[00:00.45]Part three.
[00:02.12]Chapter seven.
[00:04.18]The Land of the Eggheads.
[00:10.81]I'd only been home 10 days when Captain William Robinson of the ship Hopewell came to see me.
[00:18.31]He was so eager for an experienced sailor to join his ship that he offered me double my usual wages.
[00:26.79]I really couldn't have refused to sail then, even if I hadn't been full of curiosity to see more of the world.
[00:36.65]We set off on 5th August 1706, and bad luck dogged us from the start.
[00:45.49]Lots of the crew got ill, and we couldn't buy the goods we wanted.
[00:51.55]First, we met bad weather, and then, even worse, pirates.
[01:02.38]The pirates who captured the ship were going to tie us back to back and throw us into the sea to drown.
[01:12.42]But I pleaded with them to be merciful, and in the end they decided to keep the others to crew their ship.
[01:21.60]I'd annoyed the pirates so much with my begging and pleading, however, that they dumped me in a canoe and sailed away and left me.
[01:32.71]Our position when the pirates attacked was 46 north, longitude 183.
[01:43.91]I paddled away from the pirate ship, feeling very anxious and lonely.
[01:49.81]There were several islands to the southeast, but when I reached them, I found they were little more than rocks.
[01:59.40]Luckily, it was the season for bird's eggs, which I cooked on a fire of dried seaweed.
[02:09.62]I made myself a bed of heathery stuff and slept pretty well.
[02:15.43]I spent the next few days exploring the islands, but by the fifth day I was close to despair.
[02:23.78]There were eggs to eat, but it was plain I couldn't survive on those islands for long.
[02:30.50]I was wondering how long I had to live when a shadow fell over me.
[02:37.42]I looked round hastily and saw a great tower-shaped thing flying towards me across the sea.
[02:46.31]It must have been two miles high, and when it got nearer, I could see there were people walking up and down steps on the side of it.
[02:58.25]For a moment, all I could do was stare, frozen with amazement.
[03:04.85]Then I started jumping up and down and shouting and waving my handkerchief.
[03:14.28]No one answered me, but several people began running up the stairs, and soon a long chain came down with a chair at the end, and I was lifted up to the floating island.
[03:29.38]I'd thought that nothing could surprise me, but the men of that place, which was called Laputa, were really odd.
[03:39.54]They wore long dresses covered with stars, and they had their necks bent over sideways, so that one of their ears pointed straight up.
[03:50.28]Their eyes pointed upwards too.
[03:54.87]As if this wasn't peculiar enough, they had ordinary head upright men with them, who kept hitting them with balloons.
[04:07.74]I couldn't imagine why on earth they were doing this, but it turned out that the lopsided people were so clever that they never heard anything anyone said, unless someone hit them on the ear to remind them to listen.
[04:22.38]In fact, the lopsided people were always so busy thinking that if it wasn't for the balloon people, they would always be walking into trees or off the edge of the island.
[04:35.15]My lopsided guide was so clever that he forgot where he was going twice just on the way up to the King's Palace.
[04:45.11]The lopsided king was too busy doing an experiment to notice me much, but I was treated quite kindly.
[04:53.65]I was given a dinner of beef triangles, for the Laputans used science for everything, and then measured up for new clothes.
[05:06.67]This was done very cleverly with a compass and a lot of sums, but I'm afraid someone must have made a mistake somewhere, because when the clothes arrived, one sleeve was much longer than the other.
[05:22.65]Luckily, that sort of mistake seemed to happen a lot in that country, so I didn't feel too embarrassed.
[05:31.99]Their houses were nearly as lopsided as their clothes.
[05:36.80]The lopsided men were always too busy thinking to notice the drafts, but their wives got terribly fed up with them.
[05:48.65]The flying island of Laputa was powered by a huge magnet, and as it went along, the lopsided people let down strings, so the people below could send them food.
[06:01.07]If the people below got fed up with having to give their food away, the king of Laputa would keep the island hovering over them, so they got no sun or rain and all their crops died.
[06:14.11]The king could also drop rocks on their heads.
[06:18.85]If they still didn't give in, the king could drop the whole island on their heads.
[06:26.45]The city of Lindalino did once defeat Laputa by putting another magnet in a tower and sticking the whole island there, but that was long ago.