Sinbad is rich, comfortable, and, by his own account, bored — so at the start of each voyage he sails off again anyway, straight into rocs and cyclopes and valleys of diamonds guarded by serpents, and comes home each time swearing it was his last trip. It never is. Of all the frame-tales inside the Nights, his seven voyages are the ones that read most like a man addicted to his own near-death experiences.
What’s easy to lose in later, sanitized retellings is how mercantile the original stories are: Sinbad is a Baghdad merchant first, and every fantastical island is also, quite specifically, a trade opportunity. The wonder and the profit motive are never separated — magic and commerce sit in the same sentence, which is very much the spirit of the book that contains him.
He’s one voice among a thousand and one in the full collection, but the only storyteller whose survival doesn’t depend on Scheherazade’s.
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