Nature has often raised the most formidable barriers ever experienced by humans in their developments; oceans, deserts, forests, and mountains have served to divide and isolate peoples from the very beginnings of human existence. Landscapes have also presented situations that on the contrary have favored and even encouraged human interaction over vast areas. Maritime basins surrounded by continuous stretches of coastline are likely to have had this stimulating effect not only around their coastal periphery but also directly between various points across their shores, when adequate seafaring technology had become available. This is not a matter of environmental determinism but more properly of opportunistic circumstances.

The Mediterranean is a classic example. Peoples and civilizations emerging around its shores were bound from the earliest prehistoric times, not only by the uniformity in climate and landscape but culturally by a common Palaeolithic substratum, and later by a shared subsistence basis of wheat, olives, sheep, and marine fishes. Although political integration was only once and briefly accomplished by the Romans, the area never escaped a cultural interdependency that at times bounded France to the Holy Land, or Spain to Morocco.

GEOGRAPHICAL AND CULTURAL CONDITIONS

In the New World the only geographical setting that could have led to a similar situation is the Caribbean Sea. This unique maritime basin is essentially a division of the Atlantic Ocean that overlaps both North and South America; indeed, a true maritime basin even extends as far north as the Gulf of Mexico (see Map 8.1). The more precise boundaries of the Caribbean Sea originate in the north at the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and Belize, reaching south as far as the island of Trinidad and the delta of the Orinoco River in Venezuela. The mainland of the South American continent set the Caribbean’s shores to the west, and the West Indian islands mark its eastern and northern boundaries in the form of a massive barrier to the open Atlantic. Continuous communication was at least potentially feasible all around its periphery even before European contacts, and despite stretches of difficult coastlines, simple open boats could progress along the coasts even without sails. Overland communication along coastal plains and valleys must also be considered in spreading peoples, commerce, and ideas to the entire region.