page_title: Georg Forster
section_title: Around the world with Captain Cook
hierarchical_section_title: Georg Forster / Around the world with Captain Cook
caption_attribution_description: Resolution and Adventure with fishing craft in Matavai Bay, painted by William Hodges in 1776, shows the two ships of Commander James Cook's second voyage of exploration in the Pacific at anchor in Tahiti.
context_page_description: Johann Georg Adam Forster was a German naturalist, ethnologist, travel writer, journalist, and revolutionary. At an early age, he accompanied his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, on several scientific expeditions, including James Cook's second voyage to the Pacific. His report of that journey, A Voyage Round the World, contributed significantly to the ethnology of the people of Polynesia and remains a respected work. As a result of the report, Forster was admitted to the Royal Society at the early age of twenty-two and came to be considered one of the founders of modern scientific travel literature.
  After returning to continental Europe, Forster turned toward academia. He taught natural history at the Collegium Carolinum in the Ottoneum, Kassel, and later at the Academy of Vilna. In 1788, he became head librarian at the University of Mainz. Most of his scientific work during this time consisted of essays on botany and ethnology, but he also prefaced and translated many books about travel and exploration, including a German translation of Cook's diaries.
context_section_description: In 1772, Forster's father became a member of the Royal Society. This and the withdrawal of Joseph Banks resulted in his invitation by the British admiralty to join James Cook's second expedition to the Pacific (1772–75). Georg Forster joined his father in the expedition again and was appointed as a draughtsman to his father. Johann Reinhold Forster's task was to work on a scientific report of the journey's discoveries that was to be published after their return.
  They embarked HMS Resolution on July 13, 1772, in Plymouth. The ship's route led first to the South Atlantic, then through the Indian Ocean and the Southern Ocean to the islands of Polynesia and finally around Cape Horn back to England, returning on July 30, 1775. During the three-year journey, the explorers visited New Zealand, the Tonga islands, New Caledonia, Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands and Easter Island. They went further south than anybody before them, almost discovering Antarctica. The journey conclusively disproved the Terra Australis Incognita theory, which claimed there was a big, habitable continent in the South.
  Supervised by his father, Georg Forster first undertook studies of the zoology and botanics of the southern seas, mostly by drawing animals and plants. However, Georg also pursued his own interests, which led to completely independent explorations in comparative geography and ethnology. He quickly learned the languages of the Polynesian islands. His reports on the people of Polynesia are well regarded today, as they describe the inhabitants of the southern islands with empathy, sympathy and largely without Western or Christian bias.
  Unlike Louis Antoine de Bougainville, whose reports from a journey to Tahiti a few years earlier had initiated uncritical noble savage romanticism, Forster developed a sophisticated picture of the societies of the South Pacific islands. He described various social structures and religions that he encountered on the Society Islands, Easter Island and in Tonga and New Zealand, and ascribed this diversity to the difference in living conditions of these people. At the same time, he also observed that the languages of these fairly widely scattered islands were similar. About the inhabitants of the Nomuka islands (in the Ha'apai island group of present-day Tonga), he wrote that their languages, vehicles, weapons, furniture, clothes, tattoos, style of beard, in short all of their being matched perfectly with what he had already seen while studying tribes on Tongatapu. However, he wrote, "we could not observe any subordination among them, though this had strongly characterised the natives of Tonga-Tabboo, who seemed to descend even to servility in their obeisance to the king."
  The journey was rich in scientific results. However, the relationship between the Forsters and Cook and his officers was often problematic, due to the elder Forster's fractious temperament as well as Cook's refusal to allow more time for botanical and other scientific observation. Cook refused scientists on his third journey after his experiences with the Forsters.
caption: Resolution and Adventure in Matavai Bay by William Hodges
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