Why Blefuscians had no knowledge of Gulliver's existence?
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
Lilliput and Blefuscu are two fictional island nations that appear in the first part of the 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. The two islands are neighbours in the South Indian Ocean, separated by a channel 800 yards (730 m) wide. Both are inhabited by tiny people who are about one-twelfth the height of ordinary human beings. Both kingdoms are empires, i.e. realms ruled by a self-styled emperor. The capital of Lilliput is Mildendo. In some pictures, the islands are arranged like an egg, as a reference to their egg-dominated histories and cultures.[citation needed]
Swift gives the location of Lilliput and Blefuscu in Part I of Gulliver's Travels, both in the text and with a map, though neither corresponds to real-world geography, even as it was known in Swift's time. The text states that Gulliver's ship (the Antelope) was bound for the East Indies when it was caught in "a violent storm to the northwest of Van Diemen's Land" (Tasmania). He gives the latitude as 30°2'S, though the longitude is unspecified.[1] Likewise, the map depicts Lilliput and Blefuscu south of "Hogs Island" (Simeulue), off northwest Sumatra, and northwest of Van Diemen's Land, though the map is considerably foreshortened; Van Diemen's Land is shown south of the Sunda Strait, some 10° (700 miles) east of Hogs Island, whereas Tasmania is actually some 40° (2,500 miles) east of that meridian.[2] Neither the text nor the map make reference to New Holland (Western Australia), which had been discovered in 1644,[3] some 80 years before publication, and was well-documented in the maps of Swift's time.[4] While Australia's Cocos (Keeling) Islands are in roughly the right map location south-west of Sumatra, have two inhabited islands, and would have been known of in Swift's day, they are at entirely the wrong latitude.[citation needed]
Because the area indicated by Swift is actually occupied by Australia, and on the basis of other textual evidence, some authors have concluded that Swift intended to place Lilliput in the Pacific Ocean, to the northeast, not northwest, of Van Diemen's Land.[5][6] However, none of the sea routes to the East Indies, Gulliver's stated destination, required ships to round Van Diemen's Land; the northern routes, via India or Ceylon, avoided Australia altogether, while the southern (Brouwer) route, taking advantage of the Roaring Forties, turned northeast in mid-ocean precisely to avoid New Holland, though the number of shipwrecks on that coast from the period attests to the dangers of overshooting the turning point. Swift was sceptical about the reliability of the travel literature of his day, and it is suggested that the unlikely geographic descriptions parody many of these works (described by Percy Adams as "travel lies").[7]