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Jones, Gulliver. Gulliver Jones was created by Edwin L. Arnold and appeared in Lieutenant Gulliver Jones: His Vacation (1905).

Gulliver Jones is a Planetary Romance Hero. He is a humble Lieutenant in the United States Navy who is walking through New York City when a man drops out of the sky in front of him, wrapped in a kind of carpet. The man lands roughly, stumbles and falls on his head, killing himself. Jones takes the carpet home with him, after taking care of the dead man, and by chance walk across the carpet while saying "I wish I were in the planet Mars!" The carpet rolls up around Jones, crushes consciousness from him, and then shoots into space. It takes Jones to Mars, where he meets a group of human-looking Martians. Jones learns Martian via a kind of telepathic transferral and then engages the Martians in chit-chat about their culture. One thing leads to another and Jones falls in love with the Martian women Heru and fights the enemies of the Martians. (No one knows for sure whether Edgar Rice Burroughs read Lieutenant Gulliver Jones before writing his John Carter stories, but the similarities are certainly striking).

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