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The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris
Step into the life and times of George Forster, the young naturalist and revolutionary who journeyed to the far reaches of the known world and whose radical ideas about humanity and freedom made waves in eighteenth-century Europe—from the bestselling author of The Invention of Nature and Magnificent Rebels.
From an early age, it was clear that George Forster possessed a brilliant mind. A polyglot and gifted scientist, he became an invaluable asset to the ambitions of his domineering father, Reinhold. As a young boy, he travelled with his father from the plains of West Prussia to the wild shores of the Volga to St. Petersburg and London on scientific endeavors, and soon became the breadwinner by publishing translations of hugely popular exploration accounts. When Reinhold Forster was offered the position of naturalist aboard Captain James Cook’s second voyage, he accepted on the condition that his seventeen-year-old son serve as his assistant.
The HMS Resolution set sail in 1772 with orders to find the hypothetical southern continent of Antarctica. On her voyage to the Antarctic Circle and the islands of the South Pacific—including New Zealand, Vanuatu, Tonga, Tahiti, and Easter Island—the Resolution carried the ambitions of the most powerful empire in the world. But George Forster brought an understanding that was centuries ahead of the attitudes of his day—his ideas belonged to the future. A remarkable observer, linguist, artist, and writer whose intelligence surpassed that of his own father, he studied the diverse cultures of the world without prejudice and sought to uncover our common humanity. He was a traveler in body and mind—not bound by place, people or establishment.
Recognized as one of Europe’s brightest minds on his return, Forster held positions across the continent and regaled the world not only with tales from his travels but also radical ideas about human nature. He would write against empire, white supremacy, and slavery. He would become a revolutionary and be declared an outlaw. He would never seek to control others as he had been controlled by his father, and even embraced a liberal idea of marriage, accepting his wife’s affairs and independence Andrea Wulf’s The Traveler recounts an extraordinary life largely forgotten by history, the tale of a man who broke with convention and was unafraid to critique the world around him in dedication to his belief in the human right to dignity, equality, and freedom.
From an early age, it was clear that George Forster possessed a brilliant mind. A polyglot and gifted scientist, he became an invaluable asset to the ambitions of his domineering father, Reinhold. As a young boy, he travelled with his father from the plains of West Prussia to the wild shores of the Volga to St. Petersburg and London on scientific endeavors, and soon became the breadwinner by publishing translations of hugely popular exploration accounts. When Reinhold Forster was offered the position of naturalist aboard Captain James Cook’s second voyage, he accepted on the condition that his seventeen-year-old son serve as his assistant.
The HMS Resolution set sail in 1772 with orders to find the hypothetical southern continent of Antarctica. On her voyage to the Antarctic Circle and the islands of the South Pacific—including New Zealand, Vanuatu, Tonga, Tahiti, and Easter Island—the Resolution carried the ambitions of the most powerful empire in the world. But George Forster brought an understanding that was centuries ahead of the attitudes of his day—his ideas belonged to the future. A remarkable observer, linguist, artist, and writer whose intelligence surpassed that of his own father, he studied the diverse cultures of the world without prejudice and sought to uncover our common humanity. He was a traveler in body and mind—not bound by place, people or establishment.
Recognized as one of Europe’s brightest minds on his return, Forster held positions across the continent and regaled the world not only with tales from his travels but also radical ideas about human nature. He would write against empire, white supremacy, and slavery. He would become a revolutionary and be declared an outlaw. He would never seek to control others as he had been controlled by his father, and even embraced a liberal idea of marriage, accepting his wife’s affairs and independence Andrea Wulf’s The Traveler recounts an extraordinary life largely forgotten by history, the tale of a man who broke with convention and was unafraid to critique the world around him in dedication to his belief in the human right to dignity, equality, and freedom.
512 pages, Hardcover
First published June 2, 2026
About the author
Andrea Wulf
15 books1,003 followersAndrea Wulf is an award-winning author of seven acclaimed books, including the Founding Gardeners and The Invention of Nature which were both on the New York Times Best Seller List. Her books have been translated into 27 languages. The Invention of Nature has won 15 international awards, including the Royal Society Science Book Award 2016, Costa Biography Award 2015 and the LA Times Book Prize 2016, as well as awards in Germany, China, France and Italy. It was selected by the New York Times as “10 Best Books of 2015” and has sold more than 800,000 copies worldwide. Magnificent Rebels. The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self was published to great acclaim in 2022 (and will be published in 15 countries). Her new book, The Traveller, about the explorer and revolutionary George Forster, will be published in 2026
Her journalism has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic, LA Times, Financial Times and Guardian among many other publications. Andrea lectures across the world – from the Royal Geographical Society and Royal Society in London to the New York Public Library and the American Philosophical Society in the US, as well as literary festivals across the world. She is also a regular on radio, podcasts and TV in the US, the UK and in Germany. In 2019, she was part of the delegation that accompanied Germany’s President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on his trip to Ecuador and Colombian … following Humboldt’s footsteps.
She is a Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute, a three-time fellow of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello and the Eccles British Library Writer in Residence 2013. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of PEN American Center and a judge of the Baillie Gifford Prize 2023.
Her journalism has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic, LA Times, Financial Times and Guardian among many other publications. Andrea lectures across the world – from the Royal Geographical Society and Royal Society in London to the New York Public Library and the American Philosophical Society in the US, as well as literary festivals across the world. She is also a regular on radio, podcasts and TV in the US, the UK and in Germany. In 2019, she was part of the delegation that accompanied Germany’s President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on his trip to Ecuador and Colombian … following Humboldt’s footsteps.
She is a Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute, a three-time fellow of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello and the Eccles British Library Writer in Residence 2013. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of PEN American Center and a judge of the Baillie Gifford Prize 2023.
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June 9, 2026
The Line Was Never Innocent
Andrea Wulf’s “The Traveler” follows George Forster from Cook’s South Seas to revolutionary Paris, tracing how one young witness learned to see empire’s borders as wounds before history knew what to call them.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | June 8th, 2026
On Tanna’s shore, a faint boundary becomes the book’s central wound: the moment George Forster sees that empire can make a line look like order before it reveals itself as violence.
A man draws a line in the sand, and history calls it order. Another man crosses it, and history calls him a trespasser. On Tanna in 1774, in Andrea Wulf’s “The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris,” a European marine shoots an islander who refuses to obey a boundary imposed by strangers on his own beach. Captain Cook’s voyage has brought science, ambition, hunger, discipline, guns, maps, and the old imperial reflex of treating arrival as entitlement. George Forster, nineteen, assistant naturalist and draughtsman aboard the Resolution, sees something plainer and more damning. The line was never neutral. It was power pretending to be geography.
From that beach, the biography begins steering by a wound. Wulf could easily have written a polished retrieval from the margins of Cook’s voyage and Humboldt’s gratitude: Forster as Cook’s young naturalist, prodigy, writer, anti-racist observer, friend and influence of Alexander von Humboldt, unconventional husband, German revolutionary, and ghost who keeps slipping the shelf label. He was all of those things, and several more that make the index feel faintly out of breath. He lived as if history had given him one trunk, no stable address, and a deadline. But “The Traveler” quickens when it becomes sharper than recovery. It asks who may scratch a rule into another person’s shore, who must obey it, and who notices the price paid by the person under the rule.
Forster was born in 1754 near Gdansk, in a German-speaking patchwork of principalities, loyalties, and languages not yet pressed into a nation. His father, Reinhold Forster, was a learned, volatile Lutheran pastor who turned brilliance into household labor – a one-man university with weather issues. He educated George brilliantly and put him to work without mercy. At ten, George accompanied Reinhold across Russia to inspect German settlements along the Volga for Catherine the Great. He collected plants, pressed specimens, and saw salt lakes, steppes, Tatars, Cossacks, camels, starving settlers, corrupt officials, and the gears of despotism. It was a childhood expedition, which is to say a wonder and an injury in the same saddlebag.
On the Volga, the young Forster’s first education in wonder is already shadowed by use, as specimens, distance, and Reinhold’s presence turn childhood curiosity into a burdened apprenticeship.
The saddlebag never emptied; it merely changed contents. George’s gifts were nurtured, then put to work. In England, still a boy, his languages and pen became family revenue: he translated other men’s voyages, served his father’s intellectual enterprise, and watched praise arrive under another man’s name. When Joseph Banks withdrew from Cook’s second voyage, Reinhold was appointed naturalist and brought George as assistant and draughtsman. At seventeen, George sailed into waters blank only to European paper.
The Resolution appears small against ice, sea, and white silence, making exploration feel less like triumph than endurance: a wooden vessel carrying science, ambition, and human frailty into the glare.
The Resolution chapters offer the old shipboard ledger: Antarctic glare, sour provisions, cramped cabins, tropical abundance, strange birds, hunger, storms, quarrels, and the practical tyranny of keeping men alive in a wooden vessel at the edge of the known. Yet Wulf is not writing the captain’s story with the blood washed from the deck. Her South Pacific is green, fragrant, ceremonious, and already carrying the shadow of the gun. Across New Zealand / Aotearoa, Tahiti, Tonga, Easter Island / Rapa Nui, Tanna, and beyond, Forster watches not only landscapes and species but trades, warnings, punishments, gifts, stolen things, and fearful negotiations. He studies language, gesture, rank, hospitality, grief, music, barter, fear. He sees sailors and officers misunderstand property, sexuality, ritual, and authority, then discipline the people they have misunderstood for failing to behave like Europeans in costume.
The real division is between travel that takes inventory and travel that comes home with its assumptions dented. One collects, names, ranks, maps, claims, and calls the result knowledge. The other is forced to revise the categories it packed from home. Forster is trained in the first method but pulled toward the second. He classifies plants, records languages, observes customs, and sketches the natural world, yet looking becomes a rebuke to the map inside his own head. Difference does not confirm hierarchy. It enlarges the number of ways a person can be fully human.
Wulf is especially persuasive in showing that Forster’s humane imagination was made, not granted. No angel drops into the eighteenth century wearing better politics. He is formed by Reinhold’s control, poverty, translation labor, shipboard discipline, illness, debt, institutional dependence, marital anguish, and political exile. His belief in liberty has weight because he has known command from below. His sympathy for the man on Tanna is not ornamental kindness. He recognizes the violence of arbitrary rule because arbitrary rule is weather he had grown up breathing.
In these passages, Wulf is not merely rescuing Forster from obscurity; she is showing why obscurity found him convenient. She gives us Forster not as a plaster saint with sea legs, but as the spot where the century hurts when pressed. He exposes an age praising reason with one hand and ranking whole peoples with the other. Exploration promises knowledge while bringing disease, intimidation, and death. Science trains the eye but can harden into the neat violence of sorting. Revolution speaks of liberty while learning how quickly purity can acquire informers. Forster moves through all this, not cleanly outside the systems he opposes, but often startlingly awake inside them.
The voyage gets into his sentences. Returning to England in 1775, the Forsters are entangled in quarrels over the official account of Cook’s expedition. George writes “A Voyage Round the World” with astonishing speed, turning observation into travel literature and rebuke. He does not treat Indigenous peoples as curiosities arranged around European enterprise. He insists on their intelligence, complexity, and full human standing. Against the racial arrogance of his age, including claims made by men whose names still sit heavily in philosophy surveys, Forster argues from encounter. He has been there. He has listened, eaten, traded, guessed, erred, watched, and been changed. Hierarchies composed at a desk look rather foolish beside a beach, a body, a song, and a dead man.
Wulf’s own prose follows a similar discipline of looking. It is lucid, sensuous, fleet but grounded, and alert to the moment when beauty becomes evidence against innocence. She writes scenes before she writes arguments, allowing food, weather, ice, smoke, streets, blood, forests, manuscripts, bunks, and crowded rooms to think on the page. London smells of wealth and waste. The Antarctic cold enters the joints. Tahiti is fragrant but never allowed to remain Edenic. Mainz crackles with talk before politics becomes consequence. Paris, at the end, is less a city of ideals than a room getting smaller around a sick man.
Her rhythm is usually supple and accumulative, with short blows placed where the reader needs the cut. She knows how to let beauty gather and then ruin its composure. The effect is not decorative. In “The Traveler,” description refuses to let the other person blur. To render a person, place, or custom closely is to resist the lazy violence of category. Wulf’s best pages do what she admires in Forster: they look long enough for superiority to blush.
The four-part structure does more than count years; it tightens around him. Setting out: father, family, poverty, labor. Discoveries: ships, muskets, maps, first contact. Ambitions: jobs, debt, reputation, marriage, institutions too small for the mind they employ. Revolutions: Mainz, Paris, exile, terror, death, and reputation. The same command appears in different clothes. Father, captain, empire, marriage, republic: each asks who must obey and who gets to explain obedience afterward.
The middle does the unglamorous work. After the glamour and harm of the voyage, and before the revolutionary finale, Forster’s fame refuses to turn into security. In Kassel and Vilnius, he struggles with work, isolation, money, ambition, and the boredom of frozen institutions. His marriage to Therese Heyne is among the book’s sharpest private dramas, not for its scandal, but because the household becomes the smallest republic and the least governable. Forster’s views of women and marriage are unusually liberal; he wants intellectual companionship, emotional candor, and a marriage that does not simply absorb a woman into male possession. Yet ideals do not cancel need. Therese’s love for other men, Forster’s loneliness, and their attempts at unconventional arrangements expose the cost of living beyond convention without escaping desire, jealousy, or ordinary pain. Liberty, it turns out, does not clear the dishes.
Paris is where the book stops letting admiration travel alone. Forster’s commitment to freedom is not left safely in essays, letters, or shipboard reflections. In Mainz, he becomes a participant, not merely an observer: joining the Society of the Friends of Liberty and Equality, speaking, organizing, administering, and supporting the Mainz Republic, the first republic on German soil. He argues for union with France as protection against returning despotism. Then the door shuts. Mainz is besieged. Forster travels to Paris as part of a delegation and cannot return. The man who crossed oceans becomes trapped in a city where principle has learned to whisper names to the police. He is poor, ill, separated from Therese and his daughters, watching friends endangered, executions multiplying, and ideals acquiring an appetite for blood.
These final chapters prevent the portrait from flattening into admiration. Forster is courageous, and he is also frighteningly absolute. His conviction that one is either for freedom or tyranny gives his politics grandeur and peril. Wulf does not turn him into a fanatic without conscience, but she does show him defending revolution even as it horrifies him, insisting that the alternative – the return of despotism – would be worse. Here “The Traveler” becomes most tragic. The same imagination that allowed Forster to see dignity across oceans also binds him to a revolutionary dream that can no longer be kept clean. Freedom in a sentence is luminous. Freedom once installed in committees, armies, denunciations, hunger, fear, and prisons needs sterner housekeeping.
The praise occasionally over-lights its subject. Wulf’s warmth is often justified. Forster was brilliant, emotionally candid, cosmopolitan, anti-slavery, intellectually restless, unusually alert to women’s independence, and capable of seeing through many brutal complacencies of his age. But the biography sometimes sets too many lamps around him. Wulf tells us he was ahead of his time after the scene has already made the case. The repetition is not fatal, but it is audible: Forster as humane, Forster as unbound, Forster as later than his century. At moments one wants to tap the margin and write, gently, “Yes, Andrea, we have met him.”
Admiration is not the problem; embalming would be. A colder book would be less alive. The danger is that retrieval can become glare, and glare can flatten the face. Forster is most interesting not when he resembles an envoy from our preferred selves, but when he remains stranded inside his own century: carrying its categories even as he resists them, needing love while theorizing freedom, defending revolution while recoiling from its cruelties, escaping his father’s rule only to discover that history has sterner fathers waiting. Wulf knows this, and the late chapters prove it. Still, the biography is strongest when shadow is allowed to do its work.
The nearby books help, but mostly by showing how awkwardly Forster fits the shelf. Richard Holmes’s “The Age of Wonder” also joins science, travel, feeling, and historical transformation under skies bright with discovery and darkened by consequence. Hampton Sides’s “The Wide Wide Sea” may attract readers through Cook, the Pacific, and the reassessment of exploration, but Wulf’s book is less a captain’s story than a conscience’s itinerary. Maya Jasanoff’s “The Dawn Watch” is perhaps the sharper formal kin: one traveling writer used to read the pressures of a global age. Forster’s gaze, though, is more tender, more wounded, and more recklessly hopeful.
The book does not need to be dragged into the present; Tanna has never quite left it. Its questions rise from blood, maps, desks, ships, marriage beds, and paperwork: what exploration cost the people being explored; how universal reason coexisted with racial ranking; how borders pretend to be natural; how freedom can be endangered by the very purity invoked in its name. Wulf writes into a moment suspicious of old heroic narratives, but “The Traveler” needs no topical tether. The beach is enough. So is the ship. So is the instant when an abstraction meets an actual body and discovers, too late, that it has blood on it.
What readers may remember first is the Pacific: the ice before it, the green abundance after it, the songs, trade, fear, theft, ceremony, misunderstanding, and fatal composure of European arrival. They may remember Reinhold, too, the exhausting father whose brilliance was inseparable from damage. They will remember Forster’s youth: ten on the Volga, seventeen on the Resolution, famous in his twenties, dead at thirty-nine. Wulf makes the shortness of his life feel almost indecent. He had barely enough time to become all the things later memory would not know where to put.
The last border Forster crosses is reputation. After he dies in Paris in 1794 – sick, poor, exiled, longing for his daughters – he does not settle into a stable afterlife. He becomes problem, precursor, traitor, influence, embarrassment, inspiration. Humboldt remembers what he owes him. Others borrow, mourn, suppress, or misfile him. The epilogue matters because it shows that a life devoted to crossing boundaries may remain difficult to archive. History likes labels; Forster kept making the drawer stick.
“The Traveler” sometimes insists when it could trust, shines when it could shade, and asks one man to shoulder an alarming amount of the eighteenth century. Yet Forster mostly does not buckle. He stands where half the century collides: Cook and Humboldt, Enlightenment and Romanticism, science and sympathy, empire and anti-imperial witness, marriage and liberty, revolution and terror, Europe and the wider world it mistook for an assignment.
My final rating: 91/100, 5/5 stars.
What Wulf gives us, finally, is not a flawless hero but a way of looking. “The Traveler” understands that travel can be theft, vanity, appetite, ambition, escape, inquiry, and revelation, sometimes before breakfast. Its finest insight is that the world does not become larger merely because one crosses it. It becomes larger when one’s categories fail. On Tanna, a line is drawn in sand. A man is killed for crossing it. Another man sees, with horror and clarity, that the crime began before the shot. The line itself was already a wound.
Early thumbnail studies test the shore, the figures, and the diagonal boundary, searching for the quietest arrangement in which the line can carry the whole moral weight of the image.
The first pencil structure leaves the scene nearly bare – shore, horizon, figures, and line – showing the visual argument before atmosphere, color, or historical weather arrives.
Gesture studies refine the three human positions of the scene: refusal at the threshold, witness at a distance, and enforcement held small enough to remain ominous rather than theatrical.
The border study treats the frame as part of the argument, borrowing from field notebooks and natural-history plates to suggest how observation, classification, and power all begin by drawing edges.
The cover-derived palette is tested in muted sand, olive, oxblood, bone, umber, and dusty rose, finding a color language sober enough for violence and delicate enough for witness.
The first washes begin turning the graphite scaffold into weather and silence, letting the sand, sea, and sky gather around the still-visible line without fully closing the painting’s process.
A literary watercolor portrait of Andrea Wulf for “The Traveler,” folding botanical study, shoreline, field notes, and the book’s cover palette into a respectful author image.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Watercolors are done on 140lb vellum and then scanned into the computer using an Epson scanner. From there, they are finalized in Procreate. All art and opinions are my own.
Andrea Wulf’s “The Traveler” follows George Forster from Cook’s South Seas to revolutionary Paris, tracing how one young witness learned to see empire’s borders as wounds before history knew what to call them.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | June 8th, 2026
On Tanna’s shore, a faint boundary becomes the book’s central wound: the moment George Forster sees that empire can make a line look like order before it reveals itself as violence.
A man draws a line in the sand, and history calls it order. Another man crosses it, and history calls him a trespasser. On Tanna in 1774, in Andrea Wulf’s “The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris,” a European marine shoots an islander who refuses to obey a boundary imposed by strangers on his own beach. Captain Cook’s voyage has brought science, ambition, hunger, discipline, guns, maps, and the old imperial reflex of treating arrival as entitlement. George Forster, nineteen, assistant naturalist and draughtsman aboard the Resolution, sees something plainer and more damning. The line was never neutral. It was power pretending to be geography.
From that beach, the biography begins steering by a wound. Wulf could easily have written a polished retrieval from the margins of Cook’s voyage and Humboldt’s gratitude: Forster as Cook’s young naturalist, prodigy, writer, anti-racist observer, friend and influence of Alexander von Humboldt, unconventional husband, German revolutionary, and ghost who keeps slipping the shelf label. He was all of those things, and several more that make the index feel faintly out of breath. He lived as if history had given him one trunk, no stable address, and a deadline. But “The Traveler” quickens when it becomes sharper than recovery. It asks who may scratch a rule into another person’s shore, who must obey it, and who notices the price paid by the person under the rule.
Forster was born in 1754 near Gdansk, in a German-speaking patchwork of principalities, loyalties, and languages not yet pressed into a nation. His father, Reinhold Forster, was a learned, volatile Lutheran pastor who turned brilliance into household labor – a one-man university with weather issues. He educated George brilliantly and put him to work without mercy. At ten, George accompanied Reinhold across Russia to inspect German settlements along the Volga for Catherine the Great. He collected plants, pressed specimens, and saw salt lakes, steppes, Tatars, Cossacks, camels, starving settlers, corrupt officials, and the gears of despotism. It was a childhood expedition, which is to say a wonder and an injury in the same saddlebag.
On the Volga, the young Forster’s first education in wonder is already shadowed by use, as specimens, distance, and Reinhold’s presence turn childhood curiosity into a burdened apprenticeship.
The saddlebag never emptied; it merely changed contents. George’s gifts were nurtured, then put to work. In England, still a boy, his languages and pen became family revenue: he translated other men’s voyages, served his father’s intellectual enterprise, and watched praise arrive under another man’s name. When Joseph Banks withdrew from Cook’s second voyage, Reinhold was appointed naturalist and brought George as assistant and draughtsman. At seventeen, George sailed into waters blank only to European paper.
The Resolution appears small against ice, sea, and white silence, making exploration feel less like triumph than endurance: a wooden vessel carrying science, ambition, and human frailty into the glare.
The Resolution chapters offer the old shipboard ledger: Antarctic glare, sour provisions, cramped cabins, tropical abundance, strange birds, hunger, storms, quarrels, and the practical tyranny of keeping men alive in a wooden vessel at the edge of the known. Yet Wulf is not writing the captain’s story with the blood washed from the deck. Her South Pacific is green, fragrant, ceremonious, and already carrying the shadow of the gun. Across New Zealand / Aotearoa, Tahiti, Tonga, Easter Island / Rapa Nui, Tanna, and beyond, Forster watches not only landscapes and species but trades, warnings, punishments, gifts, stolen things, and fearful negotiations. He studies language, gesture, rank, hospitality, grief, music, barter, fear. He sees sailors and officers misunderstand property, sexuality, ritual, and authority, then discipline the people they have misunderstood for failing to behave like Europeans in costume.
The real division is between travel that takes inventory and travel that comes home with its assumptions dented. One collects, names, ranks, maps, claims, and calls the result knowledge. The other is forced to revise the categories it packed from home. Forster is trained in the first method but pulled toward the second. He classifies plants, records languages, observes customs, and sketches the natural world, yet looking becomes a rebuke to the map inside his own head. Difference does not confirm hierarchy. It enlarges the number of ways a person can be fully human.
Wulf is especially persuasive in showing that Forster’s humane imagination was made, not granted. No angel drops into the eighteenth century wearing better politics. He is formed by Reinhold’s control, poverty, translation labor, shipboard discipline, illness, debt, institutional dependence, marital anguish, and political exile. His belief in liberty has weight because he has known command from below. His sympathy for the man on Tanna is not ornamental kindness. He recognizes the violence of arbitrary rule because arbitrary rule is weather he had grown up breathing.
In these passages, Wulf is not merely rescuing Forster from obscurity; she is showing why obscurity found him convenient. She gives us Forster not as a plaster saint with sea legs, but as the spot where the century hurts when pressed. He exposes an age praising reason with one hand and ranking whole peoples with the other. Exploration promises knowledge while bringing disease, intimidation, and death. Science trains the eye but can harden into the neat violence of sorting. Revolution speaks of liberty while learning how quickly purity can acquire informers. Forster moves through all this, not cleanly outside the systems he opposes, but often startlingly awake inside them.
The voyage gets into his sentences. Returning to England in 1775, the Forsters are entangled in quarrels over the official account of Cook’s expedition. George writes “A Voyage Round the World” with astonishing speed, turning observation into travel literature and rebuke. He does not treat Indigenous peoples as curiosities arranged around European enterprise. He insists on their intelligence, complexity, and full human standing. Against the racial arrogance of his age, including claims made by men whose names still sit heavily in philosophy surveys, Forster argues from encounter. He has been there. He has listened, eaten, traded, guessed, erred, watched, and been changed. Hierarchies composed at a desk look rather foolish beside a beach, a body, a song, and a dead man.
Wulf’s own prose follows a similar discipline of looking. It is lucid, sensuous, fleet but grounded, and alert to the moment when beauty becomes evidence against innocence. She writes scenes before she writes arguments, allowing food, weather, ice, smoke, streets, blood, forests, manuscripts, bunks, and crowded rooms to think on the page. London smells of wealth and waste. The Antarctic cold enters the joints. Tahiti is fragrant but never allowed to remain Edenic. Mainz crackles with talk before politics becomes consequence. Paris, at the end, is less a city of ideals than a room getting smaller around a sick man.
Her rhythm is usually supple and accumulative, with short blows placed where the reader needs the cut. She knows how to let beauty gather and then ruin its composure. The effect is not decorative. In “The Traveler,” description refuses to let the other person blur. To render a person, place, or custom closely is to resist the lazy violence of category. Wulf’s best pages do what she admires in Forster: they look long enough for superiority to blush.
The four-part structure does more than count years; it tightens around him. Setting out: father, family, poverty, labor. Discoveries: ships, muskets, maps, first contact. Ambitions: jobs, debt, reputation, marriage, institutions too small for the mind they employ. Revolutions: Mainz, Paris, exile, terror, death, and reputation. The same command appears in different clothes. Father, captain, empire, marriage, republic: each asks who must obey and who gets to explain obedience afterward.
The middle does the unglamorous work. After the glamour and harm of the voyage, and before the revolutionary finale, Forster’s fame refuses to turn into security. In Kassel and Vilnius, he struggles with work, isolation, money, ambition, and the boredom of frozen institutions. His marriage to Therese Heyne is among the book’s sharpest private dramas, not for its scandal, but because the household becomes the smallest republic and the least governable. Forster’s views of women and marriage are unusually liberal; he wants intellectual companionship, emotional candor, and a marriage that does not simply absorb a woman into male possession. Yet ideals do not cancel need. Therese’s love for other men, Forster’s loneliness, and their attempts at unconventional arrangements expose the cost of living beyond convention without escaping desire, jealousy, or ordinary pain. Liberty, it turns out, does not clear the dishes.
Paris is where the book stops letting admiration travel alone. Forster’s commitment to freedom is not left safely in essays, letters, or shipboard reflections. In Mainz, he becomes a participant, not merely an observer: joining the Society of the Friends of Liberty and Equality, speaking, organizing, administering, and supporting the Mainz Republic, the first republic on German soil. He argues for union with France as protection against returning despotism. Then the door shuts. Mainz is besieged. Forster travels to Paris as part of a delegation and cannot return. The man who crossed oceans becomes trapped in a city where principle has learned to whisper names to the police. He is poor, ill, separated from Therese and his daughters, watching friends endangered, executions multiplying, and ideals acquiring an appetite for blood.
These final chapters prevent the portrait from flattening into admiration. Forster is courageous, and he is also frighteningly absolute. His conviction that one is either for freedom or tyranny gives his politics grandeur and peril. Wulf does not turn him into a fanatic without conscience, but she does show him defending revolution even as it horrifies him, insisting that the alternative – the return of despotism – would be worse. Here “The Traveler” becomes most tragic. The same imagination that allowed Forster to see dignity across oceans also binds him to a revolutionary dream that can no longer be kept clean. Freedom in a sentence is luminous. Freedom once installed in committees, armies, denunciations, hunger, fear, and prisons needs sterner housekeeping.
The praise occasionally over-lights its subject. Wulf’s warmth is often justified. Forster was brilliant, emotionally candid, cosmopolitan, anti-slavery, intellectually restless, unusually alert to women’s independence, and capable of seeing through many brutal complacencies of his age. But the biography sometimes sets too many lamps around him. Wulf tells us he was ahead of his time after the scene has already made the case. The repetition is not fatal, but it is audible: Forster as humane, Forster as unbound, Forster as later than his century. At moments one wants to tap the margin and write, gently, “Yes, Andrea, we have met him.”
Admiration is not the problem; embalming would be. A colder book would be less alive. The danger is that retrieval can become glare, and glare can flatten the face. Forster is most interesting not when he resembles an envoy from our preferred selves, but when he remains stranded inside his own century: carrying its categories even as he resists them, needing love while theorizing freedom, defending revolution while recoiling from its cruelties, escaping his father’s rule only to discover that history has sterner fathers waiting. Wulf knows this, and the late chapters prove it. Still, the biography is strongest when shadow is allowed to do its work.
The nearby books help, but mostly by showing how awkwardly Forster fits the shelf. Richard Holmes’s “The Age of Wonder” also joins science, travel, feeling, and historical transformation under skies bright with discovery and darkened by consequence. Hampton Sides’s “The Wide Wide Sea” may attract readers through Cook, the Pacific, and the reassessment of exploration, but Wulf’s book is less a captain’s story than a conscience’s itinerary. Maya Jasanoff’s “The Dawn Watch” is perhaps the sharper formal kin: one traveling writer used to read the pressures of a global age. Forster’s gaze, though, is more tender, more wounded, and more recklessly hopeful.
The book does not need to be dragged into the present; Tanna has never quite left it. Its questions rise from blood, maps, desks, ships, marriage beds, and paperwork: what exploration cost the people being explored; how universal reason coexisted with racial ranking; how borders pretend to be natural; how freedom can be endangered by the very purity invoked in its name. Wulf writes into a moment suspicious of old heroic narratives, but “The Traveler” needs no topical tether. The beach is enough. So is the ship. So is the instant when an abstraction meets an actual body and discovers, too late, that it has blood on it.
What readers may remember first is the Pacific: the ice before it, the green abundance after it, the songs, trade, fear, theft, ceremony, misunderstanding, and fatal composure of European arrival. They may remember Reinhold, too, the exhausting father whose brilliance was inseparable from damage. They will remember Forster’s youth: ten on the Volga, seventeen on the Resolution, famous in his twenties, dead at thirty-nine. Wulf makes the shortness of his life feel almost indecent. He had barely enough time to become all the things later memory would not know where to put.
The last border Forster crosses is reputation. After he dies in Paris in 1794 – sick, poor, exiled, longing for his daughters – he does not settle into a stable afterlife. He becomes problem, precursor, traitor, influence, embarrassment, inspiration. Humboldt remembers what he owes him. Others borrow, mourn, suppress, or misfile him. The epilogue matters because it shows that a life devoted to crossing boundaries may remain difficult to archive. History likes labels; Forster kept making the drawer stick.
“The Traveler” sometimes insists when it could trust, shines when it could shade, and asks one man to shoulder an alarming amount of the eighteenth century. Yet Forster mostly does not buckle. He stands where half the century collides: Cook and Humboldt, Enlightenment and Romanticism, science and sympathy, empire and anti-imperial witness, marriage and liberty, revolution and terror, Europe and the wider world it mistook for an assignment.
My final rating: 91/100, 5/5 stars.
What Wulf gives us, finally, is not a flawless hero but a way of looking. “The Traveler” understands that travel can be theft, vanity, appetite, ambition, escape, inquiry, and revelation, sometimes before breakfast. Its finest insight is that the world does not become larger merely because one crosses it. It becomes larger when one’s categories fail. On Tanna, a line is drawn in sand. A man is killed for crossing it. Another man sees, with horror and clarity, that the crime began before the shot. The line itself was already a wound.
Early thumbnail studies test the shore, the figures, and the diagonal boundary, searching for the quietest arrangement in which the line can carry the whole moral weight of the image.
The first pencil structure leaves the scene nearly bare – shore, horizon, figures, and line – showing the visual argument before atmosphere, color, or historical weather arrives.
Gesture studies refine the three human positions of the scene: refusal at the threshold, witness at a distance, and enforcement held small enough to remain ominous rather than theatrical.
The border study treats the frame as part of the argument, borrowing from field notebooks and natural-history plates to suggest how observation, classification, and power all begin by drawing edges.
The cover-derived palette is tested in muted sand, olive, oxblood, bone, umber, and dusty rose, finding a color language sober enough for violence and delicate enough for witness.
The first washes begin turning the graphite scaffold into weather and silence, letting the sand, sea, and sky gather around the still-visible line without fully closing the painting’s process.
A literary watercolor portrait of Andrea Wulf for “The Traveler,” folding botanical study, shoreline, field notes, and the book’s cover palette into a respectful author image.
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Watercolors are done on 140lb vellum and then scanned into the computer using an Epson scanner. From there, they are finalized in Procreate. All art and opinions are my own.
June 26, 2026
Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature is one of my favorite non-fiction books, so I would have picked up her newest — The Traveler — anyway, but it was even more intriguing that her subject, George Forster, came to her attention while research the book on Humboldt. As expected, the book on Forster is vivid and compelling and an easy recommendation.
Forster (1754-1794) was a man of the Enlightenment in many ways: a naturalist, a linguist, explorer, ethnographer, political writer, essayist, translator, and toward the end of his short life a revolutionary. But Wulf sharpest interest in Forster is the ways in which he was a man not of his times, a man who abhorred slavery, argued adamantly against the rise of race-based thinking (and of course out and out racism), and believed fervently in “human rights” before the phrase became the common concept of today.
All of which is even more impressive given he barely had any formal education at all. Instead he was educated at home by his pastor father, a quarrelsome, indebted, antagonistic man with an interest in science and an urgent need to make his mark in the world. When his father was offered the position of naturalist aboard Cook’s second voyage in 1772, he took George with him on a voyage that lasted over three years sailing around the South Seas and within nearly 100 miles of Antarctica. It was, as one might assume, a transformative experience for the seventeen-year-old. Though we did see hints of his open mind in his response to the abject poverty he witnessed on another trip with his father (this one to Russia) and his keen observations and friendly interactions with the rough crew of Cook’s ship. .
Cook’s trip, however, is where we really start to see his views diverge from his fellow Europeans. When the islanders, for instance, offer their women (some young girls) to the sailors as barter, Forster wonders, “Who was worse . . . the Māori men who forced their women to have sex, or the Europeans who partook?” And as he witnesses more and more the impact of the Europeans on the islands, he writes that, “I fear that hitherto our intercourse has been wholly disadvantageous to the nations of the South Seas; and that those communities have been the least injured, who have always kept aloof from us.” This was certainly true in purely concrete fashion, Wulf informs us, as the Europeans brought syphilis and other diseases to the unprotected islanders, causing their population to shrink from 40, 000 to under ten thousand over the next six decades.
Time and again, Forster casts an empathetic and respectful eye on the islanders while his mission mates considered them barely human and many not even that. When the islander stole objects from the Europeans, as his shipmates raged and sought retribution, Forster, based on his cultural observations, considered that the islanders did not view property or ownership in the same way as the Europeans and so theft did not mean the same thing to them. Even when things turned violent, Forster often considered the Europeans the ones who provoked, commenting multiple times on how quick they were to use their guns, and how it was tough to fault the islanders for seeing the Europeans as possible invaders given their actions.
Nor did he, as Wulf shows us, idealize the islanders in Rousseau’s fashion of the “noble savage”. Forster saw how the islanders warred violently with each other and treated their women like “drudges,” and so always kept his descriptions tightly bound to his observations of their actual behavior rather than as some abstract symbol.
All of these views, his experiences, and his ecological and cultural observations were written up in the book he published afterward, A Voyage Round the World. The book was well received and the young man found himself the toast of the town and spoken of in far-off countries. Which was lucky, as the rest of his life had to be spent writing feverishly (his own work, translations, introductions) to keep up with his father’s debts and then, in addition as those never went away, his own, as he unfortunately picked up his father’s inability to manage money.
If most of the next decade was less exciting than the three years spent with Cook, it was no less successful in terms of the respect he garnered around the world from his writings and his arguments against racism and for human rights. A quick and extremely incomplete list of his visitors or those he visited or corresponded with gives a sense of the rarified circles he moved in: Benjamin Franklin, Goethe, Humboldt, Comte de Buffon, Joseph Banks, and others. He became a member of the Royal Society and even met the king. He took on various jobs around Europe and eventually got married. But even this traditional act was unconventional, as he loved his wife Theresa deeply but found his love unreturned, and then allowed her to take up with several successive lovers during their marriage, often with a good friend of his and even at times with the lover living in their house. It caused him no end of misery, but he could not abide the idea of separation from her and especially from his daughters. Wulf is no less meticulous in her research and conveyance of information here as she is with his expedition to the South Seas or his formal writing, thus giving us a full picture of a complicated human rather than an ideal “man of the Enlightenment.”
Excitement returned to Forster’s life with the French Revolution, which he eagerly supported, taking France’s side against his home nation (which he felt little allegiance to) and becoming vice-president of the Mainz Republic, Germany’s first such republic. Eventually, he found himself stranded in France, labeled a traitor at home and thus unable to return. While the bloody violence that followed the early days of the French Revolution complicated his feelings about the matter, he never lost sight of the ultimate goal of freedom and equality for all (literally “all”, not “all men” or “all whites”, etc.).
After his too-young death at 39, his reputation declined for various reasons Wulf details, leaving him all but forgotten since the end of the 18th Century. With her trademark attention to detail, impeccable research, vivid descriptions, frequent use of primary source material, and her ability to humanize Forster and bring him to life before our eyes in a compelling story, I can think of nobody better suited to reclaim him from the near-oblivion history had so long cast him into. Highly recommended.
Forster (1754-1794) was a man of the Enlightenment in many ways: a naturalist, a linguist, explorer, ethnographer, political writer, essayist, translator, and toward the end of his short life a revolutionary. But Wulf sharpest interest in Forster is the ways in which he was a man not of his times, a man who abhorred slavery, argued adamantly against the rise of race-based thinking (and of course out and out racism), and believed fervently in “human rights” before the phrase became the common concept of today.
All of which is even more impressive given he barely had any formal education at all. Instead he was educated at home by his pastor father, a quarrelsome, indebted, antagonistic man with an interest in science and an urgent need to make his mark in the world. When his father was offered the position of naturalist aboard Cook’s second voyage in 1772, he took George with him on a voyage that lasted over three years sailing around the South Seas and within nearly 100 miles of Antarctica. It was, as one might assume, a transformative experience for the seventeen-year-old. Though we did see hints of his open mind in his response to the abject poverty he witnessed on another trip with his father (this one to Russia) and his keen observations and friendly interactions with the rough crew of Cook’s ship. .
Cook’s trip, however, is where we really start to see his views diverge from his fellow Europeans. When the islanders, for instance, offer their women (some young girls) to the sailors as barter, Forster wonders, “Who was worse . . . the Māori men who forced their women to have sex, or the Europeans who partook?” And as he witnesses more and more the impact of the Europeans on the islands, he writes that, “I fear that hitherto our intercourse has been wholly disadvantageous to the nations of the South Seas; and that those communities have been the least injured, who have always kept aloof from us.” This was certainly true in purely concrete fashion, Wulf informs us, as the Europeans brought syphilis and other diseases to the unprotected islanders, causing their population to shrink from 40, 000 to under ten thousand over the next six decades.
Time and again, Forster casts an empathetic and respectful eye on the islanders while his mission mates considered them barely human and many not even that. When the islander stole objects from the Europeans, as his shipmates raged and sought retribution, Forster, based on his cultural observations, considered that the islanders did not view property or ownership in the same way as the Europeans and so theft did not mean the same thing to them. Even when things turned violent, Forster often considered the Europeans the ones who provoked, commenting multiple times on how quick they were to use their guns, and how it was tough to fault the islanders for seeing the Europeans as possible invaders given their actions.
Nor did he, as Wulf shows us, idealize the islanders in Rousseau’s fashion of the “noble savage”. Forster saw how the islanders warred violently with each other and treated their women like “drudges,” and so always kept his descriptions tightly bound to his observations of their actual behavior rather than as some abstract symbol.
All of these views, his experiences, and his ecological and cultural observations were written up in the book he published afterward, A Voyage Round the World. The book was well received and the young man found himself the toast of the town and spoken of in far-off countries. Which was lucky, as the rest of his life had to be spent writing feverishly (his own work, translations, introductions) to keep up with his father’s debts and then, in addition as those never went away, his own, as he unfortunately picked up his father’s inability to manage money.
If most of the next decade was less exciting than the three years spent with Cook, it was no less successful in terms of the respect he garnered around the world from his writings and his arguments against racism and for human rights. A quick and extremely incomplete list of his visitors or those he visited or corresponded with gives a sense of the rarified circles he moved in: Benjamin Franklin, Goethe, Humboldt, Comte de Buffon, Joseph Banks, and others. He became a member of the Royal Society and even met the king. He took on various jobs around Europe and eventually got married. But even this traditional act was unconventional, as he loved his wife Theresa deeply but found his love unreturned, and then allowed her to take up with several successive lovers during their marriage, often with a good friend of his and even at times with the lover living in their house. It caused him no end of misery, but he could not abide the idea of separation from her and especially from his daughters. Wulf is no less meticulous in her research and conveyance of information here as she is with his expedition to the South Seas or his formal writing, thus giving us a full picture of a complicated human rather than an ideal “man of the Enlightenment.”
Excitement returned to Forster’s life with the French Revolution, which he eagerly supported, taking France’s side against his home nation (which he felt little allegiance to) and becoming vice-president of the Mainz Republic, Germany’s first such republic. Eventually, he found himself stranded in France, labeled a traitor at home and thus unable to return. While the bloody violence that followed the early days of the French Revolution complicated his feelings about the matter, he never lost sight of the ultimate goal of freedom and equality for all (literally “all”, not “all men” or “all whites”, etc.).
After his too-young death at 39, his reputation declined for various reasons Wulf details, leaving him all but forgotten since the end of the 18th Century. With her trademark attention to detail, impeccable research, vivid descriptions, frequent use of primary source material, and her ability to humanize Forster and bring him to life before our eyes in a compelling story, I can think of nobody better suited to reclaim him from the near-oblivion history had so long cast him into. Highly recommended.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Rating: 4.75* of five
The Publisher Says: Step into the life and times of George Forster, the young naturalist and revolutionary who journeyed to the far reaches of the known world and whose radical ideas about humanity and freedom made waves in eighteenth-century Europe—from the bestselling author of The Invention of Nature and Magnificent Rebels.
From an early age, it was clear that George Forster possessed a brilliant mind. A polyglot and gifted scientist, he became an invaluable asset to the ambitions of his domineering father, Reinhold. As a young boy, he travelled with his father from the plains of West Prussia to the wild shores of the Volga to St. Petersburg and London on scientific endeavors, and soon became the breadwinner by publishing translations of hugely popular exploration accounts. When Reinhold Forster was offered the position of naturalist aboard Captain James Cook’s second voyage, he accepted on the condition that his seventeen-year-old son serve as his assistant.
The HMS Resolution set sail in 1772 with orders to find the hypothetical southern continent of Antarctica. On her voyage to the Antarctic Circle and the islands of the South Pacific—including New Zealand, Vanuatu, Tonga, Tahiti, and Easter Island—the Resolution carried the ambitions of the most powerful empire in the world. But George Forster brought an understanding that was centuries ahead of the attitudes of his day—his ideas belonged to the future. A remarkable observer, linguist, artist, and writer whose intelligence surpassed that of his own father, he studied the diverse cultures of the world without prejudice and sought to uncover our common humanity. He was a traveler in body and mind—not bound by place, people or establishment.
Recognized as one of Europe’s brightest minds on his return, Forster held positions across the continent and regaled the world not only with tales from his travels but also radical ideas about human nature. He would write against empire, white supremacy, and slavery. He would become a revolutionary and be declared an outlaw. He would never seek to control others as he had been controlled by his father, and even embraced a liberal idea of marriage, accepting his wife’s affairs and independence Andrea Wulf’s The Traveler recounts an extraordinary life largely forgotten by history, the tale of a man who broke with convention and was unafraid to critique the world around him in dedication to his belief in the human right to dignity, equality, and freedom.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: A man as astonishing as Author Wulf's previous science-biography topic, Alexander von Humboldt (see here). Forster has been brought out of obscurity at a time when his delighted curiosity in the world is curdling die to the way we as a species ignored the warnings of imbalance von Humboldt was observing and reporting on. Forster is still known to us today because he wrote of his travels extensively. He was unusual for his attention to the contributions of women and his respect for the contributions of non-whites in many fields around the world. He died before he was fifty; it's a sadness to me personally that he and Alexander von Humboldt never traveled together. As Forster was two decades older than von Humboldt, I can only dream of what the synergy in these men's inclusive, broad views might have gifted us.
A man born in 1754 writing passionately about the flimsiness and dishonesty of white supremacy, and the idiocy of the idea of dominionism deserves a wide audience in the twenty-first century. If we're going to lionize dead white men, let's lionize George Forster the proponent of equality, the supporter of women's rights, the spreader of Enlightenment values. Here's a British man worthy of our respect and deserving of emulation.
Forster's travels broadened his mind and his spirit. He was a person who saw, as his private papers show, the connections among people in a time when colonialism and sexism were drawing ever thicker lines between us. I am saddened that his first-hand observations of the idiocy and evil that Othering (in today's terminology) colonized people was exacting never gained traction. I dream of a Forster who lived to lift up Mary Wollestonecraft, who worked effectively with Revolutionary Parisians to moderate the evils inherent in destroying systems to rebuild them fairly.
Author Wulf has, as is her wont, seen past History's battlefield fog to choose another target of worth and merit to remind us how long the world has been falling from Grace.
And how many before us saw it.
Honoring their legacies by taking action seems appropriate to me. I hope you'll read this dynamically written, thoroughly researched work on an unjustly underknown thinker, and feel inspired to do just that.
The Publisher Says: Step into the life and times of George Forster, the young naturalist and revolutionary who journeyed to the far reaches of the known world and whose radical ideas about humanity and freedom made waves in eighteenth-century Europe—from the bestselling author of The Invention of Nature and Magnificent Rebels.
From an early age, it was clear that George Forster possessed a brilliant mind. A polyglot and gifted scientist, he became an invaluable asset to the ambitions of his domineering father, Reinhold. As a young boy, he travelled with his father from the plains of West Prussia to the wild shores of the Volga to St. Petersburg and London on scientific endeavors, and soon became the breadwinner by publishing translations of hugely popular exploration accounts. When Reinhold Forster was offered the position of naturalist aboard Captain James Cook’s second voyage, he accepted on the condition that his seventeen-year-old son serve as his assistant.
The HMS Resolution set sail in 1772 with orders to find the hypothetical southern continent of Antarctica. On her voyage to the Antarctic Circle and the islands of the South Pacific—including New Zealand, Vanuatu, Tonga, Tahiti, and Easter Island—the Resolution carried the ambitions of the most powerful empire in the world. But George Forster brought an understanding that was centuries ahead of the attitudes of his day—his ideas belonged to the future. A remarkable observer, linguist, artist, and writer whose intelligence surpassed that of his own father, he studied the diverse cultures of the world without prejudice and sought to uncover our common humanity. He was a traveler in body and mind—not bound by place, people or establishment.
Recognized as one of Europe’s brightest minds on his return, Forster held positions across the continent and regaled the world not only with tales from his travels but also radical ideas about human nature. He would write against empire, white supremacy, and slavery. He would become a revolutionary and be declared an outlaw. He would never seek to control others as he had been controlled by his father, and even embraced a liberal idea of marriage, accepting his wife’s affairs and independence Andrea Wulf’s The Traveler recounts an extraordinary life largely forgotten by history, the tale of a man who broke with convention and was unafraid to critique the world around him in dedication to his belief in the human right to dignity, equality, and freedom.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: A man as astonishing as Author Wulf's previous science-biography topic, Alexander von Humboldt (see here). Forster has been brought out of obscurity at a time when his delighted curiosity in the world is curdling die to the way we as a species ignored the warnings of imbalance von Humboldt was observing and reporting on. Forster is still known to us today because he wrote of his travels extensively. He was unusual for his attention to the contributions of women and his respect for the contributions of non-whites in many fields around the world. He died before he was fifty; it's a sadness to me personally that he and Alexander von Humboldt never traveled together. As Forster was two decades older than von Humboldt, I can only dream of what the synergy in these men's inclusive, broad views might have gifted us.
A man born in 1754 writing passionately about the flimsiness and dishonesty of white supremacy, and the idiocy of the idea of dominionism deserves a wide audience in the twenty-first century. If we're going to lionize dead white men, let's lionize George Forster the proponent of equality, the supporter of women's rights, the spreader of Enlightenment values. Here's a British man worthy of our respect and deserving of emulation.
Forster's travels broadened his mind and his spirit. He was a person who saw, as his private papers show, the connections among people in a time when colonialism and sexism were drawing ever thicker lines between us. I am saddened that his first-hand observations of the idiocy and evil that Othering (in today's terminology) colonized people was exacting never gained traction. I dream of a Forster who lived to lift up Mary Wollestonecraft, who worked effectively with Revolutionary Parisians to moderate the evils inherent in destroying systems to rebuild them fairly.
Author Wulf has, as is her wont, seen past History's battlefield fog to choose another target of worth and merit to remind us how long the world has been falling from Grace.
And how many before us saw it.
Honoring their legacies by taking action seems appropriate to me. I hope you'll read this dynamically written, thoroughly researched work on an unjustly underknown thinker, and feel inspired to do just that.
June 9, 2026
What a book! What a read. I loved every word, every illustration, every adventure and all the travels.
After Humboldt and the philosophers of Jena, star author Andrea Wulf now turns to George Foster (1754-1794). In the forty years of his life he travelled the world and witnessed various momentous events – which live on in our shared imagination of the past.
Forster was born on mainland Europe, but lived in London and England for some of his formative years. He travelled in Russia with his father as a young boy, before they joined James Cook on his second voyage, circumnavigating the world. Together the Forsters were the resident researchers on the ship the Resolution. With enough detail, but without getting tedious Wulf takes us along on this journey and into the mind of Forster. And what a mind that was! An open minded and critical thinker he was not hindered by the misconceptions and prejudices of his contemporaries. Almost always he has an enlightened remark or a sharp observation during the events that still capture the imagination in which he takes part.
After the years long journey the Forsters found a way to capitalize their adventures by publishing a bestselling account. What stands out in all his reports is the open mind of George, who always gave voice to the worlds of the people who were ‘discovered’ and gave an understanding of their point of view. When an inhabitant of Tanna is shot by one of Cooks crew, George Forster is outraged and sides not with the European perpetrator but with the victim. This makes Wulf’s portrayal of Forster very easy to like. She also uses Rousseau’s concept of the ‘noble savage’ and Forster’s critique of this as one of the red threads to keep the reader of her book focused. And this works very well. It is but one of the examples to highlight the literary skills of this author.
When his name was established as a natural philosopher, George Forster lived in Europe visiting various cities, courts and universities. He was present during some of the less and some of the more well known episodes of the revolutions that took place on the continent in the last decades of the 18th century.
Because Wulf has a great wealth of source material and has done extensive research, she finds a way to tell the story of her protagonist as if she is there. It makes for a mesmerizing book that I read within a couple of days. I found it really really hard to put down. It is a true successor to her Humboldt book that was rightly celebrated across the world.
I only wish it would have taken me a bit longer to read it, because it took me to a world so different from ours, yet so important to understand what is going on today. I absolutely loved this book and am considering reading it again, right now, just for fun.
After Humboldt and the philosophers of Jena, star author Andrea Wulf now turns to George Foster (1754-1794). In the forty years of his life he travelled the world and witnessed various momentous events – which live on in our shared imagination of the past.
Forster was born on mainland Europe, but lived in London and England for some of his formative years. He travelled in Russia with his father as a young boy, before they joined James Cook on his second voyage, circumnavigating the world. Together the Forsters were the resident researchers on the ship the Resolution. With enough detail, but without getting tedious Wulf takes us along on this journey and into the mind of Forster. And what a mind that was! An open minded and critical thinker he was not hindered by the misconceptions and prejudices of his contemporaries. Almost always he has an enlightened remark or a sharp observation during the events that still capture the imagination in which he takes part.
After the years long journey the Forsters found a way to capitalize their adventures by publishing a bestselling account. What stands out in all his reports is the open mind of George, who always gave voice to the worlds of the people who were ‘discovered’ and gave an understanding of their point of view. When an inhabitant of Tanna is shot by one of Cooks crew, George Forster is outraged and sides not with the European perpetrator but with the victim. This makes Wulf’s portrayal of Forster very easy to like. She also uses Rousseau’s concept of the ‘noble savage’ and Forster’s critique of this as one of the red threads to keep the reader of her book focused. And this works very well. It is but one of the examples to highlight the literary skills of this author.
When his name was established as a natural philosopher, George Forster lived in Europe visiting various cities, courts and universities. He was present during some of the less and some of the more well known episodes of the revolutions that took place on the continent in the last decades of the 18th century.
Because Wulf has a great wealth of source material and has done extensive research, she finds a way to tell the story of her protagonist as if she is there. It makes for a mesmerizing book that I read within a couple of days. I found it really really hard to put down. It is a true successor to her Humboldt book that was rightly celebrated across the world.
I only wish it would have taken me a bit longer to read it, because it took me to a world so different from ours, yet so important to understand what is going on today. I absolutely loved this book and am considering reading it again, right now, just for fun.
June 13, 2026
This biography tells the story of explorer and educator George Forster, who joined Captain Cook’s second voyage at just seventeen. Traveling across the South Pacific, he studied people and cultures with unusual openness and respect. As a revered author and intellectual, he championed universal human rights and spoke out against empire, slavery, and racial prejudice. Yet his support for the French Revolution caused him to fall out of favor. This fascinating, well-researched, and inspiring biography brings him to life, reviving a man who deserves to be better remembered.
Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.
Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.
June 16, 2026
Wonderfully articulated, meticulously researched
This is a remarkably intimate and richly textured portrait. The author’s exhaustive research is evident on every page, reflected in the careful use of letters, photographs, and manuscripts. It feels both deeply personal and historically grounded. I was surprised by how relevant a 250-year-old story feels in the modern world. I purchased the book after reading favorable reviews in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times, and it more than lived up to expectations.
This is a remarkably intimate and richly textured portrait. The author’s exhaustive research is evident on every page, reflected in the careful use of letters, photographs, and manuscripts. It feels both deeply personal and historically grounded. I was surprised by how relevant a 250-year-old story feels in the modern world. I purchased the book after reading favorable reviews in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times, and it more than lived up to expectations.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Interesting biography of George Forster, a man I had not heard of before. He was a naturalist who traveled with Captain Cook as a boy and changed his life.
I found Forster's experiences during the French Revolution to be particularly interesting, as that is a period of history that I have read about and find to be significant in many ways.
Some of the book did drag a bit, but the book was well written and many details well documented.
Thak you to Knpof and Net Galley for my ARC.
I found Forster's experiences during the French Revolution to be particularly interesting, as that is a period of history that I have read about and find to be significant in many ways.
Some of the book did drag a bit, but the book was well written and many details well documented.
Thak you to Knpof and Net Galley for my ARC.
June 26, 2026
Enjoyable and fascinating book written in a straightforward style. It's clearly well-researched and the main character, George, is incredible. It was fun to learn about him, his explorations, his life back in Europe, and the times he lived in. I thought the book was going to be a lot longer because it ended at 35% on my Kindle - lots of photos, notes, bibliography, etc.
June 24, 2026
Foster
Wulf knows how to craft an excellent biography, although this was perhaps not as engaging as her Humboldt treatment. And the adventurous first half grinds down a bit in the second, and the reader is subjected to the perfidious Therese. Poor George.
Wulf knows how to craft an excellent biography, although this was perhaps not as engaging as her Humboldt treatment. And the adventurous first half grinds down a bit in the second, and the reader is subjected to the perfidious Therese. Poor George.
June 27, 2026
Not sure how this landed on my TBR. I gave it a try, but it just didn’t interest me.
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