The Seven Voyages of Sinbad: The Fifth Voyage

The Restlessness That Drives the Fifth Voyage

The Fifth Voyage opens not with disaster but with discontent. Sinbad has returned to Baghdad from his Fourth Voyage richer than ever before, and for a long while he gives himself up to feasting, almsgiving, and the comforts of his great house in the Suq al-Tujjar, the merchants’ quarter. He vows, as he has vowed four times before, that the sea has had its last chance with him. Yet the narrator’s voice — Sinbad himself, telling his story over seven nights to the porter Hindbad in his palace beside the Tigris — turns at last to the only confession the cycle ever makes about its own engine: “thumma ishtaqat nafsi ila al-safari wa ila l-tijarati” (“then my soul yearned again for travel and for trade”). It is this yearning, half greed and half curiosity, that draws him back to Basra and into the events that will end with a strange creature riding upon his shoulders.

This time Sinbad does something he has not done in any earlier voyage: he buys a great merchant vessel of his own and outfits it as captain-merchant rather than passenger. He hires a master mariner and a body of seamen, but he himself owns the bottom and superintends the lading. He invites other merchants of Baghdad to share the venture; they bring their bales of cloth, ingots of metal, and parcels of perfume aboard, paying him freight. They set sail from Basra down the river to the Persian Gulf and out into the open sea, calling at islands and ports for exchange, until they come at length to an uninhabited isle whose only landmark is a vast white dome rising upon its sandy beach.

The Egg of the Roc

The sailors land on the empty isle and crowd curiously around the white dome. It is taller than three men standing on each other’s shoulders and smooth and gleaming as polished ivory. Sinbad, who has heard the stories of the older merchants in the coffee-houses of Basra, recognises at once what this enormous hemisphere must be. “This is the egg of the rukh,” he tells them. “Touch it not. Return to the ship.” But the sailors, who are many and giddy with the freedom of dry land, laugh at the captain’s fears. They beat upon the shell with the staves and stones until at last it cracks open; from inside they pull out the unhatched chick — a colossal half-formed bird already as large as a foal — and they kill it, butcher it on the spot, and light a roasting fire upon the beach.

Sinbad orders them back to sea at once, but it is too late. The sun darkens; a vast shadow falls across the ship; and looking up the sailors see the two parent rukhs, male and female, returning to the nest. The wing-beats of the great birds raise a wind that flattens the smoke of the cooking fire and ripples the canvas of the sail. The rukhs circle once, behold the shattered shell and the roasting carcass of their chick, and let out a cry that the Calcutta II text describes as “ka-l-raʿd al-qasif” — like the crash of thunder. Then they wheel away into the high sky and vanish from sight.

Sinbad has the anchors raised in haste and the sails set, hoping to outrun the birds before they can return; but no sooner has the ship made some leagues of open water than the sky darkens again. The pair of rukhs have come back, and each one carries in its talons an immense round boulder torn from a mountain. The male drops his stone first and misses, raising a wave that nearly capsizes the vessel; the female drops hers true, and her boulder smashes through the deck and the keel and breaks the ship in two. The sea pours in; the sailors are flung into the water and lost beneath the waves; only Sinbad, who has hung over the side at the moment of impact, finds himself clinging to a great plank of the broken ship and is carried away upon the tide.

The Old Man of the Sea

For two days and a night Sinbad drifts on his plank, parched and battered, until he is at last cast up upon a green island full of fruit-trees and streams. He drinks; he eats; he restores his strength; he wanders inland in search of habitation. After a time he comes to a beautiful river that runs through a meadow, and on its bank, beneath a tree, he sees an old man wrapped in a leaf-mat. The old man is feeble and silent and signs for Sinbad to come to him. Taking him for some shipwrecked elder in distress, Sinbad approaches kindly; the old man indicates that he wishes to be carried across the stream, and Sinbad bends and takes him upon his shoulders.

The instant they have crossed, Sinbad makes to set the old man down again; but the legs that have hung so meekly about his neck now lock about his throat like cords of leather, and the wrinkled hands clench at his hair. The old man is no shipwrecked traveller at all but a creature out of the deepest stratum of the Indian Ocean voyage-stories — the Shaykh al-Bahr, “the Old Man of the Sea”, a parasite who, having once been set astride a man’s shoulders, can be made to dismount neither by force nor by prayer. He digs his heels into Sinbad’s belly and beats him with a switch and signs with imperious gestures where to walk and what to gather and how to bring it to his cracked old mouth.

This goes on for days and turns into weeks. The old creature never speaks; his urine and his filth run down Sinbad’s back; he sleeps with his arms locked round Sinbad’s neck so that even at night the merchant cannot lay him down. Sinbad becomes haggard and weak; despair settles on him; he understands at last that no ordinary effort will dislodge his rider, for the strength of the Shaykh al-Bahr is the strength of long ages spent feeding upon other men’s shoulders.

The Vine, the Wine, and the City of Apes

The deliverance, when it comes, is the gift of patient observation and the desperate cunning of a merchant who has now lost everything but his wits. In their wanderings they come upon a grove of climbing vines heavy with full and bursting grapes, and a number of empty calabash-gourds lying scattered upon the ground where some earlier castaway has discarded them. Sinbad gathers the gourds and the grapes; he treads the juice; he stops the necks with leaves; and he sets the gourds aside in a warm place between two stones. Days pass; the must ferments under the sun; and Sinbad has made wine.

He drinks first himself, and a great cheerfulness comes upon him, and he sings as he walks. The Old Man of the Sea, seeing him so suddenly merry under his bitter burden, signs to be given some of the same. Sinbad hands up a gourd; the old creature drinks once, twice, again; the dregs of the cup soon set his ancient head spinning; he slackens his grip; his heels loosen from Sinbad’s belly; his arms fall away from Sinbad’s neck. Sinbad bends suddenly and pitches him from his shoulders onto a great rock, where he lies stunned. Sinbad takes up a heavy stone and finishes the work and so kills the Old Man of the Sea.

He travels on alone, lighter than he has been for many weeks, and at last comes out upon a coast where a ship lies at anchor and a crew of sailors is busy. They are honest traders from the Sea of the Indies, astonished to see a man come out of that interior alive, for they know the country of the Shaykh al-Bahr and have never before met any traveller who survived him. They take Sinbad aboard, give him clothing and food, and explain that they are sailing onward to the Madinat al-Qirad, the “City of Apes”, where a strange harvest awaits.

In the City of Apes the human inhabitants live by gathering coconuts from forests of vast trees too high to climb; the trees are inhabited by hundreds of small grey apes, who pelt with whatever falls to hand any human who stands beneath them and pretends to threaten them. The traders give Sinbad a leather wallet full of pebbles; he goes with the others to the foot of the trees; they hurl stones up at the apes and dance and shout; and the apes in fury tear coconuts from the branches and rain them down upon the men, who gather as many as they can carry. So Sinbad, by the patient turning of an enemy’s temper into his own profit, refills his fortune with coconuts and with the pepper, aloes-wood, and pearls he afterwards trades them for at the next port; and at last comes home to Basra, and so up the Tigris to Baghdad, richer than he sailed.

Moral: The Two Burdens a Voyager Carries

The Fifth Voyage is the most moralised of all the Sinbad voyages, and its lesson hinges upon a kind of symmetry. Sinbad’s ship is destroyed because his crew refuses to leave the egg of the rukh alone — an act of greed and irreverence committed against a creature that asked nothing of them. He is then made to carry on his own shoulders a creature he tried to help out of pity — a creature that, once given the chance, will not let go. Between these two extremes the voyage sets its riddle: the danger of the world is not only what you cynically seize, but also what you sentimentally pick up. The Old Man of the Sea is the parasite of misplaced kindness, just as the broken egg is the punishment of unchecked appetite.

لَيْسَ كُلُّ مَنْ تَحْمِلُهُ يَنْزِلُ عَنْكَ

— “Not everyone you take upon your shoulders will get down off them again.” (Arabic proverbial saying, traditionally cited in commentaries on the Sinbad cycle.)

The cunning by which Sinbad escapes is also worth marking: he is freed not by force but by patient observation of his oppressor’s weakness. He notices the old man’s thirst, his isolation, his hunger for any new pleasure; he uses the materials of the land — vines, gourds, sunlight, time — to make from them the one thing that will make his rider loosen his grip. The wine is not magic. It is the practical wisdom of the merchant turned upon a creature who has fed on careless travellers for generations.

Why the Tale Has Lasted

Of all the Sinbad voyages, the Fifth has had the largest secondary life. The Old Man of the Sea has passed into English as a proverbial figure for any inescapable burden — a chronic debt, an abusive relation, a habit one cannot put down. Charles Dickens used the phrase in Dombey and Son (1848); Aldous Huxley returned to it in The Doors of Perception (1954); the United States Marine Corps adopted “Old Man of the Sea” as slang for the seabag a recruit must carry. The image of the rukh dropping the boulder upon the deck supplied the climactic scene of Nathan Juran’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958, stop-motion by Ray Harryhausen), where it was conflated with the Second Voyage’s roc; the City of Apes and the coconut harvest are preserved in Edgar Allan Poe’s satire “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” (1845), where Poe playfully proposes that all of Sinbad’s wonders were misunderstood descriptions of the steamships and railways of the nineteenth century.

What gives the voyage its strange durability is not the boulder or the rider taken separately, but the way the tale binds them together: a single chapter on the two ways a man can lose his freedom — by reaching for what he has no business taking, and by carrying what he has no obligation to carry. Centuries of merchants, sailors, householders, and addicts have recognised themselves in one half of that pairing or the other; many in both.