Georg Forster - Around The World With Captain Cook

Around The World With Captain Cook

In 1772, Forster's father Johann became a member of the Royal Society. This and the withdrawal of Joseph Banks resulted in his invitation by the British admiralty to join James Cook's second expedition to the Pacific (1772–1775). Georg Forster joined his father in the expedition again and was appointed as a draughtsman to his father. Johann Forster's task was to work on a scientific report from the journey that was to be published after their return.

They embarked on the HMS Resolution on July 13, 1772 in Plymouth. The route led first to the South Atlantic, then through the Indian Ocean and the Southern Ocean to the islands of Polynesia and finally around Cape Horn back to England, where the expedition arrived on July 30, 1775. During the three-year journey, the explorers visited New Zealand, the Tonga islands, New Caledonia, Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands and Easter Island. They went further south than anybody before them, almost discovering Antarctica. The journey conclusively disproved the Terra Australis Incognita theory, which claimed there was a big, habitable continent in the South.

Supervised by his father, Georg Forster first took up the studies of zoology and botanics of the southern seas, mostly by drawing animals and plants. However, Georg also pursued his own interests which led to completely independent explorations in comparative geography and ethnology. He quickly learned the languages of the Polynesian islands. His reports on the people of Polynesia are well regarded even to today, as they show Forster's description of the inhabitants of the southern islands with empathy, sympathy and largely without Western or Christian prejudices.

Unlike Louis Antoine de Bougainville, whose reports from a journey to Tahiti a few years earlier had initiated uncritical noble savage romanticism, Forster had a very sophisticated picture of the societies of the South Pacific islands. He described various social structures and religions that he encountered on the Society Islands, Easter Island and in Tonga and New Zealand, and ascribed this diversity to the difference in living conditions of these people. At the same time he also observed that the languages of these fairly widely scattered islands are quite similar. About the inhabitants of the Nomuka islands (in the Ha'apai island group of present-day Tonga), he wrote that their languages, vehicles, weapons, furniture, clothes, tattoos, style of beard, in short all of their being matched perfectly with what he had already seen while studying tribes on Tongatapu. However, he wrote, "we could not observe any subordination among them, though this had strongly characterised the natives of Tonga-Tabboo, who seemed to descend even to servility in their obeisance to the king."

The ethnographical items that were collected by Georg and Reinhold Forster are currently presented as the Cook-Forster-Sammlung (Cook-Forster Collection) in the Sammlung für Völkerkunde anthropological collection in Göttingen. Another collection of items collected by the Forsters is on display at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.

The journey was rich in scientific results. However, the relationship between the Forsters and Cook and his officers was often problematic, due to the elder Forster's fractious temperament as well as Cook's refusal to allow more time for botanizing and other scientific observation. Cook refused scientists on his third journey after his experiences with the Forsters.