May 4, 1699

May 4, 1699, is the precise date on which Lemuel Gulliver, after a series of failed attempts to establish himself as a surgeon in London, accepted an advantageous offer from Captain William Prichard, master of the Antelope, and set sail from Bristol for the South Sea. This departure marks the beginning of his first voyage and the entire sequence of extraordinary travels that constitute the narrative of Gulliver's Travels. The date is the first of several exact temporal markers Gulliver provides, anchoring his fantastic adventures in a framework of apparent factual precision that mimics the conventions of contemporary travel literature.

Background and Context

Gulliver's decision to sail on May 4, 1699, was the culmination of a long and restless career. After studying physic at Leyden for two years and seven months, he served as surgeon aboard the Swallow under Captain Abraham Pannell, making voyages into the Levant. He then settled in London, married Mary Burton, and attempted to build a practice, but his business failed after the death of his mentor James Bates. He returned to sea for six years, serving as surgeon on two ships to the East and West Indies, but the last of these voyages proved not very fortunate. After three years of waiting for things to mend in Wapping, he accepted Prichard's offer. The voyage began prosperously, but the ship was driven by a violent storm to the northwest of Van Diemen's Land, and on November 5, 1699, it was wrecked on a rock, leading to Gulliver's arrival in Lilliput.

Narrative Significance

The date May 4, 1699, functions as a key element in Gulliver's strategy of verisimilitude. By providing a specific day, month, and year, he creates an impression of documentary reliability that contrasts sharply with the fantastical nature of the events that follow. This technique is reinforced by the publisher's note, which describes Gulliver as a man so distinguished for his veracity that it became a proverb among his neighbors at Redriff to say a thing was "as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoken it." The date also establishes a chronological baseline for the entire work: Gulliver's first voyage lasts from May 4, 1699, to his return to England on April 13, 1702, and his second voyage begins on June 20, 1702, just two months later. This careful temporal architecture gives the narrative a sense of historical grounding that makes its satirical observations all the more pointed.

Thematic Resonance

May 4, 1699, also marks the beginning of Gulliver's transformation from a conventional English surgeon into a traveler whose perspective is radically altered by his encounters with radically different scales of existence. The date is the first of many precise coordinates—latitude 30 degrees 2 minutes south, the fifth of November, the fourth day of the eighty-ninth moon—that Gulliver uses to map his journey. These coordinates, however, do not merely locate him in space and time; they also serve as ironic markers of the limits of human knowledge. The Lilliputians, for instance, measure time in moons and have their own calendar, and Gulliver's watch, which he calls his oracle, is treated by them as a mysterious object. The precision of May 4, 1699, thus becomes part of a larger pattern in which the tools of European science and navigation are both employed and subverted, revealing the relativity of all systems of measurement and belief.