by Lionel
There are also possible tenuous links between Sinbad’s Third Voyage encounters with the small, hirsute islanders from Zughb and the legends of the small, ancient Hawaiian race referred to in a number of myths, legends, and ancient traditions as the Menehune. In one particular Hawaiian legend known as “The Maid of the Golden Cloud,” the Menehune people make a large seagoing vessel in the forests of Waolani. Scheherazade’s version of Sinbad’s Third Voyage describes the small people of Zughb as dangerous ship-takers. The Hawaiian version describes them as skilful ship-makers. Could they be one and the same people viewed from different perspectives?
As on his two earlier mysterious voyages, Sinbad finally returns to Baghdad after his Third Voyage richer than ever before.
The Fourth Voyage introduces some elementary but practical sociology, just as psychology found its way into the earlier voyages. This time Sinbad decides to leave the peaceful wealth and luxury of Baghdad as a result of the social pressure from a group of his peers who call to see him and spend their time discussing the joys and excitements of mercantile adventures in distant lands. Predictably, the Fourth Voyage starts well enough, but it is interesting to note while trying to solve the sea mysteries of Sinbad’s voyages that Scheherazade’s version includes not only the phrase from island to island but expressly adds and from sea to sea. Sailors of Sinbad’s epoch considered the various seas and oceans over which they travelled to be qualitatively discrete. This implies that the phrase from sea to sea indicated a long journey encompassing widely separated parts of the world: another small clue to his going as far as the Pacific.
After the vessel is severely damaged in a squall, which causes it to sink, Sinbad and a few fellow merchants drift to the shores of yet another cannibal kingdom, where his companions are duly fattened and eaten. Sinbad escapes and walks to a neighbouring kingdom. The realism of Scheherazade’s narrative is now reinforced by basic economic theory to complement her psychology and sociology. The people in this realm ride their horses without saddles and bridles. Sinbad teaches them the basic arts of saddlery, and because of the economic principle of supply and demand, his rare and highly utilitarian leather goods command a high price.
Everything in this kingdom goes well for him, and at the king’s insistence, Sinbad marries a rich and beautiful lady. What he doesn’t know at the time is that there is an inviolable custom in this culture: when either partner dies, the survivor is placed in the tomb with the dead spouse. To his horror, his wife becomes ill and dies. Sinbad pleads that, as a foreigner, he ought to be exempt from the local burial customs. His argument falls on deaf ears, and he is incarcerated with his dead partner. As each new doomed spouse is sealed up in the vast mausoleum, Sinbad’s ruthless piratical streak — his supercharged survival instinct — comes to the fore. Reasoning with himself that the survivors will soon die anyway, Sinbad clubs them to death with a hefty femur he’s found lying around in this dismal Cave of the Dead. In his ethical code, it seems to be a form of euthanasia. He then subsists on the food and water that each had brought to extend their last hours in this gloomy burial cave. It is customary in this strange land to bury the dead with all their possessions — especially their money and jewellery — and as well as stealing the scant provisions of food and water from the doomed surviving spouses, Sinbad helps himself to the valuables surrounding those who were dead when they were deposited in the cave.
Finally, hearing a scavenging animal at work among the bones, Sinbad realizes that it must have found its way into the dismal cavern-tomb somehow. Following it reveals to him a light in the distance, which he discovers is another way out on the far side. He eventually scrambles out through a rock fissure and settles down to wait for a passing ship. A vessel duly arrives, rescues him, and eventually ensures his safe return to Baghdad. The proceeds of his grave-robbing activities ensure that — as on all his earlier excursions — the wily and ruthless Sinbad comes home richer than he was when he left.
This ruthless, grave-robbing, murdering Sinbad is far less admirable than the hero of the first three voyages — yet he is, if anything, more bluntly honest and grimly realistic than the character revealed to the reader in the earlier adventures. His determination to survive regardless of moral scruples and ethical prohibitions makes him clearly discernible as a genuine historical character. This is no jovial pantomime hero: this is a strong, flesh and blood human being driven to his limits by adverse circumstances.
The most memorable and significant component of the Fifth Voyage is Sinbad’s encounter with the Old Man of the Sea. This strange, parasitic creature seems to be a distorted representation of one of the mysterious divine, semi-divine, or demonic characters analyzed in chapter three, “Who were the Water Gods?” Taking Greek and Roman pantheons into account, the Old Man of the Sea may be an indistinct recollection of some enemy of Bacchus, the god of wine — because it was by using wine that Sinbad was able to get the fatal parasite off his shoulders and kill it. Here in this Fifth Voyage, Sinbad’s realistic ruthlessness and determination are effective, but there is far more moral justification for them when he fights the Old Man of the Sea than in his treatment of the doomed spouses in the mausoleum cavern.
Having returned in triumph from his Fifth Voyage, Sinbad resolves to remain in the secure and comfortable luxury of his magnificent home in Baghdad. This resolve lasts only until he meets up with another party of loquacious merchant friends and sets off on his Sixth Voyage. Scheherazade’s effective and dependable narrative formula is clearly evident once again as this mystery of the sea unfolds.
The ship is blown off course into what the captain describes as a strange, unknown sea of which he has no previous experience. The vessel is eventually wrecked on a rocky, surf-battered island coast. Sinbad’s companions gradually die of hunger and disease, until he is once more the sole survivor. He travels across the island’s mountains — which are rich in jewels — and finally reaches a small river. By its banks he constructs a raft, only a little narrower than the walls of the nearby cavernous tunnel into which the river makes its way to unknown, subterranean depths.
Sinbad climbs aboard his makeshift raft and drifts on it into the shadowy gloom of the tunnel. He drifts a long way in the dark, but finally emerges into a pleasant and civilized area, where he is taken to meet the kindly and generous king of the island. Just as things went from bad to worse when the ship was wrecked, everything now goes incredibly right for Sinbad. One stroke of good luck follows another. He learns that the island is called Sarandib, also spelled Serendip, and that it is roughly eighty leagues long by thirty wide. (A league is an anachronistic measure of approximately three miles, about five kilometres.) He also reports that Serendip must be close to the equator because its days and nights are of equal length. Sinbad’s attention is also drawn to a very tall, steep mountain on the island, to its delicious fruits and fragrant herbs and spices. He also describes the profusion of jewels and precious stones to be found there.
These factors taken together make a case for the mysterious island of Serendip being Kauai in the Hawaiian archipelago. The captain of the merchants’ ship was dismayed to find that he had inadvertently sailed into an ocean he didn’t know at all. Had he sailed as far as the Pacific? Kauai is mountainous, with a peak of over five thousand feet. Most significant of all the similarities is the tunnel. We have friends on Kauai who told us while we were working there in 2004 how they had travelled by raft for many hours down one of the long, dark tunnels that carry water below the mountainous island. Kauai is not on the equator, as Serendip was supposed to be, but it is not far north of it, and day and night there are reasonably close to each other in length. Kauai is called the Garden Island with sound justification: its fruits and herbs are excellent, as were those Sinbad found on Serendip.
The English author and politician Horace Walpole (1717–1797) used Serendip as the name of the country in one of his stories, The Three Princes of Serendip: the three princes of the title continually made unexpected happy discoveri
es. The name Serendip may have been derived from the old name for Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. It is perfectly feasible that Sinbad’s Sixth Voyage took him up to Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean — a little closer to the equator than Kauai. What is much less probable is that the ship’s captain would have been distressed and anxious there, or thought that he was in a strange ocean. The mariners and merchant adventurers of Sinbad’s time were perfectly familiar with the Indian Ocean and its islands. Whether Sinbad and his companions reached Kauai must remain for the time being — until more evidence is available — another unsolved mystery of the sea.
Was this one of the hazardous rocky coasts on which Sinbad's vessel was wrecked?
Did Sinbad climb these mysterious mountains?
Sinbad’s Seventh Voyage contains the mystery of the three gigantic sea monsters big enough to swallow an entire ship. This narrative of Scheherazade’s can be linked to the detailed descriptions and analyses in chapter four, “Monsters of the Deep.” Before any of the huge creatures could destroy the ship, however, it was caught by a sudden storm and driven onto the shoreline, where it was smashed to pieces. Sinbad was rescued by the servants of a kindly and generous old sheik who ruled the territory. He treated Sinbad very well indeed and offered him his beautiful daughter as a bride, on the understanding that the young couple would rule the old sheik’s territory after his death. After his earlier marriage — and the horror of being buried alive with his dead bride — Sinbad’s hesitation is understandable. But no such morbid burial customs applied in the sheik’s territories, and Sinbad duly married the benevolent old man’s daughter.
They lived happily together for several years until the old sheik went to his eternal reward. Sinbad — now the ruler of the sheikdom — was intrigued and overwhelmed with curiosity by the strange power that enabled some of his citizens periodically to change into birds and fly. He finally persuaded them to take him with them, and after several of his characteristic hair’s-breadth escapes from death and destruction, Sinbad returned safely to his lovely bride. Unlike his first wife, this lady — who was as kind and affectionate as her father had been — continued to live happily with him, and they finally returned to Baghdad together, where they lived in luxury for the rest of their long and happy lives.
Like Jason and Odysseus before him, Sinbad the Sailor occupies a substantial place in factual history — as well as making contributions to myth and legend. These three heroes have left many an unsolved mystery of the sea in their wake.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sea Mysteries of the Hawaiian Islands
The Hawaiian Islands are among the most mysterious places on Earth, as well as the most beautiful. One of their many intriguing sea mysteries is linked with the curious Hawaiian petroglyphs. The word comes from the Greek petros, meaning stone, and glyphe, meaning sculpting or carving. A petroglyph can, therefore, be defined as a picture or symbol carved into a stone surface.
How did the petroglyph makers reach the islands? Who were they? Where did they come from? And what do the symbols really mean? Some of the petroglyph traditions assert that the Hawaiian volcano goddess, Pele, brought the designs and the methods of making them with her. But who was Pele?
Described as fair-haired and light-skinned, the beautiful, awesomely powerful Pele came from over the sea. How far? And from which direction? The answers to these questions may solve some of the riddles of the petroglyphs. Some of the oldest European petroglyphs are estimated to be at least ten thousand years old — perhaps considerably more. Others, far more recent, date from comparatively modern times.
In the early seventeenth century, an academic named Peder Alfson described petroglyphs he’d discovered in Bohuslan in southwestern Sweden. The designs included animals, means of transport, weapons, and human forms. The Hawaiian petroglyphs are strikingly similar in some ways to the ones from Bohuslan that Alfson described nearly four centuries ago.
Many of the most significant and mysterious Hawaiian petroglyphs can be seen at Pu’uloa, which means the long hill. According to some ancient Hawaiian traditions it was to Pu’uloa that Pele came from over “many great high and curving waves.” These petroglyphs are called kaha ki’i in Hawaiian. Kaha means to scratch or to mark and ki’i is a design or picture.
Swedish and Hawaiian petroglyph diagram.
There are numerous theories as to whether this Pele, traditionally thought of as the goddess in charge of the great volcano, was a real prehistoric character or simply part of an ancient religious tradition. In several accounts Pele was said to have travelled vast distances over seas and oceans, and it is important to remember, as noted already, that she had very fair hair and light skin. Linking Hawaiian and Swedish petroglyphs creates the very real possibility that Pele was a Norse, or Viking, princess.
Theoretically, her voyage would have been via Iceland, Greenland, around the northwestern ice of Canada, then south past Alaska and down the Pacific coast of America. Finally, with favourable winds and currents, her Viking longboats could have reached Hawaii — an incredible journey, but not an impossible one.
Pele is unlikely to have acquired the status of a goddess, especially a very powerful volcanic goddess, unless she had demonstrated unusual powers in that area.
The post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy comes in here. What if coincidence (whatever coincidence, or synchronicity, really is) had either just started, or just completed, an eruption at the moment when Pele and her people landed on Hawaii? The “after this, therefore because of this” fallacy might have raised her status dramatically. The fallacy of causation by association is as old as human thought.
A totally different and much more mysterious tradition brings the goddess Pele from Mu and not from Sweden. Mu, largely synonymous with the Lemurian tradition, delves deeply into mysticism, metaphysics, theology, and philosophy, as well as the strangest enigmas of human origins.
A remarkable exposition of these possible human origins comes from Lemurian Scrolls by Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami. In a series of what he describes as mystical visions, Sivaya tells how he believes mankind migrated to Earth countless ages ago because they needed what he describes as a “Fire Planet” in order to progress. In Sivaya’s view, in what he believes he was taught by the Lemurian Scrolls, our etheric, non-physical human ancestors began to solidify and materialize into something eventually recognizable as contemporary human beings.
Sivaya also refers to a very advanced being, Lord Skanda, whom he describes as the Celestial King of Lemuria.
The essence of Sivaya’s mystical descriptions suggests that there was a transition from a non-material state of being to a physical one. The non-material original, however, according to Sivaya, seems to experience a chronic feeling of discontent and of entrapment within the physical body. Modern psychology and psychiatry are well aware of the frequency with which feelings of depression, discontent, futility, and dissatisfaction with life afflict a great many people.
The mystical Lemurian explanation of human origins as put forward by Sivaya in Lemurian Scrolls runs in parallel for a mile or two with the experiences of modern psychotherapists.
Sivaya also refers to what he believes to be the mystery of flight still retained by some of the higher souls not heavily materialized or entrapped in physical bodies — human or animal.
One of the greatest mysteries of the beautiful garden island of Kauai is the Lemurian mountaintop monastery where the enigmas of Lemurian Scrolls are still taught today to honest, dedicated, and sincere open-minded seekers after truth. It is well worth visiting the monastery’s website: http://www.hindu.org/ka. Relating these mystical teachings from Lemurian Scrolls to other ancient arcane and esoteric traditions from the remote past, there is an immediate nexus with the four-element theory of the alchemists. Lemurian Scrolls emphasizes the migrating entities’ need of a fire planet in order to develop further. The complementary, combinative powers of fire are one side of the alchemical equation air, earth, and water, but the four traditional elements are al
so said to be capable of dynamic conflicts. When fire and water met, alchemists believed that these conflictual elemental dynamics were capable of releasing vast unknown powers.
These interactions are seen at their most potent, according to ancient alchemical lore, when an enormous volume of water — such as a sea or ocean — is interfaced with an equally awesome amount of fire — such as a volcano.
Volcanic islands such as those in the Hawaiian group are, therefore, according to both Lemurian and alchemical tradition, likely to be significant sites of paranormal and anomalous phenomena. Such sea-fire islands are undeniably rich in myths and legends that permeate their ancient cultures. Some of these myths and legends that relate to the lost land of Mu, also known as Lemuria, connect with the volcano goddess Pele. If there is any kind of historical reality behind these lost land versions of her origins, it rests on the existence at one time of a real geographical continent in the Pacific where the volcanic Hawaiian Islands stand today.
This particular unsolved mystery of the sea suggests that the very ancient Lemurian civilization occupied a small continent, or an extremely large island, located in the vicinity of the present Hawaiian archipelago. In these legends, the ancient Lemurians, or Mu-onians, apparently possessed limited powers of levitation, but it was not sufficient to save more than a tiny minority of them when the volcanic trauma destroyed much of their homeland.