SINDBAD THE SAILOR, VOYAGES OF, a collection of Arabic travel-romances, partly based upon experiences of oriental navigators (especially in the 8th-1 oth centuries) ; partly upon ancient poetry, Homeric and other ; partly upon Indian and Persian collections of mirabilia. In Sindbad's First Voyage, from Baghdad and Basra, the incident of the Whale-Back island may be compared with the Indian ocean whales of Pliny and Solinus, covering four jugera, and the pristis sea-monster of the same au thorities, 200 cubits long. With the Island of the Mares of King Mihraj, or Mihrjan, we may find (rather imperfect) parallels in Homer's Iliad (the mares impregnated by the wind), in Ibn Khurdadbih and Al Kazwini, and in Wolf's account of the three Ilhas de Cavallos near Ceylon, so called from the wild horses with which they abounded, to which the Dutch East India mer chants of the I 7th century sometimes sent their mares for breed ing purposes. Sindbad's account of the kingdom of Mihraj (Mihr jan) is perhaps derived from the Two Musulman Travellers of the 9th century ; it would seem to refer to one of the greater East Indian islands, perhaps Borneo. Sindbad's Valley of Dia monds has fairly complete parallels in Al Kazwini, in Benjamin of Tudela, in Marco Polo and in the far earlier Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, who died A.D. 403. As to the Mountain, or Island, of Apes in the Third Voyage, Ibn Al Wardi and Idrisi each recognizes an island of this kind, the former in the China sea, the latter near Sokotra. Sindbad's negro cannibal adventure reproduces almost every detail of the Cyclops story in the Odys sey; among the Spice islands, and perhaps at Timor, may be lo cated the island rich in sandal-wood, where the wanderer rejoins his friends. The cannibal land of the Fourth Voyage, producing pepper and coconuts, where Sindbad's companions were offered food which destroyed their reason, has suggested the Andamans to some enquirers and certain districts of Sumatra to others; with this tale we may compare the lotus-eating of the Odyssey, Plutarch's story of Mark Antony's soldiers maddened and killed by an "insane" and fatal root in their Parthian wars, a passage in Davis's Account of Sumatra in 1599, and more complete parallels in Ibn Al Wardi and Al Kazwini. The burial of Sindbad
in, and his escape from, the cavern of the dead is faintly f ore shadowed in the story of Aristomenes, the Messenian hero, and in a reference of St. Jerome to a supposed Scythian custom of burying alive with the dead those who had been dear to them ; the fully-developed Sindbad tale finds an echo in "Sir John Mandeville." For the "Old Man of the Sea," in the Fifth Voyage, we may also refer to Al Kazwini, Ibn Al Wardi and the romance of Seyf Zu-1 Yezen; Sindbad's tyrannical rider has usually been explained as one of the huge apes of Borneo or Sumatra, im proved to make a better story.
See Richard Hole, Remarks on the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, in which the Origin of Sindbad's Voyages . . . is particularly con sidered (1797) ; Eusebius Renaudot's edition of the Two Musulman Travellers (1718, translated into English, 1733, as Ancient Accounts of India and China by two Mahommedan Travellers . . . in the gth Century) ; J. T. Reinaud, Relations des voyages faits par les Arabes et les Persans dens l'Inde et a /a Chine dans le siecle (1845) E. W. Lane's translation of the Arabian Nights (1859), especially the notes in vol. iii. pp. 77-108 ; M. J. de Goeje, La Legende de Saint Brandan (1890) ; C. R. Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography (1897), i. 235-238,438-450.