Renaissance Voyages and Swift's Gulliver's Travels

Travelers and the Literature of Discovery

Renaissance Discoveries and Global Expansion

• Taking the eastern route around the Cape of Good Hope, Vasco da Gama reached India in 1497–99.
• The Portuguese reached China in 1514.
• Voyaging westward, Christopher Columbus discovered the Bahamas, Cuba, Trinidad, and Venezuela (1492–98).
• Ferdinand Magellan rounded Cape Horn, and the Pacific was opened to the Western World.
• With Spanish and Portuguese domination ratified by the Papacy, northern explorers seeking a northwest passage discovered North America.
• The Hellenic view of nature was symmetrical; the Greeks believed a habitable land mass must exist in the Southern Hemisphere corresponding to that in the north.
• Gulliver claims it as his personal belief that "there must be a Balance of Earth to counterpoise the great Continent of Tartary."
• Though not then identified as a continent, Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand were considered sizeable enough, though by Swift’s time only Western Australia had been discovered.
• Australia had a great significance for utopian writing, including Gulliver's Travels; since it was unknown, it could be peopled by the imagination.

The Royal Society and Scientific Inquiry

• Knowledge of the world was pursued by voyagers sponsored by the Royal Society of London, whom Gulliver emulates.
• The Royal Society was devoted to experimental science and the gathering of empirical data.

Gulliver's Travels and Travel Narrative Satire

• In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift takes great pains to establish a concrete geographical setting against which he can place fantastic materials for the purpose of satire.
• In "A Letter from Capt. Gulliver, to his Cousin Sympson," Swift refers to "my cousin Dampier"—William Dampier (1652–1715), author of A New Voyage Round the World (1697).
• There was a parodic and competitive relationship between Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Swift’s work.
• Swift’s reference to Dampier is intended to encourage this comparison, as there was a well-known connection between Defoe’s work and Dampier.
• Alexander Selkirk, the prototype for Crusoe, was a master on a privateering expedition around Cape Horn in 1703; Dampier was the commander.
• After four years as a castaway, Selkirk was picked up in 1709 by a ship piloted by Dampier.

Literary Sources and Synthetic Realism

• Gulliver’s expression as a narrator is conventional; rather than seeing Gulliver's Travels as a parody of a specific work, it is more appropriate to recognize Swift’s synthetic approach.
• For example, the account of the storm at the opening of the voyage to Brobdingnag, with its excessive use of nautical detail, is taken almost verbatim from Samuel Sturmy’s Mariner’s Magazine of 1669.
• Swift uses the accounts he had read of the "bestial" Hottentots in South Africa to create the Yahoos.
• Parallels can also be found with Richard Ligon’s account of slave workers in A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657).