A Long Way to Travel

Suggested citation for this article: Wilcox LS. A long way to travel. Prev Chronic Dis [serial online] 2005 Oct [date cited]. The travel experiences of one Lemuel Gulliver were first published in 1726 (1). Captain Gulliver, an ordinary, middle class Englishman, has a series of remarkable adventures , beginning with his trip to the island of Lilliput. Gulliver awakes on the island after surviving a shipwreck to discover that tiny human beings have tied him to the earth. Among the Lilliputians, he is kept shackled until he swears not to run away, to provide physical labor, and to fight the Lilliputians' enemies. These are the elements most people recognize as Gulliver's Travels, written by Jonathan Swift. Less often remembered are Gulliver's encounters with several more populations. On his second trip, Gulliver is abandoned by his ship-mates as they paddle for their lives at the sight of a Brobdingnagian, a giant as tall as a " spire-steeple. " Gulliver meets a giant farmer who makes money exhibiting him at taverns, fairs, and inns. Gulliver eventually escapes back to England to embark on a third voyage. This time he finds himself on the flying island of Laputa. Here the men of the ruling class are so preoccupied with theoretical geometry that they are unaware of ordinary conversations. Gulliver has inferior status because he speaks to those who listen: women, tradesmen, and servants. He leaves Laputa and begins a fourth voyage. This time the good captain is forced into a longboat by mutineers and left in the land of the Houyhnhnms. These beings are sentient horses, while the humans on the island are Yahoos, " brute " animals without rational thought. The Houyhnhnms consider a Yahoo who is capable of communication to be a curiosity, but at length they conclude Gulliver is too dangerous and insist that he leave. In all of these extraordinary cultures, it is Gulliver himself who is the disadvantaged one. Although he's treated in different ways depending on the values of each culture, he is an outsider to all. His experiences on the margins of these societies transform Gulliver, and he begins to see the norms of his own home in a new light. His final adventure with the Houyhnhnms changes his views on his own culture so profoundly that, upon his return home, he rejects the company of his fellow humans and, in a darkly satiri-cal conclusion, prefers …