Exotic Places Research Articles

Cutaneous ectoparasites

Parasites inhabit many places in the world. Some of these can inhabit the human skin or body. Many of these have been eradicated in the developed countries but persist in some tropical environments that are fun places to visit. Visitors can bring such parasites home with them such as scabies, cutaneous larva migrans, tungiasis and myiasis. Their clinical manifestations and treatment are presented for physicians evaluating and treating travelers from exotic places.

Secondary burial in the Netherlands: Rights, rites and motivations

Secondary burial, though often associated with exotic places, appears to be less rare in the Netherlands than people assume. In this article we discuss contemporary re-interments of ‘average’ people, seeking to understand why such reburials take place and whether, and how, the events are ritualised. The reburials, we found, do not conform to a standardised practice: they vary considerably, leaving room for the survivors to create their own rituals, because the transition from the status of ‘living’ to that of ‘dead’ has already taken place. Moreover, these ritualisations often intersect events in the lives of survivors.

Journeys and Spaces in Shakespeare's Romances

Structurally Shakespeare's romances including Pericles, Cymbeline. The Winter's Tale and The Tempest show a common movement or pattern of separation, wandering, and reunion derived from the chivalric romance. Also they represent the pattern of pastoral romance of exile from court, pastoral sojourn, and return to court. Therefore, most of characters in his romances can be seen as travellers or wanderers who leave their own native places, experience a variety of ups and downs in the exotic and distant locations and return to their homes. Seen from the aspect of time, the major characters' life journeys in the romances exhibit a tragicomic pattern in which the catastrophic movement down into terrible disorder is followed by the anastrophic movement up to stability. The pattern also represents the cyclic movement from order and harmony through chaos, disorder, and then back to order and harmony. In addition, their tragicomic life journeys are depicted as recurrent actions in successive generations ranging from father to daughter or son. Also the continuous familial disintegration reflects the repeated past as history. Hence, such life journeys portray a world of archetypal order in which the recurrent tragicomic cycle ultimately shapes human beings' existence. The cycle is also closely related to the cosmic rhythms such as the seasonal change from spring through winter and then back to spring or the ever-changing sea showing the recurrent rhythms of instability and stability. From the angle of space, characters' journeys in all the four plays show the movement of exile from court, recreative sojourn in the country or exotic places, and triumphant return to court. Then, each world of court and country is described as an imperfect or real world, which has both positive and negative things, not the ideal world of the Golden Age in the Arcadian romance. The courts or palaces are shown as the most destructive and tragic place in the beginning of journey, but in the final scene, they are changed into the most harmonious and restorative world. Hence, through characters' life journeys, the court worlds shows the extremes of hell and paradise, winter and spring, and exile and return. The country or pastoral worlds symbolizing the mutual concord and love, compared with the court society of disintegration and separation, are also represented as an imperfect reality, that is, the distant and exotic places in Pericles, the Welsh mountains in Cymbeline, the Bohemian countryside in The Winter's Tale, and the enchanted island in The Tempest are seen as an uneasy haven lack of permanent stability and rest. Through the time and space journeys of major characters in Shakespeare's romances we can read the archetypal order of our human beings' life journeys beyond history, which repeats the cycle of loss and recovery, separation and reunion, failure and success. The journeys also reflect the cosmic rhythms of daily change from night to day, seasonal from winter to spring or historical from chaos to harmony.

The Importance of Biodiversity to Medicine

IN THE PAST 12 MONTHS ALONE, MORE THAN 1000 NEW species were identified. Some were found in Earth’s most remote locations, such as the Weddell Sea off Antarctica or central Australia’s Simpson Desert, where 3 species of carnivorous sponges and a new microbat species were found, respectively. In addition, nearly 100 previously unknown species of bacteria were found to be inhabiting human epidermis. When it comes to biodiversity—a term that describes the variety of life on the planet—the more scientists look, the more they find. But these discoveries represent far more than just novelty. In them can be found a major engine of advancement for medicine and biomedical research and a new lens with which to look on human health and disease. A Canadian scientific expedition to Easter Island in 1964 provides an example of how biodiversity can benefit medicine. In a remarkable stroke of luck, the scientists brought home a scoop of soil containing Streptomyces hygroscopicus, the bacterial source of sirolimus, a drug that has revolutionized the treatment of solid organ transplant rejection. Sirolimus and its derivatives have also shown promise in the treatment of brain, lung, endometrial, and kidney tumors and as a coating for arterial stents to prevent restenosis. Serendipity of this sort has arisen not only in exotic places but also in familiar ones. For example, Chromobacterium violaceum was cultured from the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, leading to the discovery of aztreonam, a principal antibiotic used in the treatment of gram-negative infections. Science has routinely appropriated microbial compounds for human use, ranging from old stalwarts such as penicillin, aminoglycosides, and tetracyclines to the new lipopeptides (eg, daptomycin) and antifungals (eg, caspofungin). But the reliance on natural products in drug development extends far beyond antimicrobial applications. Studies involving snakes, sea squirts, sponges, and snails have led to the discovery of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, trabectedin (a new treatment for soft tissue sarcomas), the antivirals azidothymidine and acyclovir, and ziconotide, respectively. Despite enormous investment into synthetic drug development, about half of the 100 most prescribed medications in the United States and about half of the new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration in the past 25 years derive directly or indirectly from nature (TABLE). Natural products compose a superb resource for drug discovery because they have evolved, in some cases during millions of years, to exploit fundamental biological pathways often shared by humans. In addition, the random aspect of the evolutionary process gives rise to products with unforeseen, and perhaps unforeseeable, biological actions, allowing for the development of pharmaceuticals with novel mechanisms of action. For example, paclitaxel (discovered in the bark of the Pacific yew tree), a mainstay of chemotherapy for a variety of cancers, was the first drug shown to inhibit microtubule breakdown during mitosis. The ability of nature to devise novel approaches to biological challenges has proven especially valuable to biomedical research. To survive in the extremely hot water of Yellowstone Park’s Mushroom Spring, the bacterium Thermus aquaticus has enzymes that remain functional at high temperature. One of its heat-stable enzymes, DNA polymerase, was instrumental in the development of the polymerase chain reaction, for which the Nobel Prize was awarded in 1993. Another Nobel Prize was awarded in 2006 for a discovery involving a common flower. Intending to produce more intensely colored petals, researchers introduced extra copies of a pigment gene into petunias. The resulting flowers were, against expectation, partially or totally white. The molecular basis for this effect was found to be RNA interference, a fundamental biological mechanism for inhibiting gene expression that has great potential to treat neurodegenerative disease, cancer, infection, and other medical conditions. A number of scientific breakthroughs have come from studies involving some of the 100 000 or more venomous peptides produced by sea snails of the genus Conus. These slow-moving predators, which live on or near coral reefs (among the most endangered habitats on earth), subdue fish with a precise chemical assault directed at their prey’s nervous system, leading to rapid paralysis. Peptides isolated from Conus species bind many molecular targets, including ion

Christian Thorau: Semantisierte Sinnlichkeit: Studien zu Rezeption und Zeichenstruktur der Leitmotivtechnik Richard Wagners

There has never been a shortage of jokes on Wagner's leitmotifs: Hanslick thought of them as “tourist guides”; Stravinsky as “cloakroom numbers”; Debussy as “address books”; G. B. Shaw as “calling cards”; and the list goes on. These jokes pivot, each in its own way, on the significance accorded to the leitmotifs. In Hanslick's most vivid metaphor they may help musical “tourists” find their way around the strange and exotic place that is a Wagnerian music drama; in Debussy's and Shaw's image, they can still help the listener locate certain musical moments; finally, in Stravinsky's understanding, leitmotifs are little more than an orderly token for something else that has no intrinsic relation to the object that was checked in temporarily. All of these writers register that, for the longest time, leitmotifs were handled as quantifiable knowledge of Wagner's operas, a feature that held considerable appeal to the Bildungsbürger of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the educated bourgeois for whom knowledge was cultural capital. Wagnerian orthodoxy had it (and in certain quarters this is still the case) that music drama was not only to be studied using the libretto—or the score, wherever possible—but also the leitmotif compendium. Even Adorno, the Bildungsbürger par excellence, was aghast when a group of musicology students could not even notate the Siegfried motif.1 Did they have no education at all?

Ophthalmic microsporidiosis: Emerging pathogens or emerging awareness?

Abstract Purpose We report and discuss an apparent increase in the number of ocular and adnexal microsporidial infections. Methods We present cases of ocular microsporidial infection which were diagnosed by light (LM) and electron microscopy (EM) at our departments and review the literature. Results Cases involved Encephalitozoon, Vittaforma, Trachipleistophora and Nosema sp. with infection of ocular surface, corneal stroma, canaliculi and nasolacrimal apparatus. Conclusion Microsporidia are minute obligate intracellular parasites which infect via a polar tube. Human microsporidiosis is normally HIV/AIDS related, most infections being enteric with few ocular cases. With the success of antiretrovirals, the incidence of enteric microsporidiosis is now much lower. Ocular infection is now more prevalent and not usually HIV‐associated. Our cases had infection of ocular surface, cornea and lacrimal canal/sac. The diagnosis was not initially considered clinically. LM may be diagnostic if characteristic refractile ZN‐positive microspores are seen. If they are few or are not identified, LM is not diagnostic. LM does not permit speciation which usually requires EM. Diligent search for organisms may be necessary as distribution may be focal. Insufficient data exist to allow PCR‐based diagnosis of most microsporidial species. Sources and mechanisms of infection remain speculative. Insect infection is abundant. Spores are present in water. Microsporidia are poikilothermic. Microsporidiosis occurs in animals. Does the eye's immune status and lower surface temperature favour opportunistic infection by organisms adapted to lower temperatures in insects? Are animals vectors? Is travel to "exotic" places a factor? Are microsporidia emerging pathogens or are they simply not recognised?

Hilary Owen Meredith King

Hilary King, who died suddenly aged 58, was an internationally renowned epidemiologist specialising in diabetes. He was born in Leeds, England, on 31 July 1949, the son of an English...

Images of Barbaric Spain in Eighteenth-Century British Travel Writing

Images of Barbaric Spain in Eighteenth-Century British Travel Writing Ana Hontanilla (bio) Europe has traditionally been studied as a political, economic and cultural unity that historically developed in connection with the ideas of Christianity, civilization, and empire. After the New World was "discovered," Europe's imperial and civilizing mission was no longer contained within its western boundaries but also occurred within an expanded sense of geography. This is to say that the status of civilized and civilizing Europe was not defined solely from within its geographical limits but also in contrast to its colonial world. Much of the work of describing the discovery, interpreting the exploration, and articulating the connection of the newly-found territories to the motherland in Europe was done through the writings of explorers, ambassadors, soldiers, adventurers, and missionaries. The recovery and analysis of these various kinds of travelers' narratives about foreign and exotic places where they went and lived have brought a new perspective to our understanding of the historical development of the imperialized world.1 Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Spanish explorers and conquistadors in America predominantly produced the colonial discourse. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the imperial discourse was for the most part a British and French production, not only in America but [End Page 119] in Africa, Asia, and even Europe as well. In the process of examining the rise of British and French imperialism during the eighteenth century, it is crucial to acknowledge these nations' reaction to the 'Other' beyond their shores. But it is also of prime importance to investigate how they constructed the European 'other.' As Katherine Turner has argued, postcolonial studies that assume an undifferentiated European imperial center during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries presuppose homogeneity among European nations, which in practice did not exist.2 Enlightened notions of civilization and culture served to delineate the division between civil society and barbarism, between Europe and the rest of the world. However, the Enlightenment served to demarcate new ideological borders that not only operated in the overseas colonial world but also within the boundaries of Europe itself. Therefore, the initially uniform picture of imperial Europe or the assumption that modern Europeans defined themselves as a single people breaks down in the context of describing the literature of inter-European tourism, most visibly, perhaps, in British travel writing concerning Spain. In the following essay, I limit my exploration of British travel writing to accounts regarding Spain during the eighteenth century. I study how these narratives produced and disseminated a perception of Spain as an uncivilized and barbaric country, ruling it out as a member of "Enlightened Europe." Spaniards' religious practices were generally tied in with ancient paganism and therefore the population was commonly perceived by foreign visitors as pagan and primitive. In addition, the Spanish Inquisition provided the travelers with a dangerous, threatening ethos that promptly resolved any doubts of whether or not Spain was an enlightened civilized country. The seemingly outdated commercial and political institutions of Spain also contributed, in the minds of British explorers, to the formation of a nearly enslaved population in need of liberation from the tyranny of governmental tax control and its subsequent state of poverty. The local inhabitants too closely resembled the Indian or African savages and exhibited a state of personal and cultural corruption, as well as an economic dependence only potentially alleviated by adopting British institutions. A postcolonial analysis of British inter-European travel accounts shows how differential forms of religious, political, scientific, economic, and social progress in eighteenth-century Spain highlighted discrepancies in the stage of the same civilizing path that all European societies should attain.3 As the idea of civilization emphasized the movement towards political, economic, and scientific progress, demanding an accumulation of spiritual, technical, economic, and political values in the evolution of a nation, not all countries, and particularly not the Iberian countries, matched up with eighteenth-century [End Page 120] British standards of commercial and political reforms. Therefore, the location of Spain as a civilized country became extremely problematic. By referring to Spain's dramatic change of status from imperial power to a culturally-regressive and economically-dependent land, I do not intend to insinuate...

Living in the Making of History! Two Victorian Female Travellers’ Representations of the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War

At the beginning of the twentieth century a quarter of the Earth’s surface was under British rule. Set in exotic places and recounting terrifying adventures with strange peoples, travel books enjoyed great popularity in the Victorian era and contributed to the culture of the imperial years. In 1877 the Zulu kingdom remained a major obstacle to Lord Carnarvon’s scheme to federate Natal and the Cape Colony with the Boer Republics. Two years later it was invaded and eventually annexed to Natal in 1887. In the late 1870s and early 1880s two courageous women travelled to South Africa: Mrs Louisa Hutchinson, married to an army officer, who wrote In Tents in the Transvaal (1879) and Lady Florence Douglas Dixie—the first female war correspondent—who published In The Land of Misfortune (1882). Admittedly, Hutchinson’s and Dixie’s journeys were an expression of protest and power. If the Zulus were being erased from history, their narratives, recording their experiences on the controversial terrain in South Africa, tried to prevent them from being erased by history. Evolving around the notion of threat that is at the heart of war, the unjustifiable nature of the conflict is ingeniously conveyed in its displacement and complexification.

Present and Poison: Gift Exchange in Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen

Prosper Merimee's Carmen (1845-1846) tells the story a fiery, wayward, seductive, yet unattainable Gypsy cigarrera, or female cigar-maker, who goes about Andalusia as she pleases, using men along the way and breaking her lover's heart. Readings the novella have produced contradictory interpretations: either critics see Carmen as a product the French, Romantic, colonialist imagination that sought to demonstrate national superiority by figuring Spain as exotic, oriental, and feminine; (1) or they see in Carmen's behavior the refusal to obey men's rules, heed national boundaries, uphold strict identity categories, and thus, by extension, Spain's refusal to be culturally dominated. (2) This apparent contradiction between sets critical readings stems from a notable lack attention to the complex economy exchange in Carmen. Indeed, acts exchange abound in the novella, and an understanding the circulation goods and people will reveal why the novella seems simultaneously to harm Spain's image, detracting from the country's autonomy as a self-representing nation, and to free the subject--be it Carmen or Spain--from restrictions and the imposition identity categories. Carmen is a framed story passion, betrayal, and murder, but it also purports to be an ethnographic study interest to archaeologists. Narrated by an unnamed French scholar, who travels through Andalusia in 1830 to research the location Julius Caesar's victory on the battlefield Munda in 45 BCE, the story centers on the tragic love affair between don Jose, the bandit, and Carmen, the Gypsy cigarrera. This narrative makes up the first three chapters, which Merimee quickly wrote in 1845, and they were promptly published in the Revue des Deux Mondes as a complete novella. The author then added Chapter Four in 1846, when Carmen was published in book form. (3) The final chapter presents a discussion Gypsies, or Bohemians, whom Carmen and her clan represent in the novella. The narrator describes their occupations, physical types, general temperament, their ubiquity in Europe, and their linguistic influence in France. Thus, the final version Carmen's story is framed by the French narrator's scholarly study, first proposed as a search for the location the battle Munda and then offered as an expose the Bohemian people. By the time Carmen's first printing, Merimee had already published accounts his travels to Spain in Parisian journals so that the mid-nineteenth-century public would have easily read Carmen as a verite vecue, or a lived reality (Clark 189). Moreover, the Revue des Deux Mondes, a journal of the two worlds, was a cultural travel journal that described fantastical, exotic places in the world to readers Europe's civilized world. (4) At this time, Romantic travelers and writers held a certain fascination for Spain, perceiving it to be a place where passion triumphed over reason. Seeking adventures with the exotic and encounters with the unknown, the Romantics found Spain to be more savage than civilized, more Oriental than European, and--given its 700-year history Moorish rule--more Muslim than Christian. Works such as Victor Hugo's Les Orientales (1829), Notre Dame de Paris (1831), and Theophile Gautier's Voyage en Espagne (1843) represent Spain not only as a culture raw passion and primitive practices but also as a land lawless, magic-wielding Gypsies. (5) Conflated with the Orient, Spain, and particularly Andalusia, became a repository for Europe's others: Muslims, Moors, Gypsies, and criminals alike. Having traveled extensively through Spain--indeed, having been one the first French Romantics to do so, thereby paving the way for others to follow (6)--Merimee possessed the knowledge first-hand experience, which lent itself to his work fiction. By publishing Carmen in a journal that purported to reveal the actuality primitive cultures and by framing his story with scholarly propositions and observations, Merimee covered his tale adventure and passion with a veneer authority and truth. …

Exotic snakes are not always found in exotic places: how poison centres can assist emergency departments

Emergency departments throughout the USA may have some familiarity with the management of envenomation from indigenous snake species such as Crotalinae (rattlesnakes) and Micrurus (coral snakes). However, venomous species may...

A personal perspective on choosing to work toward global child health

A personal perspective on choosing to work toward global child health

Finding the Words: Literacy and Traditional Vietnamese Medicine

When I began studying at Oregon Health Sciences University, I hoped to eventually practice medicine in underserved areas around the world. In my first weeks of medical school, a professor challenged my classmates and me to consider that, although less glamorous than traveling to exotic places, there are many “international” Americans who are underserved. With this challenge in mind, I applied my enthusiasm for diverse populations and traditional means of health care toward an assignment to interview a patient with the goal of learning how she and her family utilize health care in this country. I am honored to have interviewed an immigrant from Vietnam, Vicky, who has given me an opportunity to appreciate some of the challenges the US health care system presents to recent immigrants.

Advances in Pesticide Environmental Fate and Exposure Assessments

Globalization of markets and the growing world population increase threats of invasive and exotic species and place greater demands on food and fiber production. Pest management in both agricultural and nonagricultural settings employs established practices and new biological, chemical, and management technologies. Pesticides are an essential tool in integrated pest management. Without pesticides a significant percentage of food and fiber crops would be lost, infectious diseases would increase, and valuable native habitats would be devastated. Therefore, it is important to understand the environmental fate of pesticides and assess their potential exposure and associated risks to human health and the environment. This paper summarizes the Advances in Pesticide Environmental Fate and Exposure Assessment symposium held at the 231st National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (Atlanta, GA, 2006). The focus of the symposium was to provide current information on advances in pesticide environmental fate and exposure assessments. Thirty papers were presented on advances ranging from subcellular processes to watershed-scale studies on topics including chemical degradation, sorption, and transport; improved methodologies; use of modeling and predictive tools; exposure assessment; and treatment and remediation. This information is necessary to develop more effective pesticide use and management practices, to better understand pesticide fate and associated exposures and risks, to develop mitigation and remediation strategies, and to establish sound science-based regulations.

Graduate Students Take to the Field in K–12 Education

Graduate Students Take to the Field in K–12 Education

Travel Authenticated?: Postcards, Tourist Brochures, and Travel Photography

The use of postcards, tourist brochures, and photographic evidence of travel by tourists is a way of justifying their journey and travel experience through visual authentication. The postcard, brochure, or photograph depicts the genuine or authentic vision of the traveler as having physically been present in the often far flung location under perusal. Both postcards and photographs, as visual media, serve to provide the traveler and, in turn, the relative or friend at home, with the proof of travel to distant and exotic places, and visual authentic verification that the traveler was actually present in the location. Tourist brochures, however, provide inducement to visit these same tourist destinations, conjuring up images of the "Other," the exotic, and the authentic.

Why people travel to exotic places

PurposeThis study focuses on the Portuguese tourist decision process in terms of traveling to exotic places. Based on the push‐pull motive model defined by Crompton in 1979, this paper seeks to propose an integrated approach to understand tourist motivations and how these contribute to the perception of a destination.Design/methodology/approachA structural model and a categorical principal component analysis are used to assess to what degree motivational factors may influence perceptions about a destination. The empirical study is supported through data from a sample of 1,097 individuals who travelled by plane to exotic places, during 2004.FindingsThe findings show that push and pull motivations influence the way tourists perceive the destination but the resulting image does not determined the intrinsic motivations.Research limitations/implicationsThe study has the restriction of being limited to the Portuguese case. However, these findings open paths for further investigation, namely extending to other destinations and to tourists with different incentives and nationality.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the overall understanding of why tourists adopt specific behaviors. In specific, motivations and perceptions were combined in order to understand why people could be pushed to travel to exotic destinations and how they form their perceptions.

‘Marks of extreme violence': Charles Darwin's geological observations at St Jago (São Tiago), Cape Verde islands

Abstract The first stop on Charles Darwin's famous voyage around the world in HMS Beagle was at Porto Praya (Praia), the principal town on the island of St Jago (São Tiago) in the Cape Verde archipelago. From 16 January to 8 February 1832, Darwin enjoyed his first substantive opportunity to study the natural history of an exotic place. Darwin himself regarded this occasion as a significant turning point in his life because, according to his autobiography, it was here that he decided to research and publish a book on the geology of the places visited on the voyage. He also recalled that it was here, the very first port call, that convinced him of the ‘wonderful superiority’ of Charles Lyell's uniformitarian geology over the doctrine of successive cataclysms that he had been taught in England. Later commentators have generally accepted this account, which is significant for understanding the intellectual background to the Origin of Species , at face value. In this paper we reconstruct some of Darwin's observations at St Jago based on his contemporaneous notes and diary, and in the light of our own visit made in January 2002. We find little evidence to substantiate the claim that he interpreted the geology in Lyellian terms at the time. Instead, he formulated a theory involving a great cataclysm to explain the dramatic scenery in the island's interior. He speculated that a torrent of water had carved the main valleys of the island, leaving deposits of diluvium in their beds. It is indisputable that Darwin came to embrace gradualist thinking enthusiastically during the voyage. Some of his observations made on St Jago, especially relating to uplift of the coast, were instrumental in this change of view, but the conversion was gradual, not sudden. His later published works make no mention of his original catastrophist interpretations.

Modeling motivations and perceptions of Portuguese tourists

The present paper focuses on the study of the Portuguese tourist demand motivations in exotic places. This study offers an integrated approach to understanding tourist motivation and attempts to extend the empirical evidence on the relationships between the push and pull motivations in order to determine to what extent these motivating factors will contribute to the overall perception of the destination. For this purpose, we use a detailed survey, conducted in 2004, on a sample of 1097 individuals. The performed analyses find six motivators' factors influencing the formation of the perceptions and the choice of a tourist destination.

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

*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