Gulliver's Travels
A shipwrecked surgeon among six-inch people, and then among giants eleven times his size
Page 1
Lemuel Gulliver was a ship's surgeon, and he loved the sea, though the sea did not always love him back. One voyage, his ship the Antelope was caught in a terrible storm far from any land. The wind tore the sails to rags, the waves climbed higher than the masts, and at last the ship struck rocks and broke apart in the dark water. Gulliver was thrown into the sea along with everyone else, but while the others were lost, he swam and swam until his arms would barely move. Just when he thought he could swim no more, his feet touched sand. He crawled up onto a beach, further than he could tell in the darkness and his own exhaustion, and lay down on the dry ground. He was so tired that he fell asleep almost at once, not knowing at all where in the world he had come to rest.
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When Gulliver woke, the sun was high and warm on his face, but he could not move. His arms, legs, and even his long hair had been pinned to the ground with thin ropes, stretched tight in every direction. He heard a strange small noise, and when he lifted his head as far as he could, he saw something extraordinary. Walking across his chest was a person no taller than his hand — a little man in a neat coat, carrying a tiny bow. Dozens more of these small people stood around him on the sand, talking to each other in quick high voices he could not understand, and more kept arriving on little ladders they had built up his sides. Gulliver was so astonished that for a long moment he simply lay still and stared, and the small people stared right back at him, just as amazed by him as he was by them.
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The Lilliputians decided Gulliver was not dangerous, and after many days they loosened his ropes enough to let him sit up, though a strong chain stayed fastened to his leg so he could not wander far. They brought him on a great wheeled platform, pulled by hundreds of their horses, into their capital city, and chained him in an old temple near the gates, which was the only building large enough to hold him. There, crowds of tiny people came every day to look at him, and the Emperor of Lilliput himself came to see this giant who had washed up from the sea. The Emperor was a sharp-faced, proud little man in a tall crown, and he studied Gulliver carefully, asking him question after question in the Lilliputian tongue, which Gulliver slowly began to learn. In time the Emperor grew fond enough of this strange giant to call him Man-Mountain, and to trust him more than almost anyone else at court.
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Lilliput was at war with its neighbor across the water, the empire of Blefuscu, and the Emperor asked Gulliver for help. The channel between the two lands was deep enough to sink any Lilliputian ship, but to Gulliver it was no deeper than his chest. He waded straight out into the water, pulling a great bundle of hooked ropes behind him, while the whole Blefuscu fleet watched him coming and loosed arrows that stung him like pins but could not stop him. When he reached the enemy ships, he hooked a rope to the front of each one, and then simply turned around and walked back toward Lilliput, towing the entire fifty-ship fleet behind him through the water. The Lilliputians watching from the shore could hardly believe what they saw. In a single afternoon, Gulliver had won the war for Lilliput without anyone on either side being killed, and the Emperor was overjoyed with his Man-Mountain.
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Gulliver's good fortune did not last. Jealous nobles at the Lilliputian court began to turn the Emperor against him — some were angry that Gulliver had once put out a fire in the palace by throwing water on it rather than letting it burn, and others simply could not stand how much the Emperor favored him. In secret, the court decided to punish Gulliver severely for all of it. But a kind friend at court learned of the plan and came to warn him in the dead of night, telling him he must flee at once if he valued his freedom. Gulliver did not wait to be told twice. He slipped away from the capital before dawn and made his way to the shore, then crossed the channel once more, this time to Blefuscu, where the grateful Blefuscudians welcomed the man who had once helped end their war. From there, with their help, Gulliver found an old boat, mended it, and at last set sail for home, leaving both small kingdoms behind him.
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Gulliver sailed for home, but on his very next voyage his ship was blown off course and he found himself set ashore to explore a new coastline while the crew searched for water. Before he could get back to the boat, he saw his shipmates rowing away from a monstrous giant chasing them through the shallows, and he realized, with a cold shock, that the land itself was full of giants eleven times his own size. He ran and hid among the stalks of a wheat field, but here the wheat itself towered forty feet over his head, and every stalk was as thick as a tree trunk. While he was still trying to find his way out, the ground shook, and a huge farmer appeared, striding through the field, cutting the wheat with a scythe the size of a ship's mast. Gulliver shouted as loud as he could, and at the very last moment, just before the scythe came down, the farmer heard him and bent low to see what strange small creature was crying out at his feet.
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The farmer carried Gulliver home and showed him to his family, and his young daughter, Glumdalclitch, took to caring for him at once, making him tiny clothes and a soft little bed, and keeping him safe from harm as carefully as if he were her own small child. Word of the little man spread quickly, and soon the Queen of Brobdingnag heard of him and asked to see him for herself. She was so delighted with Gulliver that she bought him from the farmer on the spot, on the one condition that Glumdalclitch come along to continue caring for him. From then on, Gulliver lived at the royal court, carried about in a special travelling box Glumdalclitch had made for him, and often set upon the table during the King and Queen's meals, where he answered their many curious questions about his own small homeland. The King, in particular, liked to question him closely, turning over in his mind everything Gulliver could tell him of a world so different from his own.
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One day, while Gulliver was resting alone in his travelling box on a windowsill overlooking the sea, a great bird of prey swooped down, seized the box in its talons, mistaking it for something to eat, and carried it off into the sky before anyone could stop it. Gulliver was tumbled about inside the box as the bird flew higher and higher over the Brobdingnagian coastline, out over the open sea, with nothing below him now but waves. He clung to the sides of his little box, feeling it swing and jolt with every beat of the enormous wings, with no way to know where the bird was taking him or whether he would ever be found. Then, quite suddenly, the bird was startled by something else in the sky, loosened its grip, and dropped the box. It fell through the air and struck the sea with a tremendous splash, bobbing there on the waves, with Gulliver still shut safely inside it.
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Gulliver's box floated on the open sea for what felt like a very long time, rising and falling with every wave, while he knocked and called out from inside, hoping someone, anyone, might hear him. At last he heard new voices outside — ordinary human voices, speaking English — and felt the box being lifted and hauled up out of the water. An English ship had spotted the strange floating box bobbing far out at sea and had come alongside to investigate, and when the sailors pried it open, they found Gulliver inside, soaked through but entirely unharmed, and overjoyed beyond words to see faces his own size again. He told them his whole extraordinary story as they sailed on, of the tiny people of Lilliput and the giants of Brobdingnag, and though some of the sailors could hardly believe a word of it, they were glad enough to have rescued him, and set a course for England at last.
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At last the ship came into an English harbor, and Gulliver stepped off the gangplank onto solid, ordinary ground, among people exactly his own size, for the first time in a very long while. He went home to his wife and family, who had feared they might never see him again, and for a time he was glad simply to sit by his own fire and tell them everything that had happened to him — the little people who had tied him to the sand, the Emperor who had called him Man-Mountain, the war he had ended by wading a channel, the giants who had kept him as a marvel, and the great bird that had very nearly carried him away forever. It was, everyone agreed, the strangest story any sailor had ever brought home from the sea. And though Gulliver would go on to have further adventures in other strange lands, for now he was content simply to be home, safe, and his own true size once more.
About this story
- Audience: kids (ages 6–12)
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