It was an adventurous but exhausting nine months at sea. I sailed with Muslim and Christian soldiers and slave traders in an incredible, epic novel called Ironfire by David Ball. I sailed with some nasty pirates in Barry Burg’s non-fiction work called Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition (Believe me, Johnny Depp was way too nelly for these guys).

I even got myself shipwrecked with Robinson Crusoe, who happened to have been on a voyage from South America, bound for the West coast of Africa where he intended to pick himself up some slaves, and probably deserved to be shipwrecked.

But of all my seafaring voyages, my favorites are the travels with Sindbad, the merchant sailor, in Arabian Nights, as translated by Sir Richard Burton. Now, Burton was a little too fond of breaking into song, and he didn’t include a single paragraph break in any of the tales. But it’s really cool that he thought to share these stories with the western world.

So how many times does it take for a man to get shipwrecked and carried away by giant birds or almost eaten by monkey men or buried alive or abducted by devil worshipers before he figures out he ought to stay at home? I think the lucky number is 7.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 15th, 2006 at 8:13 pm and is filed under seafaring. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.