Lemuel Gulliver was an English surgeon, publican, mariner and misanthrope, author of an account of his adventures entitled Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several ships, agented for publication by his maternal relative Jonathan Swift (the latter originally using the alias of 'Richard Sympson').
Gulliver, a relative of the pirate and author William Dampier, suffered a number of misadventures in his career at sea, being variously shipwrecked or abandoned or cast away on purpose. In his first voyage he discovered two islands populated by humans only an inch or so high; in his second, he encountered a reverse situation in a land of giants; in his third, he visited a succession of ever-stranger and even-more legendary places in the far East - Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdrubdrib, and Japan - and finally, in his fourth voyage, he found a land populated by talking horses who successfully convinced him of their innate superiority and mankind's disgusting and base natural state.
According to the research of Dennis Power, in his article The Magnificent Gordons and their Swift Kin, Gulliver's grandfather was a distant relative of Lord Byron (both being descendents of the sixth Baron). Mr. Powers proposed the theory that Gulliver had the ability to transport himself to other universes, where wonders like tiny men or giants could live without breaking the mundane laws of physics, when in danger, and that he was the ancestor of other men with similar apparent abilities.
In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, it is revealed that Gulliver lived to a fantastic age, and revisited many of the far-flung scenes of his youth in company of the League of the time.
External Links