Dead Alexander Invades America
BEARDED WHITE GODS?
Middle American portraits of men who, unlike the generality of Mongoloids, wore beards. Upper left, the back of a Totonac slate mirror probably from the state of Veracruz. Upper right, a carving from Tepataxco, Veracruz. Center, a figure on a pottery vase from Chama, Guatemala. Lower left, a pottery head found at Tres Zapotes, Veracruz. Lower right, a carving on a stela at La Venta, which appears to have an artificial beard such as was worn by the Egyptians. (The first three, after Vaillant, 1931; the fourth, after Stirling, 1940; the last, after Covarrubias, 1946.)
Before Alexander died in 323 B.C. he brought 5,000 Levantine and Greek shipwrights and sailors to the Persian Gulf and built a navy of 800 vessels. We hear a good deal about what his army did after his death, of the quarrels of generals and the dissipation of their forces—but not a word about the 5,000 nautical men or their fleet. As Gladwin points out, it is hard to imagine that sailors with sound vessels under them would take shore leave and walk home to Greece. If they sailed away from the Persian Gulf, which way would they have gone? They would hardly have sailed southwestward along the Arabian coast; for Alexander died at a season when the winds would have been against them, and the coast is lacking in fresh water and harbors at any time. A southeastward voyage would have been another matter. The wind would have been behind them, and they had already found the coast attractive in that direction.
With this much to go upon, Gladwin sends the fleet of the dead Alexander down the coast of India, past the Spice Islands, and out through Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. On the way the fleet picks up men and women of various races, and stimulates the whole South Seas into a navigating era. The end result is another discovery of America. It is a discovery by a varied and talented people. Along with the Melanesian-Carib and Polynesian-Arawak, the fleet of Gladwin and Alexander finally brings to our western shores those bearded white men with civilizing propensities who are found in the legends of the Toltec and Maya and the peoples of Colombia and Peru. They it is who teach the Mongoloids how to build stone edifices, work metals, weave textiles, and make fine pots. Gladwin documents all this assiduously and even goes to his opponents for evidence.
He bolsters his argument with the “Q Complex”—that list of traits in the cultures of Middle America and the southeastern portion of the United States which Vaillant and Lothrop compiled as being very old indeed and unaccounted for in present theory. Men Out of Asia suggests that the Levantine voyagers brought these things or shaped them after they landed.
He uses with the greatest relish the mass of material on Oceanic traits in the Americas that Nordenskiöld drew together in “Origin of the Indian Civilizations in South America.” Of the forty-nine elements of culture which the Swede found common to both regions, Gladwin points out that more occur in Colombia and Panama than in any other New World area—thirty-eight in all—and that Colombia and Panama surround the spot where ships would have landed if they had followed the Equatorial Counter Current to the Gulf of Darien. From this region as a center the Melanesian and Polynesian traits gradually thin out to the north, the south, and the east.
The Equatorial Counter Current, which flows just north of the equator, varies in width from 150 to 500 miles. The winds in this area are light and blow from south of east over its southern area and north of east over its northern area.
Against Gladwin’s argument must be set, however, the evidence that Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán has recently developed showing that, among the slaves sent to Mexico from Manila during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were many from New Guinea and other Pacific islands.[16] Was there a similar trade with Colombia, where Oceanic traits are slightly more plentiful than in Mexico and Central America, and with Amazonia, where they are almost as plentiful? It is vitally important, however, to remember that Melanesian slaves cannot possibly be credited with the importation of objects that have been found in pre-Columbian burials—certain Panpipes and mace heads, for example.
There are plenty of other objections, of course, to Gladwin’s theory, even though it seems to explain much that has been a mystery; but there are also defenses that he has not made. If the islands of the Pacific are not too well provided with pottery, pyramids, cement, metallurgy, and textiles, he might have pointed out that they were imperfectly supplied with the proper raw materials. If the white voyagers left their triremes behind in favor of double canoes, and if they did not build Greek temples in the New World, he might have suggested that some generations of sojourn in the South Seas led them to forget a few things. Indeed, it is surprising that these sailors remembered so much of weaving, metal working, and pottery (minus the potter’s wheel). It is equally surprising and just a little disquieting that the white gods, almost as soon as they landed, invented a complex and unique calendar and a hieroglyphic system like nothing they were familiar with. (Perhaps they could not agree on which of the many Old World varieties to use and had to devise something new.)
Before pouncing too heavily on Gladwin and his Alexandrians, it may be well to reread some sentences in his Introduction:
We are going to offer an explanation that will be a radical departure from those in current circulation, and I shall be the first to admit that this tale will need a great deal of patching and strengthening before it will carry much weight. This may seem a strange way to launch a new theory, but I am more concerned in opening up new channels of inquiry than in trying to provide pat answers to all the questions that are plaguing us.... I do not know of anyone who has yet been rash enough to try to connect the origins of American civilizations with definite causes, at definite dates, in the progress of Old World history, and it is for this reason that I have said this tale will need support and will undoubtedly need to be changed. This, however, is the way that every theory should be treated, and no harm will be done if when a new idea is launched it is regarded with due reserve, but also without prejudice.[17]
Our [next chapter] will return to rather formidable arguments for inventiveness in the American Indian; but first we should perhaps point out that Gladwin is not an Elliot Smith riding the hobby of diffusion to the end. He admits independent invention in many important fields. Pottery was invented, he believes, at least twice in the Old World. He concedes a number of origins for agriculture in the New. But he believes that the really inventive men of the New World—the men who developed corn, and devised the Maya calendar—were the men who brought brains as well as cultural equipment in the ships of Alexander, and put those brains to work devising more cultural equipment. (He ignores the fact that corn was developed more than a thousand years before Alexander was born.) Gladwin simply does not consider that early man and his successors before the birth of Christ were smart enough to produce much more than exceptionally good spear points and rather inferior milling stones. He does not believe that the Australoids or the Folsom men or the Algonquins or the Mongoloids who came over just before our era—let alone the Uto-Aztecans or the Athabascans a little later—were capable of inventing much in the way of neolithic civilization. He points out that the Indian—bereft, presumably, of the brains and blood of the men of Alexander’s fleet—has not done much inventing in the past four centuries. An opponent might remark that many an inventive, creative people has lapsed from grace—the Egyptians and the Greeks, for instance. The Polynesians and the Melanesians have not done much more inventing than the Indians since the days when the Alexandrians turned them into pre-Columbian pioneers of America culture.