We had to read this book for school, so now that we’re all finished reading it, we decided to do a collaborative book report. So, here it is!

RED: Before we read the book Gulliver’s Travels, vauge mental images of “classic” children’s fairy tales and “cute” cartoons would pop into the back of our minds whenever its name was mentioned.

It is a political satire, which we would only be able to halfway understand if we lived in England in 1726. It is very gloomy and hopeless, and has strong prejudices against red heads, and the human race in general.

Our copy included two “masterpieces of satire” as the preface called them, The Tale of the Tub and The Battle of the Books , which were pretty unintelligible. One of the chapters in The Tale of the Tub was named: “A digression concerning the original, the use, and improvement of madness in a commonwealth.”

Gulliver Twist

Daniel:  Gulliver’s Travels is a “classic” written by Johnathan Swift; it’s style is for the most part satirical, and its attempts at humor are futile. Johnathan Swift was a strange man who was officially crazy for much of his life, although when he wrote Gulliver’s Travels he was supposedly still sane.

Emily: As for being a classic… you will have to decide for yourself, but I think it could be called one, just so long as it is not a children’s classic. There are certainly some elements which put it into the classic category, for example being written in the 18^th century, and especially by a man who suffered from insanity several times during his life. (To see for yourself the evidence of insanity in classic authors, pick up a copy of one of the McGuffey’s Readers,  and read the short biographies in it that describe the writers of the different chapters, which are selected from various classic books.)

Rachel: There are some good points in the book that I don’t quite remember (It’s been a long time) but I think Jonathan Swift could have presented them better. It is a very badly written satire, with lots of disgusting details that would have been better left out. It seemed to me when I read it that Jonathan Swift had a bitter outlook on life in general when he wrote it, which was subconsciously (consciously?) communicated in his book. And of course he was insane at the time.

Lilliputians

Daniel: Contrary to the way most people view this book, it is absolutely not just a good little children’s story. The “plot” in the story first depicts a man who is shipwrecked on an island called Liliput filled with small socialists about the size of his finger. He matter-of-factly states that they bury their dead upside-down, because, they say, In the resurrection, the world will be turned right-side-up.

Emily: Lilliput is a socialist country inhabited by tiny Thumbelina sized people which has cruel punishments, very strange and unjust laws, and does not allow children to see their parents, except twice a year. When they do, the parents are not permitted to give any gifts or have any influence on them, in case they should teach their children anything different from how the government boarding schools are indoctrinating and refining them to believe.

Rachel: Lilliput also has government-run health care, among other things. Sounds familiar…

I still can’t understand how people could have twisted the story so much to make it into some sort of a ‘nice little children’s story’. They obviously missed the point of the book.

Gulliver’s Misadventures 

Many people think that the story ends after Lilliput, because of the abridged versions and cartoons, but that is only a very small portion of the book.

Daniel: On the way to Japan in the ship, Gulliver was shipwrecked again and managed to swim to an island where there were wierd people with side-ways faces, who were always trying to come up with new ways of doing things but never succeding. Here there was a lot of ridiculous satire from the author and a terrible amount of attempts at humor, the most notable of which had something to do with the people there writing not like the Chinese, from the top to the bottom of the page, or like the Hebrew, from right to left, but like the upper-class ladies of England, writing from the top left corner of the page to the bottom right corner.

Rachel: A review I read on Gulliver’s Travels said the first part was funny, but by the time Gulliver got to the lopsided people and the horses, he says “…[Swift]…uses satire like a stick to beat the reader over the head.”

A website called ‘Book a minute classics’ got it right. Paraphrasing the paraphrase; “Gulliver goes on many travels. He comes home. He hates people. The End.”

Emily: The rest of the book is about Gulliver’s misadventures in several other strange lands, like Brobdingnag, a country filled with giants, and Hyounonym, where savage, dumb humans pull carriages, and intelligent horses are the main race, thus the impossible to pronounce name. From then on the book was basically making fun of nonsense, but in the process, it became nonsense itself.

RED

            People in the Bahamas usually divide the islands into two groups, the Abacos and the Exumas.  We skipped most of the Abacos so we could have more time in the Exumas,  since it was a little later in the year than we had planned.  The first place we got to after crossing the Gulf Stream overnight was Nassau.  We docked our boat in a marina, and stayed there all day going through customs.  The next day we traveled to Allan’s cay, which is really just a strip of volcanic rock rising from the Atlantic Ocean with miniature palm trees on it. 

Our boat at Allan's cay

 While exploring the shore, we searched for the pink iguanas we had read about in the cruising guide.  We found them and snapped a few pictures.  One of the only places in the world they can be found is Allan’s cay. 

Another novelty on the island were the blowholes. They were holes in the ground on top of a hill, which were connected to an underwater cave below which would fill with air,  spewing out mist and wind when a wave would flood the cavern.  A cruiser we knew got his hat blown away by standing on top of a blowhole.  There were tons of odd things about that island because it is volcanic.

  On the main beach there was a huge whale skeleton that had died near the island and the park rangers had pulled it up.  We also visited the small nature center or museum which I think was the only building on the island.  While we were there we had fun feeding the little bananaquit birds with sugar out of our hands, we found all kinds of lizards, and  hermit crabs almost the size of a melon.

When we got back to the main beach from our hike, we enjoyed using the kayaks that were kept on the island.  The last day at Warderick Wells we spent snorkeling on a different side of the island.  The vividly colored fish were comical and exquisite , and the coral was beautiful and exotic.  We looked up almost everything we had seen in our tropical corals and fish book.

That evening, as we watched the sunset and splashed our legs in the water off the back of the boat, the barracudas and other larger fish suddenly started to appear.  Sharks also like to come out around this time, so there is a rule to start getting out of the water at 4:00 that most cruisers go by.  This is only a small part of what we did in the Bahamas, but maybe I will have time to write more about it later.    -Emily

As some of you may have noticed, our blog has, well, been absent for a while.  This is because of a failed upgrade attempt in which we lost all our settings and posts….ugg.   Since this week is a break from school (yay!) we will be working on getting our site back to normal, and hopefully all our old posts (or at least the pictures) will be back too.

Also,  I’m working on another blog involving contemplative turtles and undervalued bugs.  I’ll be posting a link soon. Until then–don’t try to search for it, you won’t find anything interesting.

-Rachel