Gladwin has not worked out his maritime invasions too thoroughly; but he sees the Melanesians—who, he believed, reached Easter Island—continuing on to Central America and becoming the Caribs and spreading into South America and the West Indies. He sees the Polynesians taking much the same route and turning into the Arawaks.
What started these South Sea islanders off on their career of civilizing the central part of the Americas? Where did they get some of the traits and some of the physical features that Melanesians and Polynesians do not now possess, as well as their inventive brains? Here Gladwin has a startling and fabulous theory to put forward. Here is where Alexander the Great and his sailors and ships come in.
_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.