Gulliver speaks to the reader. He has faithfully recorded travels lasting more than sixteen years and seven months. He cared less for ornament than for truth, and rather than astonish with improbable tales, he set down plain fact in the simplest words. His aim was to inform, not to amuse.
A traveller back from distant lands can easily invent wonderful creatures of sea and land. But a traveller’s chief aim, Gulliver writes, should be to make people wiser and better. He should improve their minds with the good and bad examples of foreign places.
He wishes there were a law. Before publishing, every traveller would have to swear before the Lord High Chancellor that what he printed was true to the best of his knowledge.