I inked this one on paper. You can probably tell if you’re paying enough attention.
Anyway, Gulliver – being the wildly irresponsible father and terrible husband that he is – instantly hops onto another boat and sails off for another year-long excursion, simply because he has a lust for adventure. Jerk. Eventually his boat finds the island of the giant guys with the name I can’t spell. It starts with a “B.” A small group paddles to shore to explore, and while Gulliver is admiring the local fauna, the other sailors totally ditch him and head back to the ship. It really isn’t – as Nicholle notes – very cool. Still, they had a pretty good reason, what with the sixty-foot dude standing by the beach. I’d probably flee in terror too.
If you’re curious, the scale on the Island That Starts With B is roughly 10 to 1, as opposed to Lilliput’s 1 to 12. That said, Swift’s text isn’t nearly as accurate to that calculation as it was in the first part.
7 Comments
My profits could have been Brobdingnagian!
It’s a spike actually, or if you want a verb it’s poking or pricking or piercing. So stab a bell and expect some complaining.
I think you’re trying to reply to fishamaphone…? There’s a button for that.
My friends complain that authors don’t make up names for things that are easy to pronounce and spell. I ask them, where’s the adventure if you sail to an island of giants named Giants? Call them Brobdingnags, and then you can have the fun of pronouncing it differently every time you say it.
This is only the beginning… he becomes way more of a dick to his family after rocking out with the Houyhnhms (now there’s a spelling I had to look up). I’m going to have to get out the old Penguin Classics Odyssey skulking on my shelf and put it to use, hadn’t clicked to the cyclops parallel before!
It’s not cool of the sailors to ditch him, but for anyone who has heard or read the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus, it is completely understandable, even if the Brobdingnaggians had two eyes instead of just one. ^^; Heck, it’s even understandable without having knowledge of the story about the antropophagous giant…
It’s a shame if lust for adventure was Gulliver’s only motivation. Most people went on those long and frankly dangerous trips because they had to earn money to support their families.
Brobdingnag. It’s spelled Brobdingnag. It’s fairly easy when you think of it as three words smooshed together: Brob. Ding. Nag. Don’t ask me what a brob is. It’s probably some kind of poisonous insect.