Gulliver's Travels (Swift)/Part 3/Chapter 4
from the Collection âGulliver's Travels. Part 3â
The division of this summary into sections is editorial.
After two months on the flying island of Laputa, Gulliver wanted to leave. Its people had not mistreated him, but they valued mathematics and music above all other knowledge and regarded him with contempt.
A friend at court helps Gulliver leave
Gulliver found the islanders so absorbed in speculation that he could get reasonable answers only from women, tradesmen, attendants and court pages. His preference for their company lowered him further in the courtâs estimation.
One sympathetic lord, a relative of the king, listened attentively to Gulliverâs accounts of Europe. Though capable and honourable, he was considered stupid at court because he was poor at music and mathematics.
At Gulliverâs request, the lord reluctantly obtained permission for him to depart. On 16 February, the king and the lord each gave Gulliver a gift worth about two hundred pounds; the lord also supplied a letter of introduction. Gulliver was lowered from the island onto the mainland of Balnibarbi and walked to its capital, Lagado.
Munodi shows Gulliver the country
The letter brought Gulliver to Lord Munodi, who received him hospitably and gave him rooms in his house. Munodi had once governed Lagado, but ministers had secured his dismissal for supposed incompetence.
The next day Munodi drove his guest through the city and its outskirts. Gulliver saw ruined houses, ragged people and labourers working fertile ground on which he could see neither corn nor grass. When he criticised the apparent misery and useless activity, Munodi cautioned him that he had not been there long enough to judge.
Munodiâs own city house was magnificent and orderly. The following morning they set out for his country estate, passing more strangely worked, barren land. After several hours they entered a flourishing district of neat farmhouses, vineyards, fields and meadows. Munodi sighed as he told Gulliver that his estate began there: his neighbours mocked him for managing it in the old way.
That evening, after Gulliver had admired the estate house and gardens, Munodi warned that he might have to demolish and refashion them to avoid further criticism and royal displeasure. He then explained how the kingdomâs new methods had arisen.
The cost of the projectorsâ schemes
About forty years earlier, visitors to Laputa had returned with a little mathematics and grand plans to remake the arts, sciences and trades. They obtained royal authority to found an Academy of Projectors in Lagado, and similar institutions spread across the kingdom. Their promised innovations included faster building, effortless manufacture and greatly increased harvests.
Munodi explained the result to Gulliver:
The only inconvenience is, that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection, and in the mean time, the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses in ruins, and the people without food or clothes.
Rather than abandon their schemes, the projectors pursued them more fiercely. Munodi and the few other landowners who kept to established practices were denounced as ignorant enemies of improvement.
Munodi pointed out a ruined mill on a nearby mountainside. Some seven years earlier, projectors had persuaded him to replace his useful riverside mill with one supplied by water pumped uphill. Under pressure from friends and already out of favour at court, he had agreed. A hundred men worked for two years before the scheme failed; the projectors blamed Munodi and continued promoting the same experiment elsewhere, with equally disappointing results.
A few days later they returned to Lagado. Munodi wanted Gulliver to see the academy but, knowing his own poor reputation there, arranged for a friend to accompany him. He presented Gulliver as an eager, trusting admirer of projectsâan account Gulliver admitted was partly true, since he too had been a projector in his youth.