George Forster’s dazzlingly humane vision

The Traveller: The Revolutionary Life of George Forster and his Search for Humanity, Andrea Wulf, Allen Lane, £30

Even as a child, George Forster’s wanderlust was apparent. Born a few miles outside what is now Gdansk in 1754, he preferred rambling through the fields and forests to the company of family and friends. While his family sat and ate dinner he would pace the room, scanning his father’s ample bookshelves for something to catch his eye, his curiosity – wanderlust’s intellectual cousin – never sated.

Forster’s young life was, however, far from free. His father, Reinhold, a Lutheran pastor, was a learned man whose passion for natural history was matched by a ferocious need for dominion. To his son, he was a tyrant, quick to give and take offence, self-pitying in his arrogance and rage. Like all tyrants, he repaid close and quiet observation, and his scope for tyranny was vast: he was the boy’s sole teacher. Forster learned much, including unhappiness. But, as Andrea Wulf reveals in The Traveller, his early learning would fuel one of the most remarkable intellectual journeys of the age.

When Forster was ten his father won a commission from Catherine the Great to inspect new German settlements on the banks of the Volga. He took Forster with him to collect botanical samples along the way, leaving his pregnant wife and five younger children behind. They travelled over 3,800 miles through Russia in eight months, an epic education in culture and landscape, language and life. Forster never saw his home again: Reinhold’s report was a failure and he took his son with him to England to repair his fortune.

‘I was yoked too early,’ Forster recalled. ‘I had to work when I should have been learning.’ But he was learning all the time from both reading and observation, aided by a prodigious gift for languages. Reinhold set him to work translating the latest books of travel and exploration into English. Chained to his desk – emotionally if not otherwise – Forster’s mind opened to an opening world.

Then, in the summer of 1772, father and son were invited to join James Cook’s second circumnavigation of the world as naturalists aboard the Resolution. The voyage ran to three years and some 75,000 miles. Wulf’s account of it takes up around a third of her book. At first that seems disproportionate, but Wulf is orienting The Traveller around Forster’s experiences, just as those experiences reoriented Forster’s understanding of the world.

The primary aim of Cook’s voyage was to discover the hypothesised continent of Terra Australis Incognita in the high latitudes near the South Pole. A secondary, secret aim, was to scout for suitable islands and peoples to claim for Britain in the South Pacific. For Forster, it was an opportunity to test the authorities he had translated against reality; he quickly learned how poor their transcriptions of nature were. His own, however, were dazzling. Whether it’s a fine-grained annotation of plumage – ‘Head dark pearly grey, gradually & very softly vanishing into a fine clear white’ – or the experience of sailing among the ice floes, where ‘the whole scene looked like the wrecks of shattered worlds’, his prose is steeped in acuity and wonder. ‘No foreigner has ever been able to write English as he did,’ a friend said. Precious few indigenes had either. 

Wulf is less interested in Forster the naturalist than in the originality and radicalism of his ethnography. The extent to which his Eurocentrism shattered against the insular abundance of the Pacific is remarkable. When he first encounters indigenous peoples – the Maoris of New Zealand’s South Island – he is complacently confident of ‘the superiority of a state of civilisation over that of barbarism’, as evidenced by his shipmates’ industry on shore. Soon he is noting that ‘our intercourse has been wholly disadvantageous to the nations of the South Seas’. Aided by his gift for languages, which afforded him a deeper understanding of indigenous culture, he now argued that ‘Virtues and vice are relative concepts [and] no-one should judge a people without considering the moral principles that guide them.’ He found himself thoughtfully defending cannibalism, for example: ‘the action of eating human flesh [is] neither unnatural nor criminal in itself’, he wrote. Meanwhile the European instinct to inflict summary, lethal justice according to their own laws disgusted him. What was the point of knowledge, he wondered, if it couldn’t be obtained ‘without bloodshed or injustice’?

The development of Forster’s thought was aided, perhaps, by the particular opposition to it that his father presented every day. Reinhold saw injustice against himself everywhere, raging against crewmen and indigenes alike; he was a one-man synecdoche of European solipsism and arrogance. On Tanna, in the Vanuatu archipelago, he thought the people ‘border the nearest upon the tribe of monkeys’. On Raiatea, in what is now French Polynesia, he shot at an islander over a price dispute: he would fight, he said, ‘to the last drop of my blood in defence of my property’. 

Forster was a child of his father’s Enlightenment. Rousseau had expatiated on the noble savage, arguing that there was ‘nothing so gentle as man in his primitive state’. Linnaeus’ classification system subdivided Homo sapiens into four colour-coded variations which he named Africanus, Americanus, Asiaticus, and Europaeus. (Guess which race’s characteristics were ‘sanguine, wise and muscular’.) Kant followed suit: indigenous ‘red’ Americans were ‘incapable of any culture’, he wrote. ‘All Negroes stink.’ Forster turned against these fathers, too. He condemned the ‘meaningless drivel of nomenclature’ and dismissed thinking such as Rousseau’s as ‘armchair philosophy’. His own worldview was holistic: nature was ‘a magic net of countless threads… a system of divine concordance’. Reality rejected classification. He was determined to ‘banish all rash hypotheses back into their small closet’.

Forster was 20 when the Resolution returned to England in 1775. He would soon be famous, ‘a man… illustrious throughout Europe’, thanks to A Voyage Around the World, his exquisitely vivid account of his travels. Escaping to the continent, Forster was fêted by everyone from Benjamin Franklin to Goethe. Wherever he stopped, people clamoured to meet him. ‘How can you sleep if George Forster is here?’ they asked one another.

There is evidence of the rapturous wonder that Forster inspired in his readers everywhere in The Traveller. Wulf’s readers might find themselves wondering with comparable astonishment at the chaos of his private life. In 1785 he married Therese Heyne, daughter of the librarian at the university in Göttingen. Described by a friend as ‘a strange mixture of nobility, greatness of the soul, and a thousand follies’, she sometimes talked so fast that she ran out of breath. While they were engaged, she had enjoyed an affair with an assistant librarian, Wilhelm Meyer. Forster took the pain and humiliation in his stride. ‘I imagined an equal sharing… with no lessening of my own rights,’ he said, adapting political idealism to private turmoil. The pattern would repeat itself with a young friend named Ferdinand Huber, who moved in with the married couple and fathered two of Therese’s children. As Wulf notes, Forster’s capacity for forgiveness was almost inhuman. ‘To accept things as they are,’ he said. ‘That’s the only philosophy.’

Which makes Forster’s subsequent participation in the French Revolution, and his embrace of its bloodshed, seem notably abrupt. In the summer of 1789, when rebels overthrew the government in Liège and established a republic, he rejoiced that ‘violence… not the gentle persuasion of reason’ had brought it about. By the autumn of 1792, when the French army entered Mainz, where Forster was living, he had radicalised further, denouncing monarchs as ‘the scum of the human race, these degenerate, imbecile, privileged people’. He was appointed vice president of the city’s provisional government. Friends believed he had lost his mind. The next year he was part of Mainz’ delegation to Paris. What he saw disillusioned him. ‘There is no virtue in the revolution,’ he wrote. ‘It disgusts me.’ He didn’t live long enough to have his heart broken further. Depressed and unable to sleep, he sank into ill-health. He died early in January 1794, aged 39.

‘To write learnedly and to write beautifully are two different things,’ Forster said. But those qualities came together in his own extraordinary writings, and they come together in The Traveller, too. Wulf has captured the brilliant immediacy of Forster both in person and on the page, together with his self-abnegation, his gift for affinity, his radical dismantling of contemporary thought. More than that, she allows the reader to bask in his sensitive apprehension of the world and to share the exhilaration of his dazzlingly humane vision of what that world might be. Forster has had to wait a long time, but he could not have found a better champion.