It is incorrect to state Germany is landlocked. Northern Germany has a large coast on the North Sea and the old Hanseatic cities did maintain a somewhat large maritime presence in European history. For nineteenth-century immigration, the main German ports of embarkation were Hamburg and Bremen. These two ports covered a majority of German emigration into the Western hemisphere, with Hamburg taking the lead. These were the ports that saw the first German steamships and modern shipping companies by midcentury. Outside of these two north German cities, the ports in the Low Countries that linked up to the Rhine like Antwerp were another area of embarkation and Le Havre in France started out strong in the early nineteenth century for German emigration but sharply declined as Hamburg and Bremen took up a dominant position in this market.