Armies quake, Lest his spurn Man and steed: Lest an host Beneath his foot be lost. Turned aside, From his hide, Safe from wound Darts rebound; From his nose Clouds he blows; When he speaks, Thunder breaks ! When he eats, Famine threats; When he drinks, Neptune shrinks ! Nigh thy ear In mid air, On thy hand Let me stand, So shall I, Lofty poet, touch the sky. GULLIVER'S TRAVEL S. A VOYAGE TO BROBDINGNAG.* CHAPTER I. 1702, in the Adventure, Captain John NichoA GREAT STORM DESCRIED; THE LONG-BOAT Surat. We had a very prosperous gale till las, a Cornishman, commander, bound for SENT TO FETCH WATER, THE AUTHOR GOES WITH IT TO DISCOVER THE COUNTRY. HE we arrived at the Cape of Good Hope, where we landed for fresh water; but discovering a THE NATIVES, AND CARRIED TO A FARMER'S there; for the captain falling sick of an leak, we unshipped our goods and wintered IS LEFT ON SHORE, IS SEIZED BY ONE OF HOUSE. HIS RECEPTION, WITH SEVERAL ACCIDENTS THAT HAPPENED THERE. - A DESCRIPTION OF THE INHABITANTS. A N active and restless life having been assigned me by nature and fortune, in two months after my return I again left my native country, and took shipping in the Downs, on the 20th day of June,, The existence of giants as a distinct race, superior in strength and stature to the rest of mankind, was long maintained as an article of faith, not merely by the ignorant and vulgar, but by men of learning. According to the Rabbins, Adam was not only the first but the largest of mankind: they affirm that when he was created his stature was so great that his head reached the heavens. This so annoyed the angels that they remonstrated with the Creator, upon which God placed his hand on Adam's head and he instantly shrank into one thousand cubits. When the Garden of Eden was disjoined from the rest of the world, after the Fall, by the interposition of the ocean, they assert that Adam waded through the depths to his new habitation, and that Eve accompanied him without fear of drowning, which she might well do, if, as the Mohammedan doctors tell us, when her head lay on a hill near Mecca her knees rested on two others in the plain, more than two bow-shots asunder. Not only Jewish but Christian writers have maintained that a gigantic antediluvian race was produced by the intercourse between "the sons of God" and "the daughters of men." (Gen. vi. 5.) And they aver that these giants were destroyed by the universal deluge. Hence the Douay version renders Job xxvi. 5: "Behold the giants groan under the waters, and they that dwell with them. ague, we could not leave the Cape till the end of March. We then set sail, and had a good voyage till we passed the Straits of Madagascar; but, having got northward of that island, and to about five degrees south latitude, the winds, which in those seas are observed to blow a constant equal gale between the north and west, from the beginning Hell is naked before them, and there is no cover for perdition." To this sublime version the following comment is added: "Giants were not able to wade in Noah's flood, but were drowned with the rest." The Rabbins, however, make an exception in favor of Og, king of Basan, compared to whom, according to their legends, all other giants were mere Lilliputians. The waters of the deluge, they say, only reached to his knees, and he was alive at the time of Exodus, when God destroyed him by the hand of Moses. For Og, perceiving the advance of the Israelites, whose army covered a space of nine miles, cut a stone out of a mountain, so wide that it would have covered the whole army, and he put it on his head that he might throw it upon them. But God sent a lapwing which pecked a hole through the stone, so that it slipped over Og's head and hung around his neck like a necklace. The weight bore him to the ground on his face, and in this condition he was attacked by Moses. Moses was ten cubits in stature, and he took a spear ten cubits long and threw it ten cubits high, and yet it only reached Og's heels. Moses, however, succeeded in slaying him; and when he was dead his body lay for a whole year, reaching as far as the river Nile in Egypt. The feats of the giants who warred against the gods are sufficiently known, and they may be of December to the beginning of May, on greater violence, and more westerly than the 19th of April began to blow with much usual, continuing so for twenty days together; during which time we were driven passed over as purely mythological. But grave a little to the east of the Molucca Islands, historians have recorded that Scandinavia was originally inhabited by giants, one of whom, according and about three degrees northward of the to Olaus Magnus, was an eminent poet, and, unlike line, as our captain found by an observation the rest of the tuneful brotherhood, wrote against he took the 2d of May, at which time the indulgence in love and wine. Britain, if we may wind ceased and it was a perfect calm; trust Grafton's Chronicle, was similarly tenanted: whereat I was not a little rejoiced. But he, "Brute with his companie after his first landing in the island at Totnesse, searched and travailed being a man well experienced in the navigathroughout all the land, and found the same to be tion of those seas, bid us all prepare against marvellous ryche and plentifull of wood and pas- a storm, which accordingly happened on the ture, and garnished with most goodly and pleasant day following; for the southern wind, called ryvers and stremes; and as he passed he was en- the southern monsoon, began to set in. countered in sundry places with a great number of mightie and strong gyants, which at that time did inhabite the same." A belief in the existence of whole nations of giants is only now beginning to fade away before the gradual progress of geographical discovery. The ancients supposed that giants possessed the interior of Africa. In the time of Purchas (A. D. 1614) the Indians of Virginia were supposed to belong to the race of Anak, for he gives the following account of a Virginian tribe, on the authority of Alexander Whitaker, an early traveller in these regions: "The Sasquesahanockes are a giantly people, strange in proportion, behavior, and attire, their voice sounding from them as out of a cave, their attire of bears' skins hanged with bears' paws, the head of a wolf, and such like jewels; and (if any would have a spoone to eat with the divele) their tobacco-pipes were three quarters of a yard long, carved at the great end with a bird, beare, or other device, sufficient to beat out the braines of a horse, (and how many asses' braines are beat out, or rather men's braines smoked out and asses' braines haled in, by our lesse pipes at home?) the rest of their furniture was suitable. The calf of one of their legges was measured three quarters of a yard about, the rest of his limbs proportionable." The exaggerated accounts of the Patagonians published by Magellan and Le Maire had not been refuted in Swift's time; so late as 1764 Commodore Byron declared that their stature filled him with astonishment. Hence Brobdingnag, considered merely as a fiction, did not seem so extravagant in the early part of the eighteenth as it does in the nineteenth century. Finding it was likely to overblow,* we took in our spritsail, and stood by to hand the foresail; but, making foul weather, we looked that the guns were all fast, and handed the mizen. The ship lay very broad off, so we thought it better spooning before the sea than trying or hulling. We reefed the foresail and set him, and hauled aft the foresheet; the helm was hard-a-weather. The ship wore bravely. We belayed the fore down-haul; but the sail was split, and we hauled down the yard, and got the sail into the ship, and unbound all the things clear of it. It was a very fierce storm; the sea broke strange and dangerous. We hauled off upon the laniard of the whipstaff, and helped the man at the helm. We would not get down our topmast, but let all stand, because she scudded before the sea very well, and we knew that, the topmast being aloft, the ship was the wholesomer, and made better way through the sea, seeing we had searoom. When the storm was over, we set foresail and mainsail, and brought the ship people are of stature the more excellent are their endowments of mind and the longer time they live; for their stature is very different, great numbers not much exceeding ours, who seldom live above a thousand moons, which is fourscore of our years. These they account base, unworthy creatures, but one degree above brute beasts, and employ them in mean and servile offices, calling them bastards, counterfeits, or changelings. Those whom they account true natural lunars, or moon-men, exceed ours generally thirty times, both in quantity of body and length of life, proportionable to the quality of the day in both worlds, theirs containing almost thirty of our days." Lucian in his True History, and Bishop Godwin in his whimsical account of Domingo Gonsales's journey to the moon, have introduced gigantic races into their fictions. It is very probable that Swift took his first hint of the Brobdingnaggians from the latter, for, like the Bishop, he associates mildness and gentleness with enormous stature. "Many of the lunarians," says the author of the World in the Moon, "live wonderful long, even beyond belief, affirming to me that some survived thirty thousand moons, which is above a thousand years; and this is generally noted, that the taller at random. *This is a parody upon the account of storms and naval manœuvres frequent in old voyages, and is merely an assemblage of sea terms put together |