by Phil Masters
Dhows are generally assumed to have triangular lateen sails, especially these days, and the Arabs have traditionally been credited with inventing that type of rigging, but some modern scholars now dispute this, suggesting that lateen sails originated in the Mediterranean. Whatever the details, though, the lateen rig certainly became the standard. It makes ships efficient and manoeuvrable, but a basic lateen is not very good at tacking, and can be dangerous to handle in a storm; hence, dhow sailors depended on the reliability of the monsoon system. By timing their voyages correctly, they could be sure that the wind would be blowing the way they wanted to go, and could usually avoid storms.
IBN BATTUTA
The medieval Islamic world extended from Spain to Sumatra and East Africa, and while it was not always at peace, it was culturally fairly unified. Hence, travellers could seriously contemplate travelling from one end of it to the other, and stories such as those of Sinbad, of journeys to lands far beyond the horizon, would not have sounded totally incredible.
The greatest real-life traveller of that world – perhaps the nearest thing to a real-life Sinbad – was Ibn Battuta, a native of Morocco. Unlike Sinbad, Ibn Battuta travelled by land as well as sea, often with a retinue of servants and even a harem, but he too suffered shipwrecks and pirates.
Ibn Battuta, the medieval traveller whose journeys perhaps resembled Sinbad’s as closely as could anything in reality. (© Classic Image / Alamy)
He was born in 1304 into a family of legal scholars, and at the age of 21 he set out on the traditional Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, by way of Egypt. Somewhere along the way he developed an overwhelming wanderlust, and also decided to study under as many Islamic scholars and mystics as he could. This in turn gave him unique qualifications as a judge, allowing him to find employment in every city and court.
According to his book, Rihla (‘The Journey’), he took some detours after arriving in Egypt, eventually reaching Mecca via Damascus. Then, he travelled on through Persia, Basrah, and Baghdad to Mongol-controlled central Asia, returned to Mecca for a while, took a trip to East Africa, doubled back to Mecca, then decided to visit India by joining a caravan from Turkey. However, he ended up visiting the court of the Mongol Golden Horde, and claimed to have visited the Crimea and what is now Russia. Then, after joining a court visit to Constantinople, he finally headed back through Asia to Afghanistan and India.
In India, he spent a few years working for the sultan of Delhi, who turned out to be dangerously unstable; Ibn Battuta escaped his court by being sent on a diplomatic mission to China. Unfortunately, he ran into bandits and was delayed for a while in southern India, but he was determined not to report failure, so he travelled on, detouring to the Maldives, where he spent a while as a courtier and chief judge. Still aiming for China, he sailed on via Sri Lanka, only to suffer shipwrecks and pirate attacks. Reaching Sumatra by a tortuous route, he took ship again and reached China via Malaya, Vietnam, and the Philippines. After a stint there, including (he claimed) a visit to Beijing, he finally decided to head home, via India, Basrah, Baghdad, Damascus (where he witnessed the Black Death), Mecca, and Sardinia, coming home after 24 years.
However, he was not quite done with travel; the next year, he volunteered to help defend Muslim Granada from a threatened Christian invasion, then when that proved unnecessary, he turned tourist. A year or two after that, he made a trip to Mali and Timbuktu in West Africa, before finally settling down in Morocco.
Only then did he write his book, or rather dictate it from memory to a professional writer. Not everyone believes every word of it; some descriptions are clearly lifted from older sources, and there are serious discrepancies, especially concerning his supposed visit to Russia; some scholars also doubt that he actually reached China. However, the mere fact that it would have been possible to patch such a tale together, and that people at the time were prepared to treat it as fact, says a lot about the Muslim world of the 14th century.
Lastly, the earliest dhows were almost certainly all ‘double-ended’, coming to a point at bow and stern, but later large designs had square sterns, sometimes highly decorated.
The Navigators
Arab seamen recognized three grades of navigators. The first grade simply knew a set of coastlines and their landmarks, and so could be trusted to sail along them, avoiding dangers but not venturing out of sight of land. The second grade could handle journeys across open water, but only by following standard routes direct from one point to another. As the Arabs knew how to determine latitude by observation of the stars, this may often have been a matter of staying on the right line of latitude for a given destination. The third and highest grade, the mu’allim, was trusted to operate freely out of sight of land, using those stellar navigation techniques and a lot of experience to determine the ship’s position.
The Arabs seem to have acquired the magnetic compass from China at some point, and perhaps passed it to Europe during the Crusades. However, it was never used very much in the Indian Ocean.
The captains of the ships on which Sinbad sails seem to be mu’allim, as they use mysterious techniques, incomprehensible to everyone else, to determine positions even when well off any known route. However, if they are mu’allim, they are often very unlucky; they keep ending up in places where they know they do not want to be.
Trade-Goods
Perhaps the biggest reason for all this seafaring was the spice trade. Spices have long been a valuable commodity, and many of them originated in India or points east of there. Growing them elsewhere is often difficult, so they usually had to be transported – by sea, the most efficient means, when possible. In fact, it was a desire to break the Venetian monopoly on the European end of the spice trade that sent the Portuguese into the Indian Ocean in the 15th century. Pepper (from Indonesia) may be the oldest trade-spice, while cloves (from the same area) and cinnamon (from India and Sri Lanka) were also known from ancient times, and show up in the stories. Sinbad could have dealt profitably in nutmeg and mace, too; they originate from a few remote islands in Indonesia.
But spices were not the only valuable product available. For example, the original texts mention diamonds and other precious stones, camphor, coconuts, aloes (a family of plants, actually native to Africa, with medical uses), ambergris, and ivory. Fragrant woods, used in perfumes and incense, were greatly valued in China; agarwood, featured in the story of Sinbad’s sixth voyage, is actually a dark, resinous, highly aromatic wood which forms in the trunks of certain tree species when they suffer a mould infection, and comes mostly from southeast Asia, while in Sinbad’s time, sandalwood would have come from an Indian species.
Unloading cargo in Oman. To this day, trade on the Indian Ocean sometimes seems little changed from the ‘Age of Sinbad’. (© Marion Kaplan / Alamy)
For that matter, the relatively ordinary wood from which Arab ships were built was itself quite a valuable resource, as discussed above. Other local trade items included amber, iron and other metals, and palm wine, along of course with supplies of food for the ships’ crews and materials used in maintaining their vessels.
SINBAD IN LATER TIMES
Tales such as those of Sinbad were never intended to remain entirely static. Every medieval coffee-house storyteller will have told them his own way, perhaps throwing in contemporary references or jokes. Manuscript copies nail them down a little, but anyone reading aloud and innovative or sloppy copyists could introduce changes; printing sets things a little more firmly in place, but then translations bring more subtle changes.
Once Galland introduced them to Europe, the stories began to be adapted to European forms of storytelling, and to be edited to fit European assumptions and sensibilities. They also inspired a long-running fashion for ‘oriental’ stories – part of an 18th-century rebellion against ‘classical’ styles. The strangeness of the Nights stories was part of their appeal, but western writers were prone to making them sound more like European fairytales, or imposing their own political and racial ideas. And,
of course, translators could simply get things wrong, or leave out crucial details.
Sinbad the Legend
By the 19th century, the Nights seem to have been part of the cultural background of every significant writer in Britain and in many other parts of Europe. They were never quite so popular in the USA, but even American literature of the period shows signs of their influence.
Sinbad became part of this; his encounters with giant monsters and strange cultures were classic ‘travellers’ tales’, and western readers fell in love with and referenced them. One example is Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade’ (1850), a supposed epilogue to the Nights in which Scheherazade annoys her husband by telling a story in which Sinbad goes on one last voyage and encounters various ‘impossible’ wonders which had actually been invented by the 19th century.
However, by the end of the Victorian era, the Arabian Nights had fallen out of fashion in the literary world. The stories were not forgotten, but they were mostly handed over to children, in safely bowdlerized forms. One setting in which Sinbad remained popular was the Christmas pantomimes which developed through that century. The writers were always looking for new plots and names to use, and the Sinbad stories offered exotic foreign locations (and hence wildly fancy ‘foreign’ costumes), simple plots, shipwrecks and monsters to show off the latest in flashy stage effects, and unfamiliar foreign names to be mangled into bad puns.
The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958) is loosely inspired by several parts of the original stories. As the man-eating (two-eyed) giant in one of them is evidently derived from the Greek legend of Odysseus and the one-eyed Cyclops, the film features a stop-motion-animated Cyclops. (© Moviestore collection Ltd / Alamy)
Modern and Post-modern Sinbads
But the Nights were never entirely forgotten by ‘serious’ writers. In fact, their tangled storytelling and complicated history had a definite appeal to modernist authors. For example, James Joyce referenced Sinbad (and a lot else) in novels including his masterpiece Ulysses (1922). Likewise, American literary novelist John Barth incorporated such references into several books and essays, culminating in The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1992), an intricate post-modernist novel in which a modern-day American falls overboard from a replica of a medieval ship and somehow washes up in the world of Sinbad and the Nights, where the two men trade stories.
As a well-known out-of-copyright heroic figure, Sinbad has also shown up in countless children’s tales, minor comic-books, and other media, as anything from a leading figure to a name to drop.
In the modern era, Sinbad has often been depicted as a swashbuckling figure in Hollywood movies. In 1947, he was played by one of the archetypal swashbuckling actors. (© AF archive / Alamy)
Sinbad Movies
In fact, during the 20th century, Sinbad found a new home, though he had to take a new form to do it. Hollywood has an omnivorous interest in heroes, and Sinbad was squeezed into the Hollywood pattern; the stories had monsters and fantasy wonders to challenge the special effects experts, plus an excuse for fancy costumes. (Getting starlets into skimpy ‘harem’ outfits was often a bonus.) ‘Sinbad movies’ do not generally follow the original stories very closely; Sinbad is usually transformed from a lucky, resilient merchant into a romantic swashbuckler, and his nickname of ‘the Sailor’ is taken to mean that he’s an expert captain, not just a traveller.
Patrick Wayne as a sword-fighting Sinbad in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977). (© United Archives GmbH / Alamy)
Most of the earliest ‘Sinbad movies’ were short cartoons, but one of the first big Hollywood projects was Sinbad, the Sailor, made in 1947, featuring Douglas Fairbanks Jr as Sinbad and Maureen O’Hara as his morally ambiguous love interest. This film makes Sinbad a fast-talking rogue on a quest for lost treasure, and has little in the way of magic or monsters. Other, lower-budget efforts followed this pattern to a greater or lesser extent, but the most famous Sinbad movies were slightly different.
These form a loose trilogy, overseen by stop-motion effects genius Ray Harryhausen: The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973), and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977). Harryhausen jumped at the excuse to create a series of fight scenes with weird monsters, a few from the original stories but mostly not, wrapped around with quest plots; his swashbuckling sea-captain was played in turn by Kerwin Matthews, John Philip Law, and Patrick Wayne. Then, in one further twist, Marvel Comics produced comic-book adaptations of two of these movies, and subsequently threw some references to the character into some of their superhero comics, although it is not clear if this is meant to be the same version of the character as in the movies.
One of Sinbad’s most recent screen appearances is in animated form in Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003), with the voice of Brad Pitt and locations and opponents from Greek mythology. (© AF archive / Alamy)
Sinbad has also reappeared in animated form occasionally in recent years, notably in 2003 with Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, from Dreamworks, with Brad Pitt voicing the hero, and Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michelle Pfeiffer in support. This draws much more from Greek than Arabian mythology, however, with Sinbad sailing from Syracuse and dealing with the goddess Eris and assorted Greek-style sea monsters and sirens (albeit along with a roc).
Sinbad on the Small Screen
Sinbad has occasionally cropped up in TV productions over the years; his most recent appearance was in Sky1’s Sinbad (2012), a family fantasy series with lots of computer graphics providing sprawling cities, giant monsters, and the occasional display of sorcery. Sinbad (Elliot Knight) becomes a youthful rogue and beginner swashbuckler, and even when episodes take ideas from the original stories, they change things around completely. On the other hand, at least the series starts in Basrah, the characters are clearly sailing on a fantasy version of the Indian Ocean, and Sinbad’s companions are an attractive multi-ethnic crew.
Unfortunately, though, this was not enough to appeal to modern audiences, and the series was cancelled after one season. Still, it’s a safe bet that Sinbad will be back on the screen somewhere, sometime, sooner or later.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Texts
The Arabian Nights
Older translations of the Arabian Nights can easily be found on the Internet (or in libraries). Modern translations used as primary references in the writing of this book were the following:
Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, trans. N. J. Dawood, Penguin, London, 1973
The Arabian Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy, selected and edited by Daniel Heller-Roazen, W. W. Norton, New York, 2010
The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights, trans. Malcolm C. Lyons, Penguin, London, 2008
Reference Works
The Encyclopaedia Britannica
Borges, Jorge Luis, The Book of Imaginary Beings, Norman Thomas di Giovanni (trans.), Penguin Books, London, 1974
Clute, John and Grant, John, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. Orbit, 1997
Hourani, George Fadlo, Arabian Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1951
Irwin, Robert, The Arabian Nights: A Companion, Allen Lane, London, 1994
Lane, Edward William, Arabian Society in the Middle Ages, Curzon Press, London, 1987 (reprints the 1883 edition)
Masters, Phil, GURPS Arabian Nights, Steve Jackson Games, Austin, 1993
Severin, Tim, The Sindbad Voyage, Hutchinson, London, 1982
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