Lemuel Gulliver, Map-Maker

Abstract:This article argues that Jonathan Swift, dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin, is the creator of the four maps and two diagrams that appeared in the first edition of Captain Lemuel Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations and in most editions since. Swift's enlightened critique of modernity accords mapping its central place in modern learning and enlightenment discovery. Mapping errors cluster in the third voyage, creating an uncorrectable map that disempowers the project of inevitable progress toward ever more perfect maps. A venerable and entrenched scholarly consensus holds that the bookseller/publisher added the maps and diagrams, employing a hack engraver to design them from reading the manuscript. External evidence indicates that Swift's manuscript contained more than the text of the voyages; the text itself references the diagrams. Internal evidence in the third voyage makes the received hypothesis untenable. No one making a map by reading the text could commit those errors. They are there for the reader to enjoy the visceral horror of finding the map go wrong.