My title was written not about Johann Reinhold Forster but by him. It appears in the dedication of his translation of Louis de Bougainville's Voyage round the World, published in 1772, which he describes as Work written by a learned, intelligent, and judicious Traveller, which abounds with remarkable events and curious observations; equally instructive to future navigators, and interesting to science in general, and Geography in particular (Bougainville 1772, 1). These words apply precisely to Forster's own Observations Made during a Voyage round the World, published in 1778, a work of infinitely greater interest in the history of science - and geography in particular. The publication of a new edition of Forster's Observations (Thomas, Guest, and Dettelbach 1996) is truly an event in the history of the subject and can only strengthen the continuing review of what has been central in its intellectual development - and, likewise, what has not. Johann Reinhold Forster was in his early forties and his son Georg in his late teens when they were called in May 1772 - with Linnaeus's student Anders Sparrman as assistant - to join Captain James Cook on his second voyage in Resolution after Joseph Banks abruptly withdrew. The Forsters had exactly seven weeks to prepare for a voyage that was to last for more than three years. J. R. Forster (1729-1798), a Prussian from a family of Scottish origin, had come to England in 1766 after studying the German colonies on the Volga for Catherine the Great. He taught for two years at the Warrington Academy while publishing works on Russian natural history as well as treatises on mineralogy and entomology and catalogs of both the plants and animals of North America. In London he met Daniel Solander, botanist on Cook's first voyage, and in February 1772 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. His son Georg (1754-1794) served as his father's assistant in natural history but became increasingly concerned with social and cultural matters. Geographers remember him primarily because of his later association with Alexander von Humboldt. The elder Forster was undoubtedly a difficult man. Indeed, he was roundly condemned by Cook's biographer and editor, J. C. Beaglehole, as of the Admiralty's vast mistakes, as dogmatic, humourless, suspicious, pretentious, contentious, censorious, demanding, rheumatic (Beaglehole 1961, xlii), and as tedious, preposterous, exasperating (Beaglehole 1962, 1: 111). Some of these characteristics must have been inevitable, considering that the conditions under which he worked almost defy belief. The water on board, he recorded, stinks intolerably and was full of putrified insects; the meat very little better than putrid and its smell extremely offensive; the bread infested by weevils in the thousands. Soon after leaving Plymouth most intolerable stench began to spread through the ship from the bilges; throughout the voyage everyone was afflicted with sciatica and rheumatism, toothache and the flux, vomiting and hiccuping, and eruptions all over. In bad conditions the naturalists were surrounded by the Oaths and Execrations, curses and Dam's of drunken sailors (G. Forster 1777, 610-649; Hoare 1982, 3: 441). The Forsters' cabin was beset by cattle and stench on both sides, the previous quarters having been given over to sheep on a stage raised up as high as my bed, shit & pissed on one side, while 5 Goats did the same afore on the other (Hoare 1982, 2: 233). And there is no doubt that the attitudes of the naval men toward these philosophers, who were not - unlike Banks on the first voyage - gentlemen, were far from unbiased. The original edition of J. R. Forster's book, published in 1788, marked the beginning of modern geography, in that it deployed the comparative method to make sense of firsthand observations across perhaps one-quarter of the surface of the earth. With this new edition it is time to turn our historical attention from the schoolmen - Varenius and the rest - who talked about places they had never been to and who are so venerated by our traditional historians of geography. …
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Oct 1, 2007
Ehsan Khoman + 1
Open Access