^6 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



that the larger species were never common in the Mediterranean. 

 It has been suggested that the school encountered by Nearchus 

 was comprised of humpbacks, which are still prevalent along that 

 coast. 



The voyage was fraught with difficulties. Food ran extremely 

 short, and the fleet completely lost touch with the land army despite 

 Alexander's sanguine belief that they could keep in close contact. 

 Nearchus, however, had sensibly shipped an experienced Indian pilot, 

 a man of Baluchistan whom he found at Mosarna and who knew the 

 whole route to Mesopotamia. The pilots referred to in the passage 

 above were obviously Indians and they undoubtedly had complete 

 charge of the navigation. As we have seen, this sea route had been 

 followed for several hundreds, and perhaps for some thousands of 

 years by the Indians, so that considerably more was known about it 

 than the Greek chroniclers of the voyage give us to suppose, and 

 Nearchus was probably never in any great danger of getting lost. 



After entering the Persian Gulf and passing the Bushire Peninsula, 

 the fleet came to the mouth of a river, probably the modern Rud- 

 Hilleh, and the record states that there "at the River Granis, near 

 which was a palace, a stranded whale fifty cubits in length was ob- 

 served, attended by a great number of dolphins, larger than are ever 

 seen in the Mediterranean." This passage has been interpreted in two 

 ways. It could mean either that a school of some smaller species of 

 whale had been stranded along with the big specimen, or that the 

 carcass was still fresh and was being mauled by a number of sharks. 

 The Greeks were never quite clear as to the distinction between 

 dolphins and sharks, and they sometimes spoke of the former as 

 having the mouth under the head, so that the animal had to turn 

 over on its back to grasp its prey. 



The whales were undoubtedly one of the sights that most im- 

 pressed the inquisitive Greeks upon this first excursion of theirs into 

 eastern seas. Nor did their interest flag from that time on. Aristotle 

 had already compiled his great works on natural history, and knowl- 

 edge of these things was current among the better-educated Greeks. 

 The extent of this knowledge was, as has been noted, quite astonish- 

 ing, and displays extraordinary powers of observation, evidence of 

 most careful compilation, and the existence of a very free and ra- 

 tional outlook upon all matters zoological. Aristotle's work The 



