Four great events happened in the
reign of Alexander which entirely changed the face of commerce: the
taking of Tyre, the conquest of Egypt, that likewise of the Indies, and
the discovery of the sea which lies south of that country.
The empire of Persia extended to the Indus.
[33]
Darius, long before
Alexander, had sent some vessels, which sailed down this river, and
passed even into the Red Sea.
[34]
How then were the Greeks the first who
traded with the Indies by the south? Had not the Persians done this
before? Did they make no advantage of seas which were so near them, of
the very seas that washed their coasts? Alexander, it is true, conquered
the Indies; but was it necessary for him to conquer a country in order
to trade with it? This is what I shall now examine.
Ariana,
[35]
which extended from the Persian Gulf as far as the
Indus, and from the South Sea to the mountains of Paropamisus, depended
indeed, in some measure, on the empire of Persia; but in the southern
part it was barren, scorched, rude, and uncultivated. Tradition
relates
[36]
that the armies of Semiramis and Cyrus perished in these
deserts; and Alexander, who caused his fleet to follow him, could not
avoid losing in this place a great part of his army. The Persians left
the whole coast to the Ichthyophagi,
[37]
the Orit, and other barbarous
nations. Besides, the Persians were no great sailors,
[38]
and their
very religion debarred them from entertaining any such notion as that of
a maritime commerce. The voyage undertaken by Darius's direction upon
the Indus and the Indian Sea proceeded rather from the capriciousness of
a prince vainly ambitious of showing his power than from any settled
regular project. It was attended with no consequence either to the
advantage of commerce or of navigation. They emerged from their
ignorance only to plunge into it again.
Besides, it was a received opinion
[39]
before the expedition of
Alexander that the southern parts of India were uninhabitable.
[40]
This
proceeded from a tradition that Semiramis
[41]
had brought back thence
only twenty men, and Cyrus but seven.
Alexander entered by the north. His design was to march towards the
east; but having found a part of the south full of great nations,
cities, and rivers, he attempted to conquer it, and succeeded.
He then formed a design of uniting the Indies to the western nations
by a maritime commerce, as he had already united them by the colonies he
had established by land.
He ordered a fleet to be built on the Hydaspes, then fell down that
river, entered the Indus, and sailed even to its mouth. He left his army
and his fleet at Patala, went himself with a few vessels to view the
sea, and marked the places where he would have ports to be opened and
arsenals erected. Upon his return from Patala he separated the fleet,
and took the route by land, for the mutual support of fleet and army.
The fleet followed the coast from the Indus along the banks of the
country of the Orit, of the Ichthyophagi, of Carmania and Persia. He
caused wells to be dug, built cities, and would not suffer the
Ichthyophagi to live on fish,
[42]
being desirous of having the borders
of the sea inhabited by civilised nations. Nearchus and Onesecritus
wrote a journal of this voyage, which was performed in ten months. They
arrived at Susa, where they found Alexander, who gave an entertainment
to his whole army.
This prince had founded Alexandria, with a view of securing his
conquest of Egypt; this was a key to open it, in the very place where
the kings his predecessors had a key to shut it;
[43]
and he had not the
least thought of a commerce of which the discovery of the Indian Sea
could alone give him the idea.
It even seems that after his discovery he had no new design in
regard to Alexandria. He had, indeed, a general scheme of opening a
trade between the East Indies and the western parts of his empire; but
as for the project of conducting this commerce through Egypt, his
knowledge was too imperfect to be able to form any such design. It is
true he had seen the Indus, he had seen the Nile, but he knew nothing of
the Arabian seas between the two rivers. Scarcely had he returned from
India when he fitted out new fleets, and navigated on the Euleus,
[44]
the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the ocean; he removed the cataracts, with
which the Persians had encumbered those rivers; and he discovered that
the Persian Gulf was a branch of the main sea. But as he went to view
this sea
[45]
in the same manner as he had done in respect to that of
India; as he caused a port to be opened for a thousand ships, and
arsenals to be erected at Babylon; as he sent five hundred talents into
Phoenicia and Syria, to draw mariners into this service whom he intended
to distribute in the colonies along the coast; in fine, as he caused
immense works to be erected on the Euphrates, and the other rivers of
Assyria, there could be no doubt but he designed to carry on the
commerce of India by the way of Babylon and the Persian Gulf.
There are some who pretend that Alexander wanted to subdue
Arabia,
[46]
and had formed a design to make it the seat of his empire:
but how could he have pitched upon a place with which he was entirely
unacquainted?
[47]
Besides, of all countries, this would have been the
most inconvenient to him; for it would have separated him from the rest
of his empire. The Caliphs, who made distant conquests, soon withdrew
from Arabia to reside elsewhere.
