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Gulliver’s Travels satirizes the form of the travel narrative, a popular literary genre that started with Richard Hakluyt’s Voyages in 1589 and experienced immense popularity in eighteenth-century England through best-selling diaries and first-person accounts by explorers such as Captain James Cook. At the time, people were eager to hear about cultures and people in the faraway lands where explorers were claiming colonies for England. Many accounts were largely truthful, but even those that were generally honest were not immune to elaboration. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift satirizes embellishing travel writers as well as gullible English readers eager for outrageous tales about other countries.