Gulliver's Travels

Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon, sets sail from Bristol for the South Seas when a violent storm shatters his vessel against the reefs of Van Diemen's Land. The sole survivor after swimming to the point of exhaustion, he washes ashore on an unknown beach and falls asleep in the short grass. Upon waking, he is astounded to find himself bound by thousands of tiny ligatures, with some forty human creatures, barely six inches tall, climbing over his body as if it were a mountain. One of them, armed with a bow and arrows, advances to his chin and lets out a shrill cry that all the others repeat. Gulliver attempts to free himself, but a volley of arrows, pricking like needles, forces him to remain motionless. The Lilliputians—for so they call themselves—then feed him entire baskets of minuscule meats and barrels of wine which he swallows in a single draft. Finally, they transport him, still asleep, on a twenty-two-wheeled machine drawn by fifteen hundred horses, to their capital, Mildendo.

The Emperor of Lilliput, taller than his subjects by a quarter of an inch, comes to examine the giant chained within a profaned temple. His court operates around bizarre rituals: ministers obtain their offices by dancing on a tightrope, and the higher they leap without falling, the more exalted their position. The Lord Treasurer Flimnap excels at cutting capers an inch higher than anyone else. The empire is torn between two factions distinguished by the height of their heels—the Tramecksans wearing high heels and the Slamecksans low ones—while a war rages with the neighboring island of Blefuscu, ever since a former emperor decreed that eggs must be broken at the small end rather than the big end. Gulliver learns their language and gradually earns imperial favor. One day, swimming across the channel, he attaches hooks to Blefuscu's fifty men-of-war and tows them back to Lilliput, thereby putting an end to the threat of invasion. The Emperor then wishes to subjugate Blefuscu entirely, but Gulliver refuses to partake in the oppression of a free people, thus drawing the sovereign's secret enmity.

One night, the Empress's apartments catch fire. Gulliver, having drunk plentifully of a diuretic Blefuscudian wine, extinguishes the blaze by urinating on the flames, saving the palace but violating the capital law that forbids making water within the imperial precincts. The Empress, horrified, vows never again to set foot in the defiled apartments. Soon, the High Admiral Skyresh Bolgolam and other ministers draw up articles of impeachment against Gulliver for high treason. A friend secretly reveals that it has been decided to put out his eyes before slowly starving him to death. Gulliver then flees to Blefuscu, where he is received with honor. On the coast, he discovers an overturned, human-sized boat, repairs it with the help of the Blefuscudians, and sets sail. An English ship rescues him and returns him to England with only a few Lilliputian sheep, no larger than mice, as proof of his adventure.

Gulliver soon sets sail again aboard the Adventure. After a storm near the Cape of Good Hope, the crew goes ashore on an unknown land to forage for fresh water. Gulliver wanders away from the group and suddenly finds himself face to face with a human being as tall as a church spire, who pursues him through a cornfield with stalks forty feet high. Giant reapers discover him, and one delicately picks him up. The farmer takes him home, where Gulliver becomes an object of curiosity. The farmer's daughter, Glumdalclitch, forty feet tall and nine years old, cares for him like a living doll, fashioning him a bed in a dresser drawer and protecting him from the household cat, which is three times the size of an elephant. The farmer soon exhibits him for money at fairs and inns, carrying him in a box fitted with windows. The Queen of Brobdingnag—for such is the name of this land of giants—purchases him for a thousand gold pieces and keeps him at court as a scholarly curiosity.

The King of Brobdingnag, an enlightened prince and philosopher, questions Gulliver at length about England and Europe. Gulliver proudly describes British institutions, wars, conquests, and gunpowder. But the King, after careful reflection, concludes that Europeans must be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth. He recoils in horror at the recipe for gunpowder that Gulliver offers him, preferring to lose half his kingdom rather than introduce such an invention. At court, Gulliver lives in a dollhouse built expressly for him, but he is constantly in peril: flies as large as larks assail him, a monkey mistakes him for its offspring and nearly smothers him, and the court dwarves torment him out of jealousy. After two years, during a journey to the coast, an eagle snatches his traveling box and drops it into the sea. English sailors rescue him and he returns home, initially struggling to readjust to the small size of humans and shouting without realizing it, accustomed as he was to making himself heard by giants.

The wanderlust seizes Gulliver once more, and he embarks on the Hopewell. Japanese pirates capture the ship and set him adrift in a small boat. He washes ashore on an island where, to his astonishment, he witnesses a flying island hovering in the sky. The inhabitants hoist him aboard Laputa by means of a chain. The Laputans have their heads tilted to one side, with one eye turned inward and the other looking up toward the zenith, utterly absorbed in mathematics and music. They require flappers to rouse them from their meditations and remind them to speak or listen. Their houses are ill-constructed, as they despise practical geometry; their garments are adorned with astronomical figures; their food is carved into geometric shapes. The flying island, four and a half miles in diameter, floats by virtue of a gigantic loadstone that can raise, lower, or move it horizontally. The King of Laputa thus governs the lands below, threatening to deprive rebellious cities of sun and rain by hovering directly above them.

Gulliver descends to the continent, to Lagado, the capital of Balnibarbi. The city is in ruins, the countryside devastated, the people destitute. Lord Munodi explains that forty years earlier, certain inhabitants went up to Laputa and returned with a smattering of mathematics that caused them to despise traditional methods. They founded an Academy of Projectors, where mad scientists pursue absurd research: extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, reducing human excrement to its original food, building houses beginning with the roof, plowing with hogs, replacing silkworms with spiders, and divining political plots by examining the stool of suspects. One professor has invented a mechanical frame in which words are randomly assembled to automatically write all possible books. Gulliver next visits Glubbdubdrib, the island of sorcerers, where the governor can summon the dead. He converses with Homer, who is ignorant of the existence of his commentators; with Aristotle, who admits to having been wrong about everything; and with great historical figures who contradict the accounts of historians. In Luggnagg, he encounters the Struldbruggs: immortals condemned to age eternally, becoming senile, blind, deaf, forgotten by all, and declared legally dead at the age of eighty.

Gulliver returns to England but sets out again as captain of the Adventure. His crew mutinies and abandons him on an unknown shore. He is attacked by vile, hairy, stinking creatures that climb trees and pelt him with excrement. A dapple-grey horse rescues him, examines him with manifest intelligence, and then calls for a brown bay. The two horses converse in neighs, frequently uttering the word Houyhnhnm. They lead Gulliver to a house where he expects to meet human masters, only to find other horses eating oats and milk from mangers. The filthy creatures he encountered are the Yahoos, and Gulliver realizes with horror that, though he wears clothes, he physically resembles them. The Houyhnhnms—for such is the name of the rational horses—are creatures of pure reason, devoid of passion or deceit. Their language has no word to express evil, disease, or falsehood. They live in perfect harmony, without government or laws, guided solely by reason and universal friendship.

Gulliver learns their language and explains his origins to his Houyhnhnm master. The horse struggles to comprehend how Yahoos could have constructed a ship or fashioned clothes, and finds it even harder to conceive of the lying, wars, lawsuits, money, and power that Gulliver describes. To the Houyhnhnms, Europeans are merely Yahoos endowed with just enough reason to multiply their natural vices and invent new ones. Gulliver lives among them for three years, adopting their virtues and increasingly despising his own species. He subsists on oatbread and milk, makes his own clothes and shoes, and builds a canoe. However, the general assembly of the Houyhnhnms decrees that a Yahoo possessing some degree of reason is dangerous, and orders his departure. Weeping, Gulliver leaves this land of wisdom. Portuguese sailors rescue him, but their sight and smell are unbearable to him. Upon returning home, the odor and presence of his wife and children repulse him. He purchases two horses with whom he spends his days in the stable, unable to endure the company of human Yahoos—above all their pride, the most absurd of vices for such despicable creatures.