Sinbad the Sailor

And other stories which try to teach us lessons

The Voyages and Travels of Sinbad the Sailor; The Death and Burial of Cock Robin; The Trial and Execution of the Sparrow for Killing Cock Robin; and The History of Beauty and the Beast

Sinbad the Sailor may have been the unluckiest man who ever took to the water in pursuit of riches. Over the course of seven voyages, he was shipwrecked innumerable times, buried alive after the death of his foreign wife, pursued by a monstrous cyclops whose eye had to be tackled in the Odyssean manner. Sinbad was seized and carried by the great birds known as rocs; he had himself marooned on islands where only a single flask of cordial sufficed to keep his body going; and when Sinbad was in pleasant places — fine country, where there were fruit trees and fertile land — he was beset: by cannibals of hideous foreignness, by elderly bastards who demanded that he carry them on his shoulders that they might enjoy the fruit trees better, and feed Sinbad the carrier only on scraps.

So mistreated is the sailor that, even to modern eyes, his reactions — his violence in reply — seems almost justified. When the old man does not loosen his grip of Sinbad’s neck, the sailor gets him drunk on wine made from the calabash, waits until the old man’s hold is loosened by drink, and then throws him to the ground from head height, enjoying the convulsions that the old man suffers before his death. When Sinbad is buried alive in a communal tomb after the death of his wife, he waits for new people — we presume both male and female — to be sent down with their own spousal decedents, before killing them swiftly in order to eat the little bread and to drink the small amount of water they are given ahead of their committal to the earth.

Attending one’s own funeral in the course of work may make any man think again about his trade.

If Sinbad were not a cipher, a figure from myth, a mortal man thrown, to stand in for the reader, into these dreadful situations, he may have given up on the sea early. Left the wandering and the seafaring to others, given it up to earn another living. No sane man sees a monstrous bird drop a gigantic rock dead centre of the ship on which he is travelling (because the sailors and passengers of the ship had cooked and eaten the chick that gestated within a vast egg protected by the beast). No sane man sees that and survives the subsequent wreck and then goes out again to the sea.

But Sinbad is not a sane man. He’s really a desperate man. He makes what he can of what he’s got. On land, even in the company of his friends, he grows bored. He must go to sea to collect some profits, departing from the port city Basra and only very parabolically arriving back, sometimes many moons later, at his hometown, Baghdad.

It’s possible the journeys sent Sinbad mad. He protests only once, when the caliph insists that Sinbad be his envoy. Yet when the caliph pays Sinbad off, he prepares to head to sea once more just the same.

It is only a very great return from a voyage, and the immense monetary reward this generates, that convinces Sinbad to retire for ever from the sea, and to spend his remaining years enjoying fabulous wealth far from the place where the waves meet the shore.

Let us journey forward in time, to another place, where a rich man gives his children great luxury on the assumption that his wealth will for ever last. It’s a story where the father was proven wrong. After that, he and his children live in a small house, and the merchant must travel further and further distances to look for work and for money, to see if his ship has come in, so to speak.

Beauty is a daughter of the unhappy merchant. The merchant whose misfortune it was, on one of these journeys, to take — after being generously feasted and provisioned by an unseen host — a bouquet of roses from his garden.

He did it for his daughter Beauty. And in consequence, the Beast says that the merchant or one of his daughters must die.

For Beauty condemned to die in her father’s place, or to marry the Beast whose captive she is obliged to be, virtue is found to be its own reward.

Her unhappy sisters, however, who hid their dislike of Beauty not too well, and did not much hide their jubilation at her going off, apparently to her death, find that the lack of virtue comes with few rewards. They are transformed into living statutes until they learn the error of their ways, which the fairy who commands it, with all her vast experience of the human mind, they may well never do.

The story of Cock Robin would, had it been current earlier, have told Sinbad a thing or two: that the very noblest die as easily as the meanest, and that it might have done well for him to take better care of his life.

And as for the sparrow who killed Cock Robin, he is subjected to a trail by his peers — under the stern eyes of Justice Hawk. And he finds, too, that justice may be as merciless as murder if you are the one in the dock. The animals all flee as the hawk, as judge, devours the sparrow. They think it not safe near such justice to stay.