The Story of the Seven Voyages of Sinbad

At a Glance

Central figures: Sinbad the Sailor, a wealthy Baghdad merchant, and Sinbad the Porter, a humble laborer who listens to his tales.
Setting: Baghdad and the seas beyond it - islands, valleys, and distant kingdoms visited across seven voyages, as told in The 1001 Nights.
The turn: On each voyage, Sinbad is cast away, captured, or enslaved, and must use wit and patience to survive and return home.
The outcome: Sinbad survives all seven voyages, returning each time with wealth, and eventually retires to Baghdad, where he recounts his adventures to the porter.
The legacy: The wealth Sinbad accumulated through his voyages, and the tales themselves, which he shares with the porter to answer the complaint that fortune is unfairly distributed.

They say there was once a porter in Baghdad who paused at the gate of a great house - sweating under his load, his sandals worn thin - and let out a bitter word about the cruelty of fate, that some men should sweat for a handful of coins while others lounged in silk and ate from silver dishes. From inside the gate came laughter, the sound of lutes, and the smell of roasted meat. Then a servant appeared and told the porter that the master of the house wished to speak with him. The master’s name was Sinbad. As it happened, so was the porter’s.

The rich Sinbad seated his guest, fed him, and said: before you envy my cushions, hear how I came by them. What followed was seven evenings of telling, one voyage for each night, and the porter - who had expected a lecture - received instead something closer to a wound and a cure at once.

The Island That Was a Whale

The first voyage nearly ended before it began. Sinbad sailed out of Baghdad young and flush with inheritance, trading with a merchant fleet, and one morning the fleet anchored at what seemed a pleasant island - green, grassy, with fresh water and shade. The sailors built fires and began to cook. The ground shuddered. Then it heaved. What they had taken for an island was a whale, colossal and ancient, sleeping so long that soil and grass had grown across its back, and the heat of their fires had woken it. It dove. The ships scattered. Men went under. Sinbad seized a wooden plank and drifted for two days before a passing vessel pulled him free. He arrived home with nothing - but he arrived.

The Valley of Diamonds

On the second voyage, his ship left him stranded on a cliff above a valley so deep the walls vanished into shadow. He climbed down and found the floor thick with diamonds. He also found the serpents - enormous things that slept through the day and hunted by dark - and the carcasses that the rukh, the great bird, dropped from the clifftops to collect meat for its young. Sinbad lashed himself to one of the carcasses. The rukh lifted him out. Diamond traders who camped at the cliff edge, waiting for the birds to do exactly this, cut him loose and listened, astonished, as he bartered his diamonds for passage home. He returned to Baghdad richer than when he had left.

The Rukh’s Egg

The third voyage was the sailors’ own fault. Their ship put in near a rookery of the rukh, and there they found an egg - vast, smooth, warm to the touch. They should have left it. Instead they cracked it open and ate what was inside. When the rukh returned and found its egg broken, it called its mate, and the two birds blotted out the sun above the fleeing ship and dropped boulders taken from the clifftops. The ship went down. Sinbad swam to an unknown shore and, through patience and careful traveling, eventually found traders and made his way back to Baghdad once more, carrying what wealth he could gather from the island’s interior before he left.

The Cannibals and the King

The fourth voyage delivered Sinbad and several of his crewmen into the hands of an island people whose hospitality was a trap. Prisoners were fed rich food and fattened before being slaughtered and eaten. Sinbad watched others grow round and dull-eyed while he refused the food and kept his wits. When he was thin enough to be overlooked, he slipped away into the jungle. He walked until he found a different kingdom, ruled by a generous king who received strangers without suspicion. Sinbad traded his knowledge and his company for comfort, earned enough in goods to buy passage on a merchant vessel, and came back to Baghdad with a new wariness and a new fortune.

The Old Man of the Sea

On the fifth voyage, Sinbad found a beach and on the beach found an old man - ancient, thin, apparently helpless - who gestured to be carried across a narrow stream. Sinbad crouched down. The old man climbed onto his shoulders. And then did not climb off. He locked his legs around Sinbad’s neck and rode him like a horse, day and night, steering with his heels, sleeping in place, and tightening his grip whenever Sinbad stumbled or slowed. This went on until Sinbad found wild grapes, fermented the juice in a gourd, and offered the old man a drink. The creature drank deeply. His grip loosened. Sinbad threw him off, and when he fell he did not rise. Sailors who later put in at that beach recognized the description - they called him the Old Man of the Sea and said no one had ever shaken him loose before.

The Elephants’ Graveyard

The sixth voyage brought Sinbad into service with a generous king, and the king told him about the place where elephants went to die - a hidden ground, deep in the forest, covered in ivory. No living elephant was harmed; they simply withdrew there when their time came, and the tusks lay in piles that no man had thought to collect for fear of the living herds. Sinbad gained the trust of the elephants over many weeks, moving carefully among them, and they came to know him well enough to lead him to the graveyard themselves. He loaded ivory onto pack animals and brought it back to the king, trading a portion for a ship and keeping the rest. He came home to Baghdad richer than he had ever been.

The River of Gold

On the seventh and final voyage, Sinbad’s ship was driven off course by a storm and smashed against a cliff. He washed ashore in a kingdom of strange customs, where he eventually heard of a river that ran through a narrow canyon, its bed laced with veins of gold and its banks patrolled by serpents. He spent weeks building a raft strong enough to navigate the current without being dashed apart, and he learned the serpents’ patterns - when they hunted, when they rested, how close to the walls they moved. He collected what gold he could carry, worked the raft back to calmer water, and found a vessel heading north. This time, stepping off the ship in Baghdad, he swore he would not go to sea again. He kept the oath. He sent for the porter, paid him well for listening to all seven evenings of telling, and gave him gifts besides - enough to settle the old argument about fortune and those who carry it.