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Welcome to Twig, the podcast where I take a classic tale, condense it into a captivating 60-minute retelling, and read it to you beside the campfire. I'm Roger Braveheart, and tonight, another unforgettable journey into classic fiction begins. A ship surgeon with a restless nature leaves England behind, drawn again and again to the sea and to whatever lies beyond the edges of the map. What he finds cannot be explained by any chart or logbook. On distant, uncharted shores, Lemuel Gulliver encounters peoples whose sizes, customs, and beliefs turn everything he thought he understood upside down. In one place he is a giant, in another barely worth noticing. Everywhere he goes he is asked to explain the country he came from, and the answers grow more uncomfortable the more he talks. Is he a traveller bringing back wonders, a witness to something troubling, or a man slowly losing his grip on the world he once called home? This is Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. I'm Roger Braveheart, and it's a pleasure to have you here at Twig, the channel that essentially hands you a condensed audiobook at no cost. What we do here is take great works of classic literature and rebuild them as rich, easy-to-follow retellings that hold on to the spirit, drama, and mood of the book they came from. My job is to take Jonathan Swift's long and densely packed novel and compress it into a gripping listen without losing the moments that matter most or the feeling behind them. Most of the shortened classics on this channel run for somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half, a far cry from the many, many hours you'd spend working through the full text. I experimented with half-hour versions early on, but too much of the story had to be thrown away. Everything you'll hear comes from Swift's original text, not from films, TV versions, abridged editions, or other adaptations, a great many of which shuffle the order of events, smooth over Gulliver's stranger experiences, or alter significant portions of what actually happens. So make yourself comfortable. Picture a sail vanishing over the horizon towards lands no one has ever named, and let's begin. Lemuel Gulliver begins by telling us plainly who he is. The third of five sons of a man with a small estate in Nottinghamshire, sent to Cambridge at fourteen, then apprenticed to a London surgeon, then studying medicine at Leyden because he always suspected his fortune lay at sea. He serves as a ship surgeon, marries a hosier's daughter, tries to settle in London, fails to make a living among the sailors of Wapping, and at last accepts a place aboard a ship bound for the South Sea. They sail from Bristol in May of 1699 and prosper until a violent storm drive them far off course. Twelve of the crew die of hard labour and bad food. Then the lookouts spy a rock too late, the ship splits, and six men, including Gulliver, get clear in the boat. The boat overturns. He swims where the wind pushes him, feels bottom at last, wades a mile ashore, walks half a mile more, drinks the last of his brandy, and falls asleep on grass as short and soft as bedding. He wakes unable to move. His arms, his legs, and even his long hair are pegged to the ground with slender cords, and something alive is walking up his chest, a man not six inches high, carrying a bow and arrow. Forty more follow. His roar sends them tumbling off his sides, and they answer with a shower of arrows that prick like needles and spears that cannot pierce his leather jerkin. Lying still, he watches a little stage built beside his ear, where a great lord makes him a long, gesturing speech he cannot understand at all. Starving, Gulliver points to his mouth, and a hundred small people climb ladders with baskets of meat no bigger than a lark's wing and hogsheads of wine that hold half a pint apiece. His courtesy is deliberate. He could crush forty of them in a moment, but he remembers the arrows and considers himself bound by the laws of hospitality. An envoy arrives with credentials, signalling that he must be carried prisoner to the capital. The wine, it turns out, was drugged. While he sleeps, five hundred carpenters build an engine on twenty-two wheels, nine hundred men haul him aboard with pulleys, and fifteen hundred small horses draw him towards the city. A guardsman's pike up his nostril wakes him on the road. At journey's end he is lodged in a disused temple and chained by the left leg with ninety-one little chains. Freed from the strings, though still chained, Gulliver stands and looks about him at a country like one continued garden, with fields the size of flower beds, and the tallest trees no higher than seven feet. The Emperor rides up and is nearly thrown when his horse rears at the sight of a moving mountain. Dismounting he studies his guest. From just beyond the length of the chain, a prince taller than his court by the breadth of a fingernail, past his prime at twenty-eight and three-quarters, with a plume in his little gold helmet, and a drawn sword barely three inches long. Gulliver lies on his side so their faces are level, and tries him in every language he knows, from Dutch and Latin to lingua franca, without one word being understood. When the rabble shoot arrows at him, six ringleaders are handed over bound for punishment. Gulliver pockets five and makes as if to eat the sick alive, drawing out his penknife while the poor man squalls, then cuts his cords and sets him gently down, releasing the others one by one. That single act of mercy is reported at court and changes everything. Six hundred of their beds sewn together make him a mattress. Six hundred servants are appointed with tents beside his door, three hundred tailors are ordered to clothe him, six scholars to teach him the language, and the cavalry to be exercised in his sight until the horses lose their fear. Behind closed doors the council has been debating whether to starve him or shoot poisoned arrows into his face, until the fear of a plague from so vast a carcass, and the news of his kindness to the six criminals wins him a daily allowance of six beeves and forty sheep from the villages round about. In three weeks he can converse a little, and every day he kneels and begs for liberty. The Emperor answers that it must wait upon his counsel, and that first he must be searched for weapons. Two officers are lifted into his pockets and write a solemn inventory, describing his handkerchief as a foot cloth, his snuff box as a silver chest full of choking dust, his comb as an engine of twenty poles, his pistols as hollow iron pillars, and his ticking watch as the god he consults before every action. He surrenders scimitar, pistols, powder, and watch, firing a shot in the air that knocks hundreds flat, but keeps one secret pocket holding his spectacles and a pocket spy glass. Gulliver's gentleness has won him such favour that children come and play hide and seek in his hair, and he begins to hope for freedom. The Emperor entertains him with the country's finest show, the rope dancers, who perform on a slender white thread stretched a foot above the ground. It turns out this is no mere amusement. It is how candidates win high office. When a great place falls vacant, five or six hopefuls petition to dance, and whoever jumps highest without falling gets the job. Even ministers are made to prove they have not lost the knack. Flimknap the Treasurer can cut a caper an inch higher than any lord in the Empire, and Gulliver has watched him somersault on a trencher fixed to a pack thread. Broken limbs are common, and only a cushion left by chance on the ground saved Flimnap's neck a year or two before Gulliver's arrival. There is a second, grander trial too, in which the Emperor and his first minister hold a stick while candidates leap over it and creep under it, the nimblest being rewarded with coloured silk girdles that half the court wears about its middle. Gulliver invents an entertainment of his own. He has nine sticks planted in a square, ties four more across his ledges, stretches his handkerchief tight as a drum head, and lifts twenty-four mounted cavalry onto this little parade ground, where they skirmish, discharge blunt arrows, charge, retreat. The Emperor is so delighted that the show is repeated for days, and the Empress is held in her chair to watch. Only once does a fiery horse punch a hole in the handkerchief and throw its rider, and Gulliver sets them all down safely and repairs the cloth. Meanwhile, riders report a strange black substance lying in a field, hollow within, wide as the royal bedchamber. It is his lost hat, and wagoners drag it back by hooks bored in the brim. Two days later the emperor has troops drawn up to march between his legs, while he stands like a colossus, three thousand foot and a thousand horse with drums beating and colours flying. At last his endless petitions are debated in full council. Only Skiris Bulgolum, the high admiral and his self-declared mortal enemy, opposes him, and he insists on drafting the conditions himself. Gulliver swears to nine articles, holding his right foot in his left hand, promising not to walk in cornfields, to carry messengers, to help move stones, to survey the coast, and to fight against Blefuscu. In return he is fed as much as seventeen twenty-four subjects, a figure their mathematicians calculated from his height. His first use of liberty is to ask permission to see the capital, Melendo, and it is granted on condition that he damage nothing. The people are warned by proclamation to stay indoors. He steps over the western gate and edges sideways through the two chief streets in his short waistcoat, afraid his coat skirts will sweep the tiles off the roofs, and every garret window is crammed with faces. The city is an exact square, five hundred feet along each wall, its two great streets five feet wide, its lanes too narrow for him to enter, its houses three to five stories high, and its population reckoned at five hundred thousand. The palace stands at the crossing of the two streets, and though he may step over its outer wall, the inner gates are only eighteen inches high. So he spends three days cutting timber in the royal park, and makes himself two stools, then walks back through the city carrying them, standing on one and lifting the other over the roofs, stepping from stool to stool into the innermost court. Lying on his side, he looks in at the open middle windows and sees the empress and the young princes among their attendants. She smiles very graciously and puts her hand out of the window for him to kiss. He promises fuller descriptions in a larger work he says is almost ready for the press, and keeps to the events of his own nine months there. A fortnight after his release, Reldrasol, the principal secretary for private affairs and a man who has done him many good offices, comes privately to his house and asks to be held in his hand while they talk. The Empire, he explains, suffers two great evils. At home there are two furious parties, the high heels and the low heels, distinguished by their shoe fashion. The high heels are more numerous, but the emperor employs only low heels, and his own imperial heels are lower than any at court. The heir is suspected of leaning towards the high heels, since one of his heels is higher than the other and gives him a hobble. Abroad the island of Blefuscu is preparing to invade. Their philosophers doubt Gulliver's claims of other nations of his size and think he dropped from the moon. The war has raged thirty-six moons over which end of an egg to break, since a royal edict, prompted by a cut finger, commanded the smaller end. Eleven thousand people have died rather than obey. Gulliver refuses to meddle in parties, but offers to defend the state at the hazard of his life. Blefuscu lies across a channel only 800 yards wide, and Gulliver keeps away from that coast so the enemy will not learn of him. He asks the seaman how deep the channel runs, learns it is about six feet at the middle, and forms a plan. Hidden behind a hillock with his pocket spy glass, he counts about fifty men of war and many transports at anchor. He orders cable and iron bars, trebles the cable, twists the bars into hooks, and fifty hooks to fifty cables. Then stripped to his leather jerkin, he wades and swims across half an hour before high water. The enemy leap overboard and swim ashore in terror. As he fastens a hook to the prow of every ship, thousands of arrows stick in his hands and face, and he saves his eyes only by remembering the spectacles hidden in his private pocket, which he ties on and works behind. When the cables will not budge because of the anchors, he cuts every anchor cable with his knife, taking two hundred more shots in the face, then gathers the knot and hauls fifty warships away behind him. The Blafoscudians shriek in despair. He picks out the arrows, rubs on the ointment given him at his arrival, and wades back, holding the cable high and crying long life to the Emperor of Lilliput, who creates him a Nardak on the spot, the highest title they have. But when the Emperor talks of seizing the rest of the fleet, reducing Glafuscu to a province and forcing every subject to break the small end of the egg, Gulliver refuses outright to help bring a free and brave people into slavery. The wisest ministers agree with him, the emperor never forgives him, and an intrigue begins that will nearly destroy him within two months. Ambassadors arrive from Blafuscu, peace is concluded on hard terms, and Gulliver quietly does them good offices. When he asks leave to visit their master, permission comes very coldly, for Flimnap and Bolgolam have called his friendliness with the ambassadors a mark of disaffection. So begins his education in courts and ministers. Then one midnight the cry of fire brings him running to the palace, where the Empress's apartment is ablaze because a maid of honour fell asleep over a romance. Buckets the size of thimbles do nothing, and his coat is at home, so he puts the fire out by an expedient of his own in three minutes. But touching the royal family is treason, his pardon never comes, and the Empress vows revenge. Gulliver pauses his adventures to describe the little world about him. Everything keeps exact proportion horses and oxen four or five inches high, sheep an inch and a half, geese like sparrows, and creatures so small he cannot see them at all, though the lily putions see near objects with wonderful sharpness. He has watched a cook plucking a lark no larger than a fly, and a girl threading an invisible needle. They write neither across nor down, but slanting from corner to corner, and they bury their dead head downwards, expecting the flat earth to turn over at the resurrection, so they will rise standing on their feet. Their original laws please him greatly. A false accuser is put to an ignominious death, and the innocent man is paid four times over. Fraud is punished more severely than theft because vigilance can guard goods against a thief, but honesty has no defence against cunning. When Gulliver once excused a swindler by calling it only a breach of trust, the emperor thought him monstrous, and he was ashamed. Obedience is rewarded as well as disobedience punished, so their image of justice has six eyes, a bag of open gold in one hand, and a sheathed sword in the other. In choosing officers they prefer good morals to great abilities, holding that a well-meaning, ignorant man does less harm than a clever corrupt one, and no man who disbelieves in providence may hold office. Ingratitude is a capital crime. He notes carefully that the rope dancing and the leaping over sticks are corruptions introduced by the present Emperor's grandfather, not part of the old institution. Children are not trusted to their parents. Every town has public nurseries where boys and girls are sent at twenty moons and raised in honour, justice, courage, and love of country, seeing their parents only twice a year without whispering or sweetmeats, while cottagers keep their children at home to till the earth and begging is unknown. Then he turns to his own household. Two hundred semstresses make his shirts, measuring him by cord and reckoning from his thumb. Three hundred tailors raise a ladder to his neck and drop a plum line for his coat, and the result looks like patchwork all of one colour. Three hundred cooks feed him from little huts, waiters hauling dishes up on cords. One day the emperor, the empress, and the young princes come to dine on his table, and Flimnap watches sourly, afterwards telling his master how much this man mountain cost the treasury and advising that he be dismissed. Just as Gulliver prepares to pay his visit to Blefuscu, a friendly nobleman from the court, whom he had once helped in disgrace, arrives at his house at night in a close chair without sending his name. Gulliver puts the chair and its occupant in his pocket, dismisses the bearers, bolts his door, sets the chair on his table, and listens. For two months he learns, secret committees have been sitting, and the Emperor has now resolved. Bulgalaam the admiral, whose glory was eclipsed by the taking of the fleet, has joined with Flimnap the Treasurer, the General, the Chamberlain, and the Grand Justiciary to draw up articles of impeachment for treason. The nobleman reads them out. First, that under colour of putting out the fire in the Empress's apartment, he traitorously lifted her in his hands. Second, that having brought in the Blefuscutian fleet, he refused orders to seize the rest, destroy the big Endian exiles, and reduce that empire to a province, pretending an unwillingness to force consciences or destroy innocent lives. Third, that he aided and comforted the ambassadors of a late enemy. Fourth, that he intends a treasonous voyage to Blefuscu on nothing but a verbal license. In the debates the treasurer and admiral pressed for the most painful death, burning his house at night while twenty thousand archers shot poisoned arrows into his face, and servants smeared poison on his shirts. Rel Dressel, his true friend, proposed instead that his life be spared and only his eyes put out, arguing that blindness would not lessen his strength, that courage grows when danger is hidden, and that he might see well enough through the eyes of ministers. Bolgolam raged that his services were the aggravation of his crimes, that a man who could quench a fire might drown a palace, and that he must be a big Indian at heart. The treasurer worried about expense until it was privately agreed to blind him first and then starve him by degrees, keeping the starvation secret and leaving his skeleton as a monument. Within three days, Reldrasal will come to read the articles and announce the Emperor's great lenity, and twenty surgeons will shoot arrows into his eyeballs. Left alone, Gulliver weighs standing trial, remembers how state trials end, thinks of pelting the city to pieces with stones, then rejects it for the sake of his oath and the honours he received. Instead he writes to Rel Dressal, seizes a man of war, tows his clothes across the channel, and is received with royal courtesy at Blefuscu, saying nothing of his disgrace. Three days after reaching Blefuscu, wandering the northeast coast, Gulliver spies what looks like an overturned boat half a league out at sea, and wading closer he sees it is a real boat, driven from some ship by a tempest. He begs the Emperor of Blefuscu for twenty of his largest remaining vessels and three thousand seamen, and while they sail round he goes over land with cordage he has twisted himself. Out of his depth he can do nothing but swim behind and shove, resting until his chin is above water, then shoving again, until the ships can tow and he can push together. Two thousand men with ropes and engines turn the boat upright, and he finds it little damaged. Ten days of paddle making bring it to the royal port, where crowds gather at so prodigious a vessel. He asks leave to fit it out and depart, which is granted. Meanwhile, an envoy has come from Lilliput with a copy of the articles, demanding Gulliver be sent back bound hand and foot to lose his eyes, and threatening the loss of his title of Nardak. The Emperor of Blifuscu take three days and answers with civilities. Sending him bound is impossible. He owes him thanks for his good offices in the peace, and in any case a prodigious vessel has been found which will soon free both empires of so insupportable an encumbrance. He offers Gulliver his protection privately, but Gulliver, resolved never again to trust princes or ministers, begs to be excused and would rather venture the ocean than be a cause of quarrel. Five hundred workmen quilt thirteen folds of linen into two sails. A great stone serves as an anchor. Three hundred cows are rendered for tallow, and the ship carpenters help smooth his masts and oars. He takes leave of the royal family with fifty purses of gold and the emperor's full length picture, stores a hundred oxen and three hundred sheep, and carries six cows, two bulls, and ewes and lambs alive to breed at home. He sails on the twenty fourth of September, seventeen oh one, sights an island, then a sail, and joyfully recognizes English colours. Aboard the merchantman he pockets his cattle, and the captain thinks him raving until Gulliver produces the little beasts and the gold. They reach the downs in April, having lost one sheep to rats, and his herd grazes at Greenwich and is later sold for six hundred pounds. After two months with his wife and children, he cannot resist the sea and ships out again for Surat. Two months at home is all Gulliver can bear, and in June of 1702 he sails from the downs again bound for Surat. They winter at the Cape of Good Hope with a leak and a sick captain, past the coast of Madagascar, and are then caught by unnatural winds that blow for twenty days and drive them far off any known reckoning. A monstrous storm follows, with all the rope work and sail handling a sailor could name, and when it dies they have been carried some five hundred leagues eastward, so that the oldest hand aboard cannot say where in the world they are. The ship is sound and the crew healthy, but their water is nearly gone. On the sixteenth of June 1703, a boy at the topmast sights land, and the longboat is sent with a dozen armed men and casks. Gulliver goes along to see the country. Finding no spring, he walks a mile alone over barren rock, then turns back to see his shipmates rowing for their lives, with a huge creature wading after them, taking prodigious strides, held back only by the pointed rocks. He runs the other way and climbs a hill, and everything he sees is monstrous. Haygrass twenty feet high, standing corn forty feet, a hedge of a hundred and twenty feet, a stile with steps six feet apart. Then a man as tall as a church steeple appears, calls out in a voice he first mistakes for thunder, and seven labourers come with reaping hooks as big as six scythes each. Trapped among stalks flattened by rain, with the beards of fallen ears piercing his flesh, Gulliver lies down between two ridges, thinks of his widow and fatherless children, and reflects bitterly that nothing is great or little except by comparison. When a reaper's foot comes within ten yards, he screams, and the giant stops, peers, and lifts him between finger and thumb sixty feet into the air. Gulliver keeps still, raises his hands in supplication and speaks. Charmed, the man puts him in his coat lappet and carries him to the farmer who owns the field. The farmer blows his hair aside, sets him on all fours, and watches him bow, kneel, and offer a purse of gold that means nothing to him, then carries him home in a handkerchief. The wife screams as at a spider, then grows tender. At dinner he uses his own knife and fork, drinks a health from a three-gallon cup, is snatched up by an archboy of ten and rescued by the father, and is unnerved by a purring cat larger than an ox, and a bawling baby that gets his head in its mouth. Alone in the mistress's bed, he kills a rat the size of a mastiff with his hanger. The farmer's wife has a daughter of nine, clever with a needle and skillful at dressing her doll, and she and her mother fit up the doll's cradle for Gulliver, setting it in a drawer on a hanging shelf out of reach of rats. That becomes his bed for as long as he stays with them. She sews him seven shirts of cloth coarser than sackcloth and washes them herself, and she teaches him the language, naming everything he points at, so that within days he can ask for what he wants. She is good natured and being little for her age not above forty feet high. She gives him the name Grildrig, which the whole kingdom takes up, and he calls her Glumdal Klitch, his little nurse. To her he owes his preservation in that country, and they are never parted while he is there. Word spreads that the farmer has found a creature the size of a splacknuck, but shaped exactly like a man, which walks upright, comes when called, and speaks a little language of its own. An old miserly neighbour comes to see for himself, puts on spectacles that make his eyes look like two full moons, and is offended when Gulliver laughs. It is this man who gives the cursed advice that Gulliver be shown for money on market day. Glumdal Clitch, having wormed the plan out of her mother, weeps with shame, afraid the rough crowds will squeeze him to death, and remembering how her parents once promised her a lamb and then sold it to a butcher. Gulliver is calmer, hoping still for liberty and reflecting that even a king in his condition could not avoid the indignity. So he is carried in a close box with air holes to the next town twenty two miles off, shaken like a ship in a storm, while a crier advertises the wonder at the sign of the green eagle. Set on a table in a great room with his nurse on a stool beside him, he walks, bows, answers her questions, drinks from a thimble, flourishes his hanger like a fencer, and handles a straw as a pike. Twelve companies of thirty see him that day until he is half dead with weariness, and a schoolboy's hazelnut, nearly as big as a pumpkin, only just misses his head. Neighbours come to the house too, and his master charges the full price for a single family. Finding him profitable, the farmer sets out in August for the capital, three thousand miles away, with Glumdolklich carrying him in a lined box on her lap. Ten weeks and eighteen towns later they reach Lor Brulgrude Pride of the Universe, where he is shown ten times a day and learns his letters from a little book of hers. The daily labours wear Gulliver down until he has lost his appetite and is nearly a skeleton, and his master, expecting him to die, decides to make what he can of him quickly. Just then a gentleman usher arrives from court, summoning him for the diversion of the Queen and her ladies. She is delighted with his manners. When he begs to kiss her foot, she holds out her little finger instead, and he embraces it and touches it to his lip. Asked whether he would like to live at court, he answers that he is his master's slave, but would gladly devote his life to her service. The farmer, sure he cannot last a month, sells him for a thousand pieces of gold, and Gulliver's one condition is that Glumdal Klitch be taken into her Majesty's service as his nurse and instructor. The girl cannot hide her joy. When her father leaves, Gulliver gives him only a slight bow and tells the Queen that he owes his late master nothing but the fact that he did not dash out his brains. Carried to the giant king, he is at first taken for a splack nuck, then for a piece of clockwork, until his rational answers astonish the monarch. Three great scholars examine him, dispute how such a helpless creature could feed itself, refuse to call him a dwarf, since the queen's own dwarf is nearly thirty feet high, and gravely conclude that he is a freak of nature. The farmer is questioned separately, the king begins to believe the story, and Gulliver is given his own quarters. The Queen's cabinet maker builds him a wooden bedchamber sixteen feet square with sash windows and a lock against rats, and he is dressed in the thinnest silks in the kingdom. The queen cannot dine without him, and sets his little table at her elbow, though the sight of her swallowing a lark's wing bones and all, or drinking a hogshead at a draught, sickens him at first. Every Wednesday, their Sabbath, the royal family dine together, and the king questions him about Europe, then takes him up laughing and asks whether he is a Whig or a Tory, remarking how contemptible human grandeur is when mimicked by such diminutive insects who have their titles, their nests, their loves, and their betrayals. Gulliver burns with indignation, then admits that a looking glass makes him doubt his own dignity. The Queen's dwarf torments him worst, swaggering and jeering, dropping him into a bowl of cream and wedging his legs into a marrowbone until he is whipped and given away. Flies as big as larks plague him, and he cuts twenty wasps out of the air, keeping their inch and a half stings as curiosities. Gulliver pauses to describe the kingdom, though he never travelled above two thousand miles around the capital, since the queen went no further when she accompanied the king on his progresses. The whole realm runs some six thousand miles in length and three to five thousand in breadth, from which he concludes that European geographers are badly mistaken in supposing nothing but open sea between Japan and California. There must, he argues, be a balance of earth to counterpoise the great continent of Tartary, and mapmakers ought to join this vast tract to the northwest parts of America, a service he offers to assist with himself. The country is a peninsula, closed on the northeast by a ridge of mountains thirty miles high and impassable because of the volcanoes on their tops, so that nobody knows what sort of mortals live beyond them. The other three sides are ocean, but there is not one seaport in the kingdom. The river mouths bristle with pointed rocks, and the sea runs too rough for their boats, so these people are cut off entirely from the rest of the world. Their rivers, however, teem with fish, while seafish are the same size as in Europe and reckoned not worth catching. Now and then a whale is dashed against the rocks, and the common people feed on it heartily. He saw one at the king's table, brought up in a hamper as a rarity, though its bigness seemed to disgust the king. There are fifty-one cities, near a hundred wool towns and many villages. Lord Brulgrud straddles a river, holds eighty thousand houses and six hundred thousand people, and measures some fifty-four English miles in length, as Gulliver worked out by pacing the royal map, which was spread on the ground for him a hundred feet across. The palace is no regular building but a heap of them, seven miles round, with chief rooms two hundred and forty feet high. He rides out with Glumdal Clitch and her governess in a coach about the size of Westminster Hall, and the Queen has a smaller travelling closet built for him, twelve feet square with iron lattice windows, a hammock and screwed-down furniture, and two staples so a trusted servant can buckle it about his waist on horseback. When he is carried through town in an open sedan, crowds press round to see him. Curious to see the highest tower in the kingdom, he comes away disappointed, for it rises only three thousand feet, no great matter in proportion, though its hundred foot walls and marble statues are magnificent. He measured a fallen stone finger at four feet and an inch. The king's kitchen is vaulted six hundred feet high, and he keeps six hundred horses of fifty-four to sixty feet. For all the kindness shown him, Gulliver's smallness kept landing him in ridiculous scrapes. Glumdal Clitch often carried him into the court gardens in his smaller box and set him down to walk, and once, before the Queen's dwarf was sent away, Gulliver could not resist a joke comparing that spiteful little fellow to the dwarf apple trees they stood among. The rogue waited until he walked beneath one, then shook it, and a dozen apples, each near as big as a bristol barrel, came tumbling about his ears. One struck his back as he stooped and knocked him flat on his face, though he begged that the dwarf be pardoned since he had given the provocation. Another day a sudden shower of hail beat him to the ground and bruised him like tennis balls, so that he crawled for shelter behind a border of lemon thyme and could not go abroad for ten days. A hailstone there, he reckoned, was eighteen hundred times the size of a European one. Worse still, a chief gardener's little white dog found him lying alone, carried him gently in its mouth to its master, and set him down unhurt, and the frightened gardener brought him back to his nurse, who hushed the whole business up for fear of the Queen's anger. He confessed too the mishaps he had hidden from her, a kite stooping at him, until he drew his hanger and ran under an aspalia, a full neck deep into a fresh molehill, and a broken shin got against a snail shell while he walked alone thinking of poor England. Small birds ignored him entirely, a thrush even snatching cake from his hand until he felled a linnet with a cudgel and was nearly beaten senseless by its wings before a servant wrung its neck. The Queen, hearing him talk of the sea, had a pleasure boat made for him, and a great pitch trough three hundred feet long placed in an outer room, where he rowed and sailed while the ladies gave him a gale with their fans. Once he slipped through the governess's fingers and hung in the air, saved only by a large pin in her dress. Another time a huge frog smuggled in with the water, climbed aboard, and had to be banged out with an oar. His worst danger came from a kitchen clerk's monkey which dragged him from his box, carried him onto the roof, and fed him like an infant until a footman brought him down, bruised for a fortnight. Gulliver found other ways to amuse himself and to please his royal keepers. Attending the King's morning levy, he watched him shaved with a razor twice as long as a scythe, and once begged the barber for the larva, out of which he picked forty or fifty of the strongest stumps of beard. Cutting a piece of fine wood like the back of a comb and boring holes with a borrowed needle, he fixed the stumps in and made himself a very tolerable comb, his own being broken in the teeth. He also had the Queen's woman save the combings of her Majesty's hair, and with the cabinet maker's help wove them into two chair frames, after the manner of cane chairs at home. The Queen kept them in her cabinet and showed them as wonders. From the same hairs he made a neat little purse five feet long with her Majesty's name in gold letters, which he gave to Glumdal Klitch, though it was too weak to carry heavy coins. The court concerts deafened him, louder than all the drums and trumpets of an army, until he learned to shut himself in his box and draw the curtains. Wishing to play an English tune, he faced a spinette nearly sixty feet long with keys a foot wide, so he had two round cudgels made, padded the ends with a mouse skin, and ran sideways along a bench banging the keys, playing a jig to the great satisfaction of both their majesties, though it was the most violent exercise he ever underwent. Giant King often had him set on his cabinet to talk, and Gulliver ventured to say that reason did not grow with the bulk of the body, and that being And ants were counted more industrious than larger creatures. Invited to describe England, he spoke proudly of its two islands and three kingdoms, its parliament of noble peers and holy bishops, its commons freely chosen, its judges treasury, forces and pastimes, and a hundred years of history. Over six audiences the king took notes and then returned with searching questions about how lords were created and bribed, how voters were bought, how lawsuits dragged, how a kingdom could run out of its estate, and why a free people kept a standing army in peacetime. At last, stroking him gently, he called it an admirable panegyric that proved ignorance and vice, the qualifications of a legislator, and pronounced Gulliver's countryman the most pernicious little odious vermin ever suffered to crawl upon the earth. Only an extreme love of truth, Gulliver says, could have made him repeat such a verdict, for his resentment was always turned into ridicule, and he had to sit patiently while his beloved country was so injuriously treated. He admits he artfully dodged many of the king's questions and gave every point a kinder turn than strict truth allowed, hiding the frailties of his political mother and setting her beauties in the best light. Still hoping to win favour, he told the king of a marvellous invention of three or four hundred years standing, a powder that the smallest spark would kindle, which rammed into hollow tubes of brass or iron, would drive balls of lead with such force as nothing could withstand, destroying whole ranks of an army, battering down walls, sinking ships with a thousand men aboard, and thrown in hollow iron balls into besieged cities, ripping up pavements and dashing out brains. He knew the cheap and common ingredients, he said, and could direct the king's workmen to make tubes a hundred feet long, twenty or thirty of which would level the strongest town in the kingdom, or destroy the capital if it ever disputed his commands. He offered this as a small tribute of thanks for royal favour. The giant king was struck with horror, amazed that so impotent and grovelling an insect could entertain such inhuman ideas and speak of blood and desolation unmoved, and swore that some evil genius, enemy to mankind, must have first contrived such engines. He would sooner lose half his kingdom than be privy to the secret, and commanded Gulliver, as he valued his life, never to mention it again. Gulliver blames this on narrow principles and short views, for these people had never reduced politics to a science. When he mentioned that several thousand books had been written among us on the art of government, it only gave the king a mean opinion of European understanding. That monarch despised all mystery and intrigue, confined statecraft to common sense, justice, and the speedy settling of causes, and held that whoever made two ears of corn grow where one grew before, deserved better of mankind than the whole race of politicians. Their learning ran only to morality, history, poetry, and useful mathematics. No law might exceed in words the letters of their twenty-two-letter alphabet, and to write a comment on a law was a capital crime. Their printing was ancient, but their libraries small, and Gulliver read from a movable ladder before propped folios. Their militia of tradesmen and farmers, once drawn out twenty-five thousand strong, flashed their swords like lightning. Gulliver always kept a strong hope of recovering his liberty, though he could see no way to it, for his had been the first ship ever driven within sight of that coast, and the king had ordered any other to be dragged ashore in a cart to the capital. Petted as he was, the life ill became the dignity of humankind. He longed for people he could talk to on even terms and streets where he need not fear being trodden on like a frog. In his third year, he and Glumdalklitch attended the king and queen on a progress to the south coast, and at a palace eighteen miles from the sea the girl fell ill and kept her chamber. Longing to see the ocean, Gulliver pretended to be worse than he was and got leave to take the air with a favourite page. His nurse consented most unwillingly, charging the boy strictly and bursting into tears as if she foreboded what was coming. Set down among the rocks, Gulliver lay in his hammock and slept while the page wandered off after birds' eggs. He woke to a violent pull on the ring of his box, felt himself borne high through the air, heard wings clapping, and knew some eagle meant to drop him on a rock like a tortoise. Then came buffets, a headlong fall, and a squash louder than Niagara. His box floated five feet deep in the sea, kept upright by its iron plates and tight enough to keep the water out. For four hours he expected death until a grating at the staples told him he was being towed. Standing on an unscrewed chair he waved his handkerchief through the roof hole and called out, and at last an English voice asked if anybody was below. A carpenter saw the passage, and the English captain who rescued him gave him a cordial in his own bed, thinking him mad when he begged that the closet be hauled aboard hole. His goods were drawn out and the hull let sink. Over supper he told his story, proved it with his cabinet of curiosities, the beard stump comb, footlong pins, wasp stings, the queen's ring and mouse skin breeches, and forced only a giant footman's tooth upon his host. They reached the downs in June, and riding home he shouted at travellers to stand aside, stooped like a goose under his own doorway, and thought his wife and daughter starved to nothing until habit wore off and his wife swore he should never go to sea again. Looking back over my two voyages, I think the deepest thing they may suggest is that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison. I said as much myself while lying terrified between two ridges of corn, and I believe it is the lesson the whole story quietly presses upon me. Among the Liliputians I was a mountain, able to drag an imperial fleet behind me. In Brodingnag I was a plaything squeezed by a child, dropped into a bowl of cream, carried off by a monkey, and finally by an eagle. Perhaps the point is that my importance was never really mine at all, but only an accident of the company I happened to keep. I think the tale also gently mocks the seriousness with which people hold their quarrels. The Liliputians divided themselves over high heels and low heels, and slaughtered thousands over which end of an egg ought to be broken, when the sacred words merely said the convenient end. Told at that scale it seems absurd, yet I cannot help suspecting the story means me to wonder whether our own disputes look any wiser to an outside eye. Similarly, when great offices are won by dancing on ropes and creeping under sticks, I believe the narrative may be warning that merit and advancement are not always the same thing, and that ministers may strain and fall for the amusement of a prince rather than the good of a people. There is also, I think, a caution about gratitude and power. I extinguished a fire, refused to enslave a free and brave people, and was rewarded with articles of impeachment and a proposal to put out my eyes, all wrapped up in praises of the Emperor's lenity. I confess I learned from that never to put much confidence in princes or ministers where I could avoid it, and I suspect the story values plain honesty above courtly cleverness. When the King of Broding Nag called my countrymen odious vermin, I was stung, yet I believe the account may be inviting readers to weigh his simplicity against our refinement. He would rather lose half his kingdom than learn the secret of gunpowder, and he thought a man who made two ears of corn grow where one grew before deserved better of mankind than all politicians together. Perhaps that is the moral I take away, that greatness may lie in usefulness and mercy rather than in bulk, conquest, or clever government, and that pride is chiefly a trick of scale. And so, dear listener, we furl our sails and drop anchor here. What you have heard today was but a summarised version, a chart, if you will, rather than the voyage itself. To read Swift's own words in full would take you many hours, hours spent among the ribbons and factions of Lilliput, hours in the pocket of a brodding Nagian farmer, hours listening to a giant king dismantle, with a few polite questions, the whole proud edifice of European civilization. Those hours are worth every minute. I have given you the shape of the thing. Swift gives you the sting. The satire is sharper on the page, the humour drier, the cruelty more sudden, and the moments where you realise he is not writing about Liliputians at all. Those moments land far harder when you come upon them yourself. So if anything today caught your ear, do seek out the original. It has waited three hundred years for you. It will wait a little longer, but it need not. We aim to put a new episode out at least once a week every Sunday, so that it's sitting ready for you at the start of the working week, for the commute, the dog walk, the washing up, or whatever quiet corner of the day you can steal for a story. Initially, though, because I have a number of book summaries already written for a different purpose, I am probably able to put out new episodes every two or three days. The show's email address is in the show notes, and we genuinely love hearing from you. Tell us what you thought, tell us where I went wrong, and above all, tell us which classics you'd like me to read next. Every suggestion gets read, and a good many of them end up as episodes. I have been Roger Braveheart, and this has been the Twig Podcast. And now, in the manner of our author, I have here given thee, gentle listener, a faithful history of my voyage among the very small and the very great, wherein I have concealed nothing, and invented rather less than most travellers do. If I have found mankind to be a ridiculous creature, proud in a nutshell and vain in the palm of a giant's hand, I beg thee, remember that I count myself among the number. Take thou thy leave of me now, and mind the ships in the harbour, for I am resolved to put to sea again upon the next Sabbath, and I shall be glad of thy company. Farewell.