Sinbad the Sailor: The Third Voyage

The First Voyage of Sinbad ended with a vow, and so did the Second. Twice the merchant swore on a safe beach that the sea was finished with him; twice the vow lasted exactly as long as the comfort of Baghdad stayed sweet. The Third Voyage opens with that vow broken a third time – and here, for the first time, the tale stops being charmed by its own hero. This is the darkest of the seven voyages. Its marvels are not wonders to be admired from a safe distance; they are predators, and they hunt.

It is also the voyage scholars reach for first when they want to show how far the Arabian Nights travelled to gather its material. The man-eating giant who lurks at the centre of the Third Voyage is not simply a monster invented for an Arab audience. He is, almost beat for beat, the Cyclops Polyphemus of Homer’s Odyssey – the same cave, the same devoured companions, the same blinding with a heated point, the same boulders hurled after the escaping survivors. Sir Richard Burton, who translated the tale into English, said of this giant flatly that he “is distinctly Polyphemus.” The Third Voyage is therefore a story that can be enjoyed by a child for its terror and its cleverness, and studied by a scholar as a living fossil of how stories crossed the ancient world.

A Third Breaking of the Vow, and the Island of the Apes

Sinbad, telling the tale long afterward to the porter and the guests at his table, did not pretend the Third Voyage was forced upon him. He had come home from the Valley of Diamonds rich beyond counting. He had houses, land, friends, and the quiet respect of Baghdad. He had also, once again, the slow inward itch that no comfort could reach. The pleasures of the settled life, he admitted, began after a time to taste of nothing at all; the company of merchants who spoke of far countries stirred in him a longing he could neither justify nor put down. So he did the unwise, familiar thing. He bought a great stock of trade goods, carried them down to Basra, found a fine ship with a sound captain and a cheerful company of fellow merchants, and went to sea a third time.

For many days the voyage was everything a merchant could wish. The ship moved island to island under fair skies; the company traded and prospered; Sinbad, shrewd now and watchful, did well at every port. Then the sea changed its face. A wind came up that was not an ordinary wind, and the captain, when he had studied the water and the sky, did a thing that frightened the whole company more than any storm: he came down from his place, beat his face in grief, and told them plainly that the current had taken the ship past all known charts. They were being carried, he said, toward the Mountain of the Apes, and no vessel that reached that shore had ever been known to come away.

Before the captain had even finished, the creatures were upon them. They came swarming over the sides of the ship in their hundreds – small hairy beings no taller than a child, covered head to foot in coarse hair, with small yellow eyes and quick, clever hands. They were too many to fight and too small to bargain with. The company could not strike them all down; for every one driven back, ten more poured aboard. The little hairy folk swarmed the rigging, gnawed through the cables, worked the ship to their own will, and ran her in to the foot of a great wooded island. There they drove the merchants ashore, every one, and took the ship and all her cargo back out to sea, and were gone. Sinbad and his companions stood on a strange beach with nothing but the clothes they wore, watching their entire fortune sail away in the hands of beasts.

The Palace and the Thing That Came at Nightfall

Hungry and frightened, the marooned men went up from the beach to search the island, and before long they came upon a building that lifted their hearts – a great house, tall and broad, with a high gateway standing open and a courtyard within. Surely, they told one another, such a place meant people, and people meant help. They went in. The courtyard was wide and empty. Around it lay scattered, in a way none of them liked, a great quantity of bones, clean and dry; and against one wall stood a long iron spit of the kind used for roasting whole animals over a fire. The men were too tired and too hungry to read the warning. They sat down in the great hall and, one by one, they slept.

They woke at sunset to the ground shaking under them. Something vast was coming. Through the gateway it came, and it stopped the breath in every throat: a creature in the shape of a man but black as a moonless night and tall as a tall palm tree, with eyes that glowed like two beds of coals, a mouth as wide as the mouth of a well, tusks like the tusks of a wild boar, ears that hung like the ears of an elephant, and nails on its hands curved and hard as the claws of a lion. It crossed the courtyard, sat itself down, and let its terrible gaze travel slowly over the huddle of small soft men it had found in its house.

What followed, Sinbad always told quickly and plainly, without dwelling on it, for it was the worst thing he had ever seen. The giant chose from among them the captain – the largest, the soundest, the best fed – and the captain did not live to see the dawn. The fire was lit; the iron spit was used for the purpose iron spits are used for; and when the giant had eaten its fill it stretched out upon the ground and slept, and its snoring rolled like thunder around the walls. The merchants sat frozen against the stone, too sick with terror to weep. In the grey morning the giant rose and went out about its business on the island, leaving the survivors shut up with the bones, and they understood at last whose bones those were, and that they were looking at their own future unless they could think of something that no trapped man had ever thought of in that courtyard before.

The Red-Hot Spits and the Flight to the Rafts

All that day the men wept and despaired, and some of them wished aloud that they had drowned at sea rather than come to this. But Sinbad – and this is the turn on which the whole voyage hinges – refused to spend the daylight grieving. He walked the courtyard, he studied the walls, he studied the open gateway and the beach beyond it, and he put a hard, practical question to the others. The island had timber. The shore was not far. “Let us,” he said, “build rafts – rafts that will carry us out onto the water – and trust ourselves to the sea, which at least kills cleanly, rather than wait here to be chosen one by one.” The men, glad of any plan at all, went down secretly to the shore and gathered driftwood and timber and bound it with what they had, and worked at their rafts, and hid them, and said nothing.

But a raft was not enough, for the giant would surely see them on the open water and wade out, or rouse others of its kind. The escape needed to be bought with something more, and Sinbad had seen, in the cold gleam of the courtyard, exactly what tool the giant itself had left lying ready. That night the men did not sleep. They waited, hearts hammering, until the giant had eaten and stretched out and its snoring filled the hall. Then Sinbad and the boldest of the company rose in the dark, and took the great iron spits, and held the points of them in the fire until the iron glowed red and white with heat. And together, with one swift and desperate effort, they drove the burning points into the sleeping giant’s eyes.

The giant came up roaring, and its roar was a thing the survivors said they heard in their sleep for years afterward. Blinded, maddened, it groped and lunged about the hall, its great clawed hands sweeping the air, while the men flattened themselves against the walls and slipped, one by one, out through the gateway it could no longer guard. They ran for the shore and their hidden rafts and pushed out onto the dark water. But the giant’s bellowing had carried, and as the rafts drew away from the beach two vast shapes came down to the water’s edge – the blinded giant, led now by a second of its kind, a female, monstrous as itself. The two of them tore loose great rocks from the shore and hurled them out into the dark after the sound of the escaping men. Rock after rock crashed down among the little rafts, and most of the company – brave men who had built and planned and dared alongside Sinbad – did not live to see the morning. When the rafts at last drifted beyond the giants’ reach, only Sinbad and two others were still alive, soaked, exhausted, and adrift on the open sea.

The Serpent, the Wooden Refuge, and the Road Home

For a day and a night the current carried the three survivors, and then it set them, half drowned and wholly spent, on the shore of another island. It was green and watered and full of fruit, and after the courtyard of the giant it looked like mercy itself. They ate, and drank from a stream, and lay down in the open to sleep the sleep of men who have nothing left to give. But this island, too, kept a tenant. In the night a serpent came – enormous, thick as the trunk of a palm, swift and silent – and in the morning Sinbad and the last companion found themselves two where they had been three. The next night it took the second man as well, and Sinbad was alone.

A lesser man, or the idle young heir Sinbad had once been, would have lain down and waited for the third night. But the Third Voyage had by now taught its hero its hardest lesson: that terror is survivable only by the man who keeps thinking through it. Sinbad gathered all the wood he could find, broad planks and stout branches, and he built himself not a shelter but a kind of box – a low, wide cage of timber lashed tightly together, broad enough to lie in and closed on every side, with one piece bound flat above him and one beneath. He made it deliberately too wide and too flat for any jaw to close around. Then he crept inside it and waited. The serpent came in the dark and found him; it wound about the wooden box and pressed and pushed and tried all night to take him, and could not get its mouth around the awkward, splay-sided thing, and at last, in the grey of dawn, it gave him up and slid away. Sinbad climbed out into the daylight, scarcely able to stand, and went to the shore – and there, far out on the bright water, he saw the sails of a ship.

He waved, and called, and tore the cloth from his head and held it up, and the ship saw him and sent a boat and took him aboard. And here the Third Voyage, having shown Sinbad the worst the world can hold, turned at last and showed him something else. The captain of that ship had aboard, in his hold, a quantity of bales of trade goods that did not belong to him – the goods, he explained, of a merchant who had been lost from his ship on an earlier voyage, goods he was carrying so that he might sell them honestly and one day give the proceeds to the dead man’s family. When Sinbad heard the merchant’s name and the tale of the loss, he knew the bales. They were his own – the very cargo he had left behind when the Roc carried him off the island in the Second Voyage. The honest captain, once he was certain, restored every bale to Sinbad with open joy, and Sinbad traded the recovered goods at the islands along the homeward route, and saw many wonders, and came at last to Basra and then up the river road to Baghdad, alive, and rich once more, and changed.

The Moral of the Third Voyage

The Third Voyage is the cruellest of the early voyages, and that cruelty is the point. The first two voyages let Sinbad lose his fortune; this one makes him watch his companions die, the captain and the raft-builders and the two men of the serpent island, good men every one. The tale does not soften it and does not pretend the survivor is specially deserving. What separates Sinbad from the men who perish is not virtue and not luck. It is that, in the very worst hour, when everyone around him is weeping or wishing for death, he keeps doing the one thing terror most wants to switch off: he keeps thinking. He counts the timber. He measures the giant’s own iron against the giant. He builds a box exactly too wide for a serpent’s jaw. The Arabic tradition has a proverb that names this faculty precisely:

“الحاجة أمّ الاختراع” — al-haja umm al-ikhtira’ — “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

Every escape in the voyage is an invention forced out of Sinbad by necessity: the rafts, the heated spits, the wooden refuge. None of them is heroic in the ordinary sense – there is no sword, no single combat, no glory. They are the inventions of a frightened, ordinary man who declines to let fear do his thinking for him. And there is a second note, sounded quietly at the very end. The voyage that has shown the world at its most predatory closes with the honest sea-captain who guarded a dead stranger’s goods for the sake of a family he had never met. After the apes and the giant and the serpent, the tale wants the reader to remember that the same world also holds that captain. Cruelty and decency sail the same sea; the story refuses to let us forget either one.

Why the Tale Has Lasted

The Third Voyage has lasted for two reasons, one of them obvious and one of them deep. The obvious reason is its monsters. The black giant of the courtyard and the elephant-swallowing serpent are among the most vivid horrors the Arabian Nights ever produced, and they have been drawn, painted, filmed and animated for three centuries. A child meets this voyage and never forgets the red eyes in the gateway at sunset.

The deep reason is the giant himself, and what he proves. When folklorists place the episode under tale type ATU 1137, “The Ogre Blinded,” they are pointing at one of the most remarkable facts in the study of stories: that the blinding of the man-eating giant by a heated point, the escape of the survivors, and the boulders flung after them appear both in Homer’s Odyssey, composed in Greek around the eighth century BCE, and in an Arabic tale written down more than a thousand years later – and in dozens of independent folk versions collected across Europe and Asia in between. Scholars still debate whether the Sinbad giant descends directly from Homer, whether both descend from an older Near Eastern folk tale, or whether the story was simply too good not to be reinvented. Whatever the answer, the Third Voyage stands as proof that a powerful story is not the property of any one people. It is carried by sailors and merchants and grandmothers across every border that maps can draw. Sinbad and Odysseus, the Abbasid trader and the Greek king, are in the end the same man, blinding the same monster, rowing away from the same dark island – and that, more than any roc or diamond, is the real wonder the voyages preserve.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happens in Sinbad the Sailor’s Third Voyage?

Restless again in Baghdad, Sinbad sails a third time. A current carries his ship to the Mountain of the Apes, where small hairy creatures seize the vessel and maroon the crew. The men take shelter in a great house that proves to be the lair of a man-eating giant. Sinbad and the survivors blind the sleeping giant with red-hot iron spits and escape on rafts, though the giant and a second giant kill most of them with hurled rocks. Sinbad and two companions reach another island where a huge serpent devours the other two; Sinbad survives by building a wooden box around himself, is rescued by a passing ship, recovers goods lost on his earlier voyage, and returns home wealthy.

Why is the giant in Sinbad’s Third Voyage compared to the Cyclops?

The episode is almost identical to the encounter with Polyphemus the Cyclops in Book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey: a giant traps a band of travellers, devours them one at a time, and is overcome when the survivors blind him with a heated point and flee, after which he hurls rocks after their escaping vessel. The translator Richard Burton noted that the Sinbad giant “is distinctly Polyphemus.” Folklorists classify both stories under the international tale type ATU 1137, “The Ogre Blinded (Polyphemus).”

How does Sinbad survive the giant serpent?

After the serpent eats his two remaining companions, Sinbad gathers broad planks and stout wood and lashes them into a low, wide box, deliberately built too broad and too flat for the serpent’s jaws to close around it. He shuts himself inside. The serpent presses and coils around the box all night but cannot get its mouth around it, and abandons the attempt at dawn. The next day Sinbad signals a passing ship and is rescued.

Where does the story of Sinbad the Sailor come from?

The Seven Voyages of Sinbad belong to the Arabian Nights (Alf Layla wa-Layla), though the cycle first circulated as an independent Arabic work, Hikayat as-Sindibad al-Bahri. It reached Europe through the French translator Antoine Galland (1704–1717) and appears in the major Arabic editions printed at Bulaq (1835) and Calcutta, and in the English translations of Lane, Payne and Burton. The voyages reflect the real Indian Ocean trade of the early Abbasid period, out of the port of Basra.

What is the moral of Sinbad’s Third Voyage?

The Third Voyage teaches that survival in disaster depends less on courage or luck than on the refusal to let fear stop one’s thinking. Sinbad outlives the giant and the serpent because he keeps planning – building rafts, heating the spits, lashing a wooden refuge – while others despair. The lesson is captured in the Arabic proverb al-haja umm al-ikhtira’, “necessity is the mother of invention.” The voyage closes on a quieter note of decency, with the honest captain who safeguarded a lost merchant’s goods, reminding readers that the world holds kindness as well as monsters.