Giant Among Giants — Gulliver's Travels

Two months after returning from Lilliput, Gulliver boards the Adventure, Captain John Nicholas of Cornwall, bound for Surat. The voyage is unremarkable until a stop at the Cape of Good Hope, where a discovered leak and the captain's illness with ague force them to winter there until the end of March. Back at sea, a fierce southern monsoon beginning on 19 April blows for twenty days and drives them roughly 500 leagues east of the Molucca Islands, into waters no one on board can identify. When the storm passes, provisions are holding but the crew is desperate for water. On 16 June 1703 a boy on the topmast sights land; on the 17th they are in full view of a great island or continent. A dozen armed men are sent in the longboat to find fresh water. Gulliver goes along to explore. No water and no inhabitants are found. He wanders a mile alone in the other direction, finds the country barren and rocky, and turns back, just in time to see his crewmates already rowing at full speed back to the ship, chased by an enormous creature wading through the shallows with its knees barely submerged. The creature cannot catch the boat for the sharp rocks. Gulliver runs. He climbs a steep hill and looks out over a fully cultivated country. The grass in the hay fields stands twenty feet high. What he takes for a road is merely a footpath through a barley field, the stalks forty feet tall. He walks for an hour to reach the far hedge, which is a hundred and twenty feet. The stile at the gate has four steps, each step six feet high. While he is trying to find a gap in the hedge, one of the inhabitants comes into view: as tall as an ordinary church steeple, ten yards to every stride. He calls to seven others who appear carrying reaping, hooks each the size of six scythes. They begin to harvest the field where Gulliver hides. He tries to retreat through the corn but the stalks are packed too close to pass and the fallen ears pierce his clothes. The reapers close to within a hundred yards. He lies down between two ridges and gives up hope, mourning his widow and fatherless children. He thinks of Lilliput, where he was the greatest prodigy who ever appeared, and now understands what it would feel like to be the Lilliputian. "Nothing is great or little," he reflects, "otherwise than by comparison." One reaper nearly steps on him. Gulliver screams. The reaper picks him up between forefinger and thumb and raises him sixty feet off the ground. Gulliver suppliates, hands pressed together, speaking in the most humble tone he can manage, and the giant treats him as a curiosity rather than a pest. He tucks Gulliver in the lappet of his coat and runs to his master, the farmer who owned the field. The farmer examines Gulliver with a straw, he believes the clothes are a natural covering, and blows his hair aside for a clearer look at the face. He calls his labourers and asks if any of them have ever seen such a creature. He sets Gulliver on the ground; Gulliver immediately stands upright and walks back and forth to show he will not bolt. He bows, kneels, and offers the farmer his purse of gold, six Spanish pieces and a handful of smaller coins. The farmer examines each one with a pin and can make nothing of them; he makes Gulliver put the gold back. The farmer spreads his handkerchief on his palm and Gulliver lies on it; wrapped up, he is carried to the farmhouse. The wife screams at the sight of him and runs, as English women do at a toad or spider. At dinner (the dish is twenty, four feet in diameter, the table thirty feet from the floor) the wife minces meat and crumbles bread onto a small plate. Gulliver produces his knife and fork to their great delight. He raises a two, gallon cup in both hands and drinks to the wife's health, which makes the family laugh so loud he is almost deafened. Stumbling on a bread, crust and falling flat, he jumps up, waves his hat, and shouts three huzzas to show he is unhurt. The farmer's youngest son then seizes him by the legs and holds him high in the air; the father boxes the boy's ear with a blow that would have knocked down a troop of English cavalry, then orders him away from the table. Fearing the boy's spite, Gulliver intercedes, kneels, and kisses the boy's hand; the farmer makes the boy stroke him gently. A cat the size of three oxen sits purring in the room, the sound like a dozen stocking, weavers working at once, and Gulliver walks calmly back and forth before her head until she draws back. Near the end of dinner a baby seizes Gulliver and gets his head into its mouth; he roars, the baby drops him, and the mother catches him in her apron. The nurse's breast, observed at close range, is six feet prominent and roughly sixteen in circumference, which prompts a reflection on the relativity of beauty: the Lilliputian friend who once told Gulliver his skin had great holes in it and his beard stumps were like boar bristles was making the same observation from the other direction. After dinner Gulliver is put to sleep on the mistress's own bed under a handkerchief larger than a man, of, war's mainsail. He sleeps two hours and dreams of his wife and children. He wakes alone in a room three hundred feet wide, the bed eight yards from the floor. Two rats the size of mastiffs crawl up the bed curtains and attack him, one gets its forepaws to his collar. Gulliver draws his hanger and rips up the rat's belly before it can bite; the other he wounds on the back as it flees. He walks the bed to recover his breath, then dispatches the dying rat with a slash across the neck. When the mistress returns and finds him covered in blood, he points to the dead rat and smiles. She calls for tongs to remove it. He has survived his first night in Brobdingnag.