Thursday, May 15, 2014
Cartography
In Chapter IV, Gulliver describes just how much Europeans must have missed in the area of cartography, saying, "...Our geographers of Europe are in a great error, by supposing nothing but sea between Japan and California" (79). Cartography, or map making by combining science aesthetics and technique, creates a spatial representation of land and water. The question that this begins to ask is whether the cartography of the world differs between Europeans, Lilliputians, and Brobdingnagians. Do the Lilliputians see the world as a whole 12 times larger than we do? Have they even traversed the entire world or do they prefer the safety of their homes? Conversely do the Brobdingnagians see the world as one twelfth that which we do? And have they traversed the world as well? It is understandable how the Lilliputians were never discovered, due to their minuscule, but what about the Brobdingnagians? Being 12 times our size, why were they just discovered by Gulliver in the early 1700's? Why did Magellan not run into Brobdingnag when he circumnavigated the world, as based on Gulliver's description it is relatively close?
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Although Magellan had circumnavigated the globe in his 1519-1522 (at least, the remnants of his fleet after his death at the Battle of Mactan did), few explorers dared to sail across the expanse of the Pacific. Also, it is clear that Magellan's path across the Pacific still left a large amount of space for a hypothetical civilization like the Brobdingnagians to exist.
ReplyDeletehttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/Magellan_Elcano_Circumnavigation-en.svg
Sailors were also unable to accurately determine their longitude. Until 1730, the heavens (i.e. stars) and a ship clock (clock that would keep running its time) were used in conjunction to calculate longitude. It was thus unreliable to map long voyages over expansive tracts of ocean because of the inaccuracies encountered when keeping the ship clock running (no mechanism was found to keep good accuracy until the invention of the marine chronometer in 1730 by John Harrison).
It wasn't until the explorations of James Cook (in conjunction with the relatively novel marine chronometer) that many of the islands of the Pacific were discovered and explored. From 1766 to 1779, Cook explored the Pacific region and published in his journals to the European world his findings of New Zealand, Australia, Tahiti, Hawaii, and much more.
Swift published this book in 1726, a mere four years before the advent of the marine chronometer.
I agree with Cody in that other sailors were frightened by traveling to certain places. Multiple times, Gulliver mentions that he sails through the Cape of Good Hope, a region at the southern tip of Africa that was very dangerous due to the strong currents that occurred there. Since a vast number of sailors were afraid to pass through the cape and through the Pacific, this would inhibit many explorers from discovering Lilliput, which is located near Indonesia.
ReplyDeleteAdding on to this, though sailors were afraid of traveling to certain places, the sailors do not know of the conditions of the sea. The weather is certainly unpredictable in the vast ocean. Who knows what could potentially happen out there. A ship may capsize at any time because of weather conditions. Sailors during this time did not have the technology needed for navigation which is another reason why sailors were not able to discover some of these places.
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