Introduction
A Voyage to Cacklogallinia appeared in London, in 1727, from the pen of a pseudonymous “Captain Samuel Brunt.” Posterity has continued to preserve the anonymity of the author, perhaps more jealously than he would present be referred only to the literary family of which his progenitor “Captain Lemuel Gulliver” is the most distinguished member. Like so many other works of that period, A Voyage to Cacklogallinia has sometimes been attributed to Swift; its similarities to the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels are unmistakable. Again, the work has sometimes been attributed to Defoe. There is, however, no good reason to believe that either Defoe or Swift was concerned in its authorship, except in so far as both gave impetus to lesser writers in this form of composition.
Fortunately the authorship of the work is of little importance. It lives, not because of anything remarkable in the style or anything original in its author’s point of view, but because of its satiric reflection of the background of its age. It is republished both because of its historical value and because of its peculiarly contemporary appeal today. Its satire needs no learned paraphernalia of footnotes; it can be readily understood and appreciated by readers in an age dominated on the one hand by economics and on the other, by science. Its satire, not too subtle, is as pertinent in our own period as it was two hundred years ago. Its irony is concerned with stock exchanges and feverish speculation. It is a tale of incredible inflation and abrupt and devastating depression. Its “voyage to the moon” has not lost its appeal to men and women who can still remember a period when human flights seemed incredible and who have lived to see “flying chariots” spanning oceans and continents and ascending into the stratosphere.
The first and most obvious interest of the tale is in its reflection of economic conditions in the early eighteenth century. The period following the Revolution of 1688 saw tremendous changes in attitudes toward credit and speculation. A new and powerful economic instrument was put into the hands of men who had not yet discovered its dangers. With the natural confusion which ensued between “credit” and “wealth,” with a new emphasis upon the possible values inherent in “expectations of wealth” rather than immediate control over money, an unheardof speculative emphasis appeared in business. The rapid increase in new trades and new industrial systems afforded possibilities of immediate rise to affluence. The outside public engaged in speculation to a degree not before known. Exaggerated gains, violent fluctuations in prices, meteoric rises and collapses; these gave rein to a gambling spirit perennial in man. The word “Projects” enters into literature as a recurrent motif, strangely familiar to our present generation, which needs only to turn Defoe’s Essay on Projects into contemporary language to see the similarities between the year 1697 and the year 1939. That essay is filled with talk of “new Inventions, Engines, and I know not what, which have rais’d the Fancies of Credulous People to such height, that merely on the shadow of Expectation, they have form’d Companies, chose Committees, appointed Officers, Shares, and Books, rais’d great Stocks, and cri’d up an empty Notion to that degree that People have been betray’d to part with their Money for Shares in a NewNothing.”
Of the many speculative schemes of the early eighteenth century, none is better known than the “South Sea Bubble.” After a long period during which English trade with the Spanish West Indies was carried on by subterfuge, an Act of Parliament in 1710 incorporated into a jointstock company the state creditors, upon the basis of their loan of ten million pounds to the Government and conferred upon them the monopoly of the English trade with the Indies. In spite of these advantages, however, the South Sea Company found itself so hampered and limited in credit that it offered to convert the national debt into a “single redeemable obligation” to the company in return for a monopoly of British foreign trade outside England. The immediate and spectacular effect of that offer is reflected in the many descriptions, both serious and satiric, of an era of speculation which to many generations might seem incredible; though not to this generation which has itself lived through an orgy of speculation.
Clearly the South Sea Bubble, which reached its climax in 1720, was the chief source of Captain Samuel Brunt’s satire, which has an important place in the minor literature called forth by the wild speculation connected with the Bubble. If the “Projects” proposed to Captain Brunt seem extreme to any modern reader, let him turn to the list of “bubbles,” still accessible in many places. Nothing in Brunt is so fantastic as many of the actual schemes suggested and acted upon in the eighteenth century. The possibility of extracting gold from the mountains of the moon is no more fanciful than several of the proposals seriously received by Englishmen under the spell of speculation. As in the kingdom of Cacklogallinia, so in London, men mortgaged their homes and women sold their jewels in order to purchase shares in wildcat companies, born one day, only to die the next. As the anonymous author of one of many South Sea Ballads wrote in his “Merry Remarks upon Exchange Alley Bubbles”:
Our greatest ladies hither come,
And ply in chariots daily;
Oft pawn their jewels for a sum
To venture in the Alley.
The meteoric rise in the price of shares in the moonmountain project of the Cacklogallinians is no greater than the actual rise in prices of shares during the South Sea Bubble, when, between April and July, 1720, shares rose from £120 to £1,020. The fluctuating market of the Cacklogallinian ‘Change, which responded to every rumor, follows faithfully the actual situation in London in 1720; and the final crash which shook Cacklogallinian foundations; subtly suggested by Brunt’s unwillingness to return and face the enraged multitudeis an echo of the crash which shook England when the Bubble was pricked.
But its reflection of the economic background of the age is not the only reason for the interest and importance of A Voyage to Cacklogallinia, either in its generation or in our own. The little tale has its place in the history of science, particularly in that movement of science which, beginning with the “new astronomy” in the early seventeenth century, was to produce one of the most important chapters in the history of aviation. So far as literature is concerned, A Voyage to Cacklogallinia belongs to the literary genre of “voyages to the moon” which from Lucian to H.G. Wells (even to modern “pulp magazines”) have enthralled human imagination. Yet while its fantasy looks back to Lucian’s IcaroMenippus, who flew to the moon by using the wing of a vulture and the wing of an eagle, its suggestion of the growing scientific temper of modern times makes it much more than mere fantasy. In the semilegendary history of Iran is to be found a tale, retold by Firdausi in the Shaknameh of Kavi Usan, who “essayed the sky To outsoar angels” by fastening four eagles to his throne. The Iranian motif was adopted in the romances of Alexander the Great and so passed into European literature. The researches of Leonardo da Vinci upon the muscles of birds and the principles of the flight of birds brought over to the realm of science ideas long familiar in tale and legend. Francis Bacon did not hesitate to suggest in his Natural History (Experiment 886) that there are possibilities of human flight by the use of birds and “advises others to think further upon this experiment as giving some light to the invention of the art of flying.”
John Wilkins, one of the most influential early members of the Royal Society, in his Mathematicall Magick, in 1648, suggested “four several ways whereby this flying in the air hath been or may be attempted.” He listed, as the second, “By the help of fowls.” Ten years earlier there appeared in England during the same year two works which were to have great influence in popularizing the theme of light: Wilkins’s Discovery of a World in the Moone, a serious semiscientific work on the nature of the moon and the possibility of man’s flying thither, and a prose romance by Francis Godwin, The Man in the Moone: or, A Discourse of a Voyage thither by D. Gonsales. These two works were largely responsible for the emergence of the old theme of flight to the moon in imaginative literature; the English translation of Lucian at almost the same time perhaps aided in advancing the popularity of the idea.
The similarities between Brunt’s romance and Godwin’s tale a century earlier are too striking to be fortuitous, and, indeed, there is no question that Brunt used Godwin as one of his chief sources. An earlier Robinson Crusoe, an idyllic Gulliver’s Travels, Godwin’s The Man in the Moone helped to establish in English literature the vogue of the traveler’s tale to strange countries. Domingo, like Captain Samuel Brunt, draws from the “exotic” tradition. Both travelers find themselves in strange lands; both experience many other adventures before they make their way to the moon, drawn by birds.
But the century which elapsed between Godwin’s fanciful tale and Brunt’s fantastic romance felt the impact of the new science. No matter how clearly both tales draw from old traditions of legend and literature, no matter how many elements of fantasy remain, there is a profound and fundamental difference between them. Godwin’s hero made his way to the moon by mere chance; it happened that he harnessed himself to his gansas during their period of hibernation. Too late, he discovered that gansas hibernate in the moon! The earlier voyage took only “Eleven or Twelve daies”and that by gansa power! The earlier author did not suggest that his hero encountered any particular difficulties of respiration, nor did he pause to consider in detail the problem of the nature of the intervening air through which his hero passed.
But a hundred years of science had intervened between Godwin’s tale and that of Captain Samuel Brunt. The later voyage to the moon is no less fantastic in its outlines than is the earlier, yet it shows clearly the impact of science upon popular imagination. The imagination of man had expanded with the expanding universe. Brunt takes care to indicate the vast distance between the earth and the moon by subtle mathematical suggestion. Although both travelers flew “with incredible swiftness,” the eighteenth century flyers found that it was “about a Month before we came into the Attraction of the Moon.” Brunt’s account of the preparation for the ascent into the orb of the moon is almost as careful as a modern account of an ascent into the stratosphere. His bird flyers lay their plans deliberately and upon the basis of the most recent scientific discoveries. There is nothing fortuitous about their final ascent. Brunt was clearly aware of the work of many scientists, notably Boyle, upon the nature and rarefaction of the air. His flyers proceed by slow stages, accustoming themselves gradually to the rarefied air, assisting their respiration by the use of wet sponges. They learn by experience the answer to the problems with which Godwin’s mind had played but which many later scientific writers had considered more definitely: what is the nature of gravity; how far beyond the confines of the earth does it extend; what would happen to man could he “pass the Atmosphere”? The generation to which Captain Samuel Brunt belonged might still delight in the fantastic; but like our own generation, it insisted that fantasy must rest upon that which is at least scientifically possible, if not probable.
A Voyage to Cacklogallinia is republished today because of its appeal to many readers. It offers something to the student of economic history; something to the student of early science. It is one of several littleknown “voyages to the moon,” of which the most famous are those of Cyrano de Bergerac, a form of reading in which our ancestors delighted and which deserve to be collected. But apart from having a notinconsiderable historical interest, it remains the kind of tale which may be read at any time because it appeals to the fundamental love of adventure in human beings. Its author was undoubtedly only one of many men who, under the influence of Godwin, Swift, and others, could weave a tale in an accepted pattern. Yet there are elements which make it unique; and it deserves at least this opportunity of rising phoenixlike from the ashes of the past and being treasured by posterity.
MARJORIE NICOLSON
Smith College,
Northampton, Mass.
Nov. 3, 1939
NOTES
1. The best treatment of the South Sea Bubble for students of literature will be found in Lewis Melville, The South Sea Bubble, Boston, 1923. The author has also included in his volume extracts from dozens of satires which appeared after 1720. He does not, however, mention A Voyage to Cacklogallinia.
2. Pages 107 ff.
3. The list of “bubbles” may be found in Melville, op. cit., chap, iv; Cobbett, Parliamentary History, VII, 656 ff., Somers, Tracts [ed. 1815], XIII, 818.
4. Contemporary letters indicating the interest of both men and women in speculation may be found in Historical Manuscripts Commission, XLV, 200, and CXXV, 288, 29495, 34950.
5. I have discussed the relationship between aviation and the “new astronomy” in several articles dealing with voyages to the moon. Bibliography may be found in two of these, “A World in the Moon,” in Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, Vol. XVII (No. 2, January, 1936), and “Swift’s ‘Flying Island’ in the ‘Voyage to Laputa,’” Annals of Science, II (October, 1937), 40531.
6. Mathematicall Magick; or, The Wonders That May Be Performed by Mechanicall Geometry, London, 1648; in Mathematical and Philosophical Works, London, 1802, II, 199.
7. The Discovery of a World in the Moone; or, A Discourse Tending to Prove, That ’Tis Probable There May Be Another Habitable World in That Planet, London, 1638.
8. The Man in the Moone; or, A Discourse of a Voyage thither by D. Gonsales, [By F.G.], London, 1638. This has recently been republished from the first edition by Grant McColley in Smith College Studies in Modern Languages XIX (1937).