From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 229-231:
By the end of 1776, less than four months after he had written the first word, the manuscript of A Voyage Round the World arrived at the printer. Publication was eagerly awaited—the naturalist Gilbert White (who was the publisher’s brother) excitedly informed friends and family at the end of January 1777 that publication was imminent. George felt no sense of relief because he had to begin the German translation immediately.
Reinhold had signed a contract with a German publisher who had travelled from Berlin to London in the previous summer. Karl Spener was an ambitious young man who had taken over his father’s firm at the age of twenty-three and who had met the Forsters already before the Resolution voyage when he visited England in 1771. Spener was only five years older than George and would become a trusted friend. George, Reinhold decided, would translate his own book, a daunting prospect given the many years in which George had spoken only English—he didn’t even converse in German with his family (and for the rest of his life, his father would speak and write to him in English). George’s letters to friends and acquaintances in Germany were always peppered with English words and his written German had become erratic. ‘I just have to ask one thing,’ he wrote to Spener with apprehension, ‘can the Berlin printers spell correctly?’ Someone would need to correct the final manuscript.
George was ill, exhausted, and had lost so much weight that even Reinhold Forster had to admit his son might need some assistance. It arrived in the form of Rudolf Erich Raspe, a brilliant eccentric who had fled the German state of Hesse-Kassel after it was discovered that he had been stealing and selling ancient coins from the collections of his employer, Landgrave Friedrich II. With news travelling slowly, Raspe wangled himself onto the guest list of the Royal Society but was soon expelled. He would later write the hugely successful Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia — a whimsical satire in which the eponymous protagonist performs such feats as riding on a cannonball, shooting a stag with cherry stones (the stag subsequently grows a cherry tree between his antlers) and visiting the moon. For the moment, Raspe was to work with George on the German translation of A Voyage Round the World. Progress was woefully slow and Raspe was often ill. Like his fictional character Munchausen, he also had a tendency to exaggerate and lie, coming up with excuses for his failure to deliver and reasons to borrow money from the Forsters. George spent a lot of time merging the voices of two translations into one and the collaboration ended in anger. Raspe, George told Spener, liked only himself and believed that others existed entirely to serve him.
The English edition of A Voyage Round the World was published on 17 March 1777. Six weeks later, Captain Cook’s own Voyage Towards the South Pole appeared, printed in a larger format and illustrated with more than sixty engravings after the drawings by William Hodges, the expedition artist—but the images of animals and plants were copied from George’s drawings which Banks had bought. It was one thing that George hadn’t been allowed to use Hodges’ evocative landscapes and depictions of indigenous people (as his father believed had been initially agreed with the Admiralty), but quite another that he couldn’t use his own drawings after Reinhold had sold them. But to see them published in Cook’s book now was a terrible blow.
Thankfully, the reviews of George’s A Voyage Round the World were mostly positive, with several writers commenting that they felt as if they were actually travelling on the Resolution. George was delighted. Samuel Johnson, one of the great literary figures of the age and the author of A Dictionary of the English Language, called the book ‘a great affection of fine writing’. Johnson’s friend and biographer James Boswell declared that ‘he carries you along with him’. Those who compared the two books favoured George’s A Voyage Round the World. ‘Captain Cook’s own narrative is a mere sailor’s journal,’ wrote one reviewer, but he was disappointed by the lack of illustrations in George’s account. ‘Every page of it abounds with life and character,’ raved the reviewer for The Town and Country Magazine, ‘painted with all the force of language.’ More than a dozen reviews were published in England, several with long extracts.
Rather than wait for the German translation, many German reviewers also read the English edition. Most admired the book, describing it as ‘ravishing’ and ‘admirable’, but there were also critical voices. One took offence at George’s description of the Dutch East India Company as ‘cruel and ambitious spice merchants’, and another disliked the favourable depiction of indigenous people, complaining about his ‘acerbic allusions to the cruelty, harshness and vices of the Europeans’. Confident about his arguments and portrait of the islanders, George sent a public reply to one of Germany’s leading newspapers, asking: ‘Why not deliver eulogies on virtues? They may appear anywhere—in a beggar’s hut or a palace, in Europe or Tahiti.’ He had no interest in repeating tedious prejudices against the indigenous people—‘I therefore show real virtues among savages, where in similar cases vices prevail among civilized people.’
The most glowing German review came from Christoph Martin Wieland, a distinguished writer who declared George nothing less than a poet. In an extensive commentary, published over three issues of the Teutsche Merkur, one of Germany’s most important journals, Wieland pronounced A Voyage Round the World a thrilling book. The descriptions were painterly and humanistic, executed with intensity and enthusiasm. It was a masterpiece. As always, Reinhold attempted to take the credit, insisting that he had shaped his son. ‘I alone was his leader, his teacher,’ he later said to Wieland, ‘who awakened the dormant spark of divinity in him.’
Within six months, pirated French and Swedish translations were available, followed by Spanish and Russian editions, and then even more French editions. None were authorized. Soon the book was declared a classic but it didn’t sell enough copies to support Reinhold’s spending habits, and of course they never received any money from the pirated translations. People loved pictures, George admitted, and at two guineas A Voyage Round the World cost the same as Cook’s generously illustrated and Admiralty-subsidized account. Father and son would have to find other ways to finance their life in London.
Far Outliers 