A Voyage to Cacklogallinia by Captain Samuel Brunt: investing in (or against) the empire

Abstract

A Voyage to Cacklogallinia with a Description of the Religion,Policy,Customs and Manners, of that Country came to print in 1727, in London, authored by a certain “Captain Samuel Brunt”, a pseudonym of a writer whose identity, willingly or not, is still a mystery. It describes a hazardous voyage by sea, very much in tune with the usual travel writing descriptions of the beauties and perils that awaited the seamen in their cross Atlantic routes. As usual in this kind of fictional works, the encounter with another community peopled by an intelligent species, the Cacklogallians, is here enhanced by the relativist notion of man’s position within the frame of God’s creation. The narrative further expands to a flight to the moon with the help of particularly powerful birds. However, the utopian factor here intertwined with fantastical travel devices just paves the way to a rather critical view of British society under the spell of imperial ideology. This paper plays on the double and ambiguous meaning of the verb “to invest”. According to its current sense it means to put one’s money in some industrial or commercial project. The older use of the word, up to the seventeenth century, also signified to attack. Investment, one of the main topics of Brunt’s ironic narration, makes the reader wonder how far greed, speculation, and all the economic tools of eighteenth-century British capitalism did hamper the white man’s ethos and political hegemony.