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Page 1
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 have wished. Whatever his real parentage, he must for the 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 unheard-of
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
New-Nothing."
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 joint-stock
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.[1] If the "Projects" proposed to Captain
Brunt[2] seem extreme to any modern reader, let him turn to the list of
"bubbles," still accessible in many places.[3] 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 [4] 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":
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