Mapping a Giant World — Gulliver's Travels

Every scale looks normal until you bring your own ruler. Gulliver has travelled roughly two thousand miles around Lorbrulgrud while the queen attends the king's progresses and never goes farther. The whole kingdom spans about six thousand miles by three to five, cut off from the world: impassable volcanoes to the northeast, ocean on the other sides, no seaports, coasts too rough for boats, and no foreign commerce. Sea fish are ordinary European size and not worth catching; whales washed on the rocks are so small a man could carry one, and Gulliver saw such a dish at the king's table without much royal enthusiasm. He offers to correct European maps that wrongly place only sea between Japan and California, joining this land to the northwest parts of America. Lorbrulgrud holds eighty thousand houses and six hundred thousand people; Gulliver paced the royal map barefoot to measure it. The king's palace is not one building but a heap seven miles round, with rooms two hundred and forty feet high. In a coach the size of Westminster Hall, Glumdalclitch carries him in his box through the shops until beggars press close: a cancer swollen with holes he could crawl into, a wen like five wool, packs, wooden legs twenty feet high, and lice on their clothes whose limbs and snouts he sees better than a European louse through a microscope. The queen orders a twelve, foot travelling closet with latticed windows and belt hooks so a servant can wear him on horseback; in sedan processions crowds gather to stare while Glumdalclitch holds him up for view. He visits the chief temple expecting the highest tower in the kingdom and returns disappointed: three thousand feet sounds vast until proportion makes it no match for Salisbury steeple. He measures a fallen statue finger at four feet one inch; Glumdalclitch pockets it as a trinket. The king's kitchen vault runs six hundred feet high; the great oven is still ten paces narrower than the cupola at St Paul's, which he would measure after returning home. He worries he has trimmed too much: translated into Brobdingnag, the king might call his account a false diminutive injury. Six hundred stall horses stand fifty, four to sixty feet high; a guard of five hundred horse looks splendid until he remembers he has yet to describe the army in battalia. Isolation makes local greatness sound absolute; a foreigner's measure and a close look at the street reveal what grandeur hides.