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Summary of Gulliver’s Travels Part 3 Chapter 1
Summary of Gulliver’s Travels Part 3 Chapter 1
The narrator sets out on his third voyage and is taken by pirates. The malice of a Dutchman is described. The narrator arrives at an island and is received into Laputa.
Gulliver had been home in England only ten days when he was visited by a former captain of his, William Robinson, who offered him the position of a surgeon on his ship that would sail for the East Indies in two months’ time. Gulliver agreed and convinced his wife that this was a good opportunity and set off to sea again on ‘The Hopewell’. Upon reaching the port of Tonquin, the captain, who had to stay ashore, sent a sloop with a crew of fourteen under Gulliver’s leadership, to trade with some nearby islands.
This small boat was attacked and captured by two pirate ships. The Japanese pirates were accompanied by a Dutchman, who told the English that he wanted them to be tied up and thrown into the sea. Gulliver, who spoke Dutch, begged the pirate to let them go, but his requests and his reference to the Dutchman as a ‘brother Christian’ seemed only to make the Dutchman angrier. A Japanese pirate captain reassured them they would not die and decided to split Gulliver’s crew between their two ships. Gulliver told the Dutchman that he was surprised to find more mercy in a heathen than in a Christian. At his words the Dutchman grew angry and punished Gulliver by setting him adrift in a small canoe with only four days’ worth of food.
Gulliver rowed to some tiny local islands nearby, but he couldn’t find much food or shelter on any of them. While he was standing on the fifth and last island, Gulliver saw a mysterious shadow blot out the sun for some time. He took out his telescope, looked up and saw that it was a floating island covered with people. He was baffled by this floating island and shouted up to its inhabitants. They lowered the island and sent down a chain by which he was drawn up.