A Voyage Round the World, Vol. 2 »

George Forster's A Voyage Round the World presents a wealth of geographic, scientific, and ethnographic knowledge uncovered by Cook's second journey of exploration in the Pacific (1772-1775). Accompanying his father on the voyage, ship's naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster, George proved a knowledgeable and adept observer. The lively, elegant prose and critical detail of his account, based loosely on his father's journal, make it one of the finest works of eighteenth-century travel literature and all account of prime importance in the history of European contact with Pacific peoples.

In its author's German translation, this work became a classic of natural history writing, but its original English version has long been neglected by anglophone scholars. This new scholarly edition makes this important book readily available for the first time since its initial publication more than two centuries ago. But it also presents the work in fresh terms, making it more accessible and relevant to a contemporary audience. The valuable introduction and annotations draw on the wide range of anthropological and ethnohistorical scholarship published since the 1960s and contextualize the book in relation to both the cultures of Oceania documented by the Forsters and the history of European voyaging in the Pacific. Appendixes include a translation of the introduction to the German edition and the polemical pamphlets by George Forster and the ship's astronomer William Wales, in which some of the book's more controversial claims were debated.

Foreword - Peter Skinner

Captain Cook's three great voyages of exploration between 1768 and 1775 are unrivaled in achievement. The harvest of geographical discovery, from Alaska to New Zealand, from New Guinea to Hawaii, with associated cartographic work, is rich beyond compare. Also unmatched are the collections of fauna and flora and the journals for each voyage with their far-ranging compilations of ethnographic and anthropological information.
While Cook's own journals remain the primary source of information and the official record of the voyages, other participants' journals are often more engaging, particularly for general readers. On his second voyage (1772-1775) made to discover or deny a Great Southern Continent, Cook took as natural scientists the brilliant, irascible polymath Johann Forster and his highly intelligent and diplomatic son George. He was only twenty-four years old in 1777, when his splendid narrative, A Voyage Around the World, was published. This handsome two-volume re-issue of the Voyage (the first in English) is certain to find an appreciative primary readership among scholars of late eighteenth century exploration and settlement; natural science and anthropology; and navigation, cartography and related topics. Editors Nicholas Thomas, Oliver Berghof and Jennifer Newell provide a highly informative introduction that contextualizes the voyage and its aims and expectations; they also discuss the Forsters' intellectual and scientific perspectives. These underlie the categorizations and differentiations George Forster makes about the many Polynesian and Micronesian peoples encountered or re-encountered during the three-year voyage. The volumes are likely (and most certainly deserve) to win a wide secondary readership-people attracted to exploration at its finest, in which incident, adventure and narrow escapes from death abound. The set will greatly reward enthusiasts prepared to exchange the seductive, fictional lure of the South Seas and exotic island societies for a far more interesting social reality; it will also extend any reader's knowledge of Enlightenment science and sensibilities. Shipboard and on-shore life, responses to health and sickness and to danger and escape are vividly handled-though many analyses of indigenous social systems are now superseded. Not least in interest are Forster's political asides, classical allusions and comments on the dynamics of commanding men overlong at sea. The editors incisively describe the power politics surrounding publication of the Voyage. Johann Forster believed he was contracted to provide the official account; the Admiralty ruled against him and for Cook, permitting Forster to write a commentary on the expedition's scientific achievements. As a free agent, George Forster wrote the Voyage, meeting the accusation that his father was the major contributor. Regardless of authorship, the Voyage is a remarkable, living, captivating account, plunging the reader into every sort of situation that nature and humankind can offer.