George Forster is the most interesting 18th century explorer that I had never heard of.
He traveled the South Pacific on Captain James Cook’s second voyage at age seventeen, sailing through icy waters tantalizingly close to undiscovered Antarctica.
He never went to school but he had a remarkable talent for languages, easily picking up Maori and Tahitian words on his travels.
The common roots of those languages and cultures led him to develop a theory of Polynesian migration two centuries before it became the scientific consensus.
The prevailing European notion at the time was also one of racial superiority, but Forster saw the peoples he met as equals and believed they had something of value to teach him.
The book he wrote about the journey made him a coveted dinner guest all over Europe. He was friends with Goethe, Benjamin Franklin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and he became a mentor to Alexander von Humboldt.
But Forster’s later life was not a happy one, and his work was largely forgotten until today’s guest rescued him from obscurity.
Andrea Wulf is the author of The Traveller: The Revolutionary Life of George Forster and his Search for Humanity, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, and Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.
You can read more about her on her website and follow her on Instagram and X.
We spoke about Forster’s remarkable Pacific journey, why his ideas were so far ahead of their time, and his unfortunate end.
These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:
We also mentioned:
A Voyage Around the World by George Forster
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