1. Why were the sailors, along with Sinbad, 'overcome with despair"?
Answers
Explanation:
Sindbad the Sailor, also known as Sindbad of the Sea, is one of most beloved characters from “Arabian Nights”. “My destiny makes a strange tale," he says. Some believe that Sindbad was a composite of historical figures or merchants and sea captain who sailed in the Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean between the 8th and 11the centuries. Some say he was born in Oman.
Sindbad took seven voyages. He endured shipwrecks, cannibalism, near starvation, and attacks by monsters, apes and giant birds and serpents. After each trip he settled down, “used life joyously, eating prime meats, drinking delicately, lying softy and dressing rich," until he got the urge to take to the sea again. When he finally retired he said he had experienced “an excess of marvel” as was “definitely cured..of any further desire to travel."
In effort to reconstruct the journey possibly taken by sailors that inspired the Sindbad tale, adventurer Timer Severin sailed 6,000 miles from Oman to China in 1980 and 1981 in a ship modeled after a merchant ship depicted in a 13th century manuscript. [Source: Tim Severin, National Geographic, October 1982]
The voyage from Muscat to Guangzhou, with stops in southern India, Sri Lanka, Sumatra, and Malaysia, took seven and a half months. Along the way the modern Sindbads endured broken sails, the doldrums, storms and pirates.