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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I THE ISTHMUS OP PANAMA South America is bounded at its northern end by an isthmus and at its southern by a strait. They are the two gateways by which the western side of the Continent, cut off from the western and central portions by a long and lofty mountain range, can be approached from the Atlantic. It was by crossing the Isthmus that Vasco Nunez de Balboa discovered the South Sea. It was by penetrating the Strait that Magellan, seven years later, discovered that this South Sea was a vast ocean stretching all the way to the coasts of Asia. In old Spanish days all the commerce of the west coast passed over the Isthmus,1 but when the days of steam navigation arrived, that commerce passed through Magellan's Strait. Now the Isthmus itself is to be turned into a strait and will be a channel for sea-borne trade, the main gateway to the West. An isthmus and a strait are, to the historical geographer and to the geographical historian, the most interesting things with which geographical science has to deal. Commerce and travel and naval warfare concentrate themselves at the spot where a narrow channel connects wide seas, and the strip of land which severs two seas from one another interposes a barrier to water- borne trade and turns it off into other directions. Itbecomes a point the control of which can stop the march of armies, and it furnishes a central stronghold whence ships can go forth to threaten the neighbouring coasts. Thus every strait and every isthmus has a high commercial importance, and almost always a political importance also, since lines of commerce have usually been, and are now more than ever, potent factors in human affairs, while the command of a water passage for fleets, or that of a land passage for armies, may be of capital importance in war. ...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217872522 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217872522 |
| Weight | 1.50 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 1.04 In |
| List Price | $24.67 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 466 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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