Annotation and Authority: Georg Forster's Footnotes to the Nachrichten von den Pelew-Inseln (1789)

Abstract

*Je viens d'achever dans ce moment la traduction de la relation vraiment tres interessante des Isles Pelew, decouvertes par les Anglais', Georg Forster wrote to the Swiss publisher and historian, Johannes Mullen 'Cette traduction', Forster added, *m'a coute bien du temps [et] de la peine, je crois qu'elle m'a reussi, j'y ai ajoute de notes, [et] ce sont d'ailleurs les premices de mon travail a Mayence'.1 A tale of maritime disaster, exotic places and peoples, George Keate's Account of the Pelew Islands situated in the Western Part of the Pacific Ocean (1788) caught the interest of others besides Forster. Its detailed description of the encounter between shipwrecked British sailors and the natives of the Palau (then 'Pelew') Islands made it one of the most widely read works on the Pacific and particularly Micronesia in the eighteenth century. Its appearance came at a time when expeditions to the South Seas by figures such as James Cook and Joseph Banks, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and Jean-Frangois de La Perouse, were advancing knowledge by leaps and bounds, and making of such explorers national heroes. Forster, characteristically quick to recognize Keate's work as a potential bestseller, published his Nachrichten von den Pelew-Inseln in der Westgegend des stillen Oceans one year later, in 1789. While Forster had initially risen to fame with the publication of the Voyage Round the World (1777) which detailed the events of Cook's