Article

Sindbad’s old man of the sea

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Sindbad’s old man of the sea

W. George Maxwell, a Straits Settlements administrator, published this short philological note in 1908 in the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, arguing that the “Old Man of the Sea” in Sindbad’s fifth voyage is an orang utan and that the epithet “of the Sea” is a Malay-language conflation of orang laut (sea people) with orang utan (forest people, or the ape itself).

Summary

The article addresses a specific puzzle in the Arabian Nights: every behavioural detail of Sindbad’s encounter with the “Old Man”—his silence, his fruit diet, his buffalo-hide legs, his clinging and squeezing, his susceptibility to intoxicants—points unmistakably to an orang utan, yet the name “Old Man of the Sea” has defeated commentators from Edward William Lane to Richard Burton. Maxwell reviews the existing scholarship in turn. Hole and Lane both accepted the orang utan identification but could only dismiss “of the Sea” as a translator’s addition or a reference to insular habitat. Burton rejected the orang utan entirely, proposing instead a “jocose exaggeration” of a custom of human portage in tsetse-fly zones of Central Africa, and seeking the “Shaykh of the Sea” in classical Tritons and Nereus. Maxwell finds all three positions unsatisfying.

His own solution is linguistic rather than zoological. In Malay, orang utan names both the ape and the aboriginal peoples of the interior, while orang laut names the coastal tribes driven from the same stock. The two terms are easily confused, and Maxwell argues that what the merchants told Sindbad—“you have met an orang utan”—was recorded in the Arabic tradition as “you have met orang laut,” i.e. “Man of the Sea.” He bolsters this with ethnographic parallels: Hugh Clifford’s Story of Chaling, the Dyak recounts a near-identical captivity by a female orang utan, and a postscript draws an analogy to a documented confusion between “Mountain-Cow” (yak) and “Sea-Cow” (dugong) in Asiatick Researches, Vol. II, p. 175.

Key Findings

  • Hole’s five arguments for the orang utan identification are: the creature never speaks; it lives solely on fruit; its legs have the hide of an animal; it clings and squeezes with characteristic ape behaviour; and it is quickly intoxicated (pp. 92–93).
  • Maxwell adds a sixth point unknown to Hole: Dyak oral tradition preserves stories of orang utan captivity closely resembling Sindbad’s, as recorded by Hugh Clifford in Story of Chaling, the Dyak (p. 93).
  • The colour objection (Simia satyrus is red, not black) is resolved by suggesting confusion with Hylobates lar, the black gibbon, whose white ruff may account for the “white beard” in illustrated versions of the tale (p. 94).
  • The “fermented grape juice” with which Sindbad intoxicates the creature is explained as a copyist’s substitution for toddy or another local intoxicant, since grapes do not grow in the relevant regions (p. 94).
  • The core linguistic mechanism: orang laut and orang utan are near-homophones in Malay, both denoting subgroups of the same aboriginal stock, making the conflation natural and probable (p. 94).
  • A parallel textual confusion between “Mountain-Cow” and “Sea-Cow” appears in Asiatick Researches, Vol. II, p. 175, demonstrating that such semantic slippage between paired terms is a recurring phenomenon in translated and copied texts (p. 95).

Conclusion

Maxwell’s definitive historical takeaway is that Borneo, not Sumatra (Lane’s suggestion), is the island of the adventure, and that the Sindbad narrative and the Dyak oral tradition are variants of a common story grounded in the real behaviour of orang utans in the Bornean forest. The “Old Man of the Sea” is thus not a mythological figure but a misnamed primate, the error having been introduced at the point where Malay ethnographic terminology passed into the Arabic literary tradition.

Context

  • Maxwell was a member of the Straits Settlements Civil Service; the article reflects the colonial-era practice of deploying local ethnographic and linguistic knowledge to resolve problems in classical and literary texts.
  • The study’s historiographical contribution lies in its use of Dyak oral tradition (via Clifford) and Malay etymology as comparative evidence for a problem in the transmission history of the Arabian Nights, a method typical of Straits Branch scholarship of the period.

References