Lilliput and Blefuscu

Lilliput and Blefuscu are two fictional island nations that appear in the first part of the 1726 satirical prose novel Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. The two islands are neighbours in the South Indian Ocean, separated by a channel 800 yards (730 m) wide. Both are inhabited by tiny people who are about one-twelfth the height of ordinary human beings. Both nations are empires and the capital of Lilliput is Mildendo.

Location

Swift gives the location of Lilliput and Blefuscu in Part I of Gulliver's Travels, both in the text and with a map, though neither correspond to real-world geography, even as it was known in Swift's time. The text states that Gulliver's ship (the Antelope) was bound for the East Indies when it was caught in "a violent storm to the northwest of Van Diemen's Land" (Tasmania). He gives the latitude as 30°2'S, though the longitude is unspecified. Likewise, the map depicts Lilliput and Blefuscu south of "Hogs Island" (Simeulue), off northwest Sumatra, and northwest of Van Diemen's Land, though the map is considerably foreshortened; Van Diemen's Land is shown south of the Sunda Strait, some 10° (700 miles) east of Hogs Island, whereas Tasmania is actually some 40° (2,500 miles) east of that meridian. Neither the text nor the map make reference to New Holland (Western Australia), which had been discovered in 1644, some 80 years before publication, and was well-documented in the maps of Swift's time. While Australia's Cocos (Keeling) Islands are in roughly the right map location south-west of Sumatra, have two inhabited islands, and would have been known of in Swift's day, they are at entirely the wrong latitude.