Bora Bora, visited by George Forster in 1773. Photograph: Brian A Vikander/Getty Images
Review: The Traveller – an 18th century explorer far ahead of his time. A revelatory account of the life of George Forster, whose rejection of racial hierarchies stood out amongst his peers.
George Forster was 10 when he left his home in present-day Poland and travelled to Russia with his naturalist father. During the expedition, which began in 1765, Forster collected plant specimens and helped with botanical research. Wide-eyed, he journeyed along the Volga river, encountering Muslim Tartar traders and Cossack warriors. There were also the emaciated figures of German settlers, who lived in poverty under the territory's despotic governor, their campsites little more than holes burrowed into the riverbanks. The experience of cultures so distinct from his own stirred a lifelong enthusiasm for travel and exploration in Forster. It also awakened his compassion for others – irrespective of culture and, especially, race.
At a time when racism pervaded public opinion as well as the philosophical texts of luminaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, Forster moved brazenly to critique and correct them. How he was able to transcend the conventional beliefs of his day is the central question of Andrea Wulf's new book – and the answer is in its title.
It is unusual to devote almost half a biography to only three years of a subject's life. But the decision tells us something about the weight the author places on the time Forster spent travelling the world as the assistant naturalist on board Captain James Cook's HMS Resolution, beginning when he was just 17. Unlike the ship's crew, Forster was concerned by how the expedition's presence in the Pacific islands would damage social relations and disrupt local economies. In his diary, he wrote that the people who received them had every right "to look on our men as a set of invaders". He deplored the "vengeful" nature of his fellow sailors and spent his time with the Indigenous people they made contact with, among them the Māori, Easter Islanders and Tahitians. He admired the Tahitians' unique conception of property and their absence of class distinctions. Towards the end of the journey a man from Bora Bora, named Hitihiti, voluntarily joined the crew, and he and Forster became close friends, teaching one another words from their respective mother tongues.
The richness of Wulf's research – drawn from Forster's personal correspondence, diaries and essays, as well as those of his contemporaries – injects a novelistic specificity into the scenes she reconstructs. It also allows the author to move from closely narrating the events of Forster's life, as if perched on his shoulder, to inhabiting his interior voice as he experiences the world in real time: the "sapphire blues" of the Antarctic glaciers, for instance, which sailed past the ship "twice as high as the mast".
Despite his departures from mainstream opinion, Forster was lauded for his intellect and daring spirit, invited to address King George III and regularly called on by foreign envoys and European royals. In his celebrated account of the expedition, A Voyage Round the World (1777), he condemned the violence committed by the crew against Indigenous people and espoused what he termed "the general rights of mankind". The appeal to what we'd now call human rights was unprecedented and radical for its inclusion of everyone, regardless of race.
In later years Forster shuttled between European cities as a professor of natural philosophy. He continued to write with conviction, forcefully refuting Kant's formulation of a racial hierarchy using his observation of the people he had met during his travels. He questioned how Kant could brandish such claims without ever having left his home town, and dismissed his methodology as "armchair philosophy". But life ultimately proved punishing for Forster. He was plagued by debts and financial insecurity; ostracised for his support of the French Revolution; and abandoned by his relentlessly unfaithful wife. For all the good he offered the world, Forster was, in the end, hard done by.
The Traveller: The Revolutionary Life of George Forster and His Search for Humanity is published by Penguin (£30). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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