June 3, 1706

June 3, 1706, stands as the decisive endpoint of Gulliver's second voyage, the day he set foot again in his native country after an absence of nearly four years. It was on this date that the ship commanded by Captain Thomas Wilcocks, having sailed from the Downs on June 20, 1702, and after a prosperous voyage that included a stop at the Cape of Good Hope and a passage through the Straits of Madagascar, finally arrived back in the Downs, the famous roadstead off the southeast coast of Kent. This return marked the conclusion of a journey that had taken Gulliver from the tiny kingdom of Lilliput to the gigantic land of Brobdingnag, and back again, fundamentally altering his perception of the world and his place within it.

The Circumstances of the Return

Gulliver's return on June 3, 1706, was not a planned homecoming but the result of a series of extraordinary and perilous events. After being carried off from the coast of Brobdingnag by a giant eagle, his travelling box fell into the sea and was eventually discovered by the crew of an English merchantman. The captain, Thomas Wilcocks, an honest and worthy man from Shropshire, initially thought Gulliver was raving when he described his adventures, but was convinced by the physical evidence Gulliver produced, including a comb made from the stumps of the King of Brobdingnag's beard, a collection of giant needles and pins, and a gold ring the queen had given him. The ship's course, driven by a trade wind, took them southward, coasting New Holland, and doubling the Cape of Good Hope before reaching England. The voyage itself was prosperous, and Gulliver, having been treated with great kindness by the captain, was set ashore without any charge for his passage.

The Immediate Aftermath and Psychological Disorientation

The moment of Gulliver's return on June 3, 1706, was marked not by simple joy but by profound psychological disorientation. Having spent over two years among beings of immense size, Gulliver's perception of scale had been permanently warped. As he traveled from the Downs to his home in Redriff, he found himself terrified of trampling on every traveler he met, often calling aloud for them to stand out of the way, a behavior that nearly earned him a broken head. When he arrived at his own house, he bent down to go through the door for fear of striking his head, and when his wife ran out to embrace him, he stooped lower than her knees, thinking she could not otherwise reach his mouth. His daughter knelt to ask his blessing, but he could not see her until she arose, having been so long used to standing with his head and eyes erect to above sixty feet. He looked down upon his servants and friends as if they were pygmies, and told his wife she had starved herself and her daughter to nothing. His behavior was so unaccountable that his family and friends concluded, as Captain Wilcocks had when he first saw him, that he had lost his wits.

Thematic Significance: The Power of Habit and Prejudice

The date June 3, 1706, thus serves as the pivot on which the entire satirical mechanism of the Brobdingnag voyage turns. Gulliver's return is not a triumphant homecoming but a demonstration of the great power of habit and prejudice. Having internalized the Brobdingnagian perspective, he can no longer see his own world as normal. The very people he longed to rejoin now appear contemptible and tiny, and his own home feels like a Lilliputian dollhouse. This inversion of perception, which Gulliver himself acknowledges as a kind of madness, is Swift's final, devastating comment on the relativity of human experience. The king of Brobdingnag's judgment that the English are "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin" now seems to Gulliver, in his disoriented state, to be a literal description of the people around him. The return on June 3, 1706, therefore, does not restore Gulliver to a stable reality; it plunges him into a world where his own species has become alien to him, a condition that will drive him to sea again, as his wife's protests could not prevent him from undertaking a third voyage.