Ten minutes later the people on the ground had shrunk to the size of toy soldiers and the houses to the size of a doll’s house. Twenty minutes later those toy soldiers had metomorphasised into ants and the dolls’ houses into small anthills.
‘Wow!’ said Alice finally finding the right description for such a word, as she looked down at the landscape as it sailed serenely beneath them, which by now resembled one of her grandmother’s patchwork quilts.
‘So whereabouts did you say we were heading?’ Old Father Time said, nervously peering over the edge of the basket as he held on to the side as tightly as his fingers would allow.
‘Well, somewhere in the direction of the south coast, which according to the latest maps is not a million miles from where the east coast used to be,’ Gulliver said as the wind blew his hair in and out of his eyes.
‘Refresh my memory, Gulliver, what did you say we we’re going to find there?’
‘Portsmouth harbour, which hopefully is full of boats,’ Gulliver said confidently while feeling anything but. Gulliver remembered his father once taking him to Portsmouth to see Lord Admiral Nelson’s all conquering ship HMS Victory. Gulliver also saw the 600-ton Tudor ship Mary Rose, or what was left of her, where she’d sat resting her weary bones on the seabed since 1545.
‘Yes, I knew there was a reason my memory was holding something back, I suffer from seasickness!’ Old Father Time said, pulling a face as if he had just been forced to swallow a tablespoon full of castor oil, presumably by Old Mother Time.
‘And after that?’ Alice enquired as Beagle jumped up at her as if to say ‘I want to see where we are going’.
‘Your guess is as good as mine!’ Gulliver said a little too truthfully.
‘So you’re guessing as to where this mythical bookshop is hidden!?’ Old Father Time said as he backed into the centre of the basket where he felt safer.
‘Of course I’m guessing, everybody’s just guessing. The Last Bookshop in the World is mythical like Atlantis, however, my guesses are educated,’ said Gulliver proudly as he pulled out a spyglass from his seemingly infinite pocket and started peering through it.
‘Good point, well made,’ Old Father Time said forcing a smile onto his lips. It seemed Old Father Time’s memory was playing tricks upon him again as he appeared to have forgotten Gulliver was a newcomer to this world.
‘Be careful you don’t fall overboard, Beagle, as I’m afraid we couldn’t afford a parachute!’ Gulliver said, as by now Beagle was in Alice’s arms peering over the edge of the basket to the land below.
‘What’s a parachute?’ said Alice turning to Gulliver, who turned in her direction without taking the spyglass from his eye, which produced the effect of a very blurred Alice.
Gulliver put down his spyglass and thought for a few seconds before answering, thinking how best to explain what a parachute was and how it worked.
‘It’s the latest invention by Leonardo Da Vinci,’ Gulliver said rather sketchily as he couldn’t remember who had actually invented it, mind you, Da Vinci had probably sketched something resembling a parachute at one time or another. A parachute is like a very large tablecloth which you cling to when falling from a great height. This slows down the rate at which you are falling at, and as long as you don’t let go of the tablecloth you will be all fine and dandy, land safely, or at least relatively safely, onto the ground.’ Gulliver said, pleased with his explanation of a parachute, especially the bit about ‘relatively’ as it was close to the word ‘relativity’ which was one of Newton’s three laws of motion, what goes up must come down. And it would have made a nice joke but Gulliver thought it too long-winded and that it would only confuse Alice further.
‘But we don’t have one!’ said Alice sounding rather alarmed.
‘Well, that’s not entirely true,’ said Old Father Time, ducking as a seagull flew over his head. ‘Old Mrs Time packed a rather nice food hamper which includes a rather large tablecloth so actually we do have a parachute,’
‘Good!’ said Alice sounding extremely relieved.
‘Now as my friend said, we mustn’t get too high, we don’t want to scrape the roof of the bottle. And we must be careful we don’t catch on the mast of the tall ship in this bottle either,’ Old Father Time said half jokingly and half not.
The thing was, the ship in the bottle, the one the gods had placed on the land, was big, but it wasn’t so big that it overshadowed everything else in the bottle. The bottle itself was big very, very big mind you, if you were standing outside the bottle looking in or inside looking out, everything was big, as glass magnifies, like being a child magnified everything.
To pass the time that didn’t exist Old Father Time gave Gulliver a brief history lesson on time. One of the things he told Gulliver was that time changes as we look back on it, an experience that went like nothing balloons in our memory, which seemed appropriate seeing as they were in a hot air balloon. Old Father Time also said the brain is a time machine in that we journey to the past and the future so quickly that we don’t notice the leap from the now to the then. Memories become frozen in time, like the house we lived in as a child, which never alters, while in reality the house had probably been demolished some time ago.
Gulliver found this lecture on time most fascinating, telling Old Father Time he could earn a good living on the lecture circuit in his time, if he ever fancied a change of scene. Old Father Time laughed and said he was keeping his options open. However, now he had plenty of time on his hands the world was his oyster, which didn’t exclude travelling to other worlds or other times. Of course, travelling to other times could only be achieved if somebody invented a time machine. Perhaps Da Vinci was already working on one, Gulliver thought wistfully.
Gulliver knew a good joke about time machines because it was a joke that he had made up and which went exactly like this… ‘I want results yesterday, if not sooner,’ said the man funding the time machine project to the inventor. ‘I need more time!’ said the inventor tearing his hair out. ‘Time, my boy? You have all the time in the world, or you will have when you’ve invented that jolly old time machine of yours!’ Okay so the joke was a work in progress but it showed promise, it definitely showed promise.
Gulliver had a compendious discussion on antique timepieces with Old Father Time who was most impressed by Gulliver’s knowledge on the subject of chronometers and commended him upon this knowledge. ‘I can’t believe you’re so knowledgeable on the subject of chronometers, Gulliver!’ said Old Father Time incredulously.
‘Well, you must remember, I am old before my time,’ joked Gulliver. Gulliver knew that Old Father Time was an horologist, in other words a time keeper, although his official title was The Guardian of Time. Horology was the art and science of measuring time. Horologists studied mechanical timekeeping devices while chronometry more broadly included electronic devices which surpassed the accuracy and precision of the mechanical clock.
Old Father Time, being even older than Methuselah had forgotten that although Gulliver was a twelve-year-old boy he had the knowledge of a thirty-five-year-old man locked up inside his head. Old Father Time joked that his mind used to work like clockwork and at one time you could set your watch by him ‘as they used to say in this world’, however, now the clock inside his head was running slow, ‘as they said’ in Gulliver’s world.
Several times in this journey of highs and lows, which mirrored a yo-yo in slow motion as the occupants of the balloon’s moods mirrored the balloon’s motions, Gulliver was given to thinking they may be lost, like words sometimes got lost in his head.
There was one tiny little problem Gulliver hadn’t thought of and that was how were they going to get out of the bottle with the ship in it? Here Gulliver took a leaf out of Old Father Time’s book when Alice asked him this exact question and replied in a knowing tone, ‘Well, Alice, we will simply remove the cork from the bottle, my dear child!’ Now as the cork was rather large and weighed a ton, this was never going to happen, and why Gulliver was calling Alice ‘my dear child’ when he was a child himself Alice couldn’t fathom! The truth was they would fly through the gap in between the cork and the neck of the bottle like the ships did. Failing that, a strong gust of air would pull them through the bottleneck whether they liked it or not, which is exactly what happened.
‘Wow, that was fun!’ Alice said as the balloon got sucked through the bottleneck.
Beagle agreed with Alice in her assessment of this roller coaster ride and barked accordingly to say as much.
‘Fun? I’m not sure I would describe it as fun!’ Old Father Time exclaimed as he adjusted his attire and brushed the hair out of his eyes.
‘Fun? That was the sort of fun you get on a ride at the funfair, which is anything but fun!’ Gulliver said looking as white as a sheet as if he had been on a ghost train as he finally opened his eyes.
What had just happened to the balloon and its occupants was not unlike what happens when you jump out of an aeroplane and then deploy your parachute, for as you do this you will be jerked in an upward motion, not knowing whether you’re coming or going. Eventually everything will become clear and you will get you bearings. If you have ever made a parachute jump you will know exactly what I am talking about, if not, I am afraid you will have to use your imagination.
Now out of the bottle and with the sea far below them, Gulliver spotted a seaport which may or may not have been Portsmouth. (Well, you know how time flies! Actually that joke doesn’t entirely work as a hot air balloon travels slowly. Having said that, at the time you are flying, time passes, so in some ways it does, although in a world where there is no time it doesn’t work on any level!) Gulliver later wrote something similar in his travelogue in a way that was anything but compendious! Gulliver vaguely remembered what Einstein had said about time, that the faster you go the slower the time passed, or some such scientific gobbledegook, and that nothing was faster than the speed of light. This theory, in theory at least, was now being brought into question by the Opera Project in Italy in Gulliver’s world. Regarding the speed of light, it appeared the fat lady had finally sung her last aria!
However, there was only one way to find out if Portsmouth was in fact Portsmouth and that was by landing. Actually that’s not quite true, as from the air and with the aid of a good optical device, the word ‘Portsmouth’ would be written upon the ground. In other words, written upon the surface of the antique globe in large capital letters, surrounded by smaller calligraphy writing of places of note. Unfortunately, due to the low cloud cover, Gulliver could hardly see his hand in front of his face.
Now anybody who has ever landed in a hot air balloon knows that the landing can be rather rough, and quite often you can find yourself being dragged across a field with hay, foliage and chickens flying all about you. That’s, of course, unless you land in the sea!
‘Can you see anything through that optical device of yours, Gulliver?’ Old Father Time asked him as he peered through the glass lens, only for the lenses in his own eyes to be met with large white wispy clouds.
‘No, I can’t see a thing!’ said Gulliver leaning out of the basket as far as he dared without doing a good impression of a lemming.
‘So you can’t see the sea then?’ Old Father Time enquired.
Gulliver was just about to say to Old Father Time that he wished the weather gods were on their side when, like a sailor in a strong wind, he was forced to change tack.
‘Old Father Time, Old Father Time!’ Alice and Gulliver shouted in unison at the top of their lungs. Beagle was going barking mad as the balloon skimmed over the sea like a skimming stone.
Gulliver wanted to close his eyes because this whole experience was beginning to make him feel seasick, which was how words upon the written page sometimes made him feel as their reared up like frightened seahorses. Gulliver thought this probably wasn’t the time or the place to say ‘hold your seahorses!’ as the ship went down, a joke which he would hold back for a more appropriate time and place. As Gulliver was the captain of the balloon he wondered if this meant he was obliged to go down with his balloon.
After contemplating this for a split second, he thought not! In truth, such a question wasn’t worth any more than a split second debate and, any more thought on the matter and he wouldn’t have needed to answer his own question, for his mind would be made up for him! Frankly, the question really wasn’t even worth an answer! However, in that split second, Gulliver, having given this question his full attention and having brought all his life experience to bear in answering it as I said before, he thought not, as a balloon is not a ship. If he had been riding upon the back of a camel in the desert, a camel being said to be a ship of the desert, and was sinking in quicksand, then yes, of course being the captain of said vessel and an Englishman to boot he would have had to go down with his ship! But the balloon wasn’t a camel and this wasn’t the desert because it was the sea, so as such this question was a no brainer, which meant he wasn’t going down with anything!
Here it appeared that Gulliver was rather going overboard, which in the circumstances was probably the best course of action! There were times when you could overthink things and Gulliver thought this was definitely one of them, however, there were other times when you couldn’t, like when you worked for a government think-thank!
It’s amazing how fast the brain works when it finds itself in times of danger, as Gulliver was finding out. This organ might well look like the sort of sponge found in the ocean, but it really is a marvellous device and an amazing piece of engineering, or at least it is when placed in the right hands, that of a brain surgeon!
Then the balloon stopped its skimming motion, which by all of Newton’s laws of motion only meant one thing, that it had to sink like the proverbial stone, as a skimmed stone does when it runs out of steam. The balloon hitting the sea caused a wave of panic amongst the occupants, not helped by a large wave that swept over the balloon. Sometimes synchronicity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be!
Here Gulliver thinks of a silly little child-like rhyme he made up when he was twelve – synchronicity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be when you’re out for a swim in the ocean thinking about the kraken then up it pops and gobbles you up for tea! He then remembered the irregular sonnet by Alfred Lord Tennyson called The Kraken, or at least the opening verse: Below the thunders of the upper deep, far, far beneath in the abysmal sea. His ancient, dreamless univaded sleep the kraken sleepeth; sunlight faintest flee. Didn’t the myths say the kraken dwelled off the coast of Norway and Greenland? Gulliver hoped the kraken didn’t turn up right on cue and prove his synchronicity theory correct. Then he remembered the kraken was tucked up safely for the night in the Antiquarium, sleeping like a baby sea monster. Some demons and sea monsters were real and some were in your own head; Gulliver wasn’t sure which was worse, the real demons and sea monsters or the imaginary ones.
Now a balloon is not designed for sailing on the sea, the ocean, or any body of water for that matter, and as such is liable to sink like a ship’s anchor at a moment’s notice. However, this does depend upon a set of given variables: how fast the balloon lands, the angle of attack to the position of the sea, the size of the balloon, the number of occupants and their combined weight, how many of the occupants have jumped ship before or after the balloon lands etc. etc. Normally, and here I add a proviso with this ‘normally’ as this is by no means set in stone, normally this process takes a little time but eventually, as the balloon deflates and it becomes heavy with water, it will, and let’s make no bones about this, sink like the proverbial anchor! (This is Newton’s Fourth Law of Motion Sickness, which he is still working on as we speak, ironing out some of the obvious and not so obvious flaws in it!)
Oh, and one more thing, a balloon not being a ship, it doesn’t have lifeboats or lifejackets and at this stage in the proceedings a makeshift parachute/come tablecloth is very little use to man or beast. Here the phrase ‘sailing through troubled waters’ sprang to Gulliver’s troubled mind and he rather wished it hadn’t, although ‘sinking fast’ might have been a more apt description in this worst-case scenario. Luckily Gulliver didn’t think of the expression ‘worse things happen at sea’!
‘Help, help! I can’t swim!’ said Gulliver as he fought to get out from underneath the canopy of the deflated balloon as the basket continued shipping water. Now Gulliver had heard that if you drank too much sea water, or swallowed it, as drinking it was definitely a last resort, you would go mad. However, if you swallowed too much of the stuff that really wouldn’t be a problem, once again, you do the math!
Alice was already free of the balloon, as was Old Father Time and Beagle, who was doing the doggie paddle for all he was worth. In a flash, Alice dived under the balloon like a mermaid and fished Gulliver out. Now all four seafarers were clinging on to the overturned basket and none of them could be said to be fairing well or doing swimmingly. Old Father Time was bobbing up and down in the water like a cork with a large coin stuck in it (as is the custom in some quarters after a special event) and as such was beginning to feel more than a little seasick. Gulliver, who let us not forget couldn’t even do the doggie paddle, was only afloat thanks to Alice, who was literally keeping his head above water.
Gulliver looked at his digital waterproof watch, which up until this point in time had stopped working. Gulliver only kept it on for show, that and it was a present from his parents. The watch not only told you the time, day and the date in every part of the world (apart from a parallel world where there was no time, day or date), but when activated acted as a compass too. The watch was going haywire; times, days and dates were flashing up on the screen in random fashion. Perhaps this wasn’t Portsmouth after all but they had fallen into the Bermuda Triangle. Well, what with continents shifting and drifting around like in some crazy aquatic jigsaw puzzle, it could well have been! You’re right, you’re more likely to see a white elephant in an aquarium, however, a white whale on the other hand, well, let’s get Pythagoras to do the maths for a change!
‘A ship’! Alice cried, pointing at a boat that had appeared out of the mists of time, or at least from around a large mound of jagged rocks which were not far from the land.
‘Hang on a minute, we’ll have you out of there in no time at all,’ said the captain of the vessel in a fog horn-like voice, as a lifeboat rowed up by the side of the balloon.
Before you knew it, Alice, Gulliver, Beagle and Old Father Time were standing on the deck of a ship in large pools of water, as sailors wrapped large blankets around them to keep them warm. The captain of the vessel was right, it had taken no time at all to rescue them, but then again, that was only to be expected in a world where there was no time.
‘It looks like we came along in the nick of time,’ the captain said as a broad grin broke out across his craggy features.
The captain was dressed in a high frilly collared tunic with billowing sleeves that could just as easily have been used as material for the sails of a child’s sailing boat. The trousers he wore resembled pantaloons, which were in part covered with thigh-length brown boots, boots which were very much the fashion for a sixteenth century sea captain.
Although Gulliver liked the look of the captain’s jib, whatever that was, he didn’t think he could carry his look off in the Brixham high street of 2O13, unless he was appearing in the Christmas pantomime version of Puss n’ Boots!
‘There’s enough blue sky to make a sailor’s pair of trousers, don’t you think, my boy,’ the Captain said to Gulliver, who looked puzzled, until he recalled his grandfather once saying exactly the same thing to him as a boy, which apparently meant it was a nice day.
‘Yes, more than enough,’ Gulliver said stuttering slightly as he addressed the captain, not that he wanted to dress the captain, like lady’s in waiting dressed the queen, as he thought the captain quite capable of dressing himself.
Gulliver thought both the captain and his ship looked familiar to him.
‘Francis Drake!’ Gulliver exclaimed loudly then wished he hadn’t exclaimed it quite so loudly as everyone onboard looked round at him as if he were one ducat short of a doubloon!
‘How do you know my name?’ Francis Drake said stroking his beard with a slightly puzzled expression on his face.
‘Everybody knows Sir Francis Drake,’ Gulliver said slightly in awe of his hero.
‘Well boy, now I’m a sir and my father said I wouldn’t amount to anything. It’s nice to know someone holds me in high esteem, perhaps one day Queen Elizabeth I will too!’ Drake said, laughing loudly. ‘I don’t know what fantastical feat I’ve done for everybody to have heard of me. Mind you, I did nearly dock my first ship in the town hall!’
‘Perhaps the boy has a crystal ball hidden down his trousers?’ said one of the shiphands, who actually had a hook replacing his left hand.
‘Maybe we should hang him from the highest yardarm and if a crystal ball falls out we’ll know he has!’ said another of the ship’s crew as the entire crew fell about with laughter. Although the sailor in the crow’s nest didn’t, as being as high up as he was he couldn’t hear what the commotion was all about. This was probably for the best as if he had fallen about with laughter that would probably, if not certainly, have been his lot!
Gulliver had no wish to be hung from the highest yardarm, or the lowest yardarm for that matter, not that he knew what a yardarm was, it was just he didn’t want to be hanging from it. Gulliver couldn’t believe his luck, he also couldn’t believe how powerful synchronicity was either.
Gulliver started to wonder, what with this being a parallel world and with everything being in reverse, that if he bumped into another one of his boyhood heroes Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson, would his ship be called HMS Defeat rather than HMS Victory!? Not that he wanted to run into Nelson, or at least not if he was travelling in the Golden Hind at the time as he didn’t want to sink the Victory. In truth it was much more likely to be the other way around, what with the size of the Victory, which was big, and the size of the Golden Hind, which was small. If this happened then the phrase ‘turning victory into defeat’ would have fitted this parallel world nicely. Gulliver thought this a little unlikely as Nelson wasn’t a defeatist sort of person, and who would go to war in a ship called HMS Defeat? With a name like that you were beaten before you started!
‘Leave the boy alone, he’s obviously just got an overactive imagination. He reminds me of myself at his age,’ Drake said walking up to Gulliver and placing his hand upon his shoulder. ‘No harm will come to you or your friends, not on my watch. Now let’s get you and your friends below deck where you can change into some dry clothes. Then after that we can get you fed and watered. Although perhaps you’ve already had enough water for the time being,’ Drake said as the smile on his face got broader.
By this time the balloon had sunk without trace, like Atlantis or the balloon fish which was now extinct. That’s if you discount the last one, which was now swimming happily in one of the tanks in the Antiquarium. Mr Silevious H. Spindlehoffer, the owner of the Antiquarium, was hoping it would mate with another fish and produce a hybrid to at least keep the spirit of the balloon fish alive. The owner of the balloon (the flying one and not the fish, although some fish do fly), had told Gulliver not to scrape the balloon on the roof of the world, in other words the glass of the bottle with the ship in it. However, he hadn’t said anything about scraping it on the bottom of the sea bed!
As the four musketeer’s went below deck, Francis Drake said he thought he recognized Old Father Time, but Old Father Time said he had that sort of face, people were always saying they’d seen him some place or some time. Old Father Time didn’t mind telling a twelve-year-old boy he was Old Father Time but a grown man might take him for being one sextant short of a chart, or one hand short of a pocket watch, or even one hook short of a pirate. However, this wasn’t a problem because Gulliver introduced Old Father Time to Drake as Old Father Time!
Later Gulliver said to Francis Drake in a rather respectful tone, ‘Captain Drake, where are we heading, sir?’ Drake said this voyage would be a short one as they had just travelled halfway round the world, having been to the Caribbean, the West Indies to be more precise, where their was a British Navy outpost. Now the Golden Hind was heading into Portsmouth harbour for repairs. When Old Father Time heard this, suffering with seasickness as he did, he was a much relieved man.
That evening over breadfruit and coloured water, the coloured water being port, Gulliver told Drake of his quest to find The Last Bookshop in the World. Drake said this quest sounded right up his Ocean Drive and he wondered if he could sign up for this journey into the unknown. There was another reason Drake wanted to climb on board with Gulliver’s idea, as he’d always been a great believer in omens. Now what could be more of an omen than having a hot air balloon land in your path which contained two children a Labrador called Beagle and the ex-Guardian of Time himself? It had to be a sign, it just had to be, thought Drake illogically. When Drake told his crew what their next voyage would be, some were given over to thinking that this was a sign, a sign that Drake had obviously lost his ball bearings somewhere in the Baring Straights!
Once again Gulliver couldn’t believe his luck, not only had he met his hero but he actually wanted to help him with his quest, even though as a quest it left a lot to be desired. Having Drake on board with his mastery of seamanship and knowledge of navigation, using charts and the stars to guide them through stormy waters, would be invaluable in finding The Last Bookshop in the World. Gulliver had considered that perhaps the reason nobody could find this bookshop was because it had been built near a cliff, and perhaps it had slipped down the cliff into the water, or had floated away and was now an archipelago, possibly part of the Galapagos Islands. Either that or like Atlantis it had sunken so far into the oceans it was now buried deep within the sea bed, like some sunken treasure off a Spanish galleon. Or maybe it had come to rest on the continental bookshelf. No, that was one idea he needed to shelve immediately, if not sooner! Well, as his grandfather was always telling him, you couldn’t afford to take yourself too seriously.
So after the Golden Hind had pulled into port and had stocked up on supplies and the crew had let off a little steam, Drake said he would be happy to join Gulliver’s merry band of misfits, as they attempted to discover this mythical bookshop. Francis Drake said he knew Queen Elizabeth I was looking for a signed first edition of Romeo and Juliet. Drake told Gulliver the queen was sick to the back teeth of receiving jewels and gold trinkets, and even more fed up with receiving dirty vegetables from foreign lands that needed to be boiled to death before you ate them! Gulliver hoped Drake wasn’t going to add some horribly written history to this story as he knew in the Elizabethan age they didn’t shy away from torture. Here Gulliver recalls the torturous history lessons he had to sit through when he was at school, never once thinking he would be a part of living history. This little adventure of his was really bringing history alive, like Dr Lucy Worsley, Stephen Fry and Fiona Bruce did on John Logie Baird’s magical box of tricks.
Francis Drake said you couldn’t beat a good book, which Gulliver agreed wholeheartedly with. Drake then joked that you couldn’t beat a bad one either, as he had once used a copy of a book called The Captain’s Gold to knock a Spanish conquistador out cold. The book was 850 pages long, which is probably why he was using it as a doorstop. Apparently Drake had even considered stuffing it into a cannon so as to sink a Spanish galleon; Gulliver wondered if that’s where the expression ‘throwing the book at you’ came from! Drake had used the book The Captain’s Gold to knock the Spanish conquistador over the head after the conquistador had knocked the sword from his hand during a raid on the Golden Hind, which was in port in Mexico at the time. The conquistador was knocked spark out in the fight, which left Drake and his men to get away with countless treasures.
Drake said the book now sat proudly in his sparse library on board the Golden Hind, he still hadn’t read past the third chapter, however, he said the book made a great story even if the story in the book wasn’t that great!
Gulliver thought it would have made a great story if Drake had said Walter Raleigh had used some of the bowls he was using in his game against Queen Elizabeth I to fire out of the cannons of his ship when the Spanish Armada attacked England in 1578. However, that would have made a bad story for if he had told such a fairy story, no one in their right mind would have believed him, unless, of course, he was using cannon balls in his game of bowls with the queen. Well, the French used metal balls in their game of boule so why ever not? However, firing bowls out of a cannon would have splintered them into a thousand pieces as soon as the lit fuse came in contact with the gunpowder. I suppose he could have used the bowls to throw at the Spanish in close-quarter fighting on the deck of his ship, or have drilled a hole in the bowls, laced them with gunpowder attached to a fuse and then thrown them onto the Spanish galleons. Now Gulliver’s imagination was really pushing the boat out!
Now that would have made a great story. Gulliver’s grandfather was right, his grandson really did have a wild imagination, so much so he should probably write a book about his travels in this world. Maybe if he ever got back to his own time Gulliver would, and it may even be a bestseller, perhaps he could call it Gulliver’s Travels in Time. However, if he did, my guess is that nobody would believe a single word, not a tale as tall as the mast of a tall ship, not in a million lightyears!