Book Review
The Traveller: the revolutionary life of George Forster and his search for humanity
by Andrea Wulf (Allen Lane, 2026)
If you like biography and history and a meaty read, this may well be a summer treat for you. Traveller, naturalist, philosopher and revolutionary, George Forster is the visionary of his era that you may well never even have heard of. In 1772, at just 17, he travelled on Captain Cook’s second voyage, from the frozen Antarctic to the tropical South Pacific islands, where his diverse experiences among different cultures helped form his enduring belief in equality between all races, and between men and women. He was one of the first people to talk about human rights, albeit in different terms, and a shared humanity, in a society pervaded by racism and sexism. Indeed, he was following HG thinking over 300 years before it was ever formalised.
Forster’s story is fascinating in itself and, looking through an HG lens, it is easy to see how his early life experiences came to inform his understandings. He was born in a region that today falls within Poland and, at the tender age of 10, spent five months travelling through Russia with his fiercely clever, volatile, often unkind and unempathetic father, identifying unknown birds and insects and collecting specimens of countless plants. By the age of 12, he had to be the breadwinner for his large, impoverished family, achieving this through the slog of translating travel books, which became bestsellers. A brilliant scholar himself, by 16, he was already attending meetings of the Royal Society in London. But it was the voyage with Cook that fully opened his eyes to the realities of the world.
A prolific diarist, Forster’s detailed accounts vividly depict the dreadful conditions that the brave crew had to bear during the long voyage. We also learn of Forster’s horror at their behaviour, with the indigenous peoples encountered treated as inferior humans and often shot at or otherwise dealt with cruelly. The Europeans just assumed that their needs were paramount and their rights incontestable, whereas Forster recognised the injustice of this – seeing the good and bad in all peoples. He was appalled, for instance, by the way indigenous women were forced by their menfolk to have sex with the Europeans in exchange for tools – and also blamed the ship’s crew for having established this sex trade. He was critical of a Māori man who brutally beat his wife for attempting to punish their son for throwing a stone at her head, and he was disgusted by the Europeans “horrid eagerness to fire upon the natives on the slightest pretences”. Indeed, often discord arose because of a failure to recognise different customs. Forster also recognised that they themselves were responsible for importing diseases that could be lethal.
Forster was ahead of his time in so many ways, including observing with regret that, within the scientific community, innumerable divisions and subdivisions had emerged, leading to the ignoring of the whole and attention only to the part.
Once home, Forster soon became famous throughout Europe for his work and knew Goethe, Benjamin Franklin, Mary Wollstonecraft and Alexander von Humboldt, amongst eminent others – even though, for countless years, his own father would continue to hold him back. He lived a colourful life, speaking out against racism (even taking on Kant) and writing against slavery. His love life was just as colourful, as he had a surprisingly liberal relationship with his wife, accepting her taking on other lovers, despite this making him deeply unhappy. Later, when head of the library at the University of Mainz, he became caught up in the ideals of the French Revolution, believing at the time that this presented a means for pursuing and furthering ideals of equality and freedom. Alas, his too-early end was not a happy one and, till now, he has largely faded from history.
Wulf offers a perceptive summing up: “For me, George Forster’s most important legacy was his unshakeable belief in humankind – this messy, uncontrollable and incomprehensible thing that is us. … 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. … He was a traveller who opened his heart, his eyes and his mind.”
Reviewed by Denise Winn