Shipwrecked Among Giants and Lilliputians — Gulliver's Travels

Lemuel Gulliver is a ship's surgeon from a modest Nottinghamshire family who worked his way up through apprenticeship and years at sea. When his London practice collapses after his mentor dies, he goes back to the ocean. In May 1699 he boards the Antelope for the South Sea. A violent November storm wrecks the ship. Six men escape in a boat; the boat capsizes in a sudden squall; Gulliver swims alone to shore and collapses on a soft grassy beach, exhausted. He sleeps nine hours. When he tries to rise, he cannot move. His arms, legs, and hair are pinned to the ground by hundreds of tiny cords. Standing on his chest is a human creature no bigger than six inches, bow drawn. Forty more follow. He roars; they flee, then return and shoot arrows into his hand and face. He decides to lie still. A Lilliputian dignitary mounts a small platform and delivers a long speech Gulliver cannot understand. He signals hunger by putting his finger to his mouth. Within minutes, a hundred tiny people climb his sides carrying baskets of meat and hogsheads of wine. He drains two hogsheads that together hold less than a pint. The wine, he learns later, had been drugged. The emperor had planned everything from the moment a scout spotted Gulliver sleeping on the beach. Nine hundred men worked a pulley system to lift him onto a 22, wheeled wooden frame. Fifteen hundred horses hauled the machine half a mile to the capital while he slept. He woke only when an officer shoved the sharp end of a half, pike up his nostril , a 'very ridiculous accident' he wouldn't understand for three weeks. The procession reached the capital gates at noon the next day. He was lodged in an ancient temple that had been declared profane after a murder and converted to common use; the north gate was just large enough to crawl through. The king's blacksmith locked 91 chains to his left leg with 36 padlocks. A hundred thousand inhabitants turned out; ten thousand climbed his body with ladders until a royal proclamation forbade it under pain of death. When the workmen finally cut the ropes that had held him since the beach, Gulliver rose with, as he put it, 'as melancholy a disposition as ever I had in my life.'