An early naturalist who cast off the ‘chains of prejudice’

When British explorer James Cook sailed from England in 1722 to seek out Antarctica, he brought 17-year-old naturalist George Forster along for the trip. Forster’s skill in documenting the wonders he witnessed made him a major cultural figure of his time. He is largely forgotten today, an oversight that Andrea Wulf aims to correct in “The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity From the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris.” Forster made cameo appearances in two of Wulf’s earlier books: “Magnificent Rebels,” which traced the origins of the Romantic movement, and “The Invention of Nature,” her 2015 biography of German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. In “The Traveler,” she recreates the sight, smell, and feel of that era in intimate detail. Here, she describes young George’s arrival in London in 1766 after growing up in a part of Prussia that is now Poland:George’s new home town was boisterous, frenzied and dirty. One million people lived in the British metropolis and every time he stepped outside, the boy was confronted with carriages, chaises and carts that clogged the streets. Porters delivering goods and carrying luggage maneuvered through the crowds, pushing and crying “By your leave”, and moving so fast that they regularly knocked pedestrians to the ground. Fiddlers played at the street corners and watchmen called out the hour of the day. Why We Wrote This George Forster’s globe-trotting youth made him more tolerant of Indigenous peoples and customs than most of his peers, writes biographer Andrea Wulf. She brings to life the frigid days as Cook and company navigate Antarctica, but “The Traveler” seems to bloom when the expedition glides into warmer climes. Such imagery helps ground Wulf’s story, a welcome quality in a narrative that moves so quickly. From an early age, Forster was in a hurry, and as his biographer, Wulf must dash along, too. Readers learn that Forster’s father, an aspiring naturalist, took him on a work trip to Russia when he was only age 10, and in short order, the boy collected some 700 specimens from the countryside. An avid reader, the younger Forster was fluent in German, French, English, and Russian. His work came to the attention of the Royal Society, Britain’s eminent community of scientists, and Forster and his father were invited to join Cook’s voyage. Museum der Weltkulturen, Frankfurt Naturalist George Forster, in a portrait attributed to Johann Heinrich Tischbein the Elder, ca. 1784. Wulf brings to life the frigid days as Cook and his company navigate Antarctica, but “The Traveler” seems to bloom when the expedition’s chief vessel, the Resolution, glides into warmer climes. In Tahiti, readers get an early glimpse of Forster’s lyrical prose style, which would serve him well when he chronicled his adventures in “A Voyage Round the World,” his popular travelogue:The east-wind which had carried us so far, was entirely vanished, and a faint breeze only wafted a delicious perfume from the land, and curled the surface of the sea. The mountains, clothed with forests, rose majestic in various spiry forms, on which we already perceived the light of the rising sun.Beyond his descriptive and artistic skills, Forster was a pioneer in ethnography; he was curious about languages and customs. “Few Europeans,” Wulf writes, “approached indigenous people with such an open mind – most explorers viewed them through a lens of arrogance at best, and with brutal disgust at worst.” "The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity From the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris," By Andrea Wulf, Knopf, 512 pp. As Wulf explains it, Forster’s eclectic background and globe-trotting youth “enabled him to think more expansively and be more tolerant than most of his contemporaries.” She points to his tolerance as a beacon in our own fractious times.Wulf’s admiration for Forster can sometimes seem indulgent. His progressive views also included unbridled enthusiasm for the French Revolution, a passion that tended to blind him to its cruelty. Wulf notes some of those excesses, then quickly moves on.She concedes Forster’s weaknesses, but she holds up his better self as an example worth preserving. “He was far from perfect – he made mistakes and misjudged situations,” she writes. “He was a product of his age, yet he shook off its chains of prejudice. He saw unity behind our diversity – not a sameness that made us all alike but a bond that should hold us together.”