Sinbad the sailor tells how he grew restless of his life of leisure, and set to sea again, "possessed with the thought of travelling about the world of men and seeing their cities and islands." Accidentally abandoned by his shipmates again, he finds himself stranded in an inaccessible valley of giant snakes which can swallow elephants, and a gigantic bird called the roc, which prey upon them. Roc was the name of Sinbad the Sailor’s enormous bird. A roc is an enormous legendary bird of prey, often white, reputed to have been able to carry off and eat elephants.

Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela reported a story reminiscent of the roc in which shipwrecked sailors had themselves carried off desert islands by wrapping ox-hides round them and letting griffins carry them off as if they were cattle. In the 13th century, Marco Polo stated "It was for all the world like an eagle, but one indeed of enormous size; so big in fact that its quills were twelve paces long and thick in proportion. And it is so strong that it will seize an elephant in its talons and carry him high into the air and drop him so that he is smashed to pieces; having so killed him, the bird swoops down on him and eats him at leisure".

The roc had its origins, according to Rudolph Wittkower, in the fight between the Indian solar bird Garuda and the chthonic serpent Naga, a word that A. de Gubernatis asserted signified 'elephant' as well as 'snake'. The mytheme of Garuda carrying off an elephant that was battling a tortoise appears in two Sanskrit epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.The roc appears in Arabic geographies and natural history, popularized in Arabian fairy tales and sailors' folklore. Ibn Battuta tells of a mountain hovering in air over the China Seas, which was the roc.

The scientific culture of the nineteenth century introduced some 'scientific' rationalizations for the myth's origins, by suggesting that the origin of the myth of the roc may lie in embellishments of the often-witnessed power of the eagle that could carry away a newborn lamb. In 1863, Bianconi suggested the roc was a raptor. Recently a giant subfossil eagle in the genus Stephanoaetus identified from Madagascar was actually implicated as a top bird predator of the island, whose megafauna once included giant lemurs and pygmy hippopotami.