Gulliver's ship wrecks in a storm and he swims to an unknown shore, collapsing from exhaustion.

Gulliver wakes tied down by ropes and discovers tiny Lilliputian beings marching across his body.

Gulliver swims across the gulf to Blefuscu and tows the entire enemy naval fleet back to Lilliput.

The Lilliputians serve Gulliver articles of impeachment and sentence him to have both eyes removed.

Gulliver flees to Blefuscu, finds an overturned boat just offshore, and escapes to the open sea.

Gulliver becomes separated from his crew on a Brobdingnagian shore and is picked up by a giant farmer.

The queen of Brobdingnag purchases Gulliver from the farmer and installs him in the royal court.

A giant eagle snatches Gulliver's travel box and drops it into the ocean far from shore.

Pirates overtake Gulliver's ship on his third voyage and set him adrift alone in a canoe.

Gulliver discovers the floating island of Laputa and is brought aboard to meet its king.

Gulliver visits the island of Glubbdubdrib and holds conversations with famous historical figures summoned from the dead.

Gulliver's crew mutinies on his fourth voyage and abandons him alone on an uncharted shore.

A group of Yahoo creatures attacks Gulliver before two horses appear and drive them off.

The master Houyhnhnm orders Gulliver to leave permanently, and Gulliver faints with grief at his feet.

Gulliver returns home for the final time, rejects his family, purchases horses, and lives as a recluse.

Gulliver's Travels follows surgeon Lemuel Gulliver across four extraordinary voyages that take him progressively further from his English life and values. In Lilliput he is enslaved by tiny people, becomes a military hero, and then flees unjust punishment. In Brobdingnag he is a curiosity in a land of giants before a freak accident sends him back to sea. A third voyage leads him to the floating island of Laputa and a series of strange kingdoms. On his final voyage, a mutiny deposits him in the land of the rational horses, the Houyhnhnms, and he is transformed forever. By the novel's end, Gulliver returns home a broken and misanthropic recluse who prefers the company of horses to his own family.

Gulliver's four voyages from shipwreck to self-imposed exile.

The Lilliputian emperor visits Gulliver and the two attempt to communicate despite speaking entirely different languages.

Lilliputian officials conduct a formal inventory of every item found in Gulliver's pockets.

Gulliver is granted freedom by the Lilliputian emperor after agreeing to a set of strict conditions.

Now free to roam, Gulliver visits the Lilliputian capital city of Mildendo and admires its scale.

Gulliver learns that Lilliput is divided into political factions defined entirely by whether members wear high or low heels.

The Lilliputian emperor awards Gulliver the title of Nardac, the kingdom's highest military honor.

The Brobdingnagian farmer's daughter Glumdalclitch takes Gulliver into her care and teaches him the local language.

The Brobdingnagian farmer charges admission to display Gulliver at market days and takes him on a ten-week tour.

A monkey that escapes into the Brobdingnagian palace seizes Gulliver and carries him up to the rooftop.

Gulliver tours the Lagado Academy and witnesses professors conducting bizarre and entirely useless pseudoscientific experiments.

Gulliver arrives in Luggnagg and is forced to crawl toward the king while licking the floor.

A Luggnaggian native explains that struldbrugs are immortal beings who age into miserable, universally despised outcasts.

Gulliver arrives in Japan by pretending to be a Dutch merchant and eventually boards a ship bound for Europe.

Gulliver gets a close look at chained Yahoo creatures and is horrified to recognize their faces as human.

Gulliver constructs a small canoe with help from the Houyhnhnms in preparation for his forced departure.

Across his four journeys, Gulliver navigates a series of significant encounters that reveal the texture of each strange society he enters. In Lilliput he negotiates his captivity, maps the kingdom's politics, and earns its highest honor before everything unravels. In Brobdingnag a farmer's daughter becomes his caretaker and a monkey nearly kills him, while the land's enormous scale exposes every human imperfection. His third voyage takes him through an academy of absurd experiments and into a court where the king extorts ritualistic submission. In the land of the Houyhnhnms, Gulliver's growing horror at the Yahoo creatures culminates in the chilling moment he recognizes their faces as human, and he ends his stay building the very boat that will carry him back to the world he has come to despise.

The encounters and discoveries that fill out each voyage.

Gulliver fires his pistol before the Lilliputian emperor, and the noise and smoke terrify the entire court.

Gulliver learns that Lilliputian government positions are awarded to whoever jumps highest during rope-dancing contests.

Reldresal reveals that the long war between Lilliput and Blefuscu began over which end of an egg to crack.

Gulliver urinates on the empress's burning quarters to extinguish the fire, earning her permanent rage instead of gratitude.

Gulliver refuses the Lilliputian emperor's demand that he help conquer and enslave the entire nation of Blefuscu.

The Brobdingnagian king challenges Gulliver's idealized account of English parliament, suggesting money and corruption truly drive it.

Gulliver offers to share the secret of gunpowder with the Brobdingnagian king, who is horrified and refuses.

Gulliver summons ancient and modern figures from the dead and discovers that elite histories are falsified by the powerful.

A Houyhnhnm family member discovers Gulliver undressing for bed and sees that his body closely resembles a Yahoo's.

The master Houyhnhnm tells Gulliver that the Houyhnhnm language contains no word for the act of lying.

Gulliver tells the master Houyhnhnm that in England, horses are enslaved as beasts of burden and regularly beaten.

The master Houyhnhnm declares that despite his faculty of reason, Gulliver is fundamentally the same as a Yahoo.

Gulliver resolves to never return to humankind after a year of living among the virtuous Houyhnhnms.

The Houyhnhnm grand assembly debates whether the Yahoo species should be fully exterminated to protect their civilization.

Gulliver tries to throw himself overboard from the Portuguese rescue ship rather than be returned to human society.

Beneath the adventure of Gulliver's travels lies a series of revelations that gradually destroy his idealism and replace it with contempt for humanity. In Lilliput he discovers that power is arbitrary and corrupt, that a heroic act can earn punishment rather than gratitude, and that loyalty to princes is a fatal mistake. In Brobdingnag the giant king dismantles Gulliver's pride in English civilization piece by piece. Among the Houyhnhnms, a series of intimate revelations — his own bodily resemblance to the hated Yahoos, the Houyhnhnm language's lack of a word for lying, and the master's final verdict that Gulliver is himself a Yahoo — complete his transformation. By the time a Portuguese ship rescues him, Gulliver would rather drown than return to the human race he has come to loathe.