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Updated: June 3, 2025
His journey to the camp, stay there, return, and preparations for again sailing, may have occupied fifteen days. Three hundred miles in twelve days is at the rate of twenty-five miles a day. Hitherto the voyage of Nearchus has afforded no information respecting the commerce of the ancients.
The remainder of his voyage, however, affords a few notices on this subject; and to these we shall attend. In the island of Schitwar, on the eastern side of the Gulf of Persia, Nearchus found the inhabitants engaged in a pearl fishery: at present pearls are not taken on this side of the Gulf.
A portion of these, when Alexander reached the Hydaspes and determined to sail down the course of the Indus to the sea, were drafted into the vessels which he caused to be built, descended the river, and accompanied Nearchus in his voyage from Patala to the Persian Gulf.
At length, on the 14th of December, on the seventy-fourth day of their departure, they reached a more fertile and hospitable shore, and were enabled to procure a very small supply of provisions, consisting principally of corn, dried dates, and the flesh of seven camels. Nearchus mentions the latter evidently to point out the extreme distress to which they were reduced.
That one may sooner believe Hesiod, and Homer, and the Tragick Poets speaking of their Hero's, than Ctesias and Herodotus and Hellanicus and such like. All who have wrote of India for the most part, are fabulous, but in the highest degree Daimachus; then Megasthenes, Onesicritus, and Nearchus, and such like. The Satyrist therefore had reason to say, Satyr.
Along the coast of the Icthyophagi, extending from Malan to Cape Jaser, a distance, by the course of the fleet, of nearly 625 miles, Nearchus was so much favoured by the winds and by the straightness of the coast, that his progress was sometimes nearly 60 miles a day. In every other respect, however, this portion of the voyage was very unfortunate and calamitous.
When he left Calcutta he had another plan in view. On December 12, 1818, he writes from on board the Nearchus, at the mouth of the Ganges, to his frequent correspondent Marsden, the Sumatran traveller "We are now on our way to the eastward, in the hope of doing something, but I much fear the Dutch have hardly left us an inch of ground to stand upon.
When Fabius Maximus took Tarentum, Cato, being then but a youth, was a soldier under him; and being lodged with one Nearchus, a Pythagorean, desired to understand some of his doctrine, and hearing from him the language, which Plato also uses, that pleasure is evil's chief bait; the body the principal calamity of the soul; and that those thoughts which most separate and take it off from the affections of the body, most enfranchise and purify it; he fell in love the more with frugality and temperance.
He there turned by the lands of Gedrosia, Caramania, and Persia, to the great city of Babylon, leaving the command of his fleet to Onesicratus and Nearchus, who sailed through the straits of the Persian Sea and up the river Euphrates, discovering the whole coast between the Indus and that river.
Of course pearl-fishing is the great occupation of the islands, and Manamah is inhabited chiefly by pearl merchants and divers. Bahrein has in fact been celebrated for its pearl-fishing ever since the days of the Periplus of Nearchus, in the time of Alexander the Great.
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