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] [Sidenote: 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. [Sidenote: Death of Alexander, B.C. 323.]