Time passed, no sorry, it didn’t, but the sun rose and sank a few times and the man in the moon popped his head out of the clouds to see what was going on. By this time Drake, his crew and the four musketeers were ready to continue on with their quest to find The Last Bookshop in the World. Gulliver had heard a rumour that it might be somewhere in the South Pacific. Mind you, the source this rumour had come from had been rumoured to be somewhat of a teller of fairytales. The man’s name? Hans Christian Andersen. But still, as this man said he was a travel writer and seemed a good-hearted fellow, perhaps he had an inkling as to where this mythical bookshop was. True, it wasn’t much to go on but as Gulliver had nothing else to go on then he thanked Mr Andersen for his help and went on his merry way, or at least Mr Andersen went on his merry way, care of a tavern called The Liar’s Inn, wishing Gulliver Godspeed as he did so. At times it appeared to Gulliver that this world was like an archaic fairyland and the people who lived in it nothing more than characters from a fairytale.
From now on till the end of time, when I use the word ‘time’, I will be using it in the metaphorical sense to aid the flow of the story. And that was exactly what Gulliver wrote in his travelogue as that seemed the only logical way around ‘the time dilemma’, as he called it. Gulliver was so used to using the word ‘time’, that it seemed this was the logical thing to do. Logic was another word Gulliver promised himself he would cross out of the dictionary when he found the mythical last bookshop in the world. Imagine if, when he found this bookshop, he found another bookshop called The Last Bookshop in the World and that it was simply part of a chain of bookshops, what a let down that would be. Although as Gulliver lived by the water he did have a soft spot for the bookstores called Waterstones. But by all accounts, according to the myth that wasn’t the case, however, the way things were going Gulliver thought that thanks to e-books, by the time he got back to his world there really might only be one bookshop left in the world and Waterstones may have sunk without trace!
The Golden Hind weighed anchor and Gulliver’s travels were off and running once again, although nobody on the dock cried ‘Godspeed’. Gulliver thought it was a funny expression to say ‘you weighed anchor’; why would you want to weigh your anchor? You pretty much knew just by looking at the thing that it was heavy as it was made from wrought iron. If you dropped it on your foot you certainly knew it was heavy, as you would if you dropped a cannonball on your foot. Did it really matter how much the anchor weighed? Yes, it probably weighed a little less every time it was dropped in the sea as the salt eroded the metal, but not to the point that you had to weigh it every time you set sail surely?
Gulliver thought it would be a nice touch if Drake made a golden anchor for the Golden Hind by melting down the gold the Spanish had been so kind to give to him. But after giving it a little more thought, for in truth it didn’t require a lot more thought, Gulliver realised that this imaginary golden anchor would, in a very short space of time, weigh less and less as sailors chipped bits of the gold away with their cutlasses. This would go on until the anchor weighed so little that it would float away into the cosmological oceans, sailing further into the Milkway galaxy, which is still suffering from the tidal effects of the nearby Magellanic Clouds, which have slightly distorted our galaxy’s shape. Passing the great ship Argo, passing the Jellyfish Nebula on the starboard side then the Hourglass Nebula on the port side (actually all the sides of the ship on this epic voyage would be the starboard side!), as the solar winds carried it further and further on its voyage into the uncharted regions of outer space, where galaxies and stars lay a quintillion lightyears away from earth, as radiowaves were constantly being picked up by radio telescopes all across the planet.
Who knows, maybe this ship might even pass the Voyager space craft, which by then would have run out of steam on the longest voyage a ship has ever been on. I’m sure Sir Francis Drake would have loved to have sailed upon the cosmological oceans on his Golden Hind, on a voyage that would circumnavigate the universe using his star charts and sextant. Now Gulliver really was letting his imagination run away with him, pushing the boat out as far as he was able, the only surprising thing was Gulliver hadn’t thought of landing on the moon in a hot air balloon… give it time!
Gulliver had once seen a design for a futuristic spaceship in a book which had sails upon it like a mast, which in principal would be powered by the sun in the same way solar panels worked. Gulliver had always been interested in the stars in the night sky and many a night he had watched stars fall out of the heavens with his father and grandfather. He knew many of the constellations by name and the star signs connecting the dots to form the Great and Little Bear and Orion’s Belt. Gulliver also knew of the Gems in the Great Ship Argo. Carina, the Keel and Vela, the Sails, were two of the four constellations of Argo Navis which was subdivided by the French astronomer Nicholas Louis de Lacaille in the eighteenth century. The other two are Puppis, the Stern and Pyxis, the Compass.
‘Okay, Gulliver, ready for a spot of hands-on sailing?’ Drake said as he motioned to Gulliver to take the wheel of the Golden Hind and sail it out of Portsmouth harbour, or Ports Mouth harbour as Christopher Columbus was always calling it.
‘What me? You want me to sail the Golden Hind!’ Gulliver said, his mouth open wide like a hungry catfish. Here Gulliver thought it may be wiser if he didn’t take the wheel as the wheel should probably stay exactly where it was! Later Gulliver was to wonder what happened to the whipstaff which steered the boat as there was no ship’s wheel on the Golden Hind. However there was a ship’s wheel on the replica of the Golden Hind in St Mary’s Overie Dock in London, as well as a propeller! Gulliver knew the Elizabethans were top-notch engineers and designers but really, a propeller? Perhaps this was another of Da Vinci’s designs, Gulliver thought with his metaphorical tongue in his metaphorical cheek!
‘Well, I’ve got to go downstairs and look at my charts and maps. I’ve got no idea what most of them mean, of course, but it gives the men confidence to think I know where I’m going. To be honest, the Spanish mapmakers are streets ahead us,’ said Drake dryly. ‘Most of the time I close my eyes and stick a pin in the map, either that or toss a gold ducat!’ Drake said as a golden smile sailed slowly across the landscape of his face. ‘Anyway, I wouldn’t trust my men to sail the Golden Hind, they couldn’t sail a toy ship in a bath tub let alone navigate their way out of a harbour without sending us to the bottom of Davy Jones’s Locker!’ Drake continued with his stand-up routine, one day it was sure to come in handy when flirting with Queen Elizabeth I. Women loved a man with a good sense of humour, it said so in all the women’s chronicles of the day, and it might just help him to keep his head attached to his shoulder, instead or it rolling around in the gutter!
‘Steady as she goes, seaman,’ Drake cried out to Gulliver as he disappeared below deck. Gulliver stood upon an old sea chest Drake had put there for him so he could see over the ship’s wheel, which was almost as big as he was. It appeared, regarding his size and the fact that Gulliver was now a boy, the wheel had rather come full circle, even if it had done so in an anti-clockwise direction.
‘Aye, aye, captain,’ Gulliver said holding on to the ship’s wheel for grim death. Gulliver had always wanted to say ‘aye, aye, captain’. That was another thing he could cross off his wishlist when he got home. Another thing he’d always wanted to say was ‘Yo ho, ho and a bottle of rum’ but he was only twelve so that didn’t quite seem appropriate at this moment in time. Having said that, some boys put to sea as early as twelve and every day a quantity of rum was given out to the sailors, although this was purely for medicinal purposes of course! Scurvy was the scourge of the sailor not getting enough vitamin C, something Gulliver knew all about; that’s why he’d got spots when he was a teenager. Gulliver’s mother had told him this was because he didn’t eat enough fruit. Whether this was an old wives’ tale he wasn’t sure, although he was sure his mother was now an old wife so it probably was!
‘Wow!’ said Alice, as she saw Gulliver sailing the Golden Hind out of Portsmouth harbour without touching the sides as a double rainbow appeared magically out of nowhere. If that wasn’t a sign, said Drake, then nothing was.
Alice loved using her new favourite word ‘Wow!’ whenever anything seemed worthy of its use, and sometimes even when it didn’t. Her stepmother was always telling her not to overuse things otherwise she’d wear them out, although apparently this didn’t apply to soap and Alice didn’t think this applied to words either!
Gulliver wanted to say to Alice ‘it’s a piece of cake’ but he didn’t, because it wasn’t. He had only been at the wheel ten minutes and already his arms felt as heavy as an anchor.
Soon Beagle was on deck jumping up at Gulliver to gain his attention.
‘Down, boy!’ Gulliver said a little irritably, if he’d told Beagle that once he’d told him a thousand times. Beagle rarely listened mind you, he was a dog and as such Gulliver felt it was only right and proper that he cut his loyal companion some slack. After all it was hard enough for him to get to grips with the English language and he wasn’t even a dog.
Beagle was a puppy again and as such he had puppy tendencies, which meant he peed whenever and wherever the fancy took him, and he wanted to play all the time, oh, and he ate like a horse!
‘You seem to be getting the hang of things,’ Old Father Time said encouragingly as he walked up and down the deck stretching his legs, as if he had been at sea for more than a month rather than ten minutes.
‘Just getting to know the ropes,’ Gulliver said giving Old Father Time some old rope. What Gulliver should have added to this remark was metaphorically speaking as he wasn’t climbing the rigging. However, it seemed to Gulliver that speaking metaphorically wasn’t something the people of this world seemed to care much for, although Drake seemed to be an exception to that rule.
‘How’s your seasickness?’ Alice enquired caringly of Old Father Time.
‘Fine, I’ve never felt better, it must be the sea air,’ Old Father Time said cheerfully, not altogether making sense.
‘So where are we heading, Captain Gulliver?’ Old Father Time said as he looked at Gulliver while ruffling his beard to displace the fleas that had bedded down there overnight.
‘We’re heading in the right direction,’ Gulliver said making perfect sense.
‘Good,’ said Old Father Time as he picked a flea out of his beard and threw it overboard. ‘Good, I’ve always said it helps if you’re going in the right direction. It’s certainly better than going in the wrong direction, which is what Old Mrs Time is always accusing me of when it comes to doing the washing up after a meal.’ Old Father Time then laughed as if it was the last time he ever would.
Drake then asked one of the sailors to trim the sails, an able-bodied seaman known simply as Hamish, or ‘the big man’. Hamish was as rough as an uncut diamond and almost as tall as Neptune himself and whose hair resembled the tangled rigging of a ship in a storm.
Hamish roared like a ship’s cannon to the ship’s boy, who unlike Gulliver, if thrown overboard in a wild sea would float like a buoy. ‘Pepper, trim the sails and be quick about it!’
‘Yes, Hamish,’ said the boy as he sneezed loudly several times, almost filling the sails in the process. The ship’s boy then climbed the rigging with the nimbleness and speed of a spider which had spied a fly trapped in its web. Most of the ship’s company had nicknames and the ship’s boy was no exception, as not only had he a tendency to sneeze loudly but with alarming frequency, which had alarmed all onboard at one time or the other.
Gulliver knew there were more nautical sayings than you could shake a gull’s tail feather at, such as – splice the mainsail, steady as she goes, ship ahoy, fire a broadside, come hell or high water, worse things happen at sea, and his personal favourite, trimming the sails. Whenever Gulliver heard this expression he expected a sailor to appear on deck with a pair of scissors in his hand after which he’d climb the rigging and literally trim the sails. That was the thing about being on board a ship, you couldn’t take things literally, especially when pirates had a cutlass in your back and were telling you in the nicest possible way that you had to walk the plank or else. It was a bit like the expression ‘taking a long walk off a short pier’, or plank in this case; it wasn’t to be taken literally, after all the pirates were only yanking your anchor!
And to add to the confusion, Drake often said to the ship’s surgeon, who was also the ship’s barber, ‘I think it’s time to trim the old sails, a little off the port side and the starboard side should do the trick,’ when he was referring to having his sideburns, his beard or his hair trimmed. The ship’s surgeon received the nickname of Dr Sawbones, for obvious reasons; more horrible history I’m afraid!
The morning alarm was sounded by the quartermaster’s mate, Gilbert Galsworthy, who frankly, by the end of most voyages wasn’t even the quartermaster’s mate, more like Billy no mates. Gilbert Galsworthy was as good at blowing his own trumpet as any of the queen’s trumpeters, which was probably why he was chosen for the task. Gilbert Galsworthy had his own trumpet that he’d fashioned from an old speaking trumpet and which apparently once belonged to Methuselah himself (a tale as tall as a tall ship’s mast if ever there was one!). This early morning call wasn’t helped by the quartermaster’s mate’s cheerful disposition, him being an early morning sort of person and all. Nor was it helped by him singing the song What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor repeatedly in a voice which can best be described as a strangulated catfish crossed with a fog horn – ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor, what shall we do with the drunken sailor, what shall we do with the drunken sailor early in the morning.’ The crew were often heard to say irritably ‘Throw him in Davy Jones’s Locker and throw away the key!’ The only friend Gilbert Galsworthy had was Able Seaman Drinkwater and a chicken he’d named Henrietta, who as yet had not found her way into the cooking pot, but once again, just give it time!
Now sleeping aboard a ship in cramped living quarters is not really a recipe for a good night’s kip, especially if some of those sleeping arrangements included hammocks, sleeping on a damp floor in between cannons, snoring sailors and the rocking motion of the ship in a rough sea. Now this rocking motion wasn’t the same gentle rocking motion a mother uses to rock her baby off to sleep, and if you thought it was, you must have rocks in your head! Gulliver had always been a light sleeper so wore wax earplugs to block out the noise of seagulls and fog horns. The good thing was there was plenty of wax available in the captain’s quarters, which he used for sealing letters as he often corresponded with Queen Elizabeth I.
A few weeks later after some rough seas followed by some calm seas followed by some even rougher seas, Able Seaman Drinkwater, almost driven to drink seawater as the water supplies were running low, thankfully spotted land from the crow’s nest. Unfortunately, he also spied a lone magpie, one for sorrow and all that jazz, and sailors back then were nothing if not a superstitious bunch. (Just for the record and the ship’s log, this seaman’s first name was Abel and that isn’t a jape, I am just stating a fact.) Soon every man jack was on deck singing sea shanties, and doing merry jigs up and down the deck, which included Able Seaman Jack Daniel. (Off the record and not to be included in the ship’s log, that was a joke, albeit a poor one.) Several of the men climbed the rigging and spliced the mainsails. Even Drake admitted he didn’t know what on earth splicing the main sail meant but luckily his men seemed to.
Except they hadn’t spotted land, they had spotted the cork in the bottle, which meant they were now on another continent. Now getting from one ship’s bottle to another was a tricky business; it was one of the hardest manouevres a ship’s captain could negotiate. There was very little margin for error for the gap between the cork and the bottle was no bigger than a hair’s breath, whatever that was! The gap was certainly nowhere near the gap which ran along the famous Northwest Passage. First you had to wait for the tide to rise and then you sailed your vessel through the gap into the oceans. Hopefully the tide had risen along with the oceans in the ship’s bottle otherwise you were in for a long drop, which was never good, especially if you landed butter side down.
This principle was a little like the procedure a barge goes through when changing locks, because in truth, it wasn’t a lot like this principle! Some said this procedure was like falling off the edge of the world. Gulliver remembered reading in The Book of Aiden the line, ‘When you reach the edge of the world, you can fly’. Unfortunately, these old sailing vessels were not ships of the sky, in other words airships, and despite the amount and the size of their sails, they could not fly! (Having said that, there is a boat called the flyboat and there is a song called The Skye Boat song, Skye being an island in Scotland.) This Gulliver included in his travelogue for the nautically minded and the more serious mariner, who may one day at a pinch find himself perusing this log.
Now obviously the ship rested on the land\antique globe so it was imperative that you waited for the tides to come in contact with the bottle, otherwise your meteoric rise would quickly be followed by a fall both metaphorically and literally speaking. Falling from a waterfall as high as Angel Falls in Venezuela into a body of water, was preferable than diving from a high board into an empty swimming pool, if you get my continental drift! Of course the moon had a big part to play in this procedure as the tides were controlled by the pulling power of the moon. Gulliver had seen high tides reach fifty feet high in some parts of Devon and there was an incoming tide which when it came in contact with the river bore looked like chocolate milk to Gulliver’s mind. (However, it didn’t taste like chocolate milk, as Gulliver once found out to his cost when falling in the river!) When the river reached top speed the waves looked like they should be on Bondi Beach, not in Devon. This river was a big draw for local surfers and this tide was said to be the second highest tide in the world, there was even talk of harnessing this power by building a hydro-electricity station in the local area. Gulliver had often heard seafaring folk talk of the great flood in Devon in the early part of the previous century when houses and people were literally swept out to sea.
As a boy, Gulliver had often put his mother’s ironing board onto the living room floor, turned the television on just in time for the title pictures of the TV police show Hawaii Five-O to come on the screen, which was of surfers riding on the crest of a wave. Gulliver would then catch this imaginary wave which came into his living room. However, in real life Gulliver couldn’t surf to save his life. Of course not being able to swim didn’t help his cause in this respect, that and he wasn’t really the adventurous type. If only there had been 3D HD TV at the time, Gulliver thought wistfully. Mind you, in Devon in 2012 there had been massive flooding and in some cases waves actually did find their way into the living room.
The one thing that puzzled Gulliver was how did the water get onto the antique globe, for he knew gravity kept it there? Although, one might say the only puzzling thing was that it was the only thing that puzzled Gulliver in this rather unbelievable explanation. Well, once again it wasn’t the science of navigation or rocket science for the younger reader. A giant comet fell to earth, or rather landed on the antique globe, which of course was waterproof, and as we all know, a comet’s tail is made up of ice, and ice when melted becomes water. This is basically the sort of stuff they teach you in first-year science at school, or at least they should, along with white reflects heat and black absorbs heat and what goes up must come down.
Oh, and just one more thing, planet earth didn’t look like a green and blue marble from outer space, it looked slightly yellow with brown, orange and dark green patches, as all antique globes look like. If in Gulliver’s travels, in this world, he ever got to ride on a horse then he really could say he was globe-trotting! But back to the action…
‘Okay, lads, hold on to your rope and tackle, oh, and if you believe in God, a prayer wouldn’t go amiss!’ Drake said in good humour, although whether you thought Drake’s humour was good or not rather depended on your own sense of humour. That’s if you had a sense of humour of course. The small man who ran The Pandemonium Emporium with the many hats upon his head infinitum didn’t seem to have one, nor did the antiquarian librarian who ran the library without any books in it in Brixham in old Devonshire.
Drake said a little prayer under his breath and hoped his father, who was once a vicar, was in heaven watching over him, as he hoped Andrew, the Patron Saint of Fishermen and St Christopher, the Patron Saint of Travellers were too. Well as Drake was always saying, ‘God knows you can never have too many saints on your side.’
The water rose and the Golden Hind along with it and soon the ship was in line with the cork. ‘Steady as she goes!’ Drake cried to an able seaman who had the ship’s wheel in his hand, as everybody on board prayed he was as able as his title suggested, otherwise they were all in the dodo’s do dos! The ship’s company also hoped this able seaman wasn’t walking around with this ship’s wheel in his hand polishing it, and that it was attached to something, hopefully the steering column!
Within the blinking of an eye the Golden Hind was sucked through the gap between the cork and the glass and was falling at great speed as if it had just gone over a high waterfall. For what seemed like a lifetime to Gulliver and the crew, the ship fell in slow motion until with a great splash it hit the water and for the briefest of moments the crew were all at sea. Luckily for all on board, the ship fell butter side up and although everybody was soaked to the skin, nobody fell overboard. However, the ship’s cook hit his head on a barrel of rum, that he may or may not have had attached to his lips at the time!
After a while the ship stopped bobbing around in the ocean like a message in a bottle and the ship’s company all breathed a huge collective sigh of relief.
Sailing in the olden days was not for the faint-hearted. It was hardly surprising that people felt the world was flat and that you could fall off the edge of it when they heard of such tales.
‘So that’s how you get out of the ship in the bottle!’ Gulliver said to Old Father Time, in a manner which suggested that Gulliver hadn’t altogether bought Old Father Time’s earlier explanation of simply removing the cork out of the bottle when you wanted to get from A to B, or Z in this case.
And then out of a crystal-clear blue sky a large fish with wings flew out of the ocean and landed upon the deck, and then another, and then another until the sky was literally raining fish. To Gulliver’s mind it was like an event ripped right out of the pages of the Bible. The Golden Hind was being bombarded by flying fish the size of baby pterodactyls. As one of these fish could quite easily have been said to be a throwback to the prehistoric age of the dinosaur, a song came into Gulliver’s mind, ‘One, two, three, four, five, once I caught a fish alive, six, seven, eight, nine, ten then, I threw it back again’. And Gulliver would have been happy to have thrown these fish back, back from whence they’d come, namely the ocean, as they were biting anything that they came in contact with, namely a gunner’s left ear. However, Gulliver didn’t throw any of these fish back into the ocean as he hadn’t a mind to lose any of his fingers. Well, he thought sensibly, what if he wanted to take up the violin, the piano or the harp, after all, he didn’t want to be all thumbs and no fingers like Tom Thumb now did he!
The gunners, who rarely saw the light of day, mostly being below deck, had brought their cannonballs onto the deck of the ship, so they could both clean them and see some of that light of day. Gunners often suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), due to lack of sunlight. Mind you, Beagle was having a whale of a time playing with the gargantuan fish that were no longer flying but sunbathing upon the deck. Some of the fish Beagle had in his mouth were thrashing about for all they were worth (which to be fair in this part of the world wasn’t that much!)
‘Duck!’ Gulliver shouted to Alice as a flying fish the size of a hammerhead shark sailed across her starboard bow.
‘A duck, really, in this part of the world?’ Alice couldn’t see it or see it coming for that matter as it clipped her right shoulder and she went down like a duck in a shooting gallery. ‘Ow, that hurt!’ said Alice as she slowly picked herself up off the deck with some help from Gulliver. ‘Where did that come from?’ Alice complained holding her right shoulder.
Gulliver didn’t think this was the right time to tell Alice she should be keeping her upper lip stiff as Nelson so admirably did when being attacked by the enemy. Mind you, in truth Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson had probably never been attacked by baby flying pterodactyls, or ever sailed his ship HMS Victory into the seas that time forgot!
Gulliver had always wondered why pterodactyls were called pterodactyls. However, once he’d broken the word down into syllabus he knew exactly why pterodactyls were called pterodactyls, you do the math! (Tero – terror, please do try and keep up as we still have a long voyage ahead of us. And I can’t be expected to explain every little minor detail in minute detail now can I?!)
‘What’s going on?’ Drake said logically, not knowing what was going on, having just been awoken from a dream to be greeted by a waking nightmare as soon as he stepped foot upon deck. Gulliver was starting to realise that this saying ‘what’s going on’ followed by a question mark was one of Drake’s favourite sayings, and his too for that matter. Later Gulliver was to write this in his travelogue: ‘This world is ripe for the saying ‘what’s going on’, followed by a question mark and then an exclamation mark. Several in fact!!!
‘Well, Captain, we’re being attacked by some large flying fish off both the port and the starboard side and possibly the bow and the stern too!’
‘Really, flying fish you say?’ said Drake to the second of the ship’s mates, who, and I know this is neither here nor there, had recently kissed and made up with another of the ship’s mates. In other words, had done a Nelson and Hardy, or at least this was what it was referred to by sailors in this nautical world.
‘Yes, flying fish as far as the eye can see,’ the second mate said as he ducked several times as incoming fish flew over his head and landed with a loud smack against the deck. After which they were either knocked spark out or squirmed like eels across the deck as they gave their considerable jaws a workout.
For a minute or two Drake just stood there scratching the fleas from his beard as if the situation the second mate had conveyed to him had gone sailing right over his head. Until he said, ‘Get the cook up here with all the large cooking pots in the galley and bring a couple of large kegs up here too. I’m sure the cook can make a nice fish stew out of this little lot. We normally have trouble catching fish while these fish seemingly can’t wait to be caught. Oh, and be careful how you pick them up, you might want to wear a thick pair of gloves. Oh, and by the time I awake I want to see the Golden Hind shipshape and Bristol fashion just in case my calculations are wrong and we’re heading in the direction of Bristol!’ Drake said as he yawned and went back below to continue his beauty sleep.
‘The captain’s a cool customer and no denying,’ said the first mate to the gunner as he followed Drake below to relay his message to the cook, muttering under his breath ‘more fish stew, I couldn’t be happier. No really, my heart is doing a jig of delight!’ in a manner that could have been interpreted in some quarters as sarcasm, namely the captain’s quarters. Drake later said he’d heard this comment and although he didn’t exactly know how high the highest yardarm was, or frankly even what a yardarm was, if he wasn’t careful he would soon be swinging from it! One thing was for sure, the ship’s captain just couldn’t afford any mates onboard his ship, having said that, he couldn’t afford not to have any either!
By this time the deck was literally swimming in fish, it certainly was a sight to behold. Sailors running round after fish which not only could be said to be all at sea but could be said to be flying off the handle as well, as the ship’s company subdued them with the butts of their muskets and cudgels. Some of the fish the cook literally caught in his pots and some jumped straight into the barrels. The gunner returned to the deck with a musket in his hand and started shooting the fish out of the air, which then fell into the barrels. This was obviously where the expression ‘Like shooting fish in a barrel’ came from, probably!
Luckily Gulliver wasn’t a vegetarian otherwise he might have found this sight unpalatable. However, there was no room in the fleet of the Royal Navy for weak stomachs or landlubbers, it was the law of the jungle, although obviously it wasn’t as they were at sea!
*
Moons and suns did what suns and moons generally did before some real land came into sight, you get the general continental drift. This sighting of land occurred when the two sailors in the crow’s nests were playing a game of I spy through their spyglasses to pass the time. Sailor A said to Sailor B, although in truth he more shouted it than said it due to the distance between the two crow’s nests, ‘I spy with my little glass eye, something beginning with L’. After several failed guesses, which included Lapland, which was way off base, but not Lilliput, the lateen sail or the lion’s head on the stern of the ship, Sailor A told Sailor B that it might be prudent if he was looking through the right end of his spyglass because, the L their little game of I spy began with, was L for land!
Drake considered this L for land ahoy to be about twenty nautical miles east, or at least east of where he guesstimated they should be at this point in their voyage. This guesstimated point was, of course, as the fish flew or the dolphin swam which, was similar to as the crow flies, and believe you me there are no flies on a crow!
As time no longer existed when involved in the art of navigation, the captain of the vessel could no longer record in his ship’s log the following observations – thirty degrees two minutes south, north, east, or west for that matter. Thirty degrees, yes, south, north, east or west, absolutely, but those two minutes being rather closely associated with time, absolutely not! Such an entry into a captain’s ship’s log made the whole calculation poppycock of the highest order, nonsense, gobbledegook and gobbledegobble. Even the mad proprietor of The Pandemonium Emporium would have howled with derision at such an entry into a ship’s log!
Another thing was that a nautical day began and ended at noon, with the noon sighting, not at midnight as in civil time. Just for the record, a nautical mile is 6,076 feet, or one degree of latitude; a statute mile consists of 5,280 feet. Of course in this parallel world, as time had well and truly flown the coup, neither civil nor sea time was given the time of day by sailors or landlubbers. However, sailors did still occasionally use the sandglass, which had enough sand in it for half an hour before it was turned by the ship’s boy as regular as clockwork. Unfortunately, as the ship’s boy often dozed off during this duty, the sandglass wasn’t any more reliable than the ship’s boy. Captains often threw the sandglass overboard with the ship’s boy still attached to it ‘as regular as clockwork’, when finding him in neglect of his duty!
Now the land they had spied was also in a large ship’s bottle, although the ship wasn’t a ship but an extra, extra large canoe made out of bamboo. When Gulliver saw the land he looked at Old Father Time nervously, as he was very afraid of asking him how they got back inside the bottle with the ship, the land and old Tom Cobbley and all in it.
However, it wasn’t rocket science, though Old Father Time hadn’t told him as much, you just reversed the procedure. Old Father Time had never even heard of the expression, ‘it’s not rocket science’! And even if he had, he was far too polite to use it. Although Stephenson’s Rocket had recently been invented by a chap named Stephenson, although in this world one can never be too sure of anything. However, a rocket hadn’t as yet been invented that could voyage forth into the cosmological oceans, certainly not one powered by steam, but give it time and it will come to pass, as all quantum scientists were so fond of saying. Gulliver had already imagined a spaceship in the style of an old steamer making its way across the cosmological oceans and a Chinese junk, well everybody’s heard of space junk so why ever not!
Yes, you could set your watch by quantum mechanics saying as regular as clockwork ‘it’s just a matter of time before the big end goes, the rocket booster’s packed up, or the sprocket has a meltdown! No sorry, we haven’t got the time to fix it right now, unless you’ve got deep pockets that is’. (And for anybody who owns an automobile I shouldn’t have to quantify that last statement.) One must remember that although Gulliver looked twelve, in part he had the mind of a thirty-five-year-old man and as such he wasn’t born yesterday!
In this world Gulliver appeared to have deep pockets, pockets as endless as the universe and as endless as his imagination. It was just a pity he didn’t have endless pockets in his world, he thought with a wry smile on his face that the man in the moon would have been proud of.
In his travelogue Gulliver wrote that quantum physicists wouldn’t last five minutes in a time where there was no time for they wouldn’t be able to say ‘everything will come to pass, given time’. Actually, quantum physicists with their out-of-this-world theories would have fitted into this world very nicely if you please.
So to spare you all the boring details, Francis Drake waited for the tide to rise in line with the canoe in a bottle before sailing the Golden Hind through the gap and into the South Pacific seas. All I will say was that after falling through the gap as if falling over a waterfall, the Golden Hind landed Queen Elizabeth I head side up! Or if you prefer the toast analogy, the Golden Hind fell butter side up. However, I will add a couple of things to this procedure. If the ship in the bottle was sitting on a land mass that was slightly tilted one way or the other, then either of the following happened; A: If the bottle was slightly raised the water would move further down the bottle and the living accommodation would be tree houses or houses built upon bamboo stilts. Also, the houses would be built closer to the shoreline, this sometimes occurred in the South Pacific islands. Or B: If the bottle was on a slight downward slope, houses would be built upon the hills and away from the shoreline. Also the water would collect closer to the bottleneck, thus making it easier to get in and out of the ship’s bottle. If there were a lot of ships in a queue waiting to get through the neck of the bottle, this, like in Gulliver’s world, was known as a ‘bottleneck’! However, having said all that, most of the ships in the bottle lay relatively flat upon the land, or in this case the antique globe.
So to fast forward a little, some more metaphorical sand fell through the hourglass as well as some actual sand before an island came into view.
‘Well, boy, how’s your first experience at sea been?’ Drake said as he peered through his spyglass at the land mass that was rapidly coming into view.
‘It’s been an experience,’ Gulliver said making perfect sense again.
‘Good, I’m glad you said that because I remember my first sea voyage and that’s exactly what I told my captain when he asked me the exact same question. Great minds think alike, that was what my father was always telling me. Being at sea is a bit like being on land, well, if you take the water out of the equation, and as long as you keep things shipshape and Bristol fashion you’ll be fine,’ said Drake not entirely making sense. ‘Some of the experiences are good and some are not so good and some are bad and some are not worth talking about!’ Drake said as he continued to survey the land mass which appeared to be an island. ‘Soon we can weigh the anchor, perhaps the natives of this island have heard of your mythical bookshop?’ said Drake sounding doubtful as he knew that most natives couldn’t read and most hadn’t even seen a book, let alone read one.
‘The last thing in the world natives have time for was reading books, most of the time they are too busy eating one another!’ Drake said as he put down his spyglass and turned to Gulliver as ever so slowly a smile yawned its way onto his lips revealing his less than perfectly even teeth. Tobacco was the cause of his yellowing teeth, chewing it rather than smoking it. Walter Raleigh had already discovered potatoes and tobacco, but thanks to the gods shaking up time, he’d now have to discover them all over again, perhaps this time Drake would discover them and Raleigh would circumnavigate the world. Maybe this time round Francis Drake might beat Magellan, Elcano and his pals to the world’s first circumnavigation, in effect airbrushing them from the history books. Or maybe there would be an around-the-world race in which Columbus, Magellan, Drake, Raleigh and Marco Polo would take part!
How Sir Walter Raleigh would have loved to have found a magic lamp with a genie attached to it, then he could have wished for a magic telescope. He could then peer into this magic telescope and as the mists of time lifted, he could see himself discovering tobacco and potatoes, then at least he would know where to look for them when it came time for him to rediscover them! Mind you, Walter Raleigh might have preferred a crystal ball to peer into, then he would have known where to look for the head he was later to lose along with his marbles!
*
About a day and a half later, the Golden Hind dropped anchor just outside an island Drake was later to name Gulliver’s Island. (Thankfully the ship dropped rather than weighed anchor, which at least saved a bit of time.)
The island did have a name but it couldn’t be seen on the antique globe as a high tide had covered it up. However, a lot of the islands in this part of the world hadn’t been named as some weren’t inhabited by man or beast.
Gulliver wondered if these natives were restless or if they’d gotten out of the wrong side of the hammock, never a good thing to do if the sea’s on that wrong side and that sea contains sharks. Well, you know how quickly the tide rises, perhaps these natives were revolting, there was nothing worse than revolting natives, another one of Gulliver’s grandfather’s bad jokes!
Gulliver, giving Alice a run for her money, then wondered if he might meet a boy named Friday on this island, like Robinson Crusoe had done in the book of the same name written by Daniel Defoe. This book was one of Gulliver’s favourite books, along with his father and his grandfather, a book he had read so many times his eyes had nearly rubbed the words from the page, his mother once teasingly said to him. Mind you, if this was simply just a vivid dream he was having and he was in his bed asleep and it was Sunday, then perhaps the boy would be called Sunday and not Friday!