Time occupied.
Although Nearchus in his journal enters into the most minute details of his voyage from the Indus to Susa on the Choaspes, it is remarkable that he has given no account whatever of the size or number of vessels under his command. An attentive perusal of his story shows however, clearly enough, that they were of the smallest description of craft then in use for sea-going purposes. During the whole voyage they closely hugged the land, invariably anchoring during the night; and though occasionally, when the wind was fair and strong, the journal records a run of sixty, and once of even eighty miles, the average distance did not exceed twenty-five, add to which, the joy of the crew when they reached Karamania, and formed a naval camp on shore, indicates but too plainly that, on board, they had been uncomfortably crammed from want of space.[266]
The voyage itself is recorded with great care by Nearchus; and Heeren, in his “Asiatic Nations,”[267] gives a condensed account of it, which is alike interesting and clear, especially in that portion of it referring to the leading outlines of the coast. It is interesting to read in the records of Nearchus that he speaks of the marauding habits of a people who, having reached a high state of civilization, and even refinement, seem to have degenerated from what they were two thousand years ago, and to observe that, by even this circumstance, the navigator by sea and the traveller by land, of our own time, can recognize the accuracy of his description.[268]
The whole time occupied on the voyage from the mouth of the Indus to Susa, appears to have been 146 days—five lunar months and six days, and not seven months, as stated by Pliny.[269] In calling attention to this fact, Dr. Vincent remarks that a modern vessel can perform in three weeks the passage which Nearchus was five months in accomplishing. “Within the memory of man,” he adds,[270] “a voyage to India required eight or nine months; but Dr. Robertson mentions that, in 1788, the Boddam East Indiaman reached Madras in 108 days, and it has since been performed in 96.” To this we may add that the voyage to India (Bombay), by way of Marseilles, Egypt, and the Red Sea, is now performed in 28 days; that auxiliary screw steam-ships from Liverpool and London perform the voyage, by way of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, to Bombay and Ceylon, heavily laden with cargoes each way, and back to England in 80 days; and that by means of the electric telegraph we can now communicate with any portion of that vast empire in a day, practically in a few minutes if there are no obstacles in the way.[271]
Future voyages.
But conquests in Asia and Western India were not sufficient to satisfy the ambition of Alexander, which knew no limits short of the then known world. Whether he really contemplated the circumnavigation of Africa, and also its subjugation, is a matter of doubt, but it is a well established fact that he had in view the conquest of the whole of Arabia. With that object, he commissioned Nearchus, with the ships he had brought from the Indus, supplemented by forty-seven vessels from Phœnicia, which had been built in pieces and conveyed overland to Thapsacus, and by others constructed on the spot, of cypress, the only wood Babylon afforded, to form a fleet, and take command of this second great maritime expedition. Two of the vessels brought from Phœnicia are described as of five banks, three of four, twelve of three, while thirty were rowed with fifteen oars on a side.[272] The object of Alexander was evidently not so much conquest as colonization. To prepare the way for Nearchus, three single vessels were despatched at different times down the Arabian side of the Persian Gulf, to learn the nature of the coast, the character of the soil, and the best sites for stations or towns. One of these vessels had instructions to circumnavigate Arabia, and to proceed up the Red Sea as far as Suez,[273] though it does not appear whether she ever reached her destination.
Death of Alexander, B.C. 323.
Nearchus would, no doubt, have accomplished the task allotted to him by Alexander, but when the expedition was ready to start, the Macedonian conqueror lay on his death-bed. In the midst of the fever of which he died, he, according to the diary of one of his officers, “transacted business with his officers, and gave directions about the fleet.”[274] On the following day, though “the fever now ran very high, and oppressed him much, he nevertheless ordered the principal officers to attend, and repeated his orders in regard to the fleet”; and on the day of his death, when unable to speak, it would appear by the diary preserved in the extracts made from it by Arrian, that his last thoughts were directed to the conquest and colonization of Arabia. His untimely death, however, not only put an end to this project, but also to all his other splendid schemes.
As is well known, the body of Alexander was hardly cold, ere the great empire he had founded fell to pieces, and was parcelled out among those who had been his ablest lieutenants; but, though for a while suffering from the rude conflict of rival selfishness, it is a remarkable fact that the commercial relations between the different provinces he had overrun had been so well established by the sagacity of the conqueror, that on the final restoration of tranquillity, the Macedonian dominion, and with it Greek principles of trade and mutual intercourse, prevailed throughout Asia, no province succeeding for many years in shaking off the yoke. Even in the distant East, though those portions of it subdued by Alexander for a while joined a native chief Sandracottus (Chandra-gupta), the ruler of a powerful nation on the banks of the Ganges, whose plan was to attack those parts of the Macedonian dominions bordering on his territories, order was soon restored; while Alexander’s immediate successor in the government of the East, Seleucus, who had carefully studied the principles of his great master, conceived so clear an idea of the importance of a commercial intercourse with India, that he marched into that country, and, entering into relations with Ptolemy the son of Lagos, established on a firm basis the trade between the Red Sea and Hindustan, as described in the previous chapter.
Eastern India.