And so without wishing to bore the reader further, all Gulliver wrote in his finished travelogue word for word was: ‘The Golden Hind and its crew did the journey in reverse, that’s if you took out them journeying to the North Pole, visiting the Land of the Giant Seahorse, otherwise known as the Galapagos Islands, and when in Marrakesh having a heart-to-heart with six of the greatest minds on the planet. Then added a fight with some Spanish galleons, Titan, Neptune and catching a sea monster, before ending with, “end of story”.’
Drake had caught this sea monster in one of his nets, which he regularly trawled over the side so as to catch fish for the crew’s fish supper. This strange-looking specimen looked like a cross between a Portuguese man o’ war, a squid, a sea snake, and a catfish and must have been hiding in the very depths of the deepest oceans since the beginning of time itself. The creature had more spikes on it than a medieval weapon and when Gulliver first spied it he thought it was the mythical kraken until he remembered it was now living in the Antiquarium in Devon. At one stage the creature slipped across the deck of the Golden Hind leaving enough slime in its wake to fill several Olympic-sized swimming pools. Some of the sailors on deck at the time nearly drowned in this slime. It was at this point that Gulliver said to himself ruefully, ‘I wish I had a camera phone on me, then I could have taken a picture.’ Luckily everybody was too engrossed with the sea monster to ask what a phone or a camera was. There were times Gulliver wished he was viewing these fantastical HD 3D moments from a rather safer viewing platform, like his couch, the one with his HD 3D television in front of it. Viewing it on his antique black and white set wouldn’t have been quite so compelling viewing, although I have no doubt it would have kept his imagination on its toes!
Gulliver was glad he got to shake John Logie Baird’s hand in The Pandemonium Emporium, even if young Master Logie Baird thought he was slightly strange for doing so, considering he had only just met him!
And then the sea serpent swallowed the Golden Hind. I bet you didn’t see that one coming, no, nor did Francis Drake or anybody aboard the Golden Hind, including Gulliver who in his travelogue wrote this exact account, word for word: ‘This really was a fantastical voyage and a dark one as the Golden Hind slipped down the creature’s throat like it was going down a water slide before sailing around upon a sea of blood in the sea serpent’s body, navigating through its veins and capillaries and reaching its heart with many lanterns placed around the deck of the ship to light its way. (It also helped that the sea monster had swallowed a lighthouse and several large flourescent fish earlier that day.) Here the Golden Hind fired so many cannons into the chambers of the monstrous creature’s heart that it was forced to spit the Hind out. Drake said it obviously thought it had indigestion and it was true, this encounter had left a bad taste in the creature’s mouth. Luckily, the Golden Hind landed in the sea butter side up. It seemed the gods and the lucky lady of the sea hadn’t completely deserted them.
Can you imagine such a thing? Oh, Gulliver could imagine it all right, because he had seen it with his own eyes, and he was sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks upon him, or at least they weren’t when they were open for at some points in this fantastical voyage his eyes were tightly shut. Anyway, you know Gulliver, as far as his imagination was concerned, he never had any trouble in pushing the boat out. Drake said the Antiquarium in Devon would pay him a pretty penny for such a unique specimen, but perhaps now wasn’t the time or the place to be taking on this sea monster. However, Drake charted the place they had come in contact with the sea monster on his map so he could come back at a later date and catch the creature for the Antiquarium. Where did they see this serpent on the sea map brought to life? Well, it was the Scilly Isles, which seemed appropriate in the circumstances, whatever they were! Where are the Scilly Isles you ask? Do you want me to draw you a map? Well, I may well have had to as on the antique globe the Scilly Isles were not far from Nova Gvinea, which in plain English is New Guinea, the gods were playing silly beggars, again Gulliver thought with a wry smile upon his face. Gulliver noticed how this old map had huge ships and sea monsters and waves as high as skyscrapers drawn upon it, which were almost as big as some of the countries upon the map.
Being the artist that he was, Gulliver drew a comparison seeing the parallel between the antique sea maps in his antiques emporium and the ones he’d seen Drake use. He’d always thought they were drawn for effect rather than drawn to scale, obviously not! Gulliver thought some of the huge waves drawn upon the antique maps were obviously modern-day tsunamis. Gulliver knew James Cook had drawn some of the most reliable and accurate maps of the oceans during his epic sea voyages, and it had been he who had discovered New Holland in the Endeavour in 1770. On Cook’s last epic voyage to find the Northwest Passage, which at the time was said to be in the region of Nova Albion, Nova meaning new, he stumbled upon the Artic and later still on this voyage of discovery he met his death as so many other adventurers would. This was often the ultimate price to pay for the adventure and one Gulliver hoped hadn’t already been written for him by the gods. However, as the gods of this world were no longer writing the script, the script rather having being torn up, he had nothing to worry about. The trouble with Gulliver was in truth he kind of liked having things to worry about, it was when he had nothing to worry about that things really worried him!
After this amazing journey into unchartered regions, Gulliver wrote in his travelogue: ‘This happening was a bit like Jonah and the whale, minus the whale and minus Jonah and plus a sea monster and the Golden Hind! Or a David and Goliath battle minus David and Goliath and– Yes, we get the picture!
Gulliver was once again surprised how easily Alice seemed to take this experience in her stride. However, Old Father Time said that this part of the journey was his least favourite as he had always had an aversion to sea monsters, and this voyage hardly did his seasickness any favours. Old Father Time did get an idea from the lighthouse inside the sea monster’s stomach, which was, having spent an inordinate amount of time inside a giant clock, he would feel quite at home working as a lighthouse keeper. This position could be on a part-time basis and would keep him out of Old Mrs Time’s hair and out from under her feet.
One of these days Gulliver was going to push his boat out so far into the endless seas of his imagination that he wouldn’t be able to make the return journey. It seemed that Gulliver’s, imagination like the universe, was expanding and the more it expanded the faster it did so. One day you were more likely as not to find him in a home for the mentally incapacitated, sitting in a rocking chair and staring into space in what seemed like a catatonic state. Although being the idiot savant he now was, he wouldn’t speak, although from time to time he would grimace or just simply smile as if he’d found Nirvana or heaven. Either that or he had found the crew of the Marie Celeste standing onboard Noah’s Ark in the harbour of the lost city of Atlantis as he was just in time to witness Noah and Plato opening the Ark of the Covenant!
After which, Gulliver would probably be imagining a genie inside a bottle that was inside a ship’s bottle encased inside another ship’s bottle. Not unlike one of those Russian dolls that keeps getting smaller and smaller until it disappears completely, like the crew of Marie Celeste did in 1872 while carrying alcohol between New York and Italy. Some had said the Marie Celeste had disappeared inside the Bermuda Triangle, having presumably been sucked into some sort of time warp. One of these nameless somebodys was a nobody named Gulliver, who after this circumnavigation was to become something of a somebody of note in this world and not just a footnote in the history books either, but quite a big cheese!
However, just for a brief moment we need to turn the clock back to the battle between the Golden Hind the three British ships which came to its rescue, four unnamed Spanish galleons and the sea gods Titan and Neptune, who refused to desert this world like the other gods. This was exactly what Gulliver wrote in his travelogue in quill and ink. The ink Gulliver used to dip his quill pen in was that of an octopus caught by Able Seaman Benjamin Smith and his twin brother Alexander, which was then hauled aboard the Golden Hind off Gulliver’s Island by six of the ship’s company several moons since passed. I hasten to add the octopus in question was not harmed in any way but was put in a glass tank designed by the ship’s master, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The octopus was given the nickname of Curly by the ship’s company as they said its head resembled the sailor aboard the Golden Hind. Later, Curly found its way into the Antiquarium in old Brixham in the county known as Devonshire.
Date unknown – ‘On the end of our journey of several lifetimes, Able Seaman “Barnacle Bill”, aka William Wigglesworth, spied two giants in the sea from the crow’s nest, one to the south and one to the north, converging on one another with great speed. This produced a wave on the ocean reminiscent of a tsunami which almost capsized the Golden Hind. And then from the west came two Spanish galleons within half a league of one another and by the look of the cannons sticking out their port sides, they too were spoiling for a fight.
As usual the captain (Francis Drake) was as calm as a mill pond and told the gunners to make ready to defend the Golden Hind and queen and country, which included the honour of Queen Elizabeth and the whole of the lands that were known as Albion. For myself, I felt anything but cool, calm and collected, in fact, the butterflies in my stomach had a fit of the collywobbles like I’ve never experienced before. As the giants came closer into view, I was reminded of an old sixties American television series I used to watch with my father called Land of the Giants.
‘It also reminded me of Gulliver’s Travels, Sinbad and the Golden Fleece and King Kong, the latter which I wish I hadn’t brought to mind as it did not end well! After all, we are all descended from the apes, our DNA being little different from theirs. This little fact Darwin delighted in telling me while our feet were still firmly planted upon the Land of the Giant Seahorse. While upon these islands, several monkeys attempted to make a monkey out of us as we tried to capture them in a cage, and succeeded too I might add. Time after time they evaded all of the traps and nets we set down, leading Drake to joke that he wasn’t sure who should be in the cage, the monkeys or some of his slow-witted able seamen, who were found wanting in this task. If the truth be told, he joked, they were less than able, the truth in truth at times is not a concept our captain, and I can’t believe I am saying “our captain” about the great Sir Francis Drake, but nevertheless, our captain is familiar with, any more than our travelling companion and shipmate Hans Christian Andersen as both seem equally adept as spinning fairytales and fishy tales of the sea serpent that got away!
‘But back to our run-in with the giants… while aboard the Hind, Alice looked as scared as I was as Neptune and Titan raised there ugly heads, and believe you me neither were what you might call as pretty as a picture, and we clung to one another like limpets to a rock. For a moment I hoped this was just a dream and asked Alice to pinch me several times over, which she did, and it hurt! And the clincher regarding whether this was or was not a dream\nightmare was when the Spanish shot a cannon across our broadside. Some ships in this world were nothing more than floating coffins, luckily the Golden Hind was made of sterner stuff, good old-fashioned English oak, or at least the stern was!
‘As the Spanish came closer and we could see the whites of their eyes, we could see the fear in theirs matched ours. Some had a look of horror upon their faces when they saw Drake shouting “El Draque!”, which I was later to find out meant “The Dragon”. A dragon would certainly have made a most welcome ally in the perilous situation we now found ourselves, like Timaeus the defender of Atlantis, who could turn into a teal-coloured dragon at the drop of a pointy wizard’s hat. Boy, would my history teacher at school be proud of me for digging up this Greek historical factoid\myth\legend\fairytale at such short notice. It’s nice to see the steam search engine in my head is still shipshape and Bristol fashion, despite my little grey cells being shaken up as much as they have by this experience! Then out of nowhere another ship joined the fray, an English ship called the Golden Lion, Captained by Sir Walter Raleigh, who stood side by side with the Hinde against Philips’ Spanish galleons.’
This was indeed a golden moment in more ways than one. Gulliver knew that this ship was normally captained by William Boroughs, who didn’t get on with Francis Drake and who’d had a spat of their own. So when Drake first saw the Golden Lion he was hardly jumping for joy, although when he saw his friend with his brother John by his side, his face lit up like a lighthouse.
And then a rainbow appeared out of nowhere, although not in the sky, as the Rainbow was another ship in the fleet of the Royal Navy. Soon the Rainbow was joined by another English ship, the Elizabeth Bonaventure, a ship Drake was later to sail upon in the timeline in Gulliver’s world, which had been on an adventure of its own off the coast of Santo Domingo. Gulliver was to wonder if Drake was aboard this ship; that really would be a turn up for the books, especially for his travel book! Two Drakes for the price of one, now that really would seem like black magic to the Spanish and the fairytale to end all fairytales. Even Hans Christian would have trouble topping this one, Gulliver thought, winking his inner eye like a cyclops! Then two more Spanish ships appeared out of the midsts of time and joined the fray, along with the Tudor warship the Mary Rose, which Gulliver had only seen in Portsmouth, or what was left of her.
And then the icing on the cake moment happened, and in truth when it did Gulliver found it hard to suspend his disbelief. HMS Victory appeared from its suspended animation in time to join the fray. Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson was standing upon the deck dressed up to the nines in his white breeches, blue and gold braded tunic with gold buttons to match and with what looked like a matador’s hat on his head. Nelson took the hat off and waved it several times over his head to reveal a white wig with a pony tail tied at the back in a black bow. The men onboard the British ships went wild, throwing their hats into the air as if victory was secured and the battle already won, which perhaps it was.
And then the strangest most curious of things happened in this Goliath verses Goliath battle which wasn’t to be expected, as Titan and Neptune stopped their personal squabble, over what I have no idea, and decided to intercede in the fight between English ships and the Spanish galleons. Wading in, Titan picked up the Spanish galleons and Neptune gathered up the English ships as if they were nothing more than toy ships sailing in a tin bathtub. The cannonballs bounced off of their massive frames as if they were marbles, and not the Elgin Marbles, I might add! The sea gods then held their respective catches within a hair’s breath of their faces and we could all feel their hot breath, which nearly tore the sails asunder and swept us into the sea. ‘The lateen sail was blown clean off like a moth’s wing in a tailspin,’ wrote Gulliver in his best English, as the gods held a small body of water in the palms of their massive calloused hands along with the ships. However, it was soon obvious to both us and the Spanish that these two giants of the sea meant us no ill will, both appearing as the most gentle of giants and as benign as the water upon a mill pond. Neptune had obviously been eating garlic, which left a bad taste in all of our mouths, as well as cheese, as some was still stuck in his beard along with hundreds of sea urchins and crustaceans.
Titan walked several hundred leagues in no time at all and placed the galleons down just off the Spanish port of Costa Dorada, while Neptune went in the opposite direction and set the Golden Hind, the Rainbow, the Elizabeth Bonaventure, the Golden Lion, the Mary Rose and HMS Victory down about a league from the English coast. Titan and Neptune then turned around, met each other in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and kissed and made up, before taking a much-needed rest on their waterbeds at the bottom of the ocean.
Old Father Time said this really was too much excitement for a gentleman of his reclining years and when he got home he would be happy to just tend his beloved marigolds.
As a golden sun shone down from the sky, the Golden Hind and its crew were both literally and metaphorically sailing upon sunshine. The Golden Hind, all sails unfurled, apart from the lateen sail which unfortunately for the sailmaker aboard had sailed its last voyage, was flanked by the Golden Lion to its port side, while HMS Victory and the Elizabeth Bonaventure flanked it to its starboard side as they sailed into Portsmouth harbour all guns blazing (that was just metaphorically speaking!). Here they were met by an exultant Queen Elizabeth I. It appeared half of Albion was out to greet the Golden Hind and the cream of the Royal Navy. Somehow the population of England had heard upon the grapevine that Drake and his crew had embarked upon this impossible quest and had achieved their goal of finding The Last Bookshop in the World , oh, and in doing so had circumnavigated the world to boot. Apparently some people had heard the news by holding a shell up to their ears, which they’d picked up from the beach and which is where the expression ‘having a word in your shell-like’ came from, probably!
The queen invited all the crew of the Golden Hind to her place, which was a palace made of crystal in Old Londinium town. Later still she asked Drake exactly where The Last Bookshop in the World was, and that if he didn’t tell her she would ex-communicate him, or worse, remove his head from his shoulders. Drake still wouldn’t break the contract he’d signed in The Last Bookshop in the World, saying to the queen that no Englishman worth his salt would break his word, and if he did she wouldn’t respect him. Drake desperately tried to steer the queen away from the subject hoping she wouldn’t cast her subject, mainly Drake, out of her queendom. Far from being angry, Queen Elizabeth I was most impressed that Drake had stuck to his guns and said that anyway, she was only yanking his anchor as she knew exactly where The Last Bookshop in the World was. However, like Drake, she had signed the same contract and couldn’t talk about its whereabouts either. Drake wasn’t sure if the queen was telling fairytales or not!
Later Drake was knighted but not by a Frenchman aboard the Golden Hind like in Gulliver’s world, but by Queen Elizabeth herself. A ballad was even written in Drake’s honour entitled The World Encompassed. This ballad made Drake realize he had actually circumnavigated the world and some, well, even he, admitted his sense of direction at times left a lot to be desired. He also read accounts of his derring-do in a book called The True and Perfecte written by Thomas Greepe and printed in London by I. Charleswood, for Thomas Hackett. This book wrote of the ‘Newes of the woorthy and valiuant ex-ploytes, performed and done by the valiant Knight Syre Francis Drake.’ The book had no date upon it. Gulliver also read some of this book and noted how he wasn’t the only one suffering from dyslexia.
Of course Gulliver realized that was just how they spelt things in Shakespeare’s Ye Olde English Dictionary. The book also told of Drake’s exploits in the West Indies, which included the Great West Indies Raid in his ships the Dragon and the Swan, which Drake said he couldn’t remember anything about, which was a little strange. Gulliver thought this was either because he hadn’t or the rum had gone to his head! There was even a poem written for him by a man called Robert Hayman who had met Drake on a steep Devon street in Totnes when he was but a small child of five. Drake had patted the boy on the head and gave him an orange and said to him, ‘God bless, my boy.’
He did recall this event. Drake, who loved children, never had children of his own. Perhaps that was why he took Gulliver and Alice under his wing, treating them as if they were his own children. The first verse of the poem went like this:
When Drake read the poem it bought a tear to his eye, although at the time he said the wind had blown a bit of grit into his eye which he was simply wiping away with his handkerchief.
Gulliver presented the queen with a map of their journey which he had sketched and then painted, as well as several pictures of mermaids and seahorses he had sketched while aboard the Golden Hind. However, Gulliver didn’t give her his travelogue as he felt he may well have to edit it first in case he had said anything he ought not to have done. After all, like Drake, he had no desire to lose his head unless it was metaphorically speaking, and in truth, it is a lot easier to speak both metaphorically and literally if you have a head than if you do not!
While they were all in London, the queen decreed that they should all be given the key to the city, a golden key at that. Not only was Drake knighted aboard the Golden Hind but so was Gulliver, becoming Sir Gulliver. Alice became a dame, receiving her dameship from young Queen Victoria, who at the time in truth was a little princess! Later still they got to ride on Stephenson’s new-fangled contraption he called a rocket, although in truth it was closer to a train than a rocket. And after that experience they slowed things down a little by watching penny-farthing races taking place over London Bridge, which Old Father Time said was more his speed. That night they witnessed the most magnificent firework display imaginable, where Gulliver got talking to a man who said his name was Guy. These proceedings were both watched by Queen Elizabeth I and a young Queen Victoria, who as it turned out was most amusing.
Later there were some fireworks of a different kind when the man named Guy appeared to spontaneously combusted right in front of Gulliver’s eyes. However, his eyes were probably playing tricks upon him, either that or the man was a conjuror, a master magician like Houdini. The icing on the cake was there was no marzipan on this cake, no sorry, only yanking your anchor, the icing on the icing on the cake was a full symphony orchestra that played Handel’s Water Music, conducted by a little-known musician who could capture lightning in a jar, musically speaking that is. The man’s name, which I’m sure is of little consequence to you being a wannabe named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who probably wouldn’t amount to anything, although that night he appeared to wave his conductor’s wand like a wizard.
At the end of the piece, Gunner William Wigglesworth had the honour of firing the cannon, which was sitting aboard the Golden Hind at the time and which in turn was sat upon a becalmed River Thames. It was just unfortunate that the cannonball which was fired from the gun sank a ship in dry dock called the Mary Rose! Only yanking your anchor, however, the cannonball did make a sizable hole in the Globe Theatre!
But as Shakespeare was later to say, ‘Worse things happen at sea.’ Anyway, in truth the building was old and desperately needed a makeover so no real harm was done. Some wag wearing a wig pointed out to the bard of Avon that unless he was very much mistaken, the Globe Theatre wasn’t at sea. Shakespeare retorted that he was just being metaphorical and, if this wag wasn’t careful, he would help him drown his sorrows and he wasn’t being metaphorical either. Further adding that the Thames would be the perfect place for Shakespeare to help him drown these sorrows of his. Shakespeare, it appeared was fond of talking about himself in the third person. In this curious parallel world where time was mixed up, it was conceivable that there could have been three Shakespeares, one in the first flush of youth, one having a mid-life crisis and one in the autumn of his years! Mind you, what with the strange nature of this world, Gulliver wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if he found the Globe Theatre was underwater, which he thought would have pleased the mermaids and mermen no end.
The crew of the Golden Hind also saw the master magician Harry Houdini free himself from several chains, and a coffin that was encased inside a block of ice that was then placed in the River Thames. The Thames was partly frozen over at the time, hence the Golden Hind being becalmed as if in a tourist’s snow dome, like the ones Gulliver had seen in the gift shop in the Globe Theatre in London in his time.
Quite how Houdini ‘the Magic Man’ achieved this miraculous conjuring fete even Gulliver was not sure, but it seemed in this age of the extraordinary, the implausible, the impossible, the fantastical, the miraculous, the phantasmagorical, such fetes were mere trifles and not in the least bit out of the ordinary in any way, shape or form.
The industrial revolution had started in earnest with the great exhibition at the Crystal Palace, which showed off the latest inventions of the time. ‘This revolution will take a little bit of getting used to for the Elizabethans amongst us,’ Queen Elizabeth said with a wry smile upon her royal countenance. However, in time the Elizabethans got used to it as the old ways mixed with the new, as it appeared it was meant to be in this weird and wonderful world of fantastical proportions that mirrored the earth of 2013, but only if you were looking in a crazy fairground mirror. Then Queen Victoria grew up and the realm was governed by two queens befitting of this golden age to end all golden ages. Now you would have thought this would have put Queen Elizabeth I’s nose out of joint somewhat, but not a bit of it as she so wisely said, ‘Two heads are better than one!’ Now Queen Elizabeth had more time for kicking her heels up and having fun, which amused Queen Victoria greatly. This was no mean feat, as the older Victoria got, the less amused she became.
Gold is an attractive proposition which attracts both people and objects to it like a magnet. Two ages were said to be golden, the sixteenth century of the Elizabethan period of Drake’s Golden Hind, where discovery of new lands was commonplace. And the nineteenth century where Caxton’s printing press took over from the golden illuminated manuscripts, the age of the industrial revolution, with its golden age of steam and inventors who became not only heroes but national treasures too.
After the gods had shaken time up in this parallel world which housed a parallel earth, the two ages were attracted to one another, like the dial of a compass is attracted to magnetic north, as they formed the new world. However, other time periods had also slipped into this world like grains of sand from the hourglass. But predominately the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries reigned over this kingdom presided over by Queen Elizabeth I and more recently by Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth I. This is how Gulliver explained the world he was now living in in his travelogue, otherwise known as his book with words and pictures.
‘Later, Queen Elizabeth thanked Drake for the books he’d given her, although she said one of them was a little too racy for her tastes. Later still, Drake laid his cape down in a puddle so Queen Elizabeth didn’t get her pretty little feet wet, that actually weren’t that little!’
Apparently Drake had heard Gulliver talking in his sleep saying. ‘Don’t let the queen get her feet wet. Throw down your cape, man, throw down your cape!’ In this dream Raleigh appeared to be in somewhat of an agitated state, although this dream appeared to be more of a midsummer night’s nightmare than a midsummer night’s dream. Now Drake knew the ancients thought that through dreams you could predict the future. After all, Gulliver wasn’t your average boy, Drake could see that, so thought he was preordained to save the queen from getting her pretty little feet wet, not realizing that was Sir Walter Raleigh’s destiny. But surely such a small act couldn’t change history, could it, a sort of butterfly effect in time?
The next time Drake sailed to Gulliver’s Island he brought the chief the copies of Shakespeare’s latest novels, although by that time, Shakespeare being as prolific as he was, he had written several more blockbusters.
Gulliver bought a house in the same street as Alice’s with the purse full of golden ducats the queen had given every member of the crew of the Golden Hind which, once again, seemed somewhat appropriate. The queen had a golden dog collar made for Beagle and he became the mascot of all shipfarers around the world. Books were even written about him, as were of Gulliver’s Travels. The queen also had a giant golden anchor made from the gold Drake had plundered from the land known as the Land of Gold – Mexico. After which she presented it to Sir Francis Drake along with his knighthood, as by now Drake had become a national treasure. It seemed at this point in time that Sir Francis Drake definitely could have been said to have had ‘the Midas touch’. Queen Victoria also knighted Isambard Kingdom Brunel for his engineering achievements and gave him some spare keys to the kingdom and the City of London just in case he ever got locked out.
Drake had procured a book at The Last Bookshop in the World which foretold of his downfall, a book called La Dragontea, an epic story poem by the Spaniard Lope de Vega of Drake’s last voyage and miserable downfall. Drake, having read the future, wasn’t sure what to do about it; should he alter the course of history or accept his fate, accepting what had already been written in print, for surely the future was written in stone and had been preordained before he had even been born? Drake decided to let things pan out the way they were meant to, after all, he wasn’t a god, although at one time the Spanish sailors perceived him to be one. Drake thought wisely that if the bad parts of his life hadn’t happened, the good parts wouldn’t have happened either. It seemed some of Old Father Time’s wisdom had rubbed off on Sir Francis Drake in this epic voyage of a lifetime, that and he thought the whole tale nothing more than what he called ‘a Hans Christian’! in other words a fairytale!
The last recorded conversation Drake and Gulliver had was outside a large manor house in Devon called Buckland Abbey and it went exactly like this…
‘Gulliver, my boy, it’s been an honour to know you,’ Sir Francis Drake said earnestly.
‘You too, Sir Francis,’ Gulliver said as a tear in his eye wasn’t far off falling like ships fell off the flat earth.
‘Sir Francis, that has a nice ring to it like a time bell. It seems, young Master Gulliver, that you were right all along. I would be happy to have you serve amongst my ship’s company any time,’ Drake said proudly, recalling when he had first met Gulliver upon the Golden Hind some time ago, a time no longer recorded. Nevertheless this was a meeting he would not forget for quite some time to come.
‘It lightens my heart to hear you say so, Sir Francis,’ Gulliver said, sounding older than his years, whatever they may be.
‘How I wish I lived in such a fine place, Sir Gulliver, then my father, God rest his soul, would truly be proud of me,’ Drake said standing in the garden of the estate looking at the great abbey that stood before him. This was the first time Gulliver had been called a sir and it made him fell proud, adding a good foot to his rather slumped frame as he stood erect like the mast of a tall ship. Now he felt like a man and not just a callow youth who was out of his depth.
‘You do… or should I say you will… or should I say you have?’ Gulliver said talking gibberish as for a moment he reverted to the stammer of his childhood.
‘I see you’ve been looking into your crystal ball again, Gulliver. I won’t ask you to tell me my future as I think a man dictates his own future. It is not for the gods to write the fate of a man, his destiny is in his own hands. Don’t you think so, my boy?’ Drake said stroking his wispy beard as if he needed some reassuring on this point.
‘Think? I think I think too much, sire,’ Gulliver said as his thoughts turned to the Greek philosopher whose name had temporarily escaped him, the one who said, ‘I think, therefore I am.’
‘Yes, thinking is not all that it is cracked up to be, that’s 110% sure, as you young people like to say nowadays!’ Drake gave out a hearty laugh and the two parted on the best of terms imaginable.
Alice and Gulliver grew up together and became life-long friends. However, as time went by Alice could see by the look in Gulliver’s eyes that he yearned to travel back to his own world and his own time. Alice couldn’t bear to be parted from him, nor could Gulliver bear to be parted from Alice, who, he said, had a smile so infectious that the world would be a better place if everybody caught her infectious smile. Alice in all honesty was curious as to what Gulliver’s world was like, a world where time still existed. Both Gulliver and Alice were in their late teens when this happened. There was one thing, however, that Gulliver had come to realize, that in this parallel earth, time did still flow like a river, it was just that it appeared not to as there were no clocks marking it. The speed of life wasn’t as fast as in his modern world, more as if it were in slow motion like when they slowed down the beating of a hummingbird’s wings in a wildlife documentary on the Discovery Channel. But time had definitely slowed down to a snail’s pace and that wasn’t just an illusion. When the gods had shaken this world up they had altered the structure of time and space. The waves that were now gently lapping on the shores of the cosmological oceans in this parallel world may have been invisible to the naked eye having been irrevocably altered, but they were still there. This meant that one day, God willing, a golden ship would be seen sailing across those waves in time and space in a voyage as fantastical as Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe, a globe which due to its age could definitely be said to be the greatest antiquity of them all.
Gulliver was no Einstein, Newton or Hawking, but this was how he perceived time. Time was a deep blue ocean, a sea of tranquility where no mountainous waves were ever seen. This he wrote in his travelogue, which was definitely coloured by the synaesthete in him. And the tune he was hearing in his head when he wrote this? Well, it was more tunes than just one tune, a musical collage of Surf’s Up, Good Vibrations and Sail on Sailor by the musical god-like genius of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, which seemed more than appropriate. ‘Swimming in the deepest oceans on earth, sailing the seven seas, walking across the sands of time until I get to the cosmological oceans where I sailed away on the ship which I built with my own fair hand, a ship I named Imagination.’ Although for Gulliver it wasn’t to be a solo voyage as he had two other crewmembers aboard his ship.
Oh, and perhaps I should tell you that with the help of Alice ‘the Mermaid Girl’, Gulliver actually learnt to swim. He wasn’t quite a merman, certainly not in the same 20,000 leagues under the sea as fish which swam in the oceans, but he could do a passable doggie paddle, or at least Beagle thought so.
Was Alice a real mermaid or not? That’s a very good question. Unfortunately on that subject I’m sworn to secrecy.
And so Gulliver, Alice and Beagle returned to the cave with a diving bell designed by Leonardo Da Vinci himself. Da Vinci had heard of Gulliver’s travels and had journeyed to Devon from Italy especially to talk to the boy the world was calling the ‘Golden Boy’ or ‘the boy who held wonders in his hand’. As soon as the two met they recognized one another from their meeting upon the Black Sea. Gulliver told Da Vinci about his world and how he needed to get back there. So Da Vinci designed a diving bell which didn’t look like a tin bathtub and one that two people and a dog could fit comfortably in to make such a perilous journey under the sea without be drowned in the process. Da Vinci’s design was based on the pumping motion of a jellyfish as it pushes itself to the surface, an aqualung of sorts, a modern breathing apparatus not unlike the propulsion systems of a nautilus fish which lives in a spiral shell. Gulliver wondered if Da Vinci had ever met Jules Verne or H.G. Wells, which certainly would have been a meeting of minds that Gulliver would have liked to have been present at.
Leonardo had the diving bell put onto a cart drawn by a horse which transported it through the labyrinths of the cave to where the rock pool was situated. Gulliver, Alice and Da Vinci then offloaded the contraption into the water.
To Gulliver, the diving bell looked not unlike a miniature Unidentified Flying Object, although of course in this case it was an Identified Submersible Object.
What Leonardo Da Vinci didn’t tell Gulliver was that he was working on a time machine which was very nearly complete and that he might well see him again some time soon.
‘Well, Alice, are you ready?’ Gulliver said looking at Alice as he climbed into the diving bell that was half submerged in the pool of the cave’s lagoon with Beagle in his arms.
‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ said Alice as she stepped into the diving bell nervously.
‘You know what happens in stories when you go from one world to the next, time hardly passes at all. And if you don’t like my world you can always come back.’ Gulliver said doing his level best to reassure Alice. Gulliver was pretty sure it would still be Sunday!
‘Don’t worry, my young friends, I have complete faith that my invention will get you to your destination safely,’ Da Vinci said smiling warmly while stroking his beard, which normally meant he was nervous.
‘If it’s all the same to you, Leonardo, I feel much more comfortable when I’m worrying about something than when I’m not!’ said Gulliver, who felt such a perilous journey required a certain amount of worrying for not to do so he felt would have been tempting fate. Gulliver had always felt, in his world the gods never liked it if you got too far ahead of yourself. The minute you said life was going swimmingly or things were plain sailing, the minute you were sunk, the gods made 110% sure of that!
Da Vinci showed Gulliver and Alice how his invention worked and what operated what, as in the diving bell there was a mass of shiny white china buttons, mahogany levers, brass toggles and weird-looking switches. He also told Gulliver, if he insisted in worrying, exactly what he should be worrying about the most, saying if any of the needles pointed to the furthest west or the furthest east it normally meant you were sunk, even if you were in the air at the time!
‘Good luck and Godspeed. Arvideci to you and always remember these words, Gulliver, sono il migliore, optimus sum, arvideci, arvideci,’ cried Da Vinci waving happily in their direction as he bid them a fond farewell.
Gulliver thought arvideci sounded like arrived and not goodbye, as if Da Vinci was welcoming him to this world, a déjà vu moment if you like. Gulliver had no idea what the words Da Vinci had said meant any more than he knew what half the words in the English language meant. But that was language for you, it was nothing more than a whole load of words cobbled together to fall where they may, as if in a snow dome that had been shaken up by God knows who, probably Shakespeare!
Later Gulliver was to find out these words in Italian and in Latin meant ‘I am the best’. Now some could say Leonardo Da Vinci was being somewhat of a big head know-it-all geek that wasn’t Greek, or more likely translated could mean, ‘Believe in yourself, Gulliver. Be optimistic for you could do anything you put your imaginative mind to.’
And then the diving bell submerged under the water as a mass of rising bubbles rose to the surface in its wake and then it was gone, leaving the mirror image of Leonardo Da Vinci’s face in the water of the rock pool. As a smile rippled across his craggy features you could say Da Vinci’s face was quite a picture; if you had a highly attuned imagination you could almost say his face mirrored the smile on the painting of the Mona Lisa!