appears; but the outward cloak of the land varies from zone to zone.  The significant anthropo-geographical influence of the size of the oceans, as opposed to that of the smaller seas, comes from the larger circle of lands which the former open to maritime enterprise.  For primitive navigation, when the sailor crept from headland to headland and from island to island, the small enclosed basin with its close-hugging shores did indeed offer the best conditions.  To-day, only the great tonnage of ocean-going vessels may reflect in some degree the vast areas they traverse between continent and continent.  Coasting craft and ships designed for local traffic in enclosed seas are in general smaller, as in the Baltic, though the enormous commerce of the Great Lakes, which constitute in effect an inland sea, demands immense vessels.

[Sidenote:  Neutrality of the seas, its evolution.]

The vast size of the oceans has been the basis of their neutrality.  The neutrality of the seas is a recent idea in political history.  The principle arose in connection with the oceans, and from them was extended to the smaller basins, which previously tended to be regarded as private political domains.  Their limited area, which enabled them to be compassed, enabled them also to be appropriated, controlled and policed.  The Greek excluded the Phoenician from the Aegean and made it an Hellenic sea.  Carthage and Tarentum tried to draw the dead line for Roman merchantmen at the Lacinian Cape, the doorway into the Ionian Sea, and thereby involved themselves in the famous Punic Wars.  The whole Mediterranean became a Roman sea, the mare nostrum.  Pompey’s fleet was able to police it effectively and to exterminate the pirates in a few months, as Cicero tells us in his oration for the Manilian Law.  Venice, by the conquest of the Dalmatian pirates in 991 prepared to make herself dominatrix Adriatici maris, as she was later called.  By the thirteenth century she had secured full command of the sea, spoke of it as “the Gulf,” in her desire to stamp it as a mare clausum, maintained in it a powerful patrol fleet under a Capitan in Golfo, whose duty it was to police the sea for pirates and to seize all ships laden with contraband goods.  She claimed and enforced the right of search of foreign vessels, and compelled them to discharge two-thirds of their cargo at Venice, which thus became the clearing house of the whole Adriatic.  She even appealed to the Pope for confirmation of her dominion over the sea.[576] Sweden and Denmark strove for a dominum maris Baltici; but the Hanse Towns of northern Germany secured the maritime supremacy in the basin, kept a toll-gate at its entrance, and levied toll or excluded merchant ships at their pleasure, a right which after the fall of the Hanseatic power was assumed by Denmark and maintained till 1857.  “The Narrow Seas” over which England claimed sovereignty from 1299 to 1805, and on which she exacted a salute from every foreign vessel, included the North Sea as far as Stadland Cape in Norway, the English Channel, and the Bay of Biscay down to Cape Finisterre in northern Spain.[577]