " small con-
tinent/ 5 for it includes a number of countries
whose peoples differ from each other in race,
language, customs, and religion. India is as
big as Europe without Kussia, or, to put it in
another way, it is fourteen times as big as the
British Isles.

At least 150 different languages are spoken
by the 315 million people who inhabit the land,
and a native who goes very far from home
would find it impossible to speak to or under-
stand the speech of the people among whom
he had arrived. A native of Madras, visiting,
say, Bombay, would be, so far as language is
concerned, as much a foreigner as an English-
man would be if he went to Turkey.

To understand why there should be so
much variety and such great differences it
is only necessary to think a little more of what
India is like. In the first place, the different
districts are more or less completely separated

137

138 THE WORLD

from each other, and in the second place these
different districts vary a great deal in climate
and surface. On the western side of India
are the steep, forested Western Ghats. These,
in the days before the railways were built,
made it almost impossible for people of the
coast strip " to travel inland, and hence these
people differ in language and custom from the
other peoples of India. The Eastern Ghats are
not so high as the Western Ghats, but travel
inland is difficult, and the rivers, that look such
good highways on the map, are of no use to
travellers, as they are unnavigable. Here,
then, on the eastern coast is another set of
people.

The Eastern and the Western Ghats are
merely the steep edges of the high plateau of
the Dekkan. It is separated from the coast
strips in the way already described : on the
north are the Vindhya and Satpura Moun-
tains, which again are difficult to cross. The
Dekkan, then, is another isolated area, for
when travel is difficult, men usually stay at
home.

In the north of India the Himalayas shut
off India, as a whole, from the rest of Asia.
It is true that there are one or two difficult
ways over the lower parts of the Himalayas
and, by means of these, various invaders have
made their way into the country from time to
time. But each body of newcomers drove

THE PEOPLES OF INDIA 139

away the people whom they displaced, and
forced them to take refuge in the mountains

THE HIMALAYAS.

and the forests ; thus both the old inhabitants
and the new were separated; they kept them-

140 THE WORLD

selves to themselves and preserved their own
customs.

Differences of temperature have added to
the differences caused Tby the surface of the
country. India is, everywhere, a hot land at
sea-level, but it has climates as different as
those of a hot-house and an ice-field. There
are perpetual snows on the Himalayas. At
Lahore there are, during the cool season, frosts
in the early morning, and people have fires
in the houses in the evening. In Colombo
there are no fireplaces at all, except for cook-
ing, and the punkah or fan that cools the air of
the rooms is kept going from Christmas to
Christmas.

Differences of rainfall are equally important.
Where rain is abundant, as in the valley of the
lower Ganges, we have swamps and jungle ;
where there is little or no rain, as in the lower
part of the Indus valley, we have the Thar
desert, where not only people cannot live, but
on which they cannot move.

All these differences mean differences in the
way of living. Some of the people of India
live in great cities like Calcutta and Bombay
and Madras and Delhi, where you may meet
people as civilised as Europeans, while some
forest dwellers are little better than the pygmies ;
and so it happens that India, isolated from the
rest of the world by seas and mountains, and
divided up into compartments by river and

OF INDIA

141

forest, mountain and desert, with different
climates and soils and vegetation in different
parts, has people with different customs in
eveiy different area, and that these governed
themselves in their own way, kept their own
manner of living, and hated foreigners ; and
everybody was a foreigner even if he lived in
India, provided he lived in a different area.
And yet on all the flat lands, that is, on the
plains of the Indus and the Ganges and on the
higher plain or
plateau of the
Dekkan, men
are alike in one
thing: they are
farmers, and life
is centred in
villages, not
towns. Nine-
tenths of the
people of India live on the crops they them-
selves raise/ Their methods of cultivation are
not very scientific and the implements they
use are very old-fashioned. The ryot or farmer
uses a wooden plough and merely scratches the
surface of the soil ; he cuts his grain with a
sickle, threshes it by hand or under the feet
of his animals, and his women-folk grind the
grain by hand as they have done for centuries.
In this fertile country the farmer is everywhere
a poor man.

PLOUGHING WITH OXEN.

142

THE WORLD

But though most of the people are farmers
they do not all grow the same kinds of things.
In the plain of the lower Ganges, for instance,
where the rainfall is heavy, the chief food crop
is nee, but in the Punjab it is wheat, and on the
Dekkan it is millet. Neither do they use the
same kinds of animals when they travel or for

work on the fields.
In the dry plains
one sees the camel
and the horse; in
the North-West
Provinces the bul-
lock is common ;
in the plain of the
lower Ganges it is
the buffalo ; and in
the high moun-
. tains, where none
of these are of an}?
use, there is the
yak.

Owing to the
heat little clothing is worn. Three long
strips of cotton with a blanket of coarse
wool where the rain is heavy or the cold
severe, suffice for both sexes. Food is of the
plainest and is all home grown; millions of
people never eat meat at all. The houses are
built for convenience and not for beauty.
Where the rainfall is heavy and wood and

WINNOWING RICE.

THE PEOPLES OF INDIA

143

grass and leaves are abundant., the walls are of
wood and the roofs of leaves and grass. In
the drier plains the walls are of mud for want
of other materials. Life is lived in the open
air except when cold or rain forces the people
to go indoors. There is little furniture except
a few rough bedsteads, and even these are not
to be found in the homes of the poor. During
the hot part of the year, and that
means most of the year, people
sleep outside their houses on the
verandahs if they possess them,
and if not, then anywhere, even
by the roadside.

Nearly three-quarters of the
people are Hindus, a darkish-
brown race that once lived in
Central Asia. They invaded India
from the north-west and drove
the natives into the hills and
forests. To keep themselves
separate from those whom they
had conquered and whom they
despised, they forbade marriage between the
races. Further, they divided themselves into
four classes or castes. Of these the Brahman
or priest was the highest of all Then, in de-
scending order of merit, came the warrior, the
trader or farmer, and the servant. Everybody
who was not a member of one of these four
castes was a pariah. To-day there are between

A WATER- CARRIER.

144 THE WORLD

two and three thousand different castes, and
every Hindu, except the very lowest, belongs
to one or other of them. Each caste is shut
off from all the rest as "by an insurmountable
wall A man can take food from another of
higher caste but not from one of a lower caste.
People from one caste cannot marry any one
belonging to another caste. Each trade is a
separate caste and, therefore, a man has to
keep to the trade to which he is born. If a

grocer's son wanted to
be a fishmonger or a
shoemaker his friends
would hold up their
hands in horror and
astonishment.

The caste system is
bound up with religion,
and religion in India
not only says what a
man shall believe but also how he shall eat,
drink, and sleep, and what his trade shall be.
But it has little to do with how he acts, for no
matter how many sins he commits, he can
wash them all away by bathing in the Ganges.

Just as there are different races and lan-
guages, so there are several religions. The
Hindus believe in some form of Brahmanism.
According to this religion there are three chief
gods Brahma, the creator of the universe;
Siva, the destroyer ; and Vishnu, the preserver

A POTTEK.

THE PEOPLES OF INDIA 145

of all things and many little gods like the
Elephant God and the Monkey God. The
sacred books are the Vedas, perhaps the oldest
books in the world. When a man dies he is
born again, and this will happen time after
time, for thousands of years, unless he becomes
pure in word, thought, and deed, after which
he will rest for ever, and be born
no more on earth. When a man is
reborn he may come back as a man
or an animal. It all depends on
what kind of life he has lived. If
he has been very wicked he may
reappear as a slave or a beetle ; if
he has been very good, perhaps he
will be a prince. As a man sows so
must he also reap. To become good
one can do good deeds pray, fast,
and inflict torture on one's self.
There is no forgiveness.

In the Punjab most of the NATIVE INDIAN
people are Mohammedans, and there WOMAN WITH

* "- CHILD ON HIP.

are altogether about 60,000,000
Mohammedans in India. These pray with their
faces towards Mecca and swear by the
beard of their prophet. Their chief article
of belief is " There is no God but God, and
Mohammed is His prophet. ' ' Mohammed taught
that the Creator rules the universe with love
and mercy, and is alone to be worshipped ;
bhat in times of adversity there must be no

146

THE WORLD

murmuring against His decrees ; that He must
always be looked upon with trustfulness and
love. A Mohammedan also believes in eternal
punishment for those who worship idols, or
who do not believe in the prophet. He makes
frequent ablutions, prays five times a day,
goes on a pilgrimage to Mecca if he can find the
time and the money, fasts often, does not touch
wine or pork, and gives alms as a
duty. His sacred book is the
|[i Koran, and his day of rest is our
Friday.

Buddhism is the third of the
great religions. It was founded by
Buddha, the son of an Indian
prince. He was born about the
fifth or sixth century before Christ.
He was so shocked by the wicked-
ness and misery of the world
around him that he became a
hermit and thought out what he
considered the best means of
escape from the troubles of life. The aim of
his religion is to reach a state called Nirvana,
where both pleasure and pain cease for ever.
Until a man reaches Nirvana he will be born
again and again.

Then there are the Parsees, who worship
the sun, the Sikhs, who hold services where
they say prayers, sing hymns and listen to
sermons much as we do, and yet others who

BHILS.

THE PEOPLES OF INDIA

147

think that every hill and stream is the abode
of a spirit.

Even on the Great Trunk Koad that runs
through the Ganges Plain you may see many
different kinds of things and people. As the
road stretches, shimmering in the heat, away
into the distance, there passes along it much
that we think about when India comes into
our minds.

Here is the Kabuli trader, hook-nosed,
beady-eyed, tall and gaunt with his high
turban, long robes and shoes with
turned up points, on the look-out
to lend money to the needy or to
recover it from those who are
already in his debt. There is a
wild-looking, long-haired Akali
with blue-checked clothes and blue
turban. That almost naked, clay-
smeared person with his hair coiled
on his head, and bearing a trident
in his hand is a fakir ; that one,
saffron-robed and spotlessly clean
is a Hindu priest. Those flat-
footed, strong-limbed women in
the blue petticoats are changars
who help to build embankments. Numerous
women, dressed in a strip of common cloth
draped gracefully about them and carrying
earthenware pitchers on their heads or supported
on their hips, move by with queenly step.

NATIVE POLICE-
MAN.

148

THE WORLD

Now and then, a baby takes the place of the
pitcher on the hip.

The most familiar sight is the bullock cart
churning up the dust ; the bullock, guided by
reins of string threaded through its nostrils and
urged forward by the twisting of its tail and the
jabs of a short-handled whip, zig-zags along the
highway. A Brahmini bull, fat, slow and lazy,
feeds where it will and on what it pleases, for
it is a sacred beast. An occasional camel, its
approach heralded by the slow, regular, clear
and beautiful sound of the bell that hangs over
its shoulder, makes its appearance. Some-
times there may
be a line of
camels tied
head to tail, and
sometimes one
will be seen
harnessed to a
cartel cart
double - decked,
dirty and
crowded with a whole family and its belongings.
The camel is a stately beast, when the road is
dry ; when it is wet its soft padded feet slither
north, south, east and west.

Everywhere there is colour blue, red,
yellow, brown and saffron ; everywhere there
is noise the harsh cry of the bullock driver,
the laughter of children, the bleating of goats,

WAITING FOR A TEAIN.

THE PEOPLES OF INDIA 149

the clucking of half-starved chickens, the snap-
ping bark of the mangy pariah dog, the buzzing
of millions of mosquitoes, the chirping of
crickets, the music of a wedding party and the
never-ending chatter of a never-ending proces-
sion.

To tell of all the different races, religions,
and customs of India would fill many books,
and here we have only one short chapter in
which to touch upon the fringes of the subject.
But perhaps it is long enough to make you
understand that " India " is not a country
with one or two races, but a great medley of
all kinds of people who do not understand each
other's speech or believe in the same gods,
and who do not even love one another as
members of one common country.

All this makes it difficult to govern India
properly.

CHAPTER XVIII

CHINA

" WILL you take China tea or Indian ? " is a
question asked of guests in many houses.
And such a question tells us, even if we did not
know it before, that India and Ceylon are not
the only countries that produce tea and that
in China also this precious leaf is grown.

In Chapter XVI. we learned that tea grows
on warm wet hill-sides. Therefore there must
be some parts of China that are mountainous
and that possess a damp, hot climate. But
China, like India, is an enormous country with
millions of people, mostly farmers, living in it.
It contains more people than the, whole of
Europe; in fact it contains a quarter of all
the people living on the surface of the earth.
And because the country is so large it must
possess many different kinds of climate ; it
will probably then possess many different kinds
of soil and surface, and we can, therefore, guess
that the same kinds of crops will not be grown
everywhere and that only in certain parts of
this extensive country will the tea shrub
flourish. Let us see if this is so.

150

CHINA

151

Firsfc, we know that tea grows best In a
hilly country. What kind of surface has China ?
China is divided chiefly between the basins of
three enormous rivers. In the north is the
Hwang-Ho, a river that rises in the dry and
dusty highlands of Tibet. The west winds

FlG. 30. MAP TO SHOW WHERE THE PLAINS AND VALLEYS OF CHINA

ARE.

that blow in winter across this part of the
earth have been driving the dust of the table-
land before them for so many centuries that
hills and valleys are, in some places, hundreds
of feet below the level of the surface of the
deposits of dust. Such deposits are called
loess, a word which means loose. Through the

152 WORLD

loess the Hwang-Ho and its tributaries have
carved, their way, making in the course of time
a number of steep-sided ravines. Millions of
people live on the floors of these valleys, for
the soil is very fertile where there is water.
Many of the people live in caves which they
have dug out in the steep sides of the valleys,
and even where it is known that there are
thousands of dwellers it may be almost im-
possible to find a single house. The loess is a
crumbling yellow kind of earth which stains
everything that it touches. The soil is yellow,
the houses are yellow, the roads are yellow,
Hwang-Ho means Yellow River, and the national
colour of China is yellow.

As the river comes out of the mountains it
bears a heavy load of fine silt, and with this
it has built up the Great Plain of China, per-
haps the most thickly peopled plain in the
world. At its northern end stands PeJcin, the
capital of China. The city is divided into two
oblong towns, one for the people and one for
the government, and each is surrounded by
high thick walls that were built to keep out
robbers. The two towns are again enclosed by
a wall and a moat. Pekin is a dirty city and
is troubled, from time to time, by the dust-
laden winds from the west.

Much of the silt which is brought down by
the Hwang-Ho is, every year, deposited on the
bed of the river itself, which is thus raised so

CHINA 153

high that when the floods come, the water
overflows the banks. To prevent this, as far
as possible, embankments have been built and
millions of trees planted on them, but, at
times, the embankments give way, terrible
floods follow, and the river changes its course.
Until 1852 the mouth of the river was on the
south side of the Shantung peninsula. In that
year the banks broke down, the river took
another path and flowed into the Gulf of
Pechili, that is, the river mouth moved 300
miles to the north. In 1887 there was another
big flood ; a thousand villages were destroyed
and a million people drowned. On account of
these disastrous floods the Hwang-Ho is called
" China's Sorrow," and there are no large
towns near the banks of the river in its lower
course.

As tea grows on the sides of mountains we
shall not expect, for that reason alone, to find
farmers cultivating the tea shrub on the Great
Plain of Ctina.

In South China there are long ranges of
mountains running roughly east and west.
In their valleys there are a number of big
rivers, the chief of which is the Yang-tse-
Kiang. It rises in Tibet, but little is known
about it till it reaches the province of Yunnan.
At Ichang it cuts its way through a mountain
range, becomes a foaming torrent, and prevents
steamers from getting further up the stream.

154 THE WORLD

But small boats are often hauled through the
rapids, as many as 200 men being harnessed
at the same time to a single boat. As the
waters rush through the narrow passage they
wear away the sides of the cliffs, dash the
boulders from side to side, grind the loose
rocks into fine mud, and carry this, with their
other loads, from the mountains, to be dropped
lower down where the speed of the current is
slower. The plain that surrounds the lower
part of the Yang-tse-Kiang is made up of the
mud brought down by the river. There are,
however, rarely any floods like those of the
Hwang-Ho, for the Yang-tse-Kiang is con-
nected, by means of short tributaries, with a
number of lakes, and these lakes have to be
filled up first before the river can rise high
enough to overflow its banks.

South of the Yang-tse-Kiang are more
ranges of mountains, and then comes the basin
of the third of the big rivers, the Si-Kiang.
This rises in the high lands of Yunnan and
flows eastwards. At its mouth it forms a large
delta and in its course there are a number of
rapids ; but it is, all the same, a fairly useful
waterway.

If tea grows on the sides of mountains it
will probably grow in one or both of the valleys
of the two rivers last mentioned. But, secondly,
tea requires warmth and moisture. The north
of China is farther north than London ; the

CHINA

155

south of China Is farther south than Cairo.
There must then be great differences of tempera-
ture due to this fact alone, that China stretches
so far north and south. The summers, how-

RAINFALL
c/? Rain

^H Moderate Rain
]:->:| Little Rain

FlG. 31. MAP TO SHOW WHERE RAIN FALLS OVEB, ASIA IN WINTER.

ever, are everywhere warm ; the winters, which
are mild in the south, are very cold in the
north ; the northern plain is so cold in winter
that lakes and rivers sometimes freeze. That

156

THE WOELD

is not the land for tea. Even at Shanghai,
near the mouth of the Yang-tse, it can be so
cold in winter that one is glad of a thick over-
coat.

SUMMER CLIMATE

, English Miles .
o 500 1000

. Prevailing Winds
RAFNFALL
Much Rain
Moderate Rain
_ 3 Little Rain
FlG- 32. MAP TO SHOW WHERE BAIN" FALLS OVER ASIA IN SUMMER.

Because Asia is such a big mass of land it
loses heat very quickly in the winter. Just
as in India, winds in winter blow from the
interior outwards towards the sea. These winds

CHINA

157

are cold and dry and bring bitter gales in the
north, and sometimes frosts as far south as
Hong Kong. These cold winds are a good
thing for the people of southern China, for they
brace the people . up and prevent them losing
energy, as they might do if the climate were
always hot.

FlG. 33. MAP TO SHOW WHERE TEA GBOWS IN CHINA.

In summer the land absorbs heat quickly
and the temperature of all parts of China rises.
The winds, again, as in the case of India, now
blow from the sea to the land, and, wherever
there are mountains, these winds rise and are
cooled and bring heavy downpours of rain.
In southern China then we can find places

L

158 WORLD

something like those we have seen in India
mountainous, wet, warm. It is in the moun-
tainous district especially near the coast between
the valleys of the Yang-tse and the Si-Kiang
that tea is grown just where we should expect
to find it.

But though tea cannot be grown every-
where, other things are grown cotton, rice,
millet, oranges, mulberries and even palms,
bananas, and pineapples on the warm lowlands
of the south. The Chinese, like the people of
India, are mostly farmers, and there are so
many of them that no land can be wasted.
The farms are small and without hedges, and
the farmers and their families are models of
industry. During the busy season everybody
men, women, and children works from early
dawn till dark, Sundays and weekdays alike.
Grain is cut by hand ; the roots are pulled up
to be dried and used as fuel. In the autumn
even the grass roots and the stray leaves and
flower-stems by the roadside are collected for
the same purpose. The methods of farming
may be simple and old-fashioned, but the
industry, cleverness, and patience of the people
make up for this, and grain enough for all the
millions who inhabit the country is produced.

There are few sheep or cattle, for the land
is too valuable to be set apart to grow food
for them. The Chinese can seldom afford to
eat meat, though the poorest occasionally make

CHINA 159

a meal of cat, dog, rat, or mouse. The chief
food animal is the pig, because it can live on
refuse, and so can be reared without taking
up too much room.

But the chief grain and the chief food of
China is rice, which grows in the valleys of all
the three rivers, for it grows rapidly, and can
be grown wherever there is plenty of rain and
heat, and, as we have already seen, the rain
comes to China in summer when all the land

TRANSPLANTING RICE PLANTS INTO THE PADDY FIELDS.

is hot. Rice is sown in wet ground and sprouts
in about a 'week. Three or four weeks later
the young plants are transplanted into the
"paddy fields." The fields are completely
under water and are simply masses of mud.
They require very careful weeding, and this is
an unhealthy and difficult task, as the labourers
are, at all times, knee-deep in the water. They
get rheumatism, and that is the reason why
they smoke opium to deaden the pain. As
water is so important in the cultivation of

x

100

WOBLD

rice, the plant can only be grown In the low-
lying deltas, or in the plains that are flooded
after the rains, or else in places where the land
can be irrigated. And in China men can be
seen watering the fields in much the same ways
as in Egypt. " By a system of buckets fastened
to an endless chain and passing over an axle,
which is turned either by the feet of men or
by a connecting wheel worked by oxen, the
water is raised from the river or canal to the

TRANSPLANTING RICE PLANTS : THIRTY MINUTES LATER.

level of the fields, where it is discharged into
the troughs at the rate of sometimes 300 tons
a day. This is the sakiah of the Egyptians ;
and should any traveller from the banks of
the Nile visit the plains of China he might
recognise in the method adopted" for raising
water from wells the shaduf of the land of the
Pharaohs. A long horizontal pole, at one end
of which is a bucket, and on the other a certain
weight, is fixed on an upright in such a position
that on raising the loaded end the bucket

CHINA 161

descends Into the well, and with the help of
the counterbalancing weight can be raised full
of water with ease and rapidity. If the level
of the river or canal be only triflingly lower
than the field to be irrigated, two men standing
on the bank, and holding a bucket between them
by ropes, draw water very quickly by dipping
the bucket into the stream and by swinging
it up to the bank, where its contents are emptied
into the trough prepared to receive them."

On the banks of the rivers and by the open
sea men catch fish in enormous quantities.
There are 40,000,000 people in China who get
their living by catching fish. Because rice is
rather tasteless the fish that is eaten with it
is often kept till it has a nice strong flavour.
For the same reason pungent spices and hot-
sauces are much appreciated.

In building houses wood is not much used.
The houses are often roofed with rice straw,
especially in the rice-growing districts, and
.even the sides of the houses may be thatched
with the same material, as such a covering
tends to keep the interiors cool in summer and
warm in winter, but it does not last long and
has to be replaced every three to five years.
When the old straw is pulled off it is either
burned for fuel or used for manure in the fields,
and even if it be burned for fuel the ashes will
be taken to help to feed the new crops. The
commonest building material is clay, of which

162

THE WORLD

there is plenty. Wherever there is an abund-
ance of fuel the clay is baked, but in the
northern plains,, where fuel is scarce, the bricks
are just dried in the sun and, sometimes, they
crumble away in a heavy rain and let the roof
down.

Chinese tea, rice, silk and other things come

CHINESE 5"AHM: HOUSE.

it is built of clay and thatched with straw. The storage pits
hold manure for the ground.

to Britain by much the same route as they
do from India, but the journey is longer. The
ships are loaded up at one or more of the ports
that act as collecting stations for the different
valleys. There is one at the entrance to the
Yang-tse-Kiang on the north of the mountains,
and one at the entrance to the Si-Kiang on the

CHINA 163

south of the mountains. For the Si-Kiang
valley the port is Canton. The Chinese will not
allow the foreigner to buy and sell wherever
he pleases. He can only trade in those places
agreed to by treaty ; such ports are called
Treaty Ports. Canton was the first of these
ports to be opened to the foreigner. It is
really three towns : (i) The native town on
land, surrounded by a high wall for purposes
of defence. The streets are narrow and covered
in with matting, so that they are stuffy and
smelly, but, on the other hand, they are warm
in winter. There are no cabs, but persons are
carried about in sedan chairs.

(ii) The second part of the native city is on
the water. About a quarter of a million people
live in boats, because the river provides a fine
highway for trade and an abundance of food
in the form of fish, and, further, the use of the
river in this way sets free more land for farms.
Thousands of people are born in the boats,
brought up in boats, and never set foot on
land during the whole of their lives. They rear
chickens and even pigs in cages hung over the
sides of the boats. There are floating houses,
floating markets, floating theatres, floating jails,
and floating policemen.

(iii) The third city at Canton belongs to the
foreigner. He could not live in the narrow,
crowded, dirty, stuffy streets, so he has a little
town of his own with broad clean streets and

164 WORLD

well-built houses. He can go into the Chinese
town if lie wishes, but no Chinaman is allowed
in the white man's city without a pass.

As trade increased and ships grew bigger
the ships required good harbours for shelter,
strong places for defence, and means of storing
coal. Near to the entrance to the Si-Kiang
valley there was a rocky island with a magnifi-
cent harbour, and here is the British trading
centre of Hong Kong. It is well placed as a
port for southern China, and it is one of the
most important ports in the world, collecting
and distributing goods in many directions.

The Yang-tse-Kiang valley is even more
important, and the trader sought for an entrance
to it, but there were two difficulties : in the
first place the Chinese would not give him a
treaty port, and in the second the estuary is
so low and marshy that there was no suitable
ground on which to build a big town. In 1843
the Chinese agreed to open the Yaixg-tse-Kiang
valley to foreign trade, and the place chosen
for the port and market was the first spot
south of the marshy estuary where one could
be built. This is Shanghai, not on the Yang-
tse-Kiang itself, but on a small river that flows
into the same delta. It is over fifty miles from
the sea and nearly twelve miles from the
junction of its own river with the main stream.

We can imagine, then, that our ship has
been loaded up at one of these or at some other

CHINA 185

port and is making the journey to England-
It will have to go a long way south in order
to get round the end of the mountainous,
forested Malay peninsula. At the southern end
of this peninsula is the British coaling station
and port Singapore. Like Chicago, at the end
of a lake where many routes meet, so Singapore
is at the end of a peninsula where many sea
roads converge. From Singapore the vessel
crosses the southern end of the Bay of Bengal
and makes for Colombo, where again the British
flag is seen flying, and where stores of coal are
kept for passing ships. Then the southern part
of the Arabian Sea is traversed, and the vessel
arrives at Aden. There we can leave it, for
from there we have already traced the way
home. But if our journey from Singapore to
Aden has been made in fine calm weather when
the ocean is like a plain of oil by day, and the
sky a palpitating flame of summer lightning
at night, it will leave memories that will linger
long after all the rice has "been eaten and all
the silk been worn to rags.

CHAPTER XIX

JAPAN

A COMMON Japanese fan is, In its way, a tiny
geography book of the country, and so much
information is not often given in such a little
space. There are, of course, many different kinds
of fans from Japan, but there is one so common
that it is familiar to everybody. It is made of
split bamboo and covered with
paper. On the paper there are
pictures of flowers and fir trees and
of a mountain. The mountain is
conical in shape and has a white
cap on the summit. What does
all this tell us ?

The conical shape of the
mountain indicates that it is a vol-
cano : the snow on the top that it
The fir-trees say that the country
is cold and damp, for these are the trees we have
seen in the Canadian forests. The bamboo tells
a different story and says that the country is
warm and damp. Then the paper is rice paper,
and that means that Japan is very warm and
damp. If both fir trees and bamboos and rice

166

A JAPANESE FAN.

is very high.

JAPAN

167

grow in Japan, then the country must stretch
a long way from a cold north to a much warmer
south.

After the fan comes the map, to help us to
find out whether the story we have read out of
the fan is correct or not. And the map shows
first that Japan is a mountainous country, so

kohama

Highlands

FlG. 34. MAP TO SHOW THAT JAPAN IS A MOUNTAINOUS COUNTRY.

mountainous that there are but few plains and
therefore but little land for growing crops.
Amongst the mountains there are a number of
volcanoes which sometimes pour out streams of
molten rock or lava and clouds of steam and of
red hot dust. The most beautiful of all the
volcanoes is Fuji-yama. It is so beautiful
that if you approach Yokohama from the sea,

168 THE WORLD

soon after dawn, when the distant blue mountain
melts Into the deep blue of the sky and the
snow-capped summit seems to hang in the
heavens, all by itself, you do not wonder that
the Japanese put it on their fans and pictures
and even make pilgrimages to worship at the
white altar up above them. It is covered with
snow only in the winter, but it is always covered
with snow in the pictures and on the fans,
sometimes white and sometimes tinged with
pink and purple as it is seen in the glow of the
sun at eventide.

Where there are volcanoes there are usually
earthquakes, and scarcely a week passes with-
out a small one somewhere. Most of them are
too small to do any damage, but occasionally
the land shakes violently, huge cracks appear
in the ground, houses are thrown down, and
much destruction is caused. In 1923 a dis-
astrous earthquake killed about 150,000 people
and did 250,000,000 worth of damage.

The north of Japan is as far north as the
north of England ; the south of Japan is as far
south as the south of Morocco. Also a cold
current from the Arctic washes the northern end
of the country and a warm current from the
south washes the southern end of the country,
Hence we get temperatures suitable both to the
fir tree and the bamboo. And it is everywhere
wet. As mentioned in the last chapter, the winds
from Asia blow outwards in the winter when the

JAPAN

169

interior of the continent is bitterly cold. They
cross the sea and bring some rain with them to
Japan. The summer winds blow inwards from
the sea and are therefore wet ; they bring much
rain to Japan. There is rain enough in ever} 7
part of the country to support the growth of
trees, but the kind of forest depends on the

RICE FIELDS IN JAPAN.

temperature and the most luxuriant forests
are in the warmer south.

The mountains occupy so much of the surface
of Japan that there is little room left where men
can work and live. Only about one-sixth of
the country is suitable for farming, and yet
farming is the chief industry. The Japanese
have made the very best possible use of all the

170 WORLD

land that can be cultivated and they are perhaps
the cleverest farmers in the world. They work
hard and long ; they dig with the spade and do
not plough, because in this way they get better
crops. They weed the fields as we weed the
garden, and they grow many varieties of food,
the chief of which is rice.

Plants from which paper can be made are
also important. Paper is used for almost every-
thing. The Japanese have paper walls to their
houses, paper caps on their heads, paper string,
paper pocket-handkerchiefs, and even paper
cloaks and shoes. Some of this paper is so
strong that it is almost impossible to tear it
and some of it is so water-proof that the rain
cannot get through it.

Another common plant is the bamboo, a
kind of grass. Its hollow stem is used for
every purpose from building houses to making
fans. It is used for screens, hats, sails for shif>s,
paper, and even for water and gas pipes.

As there is so little flat land and so many
people to feed, the fields cannot be given up to
grow food for sheep and cattle. Therefore,
there is no wool for clothes and no butter or
cheese for food. There is no leather for shoes,
and these are therefore of wood, so that the
carpenter is the shoe-maker. And as there are
few horses, except in the north where there
is a little grass, and few people, the Japanese ride
in jinrickshaws a kind of big perambulator

JAPAN

171

with shafts. These are pulled by men who
travel long distances at a good speed and for
very little pay. There is not much animal food
except fish, but of this there is an abundance in
the streams and the sea. The silkworm produces
material for clothing, and there happens what
seems to us a curious thing, and that Is that silk
clothing is cheap and woollen clothing is dear.

A BUSY STREET IN TOKIO.

Tokio is the capital of Japan. Notice the jinrickshaw.

Poor people wear silk ; only those who are better
off can afford wool.

Many Japanese houses are not built of stone
or brick on account of the earthquakes. These
houses are very simple. The roof is of tiles or
thatch and is very heavy in order not to be
blown off in the strong gales that come during
the winter season. The roof is supported by four
poles at the corners and these are commonly

172

THE WORLD

of bamboo. It slopes steeply in order to throw
off the rain and it projects well beyond the walls
to give shelter from the sun. Japanese hats are
shaped like Japanese roofs and for the same
reason. The walls are made of thick oiled paper
and at night shutters of wood are put up all the

way round. The insides
can be divided up by
paper screens into as
many rooms as the
family requires. There
are no chairs or beds, for
people sit and sleep on
thick rice-straw mats on
the floor. The size of a
room is usually given in
the number of mats it
takes to cover the floor,
thus one room is a four-
mat room, another an
eight-mat room and so
on. There are no tables,
though a small stool may
be used as a kind of
table.

Such flimsy houses are very liable to be
destroyed by fire, and if a man possesses
valuable pictures or pottery he stores them in
a safer place and only has one or two of them
at home at a time. In this way he has plenty
of time to look at them and admire them, and it

JAPANESE HOUSE AND RICE
FIELD.

JAPAN

173

is partly due to this that the people are so fond
of beautiful things. Houses such as we have
described do little damage if an earthquake
brings them to the ground, and they cost but little
to repair or rebuild.

The houses can be opened not only at the
front but all the way round by the removal of
the paper screens that form the walls. It is
quite a common custom to take out these walls

NAGASAKI HARBOUK.

Nagasaki is the port on the west of Japan.

and so allow everybody in the street to see
everything that is going on inside. It is a good
thing to have open houses of this kind because
the heavy rains come when the heat is greatest
and, at that time, the air is unpleasantly stuffy.
The Japanese are fond of fresh air and sunshine
and have their houses open to keep them
sweet.

The seas between Japan and Asia are stormy,
and this helped, in days gone by, to shut off the

M

174 WORLD

Japanese people from the people of the main-
land. In the winter, when the winds blow from
Asia to Japan and when people might have
come across the narrow waters, there were
terrible snow-storms and fogs that kept them
at home. In the summer, when the weather
is fine the winds blow strongly from Japan to
the continent and tend to keep out visitors.
In this way the Japanese formed a nation,
away from other people, and grew up fond of
their own land, proud of its beauties and
intensely loyal and patriotic.

Perhaps the suddenness of the earthquakes
and the volcanic outbursts taught the Japanese
to meet sudden danger and even death without
shouting or weeping. Certainly they can keep
their heads in times of peril and face danger
without fear.

Perhaps the open houses, where all life is
seen by everybody, have had something to do
with the politeness of this nation. \ It is no use
pretending what a " sweet " person you are
when you are in some one else's house if you are
really bad tempered in your own. Everybody
knows exactly what you are like when you are
in the bosom of your family. . And if one is
rude to a Japanese he does not get angry and
say nasty things back again, but preserves a calm
and dignified behaviour, perhaps the greatest
possible rebuke to a person who has lost his
temper and exhibited his bad manners.

CHAPTER XX

THE LAND WAY FROM CHINA

have seen tow tea comes to Britain from
a by sea. But part of the tea which is

out of China to be sold in Europe can be
ed overland to Russia. Formerly it was
ed by camels and it was therefore necessary
ick it in as small a space as possible. The
5S were ground, steamed, and then com-
jed into flat blocks something like small
tiles. In this form it was and is exported

brick tea " and is used in some parts of
'al Asia as money. The caravan is rapidly
oaing a thing of the past and the tea is now
ed chiefly by the Trans-Siberian Railway.
a the course of its journey the railway
srses the north of Asia from east to west
Ly through the Russian territory of Siberia,
gh the first part of the journey lies through
Chinese territory of Manchuria. The first
astern half of the journey is through a
itainous country that forms part of that
Lerful system of highlands that fills up
al and eastern Asia ; the second or western
of the journey is across a part of the great

175

176

THE WORLD

plain that fills the northern parts of both Europe
and Asia.

We will board the train at Vladivostok, the
Pacific terminus of the line. It has a splendid
harbour, but this is frozen over in winter. At
first we cross the plains of Manchuria, but we
presently reach those mountains of which we
have spoken above. In places they are thickly
forested. Amongst the mountains there are

FlG. 35. MAP TO SHOW THE GREAT LOWLAND OF EUROPE AND ASIA.

many tunnels, one of which is a mile long. No-
where do we find great towns or thickly peopled
areas, but here and there are settlements of
miners who extract silver and* other valuable
minerals from the ground.

The most mountainous part of the journey
comes to an end in the neighbourhood of Lake
Baikal. This lake is long and narrow and is the
deepest freshwater lake known. It is surrounded

.THE LAND WAY FROM CHINA 177

at the southern end by huge granite cliffs which
rise precipitously from the water, and the work
of constructing the railway along these shores
was so difficult that for a long time there was a
break in the communication. The gap was
filled up by steamer connection across the lake,
or, in the winter, when the lake was frozen over,

FlG. 36- MAP TO SHOW HCJW MUCH OF ASIA IS FROZEN IN WINTER.

by ice-breaking steamer. But in 1904 a road
was blasted out of the cliffs and the railway
linked up east and west.

Near the .western shore of the lake is Irkutsk,
a curious mixture of wooden houses and stone
public buildings. It has been called the " Paris
of the East/ 5 but it is not a very comfortable
place in which to live, for in summer it is hot

178

WORLD

and In winter the cold is so severe that the
mercury freezes in the thermometer. A number
of caravan routes west, east, north-east meet
at Irkutsk, but as the railway is .extended and
branch lines are made the caravan routes tend
to disappear. At Irkutsk there is a great trade
in furs obtained from the forests and tea which
is brought from China.

West of Irkutsk we enter a forest belt like

Coniferous Forest J
FIG. 37. XAP TO SHOW WHERE THE GREAT FORESTS OF SIBERIA ARE.

that of Canada and get a glimpse of the wonderful
wealth in timber that Siberia possesses. The
forests are so extensive that parts of them have
never been visited by man. Even the boldest
of the fur hunters have never gone much farther
than perhaps fifty or sixty miles into the
interior of these gloomy woodlands. The j ourney
is monotonous, for the trees are often all alike
for mile after mile. Wood from the forests

, THE LAND WAY FROM CHINA 179
supplies the train with fuel, and blocks of wood
are stored at the railway stations in the same

JSL * T store coaL Handlin g wood is

lighter and cleaner work than handling coal and
many women are employed in this kind of work.
Once we have crossed the Ob we enter the
part of Siberia that really counts the rich
agricultural land where men can farm and make
a good living. It is a land of black earth and
is bordered on the north by the forest and on

SIBERIAN RAILWAY TRAIN.

tlie south by the barren and waterless steppe.
Here are found five-sixths of the population of
Siberia. They are mostly Eussians who have
settled down and who have been given grants
of land. They are supplied also with agricul-
tural implements and with cattle and seed in
order that they may successfully establish
themselves.

The peasants live almost entirely in villages or
hamlets and in houses made of wooden logs with
the chinks between them filled up with moss or

180

WOKLD

mud. The soil is so rich that it yields most
fruitful crops and there is an abundance of live
stock, especially horses. In the centre of the
steppe region is Omsk, the " capital of the
steppes." In the neighbour-
hood of Omsk thousands of
cattle are reared and a
flourishing trade in butter is
carried on.

Between Europe and Asia
the Ural mountains must be
crossed, but they are so low
that they present no diffi-
culties to the engineer.
Once on the other side we
are in the plain of European
Russia. The European ter-
minus of the line is Moscow,
and the distance from Vladi-
vostok to Moscow is between
4000 and 5000 miles. The long journey shows
us a hilly forested region at one end and a flat
fertile land at the other with a flattish forested
region in the centre.

SIBERIAN PEASANT.

CHAPTER XXI

' STEPPES AJSTD STEPPE BWELLEES

THE Trans-Siberian railway crosses the Great
Plain of Siberia. This is tlie biggest plain in
the world and contains much more land than
the whole of Europe; it is shaped something
like a triangle with high land on two sides and a
frozen sea on the other. Like the plain of
North America, it has tundra in the cold north,
then forest and then wheat lands, but whereas
the North American plain leads south to the
warm wet shores of the Gulf of Mexico, this
Siberian plain leads south to land that is so dry
that part of it is desert.

The hot desert is in Western Turkistan
in the south of the plain. Except near the
oases nothing grows but a few prickly plants,
and there can be no people living except where
the land can be watered. Through the Sahara
desert flows the Nile, on whose banks men
live and farm. On account of the never-failing
wat'er supply in Victoria Lake the Nile never
dries up. Through the desert of Western
Turkistan flow two rivers, the Amu Daria and
the Syr Daria, but neither of these is so useful

181

182

THE WORLD

as the Nile. They get their water from the
snows that melt on the mountains and they
are not very full except for a few months. As
long as the Syr Daria is receiving water from
other streams in the mountains it is 20 to 40

FIG. 38.:

MAP TO SHOW THE PABT OF THE PLAINS WHERE THE
KIRGHIS LIVE.

feet deep and, in some places, a -third of a
mile wide. But farther westward it is a shallow
stream that sends out branches which lose them-
selves in the sands. On the edges of the desert
are the high mountains and from their sides

STEPPES AND STEPPE DWELLERS 183

flow streams that never quite fail The conse-
quence is that the upper valleys have plenty
of water, and cotton, maize, wheat, and fruit can
be grown. In such oasis-like valleys there are
settlements, and a map of this part of the world
shows a ring of towns Tashkent, KhoJcan, Sa-
markand, and Bokhara, all flourishing amongst
the fields and orchards that are fed by the waters
that flow from the melting snows.

The tundra on the north of the plain is much
like the tundra of North America and needs
no further description, but we must note that
no Eskimo live there. The Eskimo are a fishing
race,, a seafaring people, and they would be
very unhappy in northern Asia. The poor
tribes of the Asiatic tundra depend on the land
and not on the sea, and are not nearly so well
off as the Eskimo. They hunt and fish, move
constantly, and, therefore, use tents. These are
made of birch-bark or skins fastened over poles
with a hole left in the top for a chimney. Beds
are made of skins and dried moss ; clothes are
made of reindeer skin, food is reindeer flesh or
fish. The reindeer is to these people what
the dog is to the Eskimo and the camel to the
Arab. It is the ship of the frozen desert ; it
also supplies milk, meat, and clothes.

South of the tundra is the forest that we have
learned about in our railway journey, and south
of this is the wide grass land or steppe, part of
which we have also crossed in the train. These

184

WORLD

grass lands are very much like the American
prairies, not flat but undulating and without
trees except in the broad deep valleys of some of
the rivers. In the winter the land is extremely
cold ; in the summer extremely hot. It is too
far from the sea to feel the tempering effect of
the sea-breezes.

On the steppes of Russian Central Asia live
the Kirghis. At first it would seem as though
the Kirghis and the Red Indian should lead the
same kind of life, for both are dwellers on grassy

TENT USED BY THE KIRGHIS.

plains. But the Red Indian had no sheep or
horses ; he had to be a hunter and chase wild
animals. The Kirghis, on the other hand, had
great herds of sheep, goats, camels, asses and
horses ; they are shepherds, not hunters. But
both are wanderers and dwell in tents. The
Kirghis must follow his flocks and he cannot
remain long in one place, because so many
animals would soon eat up all the grass. The
Kirghis 5 tents have walls of lattice-work which
can be made to open or shut to alter the size
oi the tent at the convenience of the owner.

AND STEPPE DWELLERS 185

Wooden poles are fixed to the top of the wall
and meet together to form a framework for the
roof. The whole is covered with sheets of felt
held in place by cords and ropes. The felt,
cord, and ropes are made of the hair or wool
obtained from the flocks. The women put up
and take down the tents, while the men look
after the animals. Inside the tents are beautiful
rugs and carpets made of wool, and dishes of
wood and leather.

When the family moves on to a fresh place
the horses go first to get the richest grass. The
cattle go next, and when they have had enough
to eat, the sheep follow, and with their tiny
mouths manage to get a good feed off grass
that would have been too short for the big-
mouthed animals. The horse is the most useful
animal to the Kirghis, as, without it, it would
be impossible to keep the flocks and herds from
straying all over the plain and getting lost.

As there are so many animals, and as the
grass often dries up in the hot summer, the
different tribes each have certain parts of the
country where they may take their flocks to
feed. They can wander where they like as long
as they keep to their own part of the country,
but if one tribe wanders into the land belonging
to another, there is fighting ; the Khirgis is
warrior as well as shepherd.

Each tribe needs a wide stretch of country
to feed its many animals, and over this it

186 THE WORLD

travels at a rate of from five to ten miles every
few weeks. The road taken leads from one
water supply to another,, for though water is
scarce in this thirsty land, 'every spot where it
is obtainable is well known to the dwellers
therein. In the height of summer the tribes
go up into the mountains to feed their flocks
on the pastures that have been freed from the
snows, but they return to the plains again
when the winter comes.

If a man's flocks increase very much he may
need more grass and water for them than his
own part of the country can supply. In such
a case he wanders into land that does not belong
to him and steals some other's grass and water.
He becomes a robber, which is the meaning of
the word Kirghis.

The Kirghis are also traders. Every year,
caravans cross the grass lands as they do the
deserts and savannas of Africa. When the
shepherds meet the merchants they exchange
horses and sheep and woollen rugs for grain,
better clothes, wooden dishes and flour, and for
some of that brick tea that has come overland
from China.

The food of the Kirghis is chiefly the flesh of
the animals they tend. Beef is not thought
much of, but mutton and especially horse-flesh
are favourite dishes. Horse-flesh is always
served at big feasts. There is no bread, but a
kind of porridge is made out of millet or some

AND STEPPE DWELLERS 187

other grain that has been obtained from the
caravans. The common drink is milk either
fresh or sour. A particular kind of sour milk
is called koomis. There is always plenty of
butter and cheese.

The Kirghis are fond of big families. A
man's riches 1 are measured by the size of his
flocks and herds. But large
numbers of ( animals need large
numbers of people to take care
of them. A man with only one
son or servant would have to be
a poor man ; a man with a dozen
children would stand a good
chance of becoming rich.

The clothes are a long loose
garment called a kaftan made of
fur, felt, or linen, high boots of
soft leather, and a cap of sheep-
skin. A rich man will have a
velvet robe^ and perhaps a belt, A KIRGHIS WEARING
bridle and saddle, studded with SHEEPS^ N CA^ D
gold and silver and precious
stones. The women dress much like the men,
but they cover the head with pieces of
white cotton cloth and not with a sheepskin
cap.

Though the Kirghis have many difficulties
to fight against, they contrive to make them-
selves pretty comfortable.

CHAPTER XXII

THE CHRISTMAS PUDDING

A SHIP coming to Britain from India or China
passes through the Mediterranean Sea. This
sea is surrounded by a number of important
countries like Egypt, Greece, Italy, France, and
Spain. In other chapters we have learned how
different things that we eat and drink are grown
wheat and meat, rice and tea. And in Chapter
IV. we saw that the dry sunny valley of California
was one of the places where fruit is grown. But
the greatest of all the fruit-growing countries
are those countries just mentioned about the
Mediterranean Sea. It is from these lands
that many of the ingredients of the Christmas
pudding come.

Now if the lands of the Mediterranean are
orchard countries, that will give us some clue to
the kind of climate, for in the first place trees
cannot grow without plenty of water, so we know
there must be a fairly heavy rainfall, and fruits
of the kind we have mentioned will not ripen
unless the summer be both warm and dry, so
we also know the rain falls chiefly in the spring
and winter and the summer is a time of drought.

188

THE CHRISTMAS PUDDING 189

In China, India, and the savanna lands of Africa
we have seen that just the opposite happens ;
there the rain falls in the summer and the winter
is the dry season of the year.

Let us see what kinds of lands these are in
which fruit is grown.

Greece is very mountainous: among many
of the mountains the sea runs in and out
in all directions. Between the mountains and
near the sea are a number of small fertile

OLIVE TREES

plains where good crops can be grown.
Round the coast there are hundreds of islands
of all shapes and sizes, far apart from each
other on the west, crowded together on the
cast, necklaces of green stones set in an azure
sea. Greece is a patchwork quilt made up
of the dark blue of the sea, the silver of
the -snowy mountain tops, the green of the
plains, the bluish green of the olive trees,
and the purple of the grape. There is plenty

190

THE WORLD

of sunshine and the summer is hot, though not
as hot as it is in the desert or the savanna. There
is "not enough fertile land to feed all the people,
so some of them had to find other ways of
getting a living. The mountains pushed them
into the sea and they became sailors. It was
easy to build boats, for there were then plenty
of trees in the forests ; to-day there are not so
many forests, for the trees have been carelessly

A VHSTEYARD IN GREECE.

destroyed. The Greek sailors wandered to the
eastern end of the Mediterranean where there
were people with things to sell, and these things
they carried away to other countries. They
began as carriers, but soon they bought and sold
for themselves and became keen traders, as they
are to this day.

The two chief things exported from the
country are olives and currants. From the

THE CHRISTMAS PUDDING 191

%

fruit of the olive the Greek gets oil which is of
great value to him, for the dry hot summer
withers the grass and prevents the keeping of
many cattle. Thus there is an absence of
butter or cheese, and olive oil is used instead of
butter. The currant is a small grape that has
been dried. The cultivation of this grape
provides a great deal of work ; the ground must
be prepared, the trees pruned, the fruit picked
and then packed to be sent all over the world.
Packing cases must be made from timber and
labels must be printed. Wine is also made from
the same small grapes.

Italy is a long narrow peninsula. In the
north are the high mountains, the Alps. On
the high ground of course there are no fruit
trees.

But the descent from the Alps into Italy
is steep. The snow is soon left behind and the
road winds through rocky gorges and forests
of pine and fir. Below these are the forests of
walnut and sweet chestnut, then the vine and,
as the air gets milder and warmer, oranges,
myrtle, and olive. At the foot of the Alps
is the plain of Lombardy, the richest part of
Italy. It has been built up of soil brought from
the mountains and is fertile and level. Hence
it is densely peopled. Through it runs the river
Po and numerous tributaries ; easily made
canals add other roads and means of irrigating
the fields. The plain is so hot in summer that

192 THE WORLD

even rice can be grown in the flooded fields ;
in winter it is open to cold winds. On the plain
are grown olives, mulberries on which silkworms
are fed, and grapes from which wine is made.
In other parts of the plain there are grass lands
on which are reared cattle and, from the milk of
these, several well-known kinds of cheese are
made.

The Lombard peasant works hard and lives

FlG. 39. MAP TO SHOW THE HIGHLANDS OF EUROPE.

sparely. He makes his breakfast of maize
porridge and water and his dinner of soup
thickened with cabbages and turnips and
flavoured with a little lard. He eats raw vege-
tables with oil and vinegar, and on special
occasions he adds cheese, eggs, and dried fish.
He rarely touches meat but he will eat frogs,
snails, and hedgehogs. He is a busy person,
always in the fields looking after his crops, and
the men of the towns are clever business men,

THE CHRISTMAS PUDDING 193

who also work hard and seem to be successful
in everything ihey undertake.

The port of the plain is Venice. In the
fifth century a number of people, fleeing from
barbarian invaders, sought somewhere to take
refuge. They found a place that had marshes
and swamps at the back of it and sandbanks
and lagoons in front of it. Here they were
safe. They got both salt and fish from the
sea and traded these for other things. They
were in a good position for trade as they could
send ships to Egypt and Greece and then
forward the cargoes over the Alps into Central
Europe. When the Cape route to India was
discovered Venice lost much of her trade, but
when the Suez Canal was cut some of the trade
came back again.

South of the plain the Apennines fill the
greater part of the peninsula, though there are
narrow lowlands along the coast and a wider
plain in the south-east. On the steep slopes
mountain chestnuts are grown. These are
ground into flour and form the chief food of the
dwellers on the hillsides. As the summers are
dry there is little grass, few cows, and no butter.
Sheep and goats can be kept and they provide
a little milk- and some wool for clothing.

The capital of Italy is Home, built on seven
hills for defence against foes and floods ; it was
on a navigable river, where there was an island
that made it easy to build a bridge, and it was

194 THE WORLD

far enough, from the sea to be safe from
pirates.

The peninsula of Spain and Portugal is at
the south-western corner of Europe. It is shut
off from the rest of the continent, for it is sur-
rounded by sea except where the steep Pyrenees
divide it from Trance. Three-fourths of it
form a high plateau which descends steeply
on all sides to the very narrow lowlands on the
coast, or in some places right into the sea itself.

Spain is a very dry land, for, like the rest of
the Mediterranean lands, it has little or no rain
in summer, and in the winter, when the winds
blow in from the w r est, the high mountain edge
of the plateau receives all the rain brought by
the Atlantic winds. Very few sea breezes ever
reach the interior of Spain.

What we have said about the plants of Italy
and Greece is also true for Spain ; only plants
that can withstand drought will live through
the dry summer, and of these the chief are olive
and vine. But Spain has also an important
plant in the cork oak. This is an oak tree
that has surrounded itself with a thick bark
to prevent loss of moisture during the hot
summer. The thick bark is cork. The first
crop is taken when the tree is about twenty
years old and is so coarse as to be of little, use.
After that, strippings are made at intervals of
ten years each, for a period of perhaps eighty
or ninety years. Care has to be taken that when

THE CHRISTMAS PUDDING 195

the outer bark is removed the inner one is* un-
injured or the usefulness of the tree will be

destroyed.
/

Then in all these countries there is little

grass and few cattle. Sheep can, however, be

sustained on scantier and shorter grass than

cattle, and therefore sheep are not so un-

IREIGATION WHEEL IN SPAIN.

common. And the merino sheep of Spain is
world famed. But the most hardy of the
domestic food-supplying animals is the goat,
which will .eat almost anything from withered
shrubs to old boots. The goat gives milk from
which cheese is made and hair which is turned
into coats, ropes, and other things. The horse,
like the cow, needs rich grass and is therefore

196

WORLD

comparatively scarce in all these countries.
Its place is taken by the ass, which is much
less particular about its food, and the mule, which
is hardier and more sure-footed than the ass.
Its greater strength makes it particularly suitable
for travel in a hilly country, but it has a most
disagreeable temper. On the level plains oxen
are used to pull both ploughs and carts.

LEMONS IN SICILY.

Almost in the centre of Spain is the
capital, Madrid, about the worst- situated capital
in Europe. The climate is hot in summer and
very cold in winter, and the surrounding country
is a barren sandy plain. Its river is a torrent
in winter and a thread of water in summer ,and
the subject of many jokes, such as " We know
there is a river because there are bridges over
it," or " Why doesn't the government sell the

THE CHRISTMAS PUDDIXG 197

bridges and buy some water to put in the
river ? "

But there is enough water, if caref ully used,
to irrigate the fields, and to grow the fruits we
prize. Seville oranges, Barcelona nuts, Valencia
raisins all grow in Spain.

If it had not been for the products of these
lands we might never have known the delights
of a really good rich Christmas pudding with its
wealth of currants, sultanas, valencias, almonds,
and orange peel. All these come from the
Mediterranean countries. Currants get their
name from Corinth, the port in Greece from which
they are shipped, and valencias are named after
one of the provinces of Spain. Oranges grow
in Spain, Sicily, and round Smyrna, and there are
many other fruits from these regions such as figs,
lemons, olives, grapes, prunes, and nuts and, in
the oases of the Sahara, dates.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE SWISS ON THE ALPS

THE great highlands of America run north and
south ; the great highlands of Asia run east and
west with a plain to the north of them and three
mountainous peninsulas to the south: Europe
is something like Asia in the arrangement
of high and low ground. More than half the
continent is a plain extending from the west
of France to the east of Russia, where, except
for the low Urals, it joins the great plain of
Siberia. South of the plain there is a belt of
plateaus, while south of the plateaus we have the
great highlands running east and west from the
Pyrenees to the Caucasus mountains, and then
extending right across Asia. The greatest of
the highlands are the Alps to the north of Italy.
The Alps stretch in a big curve from the
shores of the Gulf of Genoa, round the north of
Italy. They are twice as long as England and
they cover almost as much land as England,
Scotland, and Wales put together and in places
are nearly a hundred miles broad. The highest
peaks are nearly three miles high and are

198

* THE SWISS ON ALPS 199

crowned with snow and the upper valleys are
filled with glaciers.

Different peoples live in one part or another
of the Alps. In this chapter we deal only with
the Swiss.

Switzerland is a country of great mountains
where there are green valleys, high rocky peaks,
miles of snow and ice, torrents of falling water,
and laughing, rushing streams that flash in

40. MAP TO SHOW THE ALPS.

the sunlight. At the foot of the mountains,
where it is warmer, grapes can be grown, but
upon the tops of the peaks there is nothing
but white shining deserts of snow and ice. The
higher you* go, the poorer the soil, the colder
the^air and the worse the roads.

There are villages in the valleys, and towns
like Berne out on the lower land to the north,
but a great many Swiss are farmers. In

200 THE WORLD

the fewest valleys In Switzerland it is warm
enough to permit the growth of some grapes
and other fruit, but in most places it is too cold.
In the higher valleys are fields of oats, barley,
and rye, the grains that can stand much
cold and wet. Higher still there are no trees
or fields and here we find grassy slopes where
cattle can be reared. At last we come to the
ice and snow where nothing grows at all.

It is difficult for the Swiss farmers to grow
enough food : there is so little flat ground. On
the hillsides, as soon as the soil is ploughed it
gets loose and the next heavy rains tend to wash
it away and leave nothing but bare rock. To
stop this, walls are built along the hillside and
the space between the wall and the hillside is
filled with earth which the peasant has to carry
to the spot in baskets. He has first to make a
field with his own hands before he can begin to
grow food. And when the field has been made,
he has often to bring fresh soil, and lie has to
pay continual care to his walls, for if they fall
down, the field will be washed away into the
valley below.

On the high grass lands animals are reared.
These high meadows are called alps y a word
which has been applied as a name to the whole
of the mountain ranges in this part of the world.
The chief animals reared are cattle, goats, and
sheep. The grass on the alps is short but rich,
and the cows that are fed on it give better milk

SWISS ON ALPS 201

than those fed in the valleys : it is of these Gattle
that we think most when we hear of Switzerland.
Dotted about the alpine fields are little wooden
houses called chalets, where the shepherds live
all through the summer. Here the men and
animals stay till the cold voice of winter calls
them all home again. The day of departure
from the village for the high pastures is a public
holiday. Everybody gets up before dawn and
even the animals themselves seem to be infected

A SWISS CHALET.

with the spirit of merriment, for they are glad
to get out of the sheds and stables where they
have been kept all the winter and to regain their
liberty and a suppty of fresh grass. They caper
with joy, and careful watch must be kept over
any animal that it is desired to retain in the
valley, for if it once gets loose it will bolt after
its companions.

The milk cannot be brought into the valley
every day, so it is made into cheese which is
brought down, in great loads, in the autumn.

202 THE WORLD

f

Some of the milk is condensed and sold to us in
tins as " Swiss milk/' some again is used in the
manufacture of milk chocolate,

It is only during the summer that the
animals can be fed in the open. During the
winter they must be kept in sheds and fed on
hay and grain. And so while one set of people
is tending the herds in the mountains another
is busy in the valley growing the winter food of
hay and grain. Twigs and leaves are also stored
up for the goats. The amount of grass in Swit-
zerland is so small that it is impossible to allow
any of it to be wasted. Hence it is cut when it
is only three inches high ; in this way three
crops of short hay may be obtained in a good
season. Scarcely a blade of grass escapes, and in
places where even the sheep and the goats
cannot go, the peasant climbs with iron hooks
on his boots to cut grass a handful at a time.
Later on in the year he brings it all down on a
sledge.

Amongst mountains there are often cloudy
days, much rain, and heavy dews and it is not
always easy to dry the grass. When the peasant
thinks the day is going to be fine, he cuts a small
quantity of grass, and, during the day, his wife
and children toss it over and over in order to
dry it quickly. In the evening they tie it into
bundles and carry it to the barns. Quite 'fre-
quently grass can be seen drying on poles, hung
on the sunny side of the house.

THE SWISS ON THE ALPS 203

Between the fields and the meadows there
are forests of firs and pines, the wood from
which is used in the manufacture of furniture
and houses, and for the supply of winter fuel.

The homes of the Swiss are large and com-
fortable. They are broad and long but not too
high, and they are so built that they can stand
against the wildest
storms that come
from the mountain
heights. The lower
part is of stone
from the mountains ;
the upper part is
of wood from the
forests. In the stone
part are the cellars ;
at the back are
the stables and cow-
houses ; in the upper
part are the rooms
where the " people
live. The roofs,

like those in the COTTING HAY ON THE MOUNTAIN SIDE.

Japanese houses, are weighted with stones to
prevent them being blown off by the winds, and
they project over the sides to give protection
from rain and shelter from sun. The doors
and 'windows are often placed at some height
above the ground in order that they may not
be blocked by snowdrifts. The furniture inside

204

THE WORLD

the fcouses Is strong but simple and Is made at
home or by the village carpenter and chiefly
during the winter, when the deep snows put an
end to all farming operations.

Little meat is eaten, except on Sundays, but
there is always plenty of milk, butter, cheese
and bread Clothes are often made of wool

PINE WOODS, SWITZERLAND.

obtained from the peasant's own flocks and spun
and woven and made into garments at home.

As the soil and the weather do so little to
help man in a country like this, he has to do
all the more for himself. In the summer the
farm, the forest, and the meadow take up all his
time and he is busy enough, but during the long
winter there is not much work except feeding

THE SWISS ON ALPS 205

the cattle, and that does not take very tang.
A great deal of the time that is to spare is given
up to wood carving, the making of furniture,
the.repair of implements and so on. Much of
the beautiful wood carving is sold to the thou-
sands of tourists who visit the land in summer.

These tourists, who are attracted by the
beauty of the mountain scenery, have provided
the Swiss with new occupations in comparatively
recent years. In, numerous hotels the Swiss
supply tourists with excellent food and shelter ;
in order to get from, one place to another motor
cars and Qther vehicles are lent out on hire and,
for the adventurous who wish to scale the up-
lifted summits, there is a specially trained set
of guides. These guides know all the safe and
dangerous routes to the peaks to which they act
as guides, and are noted as much for their pre-
sence of mind, and their resourcefulness in times
of peril, as they are for their skill and pluck.

There conies a time when there is no longer
room enough in the valley for the people who have
grown up in it ; many are compelled to go to
other countries to earn their living, and there is
perhaps no land in the world where Swiss are
not to be found at work. Even those who stay
at home in the summer frequently go to other
lands in the winter when there is so little to do
on tjie farms. But even if they leave home for
some months or years they always look forward
to returning at last to their narrow valleys and
snow-capped mountains.

o

CHAPTER XXIV

THE SAILORS OF THE NORTH

PEOPLE are always interested-in sailors and there
lias been a good deal in this book about them.
There were the Arabs who long ago brought the
spices from India. Sailors from Venice and
Genoa voyaged in the Mediterranean Sea and
carried the pepper and other spices which they
obtained from, the Arabs so that people all over
Europe could get them. Then the Portuguese
and the Spaniards, taught by the Mediterranean
sailors, found their way to America and the
Indies in their desire to obtain the valuable
things which were to be brought from those
distant lands.

But so far w r e have said very little about some
people who were far better sailors than the
Spaniards or the Portuguese, and in this chapter
w^e are going to tell of the Norwegians and the
Dutch and, of course, the British.

In the north-west of Europe it is never very
cold and it is never very hot. It is never so
cold in winter as it is in Canada or in the east of
Europe. In all the northern part of North America

206

THE SAILOES OF THE NORTH 207

the ground is frozen every winter for a long Mine.
The same is true of Eastern Europe. The
north-eastern coast of North America is frozen
and no ships can approach the land for months.
Yet none of the harbours of Britain have ever
had enough ice in them to prevent ships entering.
The lands on the other side of the English
Channel and North Sea are also open to ships
all the year round and ev.en the coasts of Norway

IBelQw 32F in January

FlG. 41. MAP TO SHOW THAT IT IS NOT SO COLD IN BK1TA1N DURING

WINTER AS IT IS IN CANADA AND EASTERN EUROPE.

are usually free of ice. This is one very great
advantage possessed by those countries.

Another advantage is that it is not too hot
to work in summer : it is not like India or most
of South America and Africa or parts of North
America. Over a great portion of the world
people are not able to do much ^hard work in
the 'hot hours of the summer days ; but in
Britain, Norway, Holland, and France people
are able to work hard all the year round.

208

THE WORLD

A third advantage is that the seas round the
north-west of Europe, though deep enough to
float the largest vessel, are shallow enough to
allow fishermen to catch the fish with trawl and
net and line. It was one of the advantages of

FlG. 42. MAP TO SHOW THE SHALLOW SEAS OF NORTH- WEST EUROPE.

Venice that the Adriatic Sea was shallow and the
early settlers there could catch fish.

Fish that swim near the surface, like the
mackerel and ^herring, are caught with a drift-
net. This is let down into the sea and forms a
kind of wall or fence. Heavy weights keep the
bottom down and big corks at the top keep it

SAILOES OF NORTH 209

floating upright. The fish swim up to the* net,
try to get through, and are caught by the gills
in the meshes of the net.

Fish that live at the bottom of the sea, like
soles and plaice, are caught in a net shaped like
a bag. The net is dragged along by a boat
called a trawler. Some trawlers are sailing

FISHING WITH A DKIFT NET.

vessels and send their fish to market by swift
steamers that come to them to collect what they
have caught. . Others are themselves steam-
boats, and .bring their own fish to market.

Codfish are caught on a line ^vhich may be
as inuch as nine or ten miles long. The line
has hooks some feet apart and a long one might
have as ina as 5000 hooks on it.

210

THE WORLD

Mi those ways of fishing can be used best
when the water is not very deep. The seas
round North- West Europe are really very
shallow, the North Sea especially so : in the
centre is an area even shallower than the rest,
called the Dogger Bank, where great numbers
of fish are caught.

FISHING WITH A TRAWL.

Very many Norwegians are sailors. The
Vikings were Norwegians who lived round the
long narrow viks or wicks or fior-ds. These
fiords have steep rocky mountains all round them
and there is little fiat land that can be used for
fields, so the Vikings tried to catch some of the
fish which lived in the quiet waters of the fiord.

THE SAILORS OF THE NORTH 211

They could make boats from the wood "feo be
had from the forests and they learned how to
manage them, so that by-and-by they ventured
out into the open ocean and sailed across to
Britain and the coasts of the Continent and
perhaps even crossed the Atlantic and reached
the shores of America long before Columbus.

Nowadays
many fish are
caught off the
Norwegian coast.
Cod from which
cod-liver-K)il is
made are
caught off the
Lofoten Islands,
and Bergen is a
great fish market
for all kinds of
fish. If you go
to Bergen you
see many fTstdng
boats in the har-
bour, fish barrels on the quays, and buildings
where fish are preserved before they are
exported. You may even buy live fish from
the stalls in" the market place. The fishmonger
lifts the one the customer wishes to purchase
out' of the tank where it is swimming with
many others, so that it is quite certain to be
fresh.

NORWEGIAN FIORD.

212 THE WORLD

A little oats and barley and rye and potatoes
may be grown in Norway and some cattle and
horses and goats may feed on the grass, which
is cut and dried quite as carefully by the
Norwegian peasants as by the Swiss. But the
only things that are sold abroad are timber and
fish, so many Norwegians are sailors and use
their ships to carry goods for other nations, and
brave sailors they are too.

Holland is very different from Norway.
Holland is very flat, Norway is mountainous.
Norway is rocky, w T hile in Holland scarcely
a stone is to be seen. But Holland is v6ry small ;
a great part of it is below the level of the sea and
the rivers, and is only kept free of water by the
aid of dykes and by pumps worked by windmills
which lift the w^ater from drains or canals into
the rivers. Though the Dutch make the most
of their small land and grow large crops by means
of spade culture, yet the land cannot grow
enough for all the people and many Dutchmen
are sailors. They, too, learned of 'the sea by
fishing, first in the South Sea or Zuider Zee and
then in the shallow waters of the North Sea.
They too became explorers and sailed all over
the world. Sailors from Holland first sailed
round Cape Horn and gave it its najne. They
sailed round the Cape of Good Hope and
founded thriving settlements in the East Indies.
From Java they still bring back india-rubber
and coffee and sugar.

SAILORS OF NOETH 213

They are not only fishermen and sailors^who
bring goods to their own country ; they carry
goods for other nations. Holland is better
situated than Norway for trade because it is
convenient to land many things in Holland that
are really being sent to places in the interior of
the continent. By means of the Rhine, boats
can sail far inland, so that the ports of Amsterdam

D.UTCH SCENE WITH WINDMILLS.

and Rotterdam are much larger than the ports
of Norway.

And then there is Britain. There was a time
when no sailors lived in Britain, but that was
a long time ago. In Britain, though there
are a great many people who are neither fisher-
men nor sailors, nearly every one has at any
rate seen the sea at one time or another. The

214 THE WORLD

coasts of the west of Scotland are like those of
Norway : there are long narrow bays and there
is little land which may be cultivated. Men
there became fishermen as did the Norwegians.
Stomoway, in the north of the Island of .Lewis,
is still a fishing town. The east of Britain is
near the shallow seas that were open to the
Dutch ; there, as near the Uogger Bank as
possible, are Yarmouth and Lowestoft, while
farther north are Grimsby 'and Aberdeen and
Peterhead and Wick.

Fishermen are " trained from boyhood to
6 scour 3 the sea, familiar with, the s&a bottom
and all the intermediate levels as no other
seamen are, trained to achieve the impossible,
gamblers all knowing the game backward
imperturbable, coolheaded, fearless. Such were
the men who singed the Spaniard's beard and
harried the French under letters of marque-
And now that the days of sail are almost over
there is left no school of seamanship to compare
with our deep-sea fishing fleets. 3 * 3 '* So again
it was in fishing that British sailors learned their
trade. They learned how to cross the ocean,
they came to know how the winds blew, westerlies
and trade winds and monsoons. . They followed
the Spaniards to America, the Portuguese and
Dutch to the .East. The Pilgrim Fathers sailed
for New England, the East India Company

United Empire, March 1919, p. 97.

SAILORS OF THE NORTH 215

traded with. India. Ships were improved in siiape
so that they could sail more swiftly : the fast
clippers brought tea from India, and now oil all
the seas of all the world are found British ships
and British sailors.

But "the clays of sail are almost over."
Nowadays ships are moved by steam, even
fishing vessels. " To drive vessels by steam coal
and oil are used, and i is another advantage
possessed by some* of the lands of North- West
Europe, France and Germany and Britain, that
coal is found in them. All along the northern
edge of the highlands in the centre of Europe
coal is mined and along the edges of the highlands
of Britain it is also mined.

And' not only is coal used to drive vessels :
it is used to make more things than can be used
at home, things of cotton and woollen and iron.
These are carried by our ships to other lands.
These ships require harbours and docks and the
various appliances for loading and unloading,
so that British ports have become as large as
any in the world. From London and Liverpool,
Hull and Glasgow are sent away the manufactures
of Britain, and to those ports are brought in
return the products of lands all over the globe.
The ships can sail far inland, because the tides
keep the estuaries clear of mud as they do also
the estuaries of France and to a less* extent those
of Holland and Germany.

There are many French fishermen and sailors

216 WORLD

too.* The fishermen sail even to the banks of
Newfoundland. There are French colonies In
Asia and Africa and South America, and French
vessels bring their products back to Europe,

No sea in the world has so many ships on ib
as the seas round North- West Europe. They
come together from all parts of the world and
depart again to North America and South
America, to Africa and Asia and the isles of the
Pacific, as well as countries fiearer home. The
lands would be all separate were it not for sailors,
and especially for the sailors of North- West
Europe.

CHAPTER XXV

THE BRITISH EMPIRE

WE have now seen something of the world and of
how people live in different parts, and among
.the things which y r e have noticed is that there
are very many different ways of living, of finding
one's food, clothes and happiness.

In thi last chapter we are going to speak
of the* British 'Empire. British sailors have
taken their ships " swift shuttles of an Empire's
loom " to all -parts of the world that can be
reached by sea. In all kinds of places, scattered
all over the world, there are bits of the British
Empire. Some of them are great regions, almost
continents, others are only a few square miles
in area, but between them they include an almost
endless variety of conditions and manner of life.

Already something has been said of Canada
and of India. We have seen how wheat-farmers
and fur-traders live in the centre and north of
Canada, and a little thought will show that wheat-
farming and fur- trading are only two occupations
out of hundreds possible on the great area of
Canada. In India we have also seen that there
are not only people with different occupations
but there is a medley of races who wish to* live

217

218

THE WORLD

in Different 'ways. In Australia and South
Africa there are also people who live differently
from each other and from those in other lands.

Let us first compare Australia and Canada.
They are about the same size, so enormous that

each of them is only a little less than the wiiole
\j

of Europe. In almost everything else but size
they differ. A great part of CaiTada is too cold
for many people to live, but it is nowhere very

Sydney

FlG. 42. MAP TO SHOW THE FORESTS AND STEPPE LANDS OF

ATJSTKALIA.

dry ; a great part of Australia is too dry for
people to live, but it is nowhere very cold. When
it is winter in Canada and very cold, Australia
is having a hot summer. In Canada there are
great forests ; in Australia there are few trees
and these are mostly gum trees which give little
shade and which look as if they were all branches ;
they have few leaves and these hang straight
downwards. Tlte native animals of Australia

THE BRITISH EMPIRE 219

fcoo are not only different from 'the fur-bearing
animals of Canada, but are different from ^he
animals of the rest of the world. Elsewhere
there is nothing like the kangaroo and the duck-
billed platypus, an animal that lays eggs like a
bird.

Much more important is the fact that Canada
is little more thn a week's journey from Britain ;
people can easily come home for a holiday,
while Australia is o far-away that there is no
time during ordinary holidays to come back to
" the old country." New Zealand, of course,
has the "disadvantage of being still farther away.

Australia Is so large that while some parts
are dry others are wet, while some are very
hot" some are moderately cool. The north of
Australia is wet and hot, like the Indies, and few
white people like to live there, while in the south,
in Tasmania, there is a delightful climate some-
thing like that of the south of England. Some
parts of Western Australia are so dry and hot
as to be almost a desert, though they are not so
hot and dry as the Sahara ; elsewhere the land
is rather like the steppe. It is natural that
comparatively little of Australia is cultivated ;
it is t6o dry. It is, however, wet enough over
a large area -to* grow grass, and a great number
of Australian farmers are sheep-farmers. The
runs or farms are of great area, s$me of them of
the size of some of the smaller English counties.
The sheep came originally from Spain, where we

220 . WORLD

have seen it 'is* also dry and hot; the wool of
tlie^e sheep is much finer than the wool of
English sheep.

The dwellings of the settlers and especially
of the early settlers were lonely and far from
pretty. The post might come once a week and
even then the letters might have to be fetched
fifteen to twenty miles. The houses would have
plain boards for sides and roofs of corrugated
iron ; they were shaded by a no trees and had-
no gardens. The life was hard and only brave
men and women could stand it. The food
of the settlers consisted of mutton &ncl home-
baked bread washed down by tea &t evefy meal.

Shearing time supplies the great variety in
the yearly round. On a large station ^erKaps
a quarter of a million sheep may have their wool
clipped and this may take seventy or eighty
shearers working hard for six weeks. It is not
easy work ; the hand is strained with constantly
working the shears, and as the work has to be
done in a stooping attitude, the jaien become
very tired after each day's work.

The shearing shed is a busy scene with the
sheep, some thousands of them, awaiting their
turns, and the shearers and their assistants who
pick up the fleeces, fold them, put 'them into bales
and send them off to reach, eventually, the mills
of Yorkshire.*

Many men who afterwards became sheep-
fariners first went to Australia to dig for gold

BRITISH 221

which was found " in Victoria ; the houses of
the mining 'towns were of the same unlovely
kind. They were perhaps even worse, for the
roads were thick with dust in summer and
almost impassable in the wet winter.

Along the east coast, where there is more
rain brought by the south-east trade winds
and ' where people have bsen living longest
the farms are much surlier and fanners are
"now producing other things besides wool and
mutton, sugar in the wet north and fruit in the
south, \vhere the climate is more like that of
the Mediterranean lands where fruit is grown.
Here the villages have now a water supply, the
ugly shanties are giving place to trim houses,
the streets have avenues of eucalyptus and other
trees. Here too there are the great cities of Sydney
and Melbourne, each on a magnificent natural
harbour. That on the shores of which Sydney
is built is probably the finest in the world.

And what can we say of the portion of South
Africa which* is included in the British Empire?
It is not nearly so large as either Canada or
Australia, being only about a quarter of the size
of either of them, but even so it is as big as
eight United Kingdoms, so it cannot be called
small, and m there are opportunities for many
different ways of living. It is more like Australia
than. Canada. The land of the ^ west is very
dry, so dry as to be called a desert, the Kalahari
Desert. There are also wide stretches of grassy

p

222 WORLD

stope land, also like Australia,, though it is
called by a special name, u the veldt" There
are, too, much smaller areas like English park-
land; while trees like the cork and oak, and fruits
like the vine are grown in the very south. Such
forest land as exists is along the east coast where
rain is brought by the south-ejist trade winds.
Oh ! 55 yon say, " that is just like Australia ;
then there will be steep-farms and the other
things which we hear of in Australia. " That is
partly true, but there are many ways in which
South Africa differs from Australia. Tke sheep*
farms are certainly there and % go'od^defal of
wool is sent across the sea to Britain. There" are
great gold mines near Johannesburg too,^nd.t&at
reminds us of Australia.

But in Australia the people though they live
differently are almost all British, while in South
Africa for every European there are four people
who are not Europeans. Most of these are like
the dark-coloured Zulus we read of in Chap. XIII.,
but they speak so many different languages and
dialects that the country is more like India
than Australia in the mixture of peoples. Even
in India the white people are British,, but in
South Africa only half of the. Europeans are
British ; the other half are of Dutch descent,
and these nqt only speak a different language
but have different customs and habits.

..There are Zulu kraals or villages of huts and
Tonely houses of the Boer or JDutch farmers :

223

jet there are cities' like Cape Town or Johannes*
burg which are much like cities inhabited by
Europeans in other parts of the world, while
even in Sbuthern Rhodesia, where there are
twenty-five natives to every white person, there
are towns with public supplies of water and
electric light, with, telephones, libraries, museums,
hospitals, theatres, churches, and schools.
Through South Africa <reat railways run, but
-trek carts drawn 'by eighteen or twenty oxen
or mules or -donkeys are used to .cross the steppe

CAPE TOWN.

lands, and in some forest districts there are no
roads but only native paths a foot wide along
which there" wind lines of native porters carrying
goods on their heads in bundles that weigh fifty
or sixty pounds.

Peo>ple live in many different ways in South
Africa.

There are many other parts of the Empire,
some large like Nigeria where the jiegroes of the
Suclan live (see Chap. XIII.), or tiny pieces of
land like Gibraltar or Aden, or small islsCo4s ^
the ocean like j3t. Helena or Malta,

224 - WORLD

In each of them-, there are^people who think

of where they live as" " home "and think with
affection of the things they know best.- The
Englishman thinks of roses in the hedgerows and
trim gardens, the Scotsman of heather OR Tbfeak
moorlands, the Irishman of the scent of bog
plants. The Canadian takes the. maple leaf as
his emblem, the Australian chooses the wattibC
New Zealanders and South Africans,, negroes and
Hindus., each have certain familiar sights anc
sounds which make them feel at home and to
which they return with -a feeling of relief and
satisfaction. * e * ^^'^

We sometimes hear it said that Canada, "61'
New Zealand or some other country is " ouEgJ!
or that it " belongs " to Britain. This is
not true even if we are thinking of the land
called Canada, and it is even less true if we under-
stand that the Empire is not made up of land but
of people. It is made up of the people of Britain
and of Canada and India and Australia and the
rest. The Empire is not " ours Jf ' but "us."
And what keeps us together ? Good \vill and
knowledge. That is one reason why we learn
geography.

" Far and far our homes are set round the Seven Seas;
Woe for us if we forget, we that hold by these f
Unto each his mother-beach, bloom and bird and land
Musters of th^SJeveri Seas, oh, love and understand."

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