GULLIVER'S TRAVELS

_VOYAGE TO LILLIPUT_

By JONATHAN SWIFT

ADAPTED BY JOHN LANG




I

GULLIVER'S BIRTH AND EARLY VOYAGES


Two hundred years ago, a great deal of the world as we now know it was
still undiscovered; there were yet very many islands, small and great,
on which the eyes of white men had never looked, seas in which nothing
bigger than an Indian canoe had ever sailed.

A voyage in those days was not often a pleasant thing, for ships then
were very bluff-bowed and slow-sailing, and, for a long voyage, very
ill-provided with food. There were no tinned meats two hundred years
ago, no luxuries for use even in the cabin. Sailors lived chiefly on
salt junk, as hard as leather, on biscuit that was generally as much
weevil as biscuit, and the water that they drank was evil-smelling and
bad when it had been long in the ship's casks.