Terra Incognita on Maps of Eighteenth-Century Spanish America: Commodification, Consumption and the Transition from Inaccessible to Public Space1

At the end of the first part of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, narrator Lemuel Gulliver finds himself in a difficult position after escaping the island nations of Lilliput and Blefuscu, and being taken on board an English vessel. By way of Gulliver's real-yet-fictional souvenirs, Swift satirizes the simplicity of the scientific investment in the object, and by extension, the investment of narrative in both science and reality. Moreover, the author uses the textual objects to highlight the underlying collusion of science and literature in the larger transgressions of the British colonial project. In questioning narratives of explorers both historical and fictional, Gulliver's Travels also interrogates the legitimacy of early eighteenth-century accounts, particularly travelers' tales, whose authors resorted to borrowing from scientific reports in an attempt to achieve narrative authenticity. Gulliver's South Seas travel narrative depicts the unrestrained "conquest of space" that characterizes European imperialism.