George Forster: scientist, author, global nomad

George Forster was twenty-two years old when he was elected in 1777 to the Royal Society, Britain’s highest academy. His pedigree as a scientific researcher was outstanding, but he had even higher standing as an author. Literary salons across Europe applauded A Voyage Round the World, his account of Captain James Cook’s tour across the breadth of the Southern hemisphere.

Andrea Wulf’s biography of Forster  — The Traveller: The Revolutionary Life of George Forster and his Search for Humanity (Allen Lane, £30) — does full justice to a prodigy who became a nomadic naturalist but ended as a revolutionary.

One would expect an overachiever of Forster’s calibre was launched by superior formal education. Nothing could be further from the truth. At the age of ten, George (also known as Georg) had been uprooted from his native Prussia, separated for years from his mother and siblings, and as a teenager was apprenticed to a merchant in London. He had been unable to finish schooling because he had never stayed long enough in any one place.

George Forster’s lucky break came after Captain Cook’s first choice of scientific observer for an expedition to the South Seas, Joseph Banks, passed on the opportunity, and Cook offered the vacancy to his father, Reinhold Forster. Originally a pastor in Prussia, Reinhold had been commissioned by the Russian government to reconnoitre conditions in remote territories along the Volga river and write a report. Reinhard had had his son George – then ten years old — come along on that foray, and after Russian authorities did not approve of his report had departed to London, again taking George along. George Forster was a quick study. By then he had picked up enough Russian to translate an important history of Russia into English, a copy of which he presented at the age of 13 to the Society of Antiquaries.

To be recruited by James Cook at the age of 17 was a stroke of luck, but George Forster leveraged his luck with industry and curiosity. On whatever island James Cook weighed anchor, George Forster went ashore to gather plants and seeds, to sketch animals and peoples, and to accumulate a cache of observations.

Travel writing was popular in the eighteenth century, a genre where authors wrapped into fables about foreign lands messages that readers had no difficulty unpacking. Readers of Gulliver’s Travels knew that Jonathan Swift’s Lilliput really was Britain. Montesquieu tweaked the recipe. His Lettres Persanes did not conceal that it was about France, but, writing in the guise of Persian visitors, the author did not stray from a safe space when he scrutinised French customs. Taking his cue from Montesquieu, Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizens of the World had visitors from China comment on the sights of London.

Over time, critiques of social conventions became more forthright.

Public intellectuals disputed whether traditional society worked the way it should. Jean-Jacques Rousseau popularised the notion of the “noble savage”, who had not been corrupted by the vacuous comforts of civilisation. Immanuel Kant taught that society needed to make reason rather than convention the arbiter of social conduct. Rousseau and Kant and other public intellectuals never reached agreement on what direction social progress should be heading, but had no doubt that society was in need of an overhaul.

This meant that travel writers had to meet new expectations. Travelogues had to switch from fictional to factual because the reading public wanted information on real counterfactuals. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, a French navigator who sailed the world’s seas, wrote Le voyage autour du monde, an example of the new, empirical travelogue that readers demanded. Comparing A Voyage Round the World with Le voyage autour du monde shows how George Forster broke the mould of travel writing.

A Voyage Round the World brims with the author’s excitement on approaching a tropical island, his visceral anxiety of sailing through a storm, his thrill of discovering unknown plants and animals. He found the taste of breadfruit “infinitely superior” and of roast pork “beyond comparison.” The aptitude for languages that George Forster had demonstrated when translating from Russian into English stood him in good stead. Noting variations of idioms from island to island, he intuited, as he was to write many years later, patterns of sequential settlement through migration, anticipating findings corroborated by later generations of ethnologists.

But for all that, Forster’s views on the societies he observed were complex and his estimation of the benefits that Europeans brought them ambivalent. He was appalled by how little it cost to bribe islanders to force their women into prostitution. And as outbreaks of violence between sailors and islanders were frequent, in some cases fatal, witnessing the interactions between islanders and sailors made him ask why European norms could come to be thought of as superior to those of natives. If sailors marked out a no-go area on a beach and an islander crossed the perimeter, what right had a sailor to shoot the islander dead? Did the people who lived there not own the island in its entirety?

Such musings were very much at odds with the recitation readers would take from having read Bougainville’s rendering of the people of Tahiti, who were presented as Rousseau might have predicted – noble savages who were carefree, gentle, unaffected, and ever willing to indulge visitors with sexual favours. After his book came out, George Forster did not remain in London long. On visits to the Continent, he was a sought-after guest by academicians and high society. In France, Forster was wined and dined by the likes of the Comte de Buffon, the eminent naturalist, and Benjamin Franklin, the American Founding Father. In Germany, Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder thought it a privilege to meet this twenty-something Wunderkind. In Austria, he was received by the intellectually curious Emperor Joseph II.

George Forster was an accomplished naturalist, but the making of him had been his recruitment by James Cook. If being in the right place at the right time was why George Forster became famous, being in the wrong place at the wrong time was why he was later forgotten.

In 1792, Forster was employed at the University of Mainz when the army of republican France invaded, deposed the government, and inaugurated a republic. Unwisely, Forster agitated on behalf of the occupying forces, stood for election to the new republican government, and then was forced to flee to Paris to pre-empt arrest by royalist forces retaking the city.

In Paris, Forster might have hoped to be received with the hospitality he remembered from his previous sojourn. But his two periods in Paris crystallised the highs and lows of the last phase of the Enlightenment. The ancien régime had been corrupt but nevertheless cosmopolitan, and had shown more respect for a parvenu than would the egalitarian Jacobins. Although spared the fate of one fellow Mainz republican, Adam Lux, who was guillotined, in 1793 George Forster succumbed to illness. At the time of his death, his reputation in tatters, he had become an outcast for having supported the French Revolution at its most abhorrent phase. Many prominent writers and scholars of the time mourned him but few dared publish an obituary.

Forster was a global nomad. He never settled down, perhaps never could have even had he wished. He lived in an era when science, technology and politics were rattled by shocks, and he was raised up and knocked down by them. Andrea Wulf — whose previous subjects include the polymath Alexander von Humboldt and the early Romantics — patterns George Forster’s biography into a story that is relatable to readers today. With a large part of her biography devoted to Forster’s South Sea journals, The Traveller would make congenial reading on long-distance flights to the Pacific. Even if you aren’t planning such a voyage, it is strongly recommended.

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