Category Archives: travel

by | 24 August 2026 · 5:42 am

Far Western Reaches of Nusantaria

From Empire of the Winds: The Global Role of Asia’s Great Archipelago, by Philip Bowring (I.B. Tauris, 2018), Kindle pp. 67-73:

We do not yet know how products from Nusantaria came to arrive at the plush homes of a literate, urbanized Babylon. But that merely says how little we know about unwritten history. Sailing techniques which took Austronesians to Samoa were equally capable of taking them to the west coast of India where people from Harappa, the city of the Indus valley civilization which flourished between about 4500 and 3900 BP, had a settlement in Gujarat. At the least, sailing to the south-east coast of India from Sumatra or the Malay peninsula would have been well within their reach. There is evidence that the single outrigger sailing craft found in southern India was brought from the east around this time. The use in Arabic and Persian of Dravidian- rather than Sanskrit-derived words for Indian items such as ginger and rice indicates very early south Indian connections, and Nusantarians may also have taken coconut cultivation to Sri Lanka and southern India.

Other indications of trade links between the eastern archipelago and the west come from ancient Egyptian, Hebrew and Greek sources. An Egyptian text from around 1500 BCE refers to an expedition to the Land of Punt, most likely a kingdom on the Horn of Africa and source of various exotic products including gold, ivory and fragrant woods from tropical regions, possibly a reference to aloeswood which came only from the islands, peninsula and the far south of China. The expedition also returned with an item believed to be cinnamon, possibly from south India but more likely from the Malay peninsula or Sumatra. There are also Hebrew references to cinnamon from the seventh century BCE and a Greek one from the fourth century BCE. Hebrew texts from the time of King Solomon (around 950 BCE) make references to sandalwood, which may have come from south India, but the best came from drier places like Timor in the eastern archipelago. The first century CE Jewish historian Josephus mentioned trade expeditions sailing to the east from the Red Sea which took three years to complete.

…

Roman ships, built of cedarwood planks and with pitch caulking and lead-lined hulls, carried an average 220 tonnes of cargo according to the Musiris document but could be up to 35 metres in length with a deep draught and have a capacity of 350–500 tonnes.

Major Roman exports were wine, glassware and metals, but imports were invariably greater in value, so the difference had to be paid in silver. In addition to luxury items such as ivory, tortoiseshell, pepper, frankincense and silk, the Romans even imported special sands from India and Africa to facilitate the cutting and polishing of marble for their many magnificent buildings.

The Romans had several trading bases with semi-permanent settlements on the Malabar coast of India, and at least one on the Coromandel coast: Arikamedu, near Pondicherry in Tamil Nadu. This was active from the second century BCE or earlier until the third century CE. Although trade would have suffered as Roman power declined in the face of rebellions and the onslaughts of Germanic tribal confederation, access to the east remained on such a scale that large quantities of pepper and silk were among the demands of Visigoth leader Alaric in return for not sacking Rome in 408.

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Filed under Africa, economics, language, Mediterranean, South Asia, Southeast Asia, travel

by | 28 July 2026 · 5:44 am

Forster’s A Voyage Round the World

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.

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by | 26 July 2026 · 5:01 am

Rounding Cape Horn, 1774

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 201-202:

The seas here are notoriously dangerous, with the warmer water and weather fronts of the tropics colliding with the cold southern seas. Where the Atlantic and Pacific oceans meet, gale force winds whip across the water, and with no landmass in the southern seas to block them, waves can build for hundreds of miles, growing in strength and height until they reach Drake’s Passage, the narrowest point between South America and Antarctica. Cook knew what to expect from these angry seas where hundred-foot waves were not uncommon. Vessels disappeared or were shipwrecked here: lost in fog and hurricanes, crushed by icebergs, swallowed by waves, or smashed against rocky cliffs.

Unlike many other ships, the Resolution was lucky, and at 6 a.m. on 29 December 1774, she passed Cape Horn without incident. To George’s delight thirty humpback whales and several hundred seals played in the waves nearby. The whales came so close that when they spouted, the Resolution was enveloped by the reeking stench of half-digested krill. George watched mesmerized as the giant animals breached, leaping out of the water and then twisting onto their backs, landing with such force that the sounds their bodies made were like explosions. Repeatedly slapping their tails and fins against the surface, the whales made the water boil.

On 3 January 1775 they left the South American coast and turned east to cross the southern Atlantic towards Cape Town. Two weeks later, they spotted an island on the horizon and made their way towards it. Mountainous with craggy steep cliffs, it was icy and windswept. Its only inhabitants seemed to be large flocks of seabirds—albatrosses, petrels and shags among them—along with seals and penguins. Larger than any of the penguins George had seen so far, these were also tame. He measured them, recording that they were 39 inches tall, with black heads and yellow ear patches. He identified them as King Penguins, but ornithologists suggested later that this might be an altogether new species: the Emperor Penguin—Aptenodytes forsteri, named after the Forsters.*

Cook named the island South Georgia, after George III, and hoisted the Union Jack, taking possession for the king and his heirs while the marines fired their muskets into the air ‘to give greater weight to this assertion’, George wrote drily, ‘to the utter amazement of the seals and pinguins, the inhabitants of these newly discovered dominions’. Then, instead of turning north-east on a straight line towards South Africa, Cook stayed on an easterly course, skirting along the higher latitudes, still in search of the Southern Continent.

  • Several other species which they found during the Resolution voyage were named after the Forsters, including the New Zealand fur seal (Arctocephalus forsteri), the Yellow-eyed Mullet (Aldrichetta forsteri) and the genus Forsterygion—a small fish from coastal New Zealand. Other species named after them are a hawkfish (Paracirrhites forsteri) and a North American tern (Sterna forsteri).

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by | 25 July 2026 · 8:08 am

Explorers Return to Europe, 1775

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 207-208:

Before they had left England, it had been decided that the Resolution would return via Cape Town—which was why friends and families had sent letters there to wait for the crew on their arrival. The men devoured fresh food and letters and news. They read piles of old newspapers to catch up. ‘Sweden delivered from the yoke of aristocratical tyranny’, George was glad to learn. In the so-called Swedish Revolution, the young king Gustav III had been the mastermind in a coup d’état which had ended the stronghold that the nobility had exercised over the monarchy. He was not intending to take away freedom, the king had said, but wanted to stop aristocratic despotism and establish ‘a right kind of Liberty that only can make you, my dear subjects, happy’. Like other enlightened rulers at the time, he had then begun to reform the justice system and economy, as well as instituting limited religious freedom.

France had a new king: at the age of nineteen, Louis XVI had succeeded his grandfather in May 1774 during the second visit of the Resolution to Tahiti. Poland had lost vast swathes of land when Russia, Prussia and Austria had divided around a third of the country between them. Having added a huge territory to Prussia in the Polish partition, the Prussian king was, George noted, ‘resting from his triumphs’. George also read that Russia and the Ottoman Empire had signed a peace treaty in July 1774, ending the war that had begun in 1768. With Russia gaining land and the right to protect Christians in the Muslim realm, the treaty marked the beginning of the decline of the once powerful Ottoman Empire, which for long had controlled large parts of south-east Europe and the Middle East. George was optimistic. After the long years of war in Europe, peace seemed finally possible. Everything ‘promised general happiness to the human race’.

But trouble was brewing in the British colonies in North America. In December 1773 a group of colonists had dumped more than 300 chests of tea—the entire shipment of three East India Company vessels—into Boston harbour in protest against Britain’s new tax regulations on tea. A month later the rebels had tarred and feathered a British customs collector. On 5 September 1774, just as the Resolution had landed in New Caledonia, the colonists had convened the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia—a congress of elected colonial delegates—to discuss how best to respond to British rule in North America. Frustrated by the lack of parliamentary representation and economic restrictions, the delegates called for a boycott of British goods and recommended that each colony establish its own militia.

There was also news from the Adventure, which had stopped in Cape Town on her way to England exactly a year earlier, in March 1774. The men of the Resolution were horrified to learn that ten crew members had been killed and eaten by the Māori, but Cook refused to pass judgement until the news had been confirmed. He had always found the Māori to be brave and open-minded, ‘but they are a people that will never put up with an insult if they have an opportunity to resent it’. George agreed. John Rowe, one of the officers who had been cannibalized, had always shown a brutal disregard for indigenous people and ‘been exceeding desirous of firing upon them’. The Māori must have been provoked. ‘The whole tenour of their behaviour to Europeans, seems to acquit them of treachery and cruel malevolence,’ George wrote, ‘it is therefore greatly to be suspected that they took umbrage at some affront, perhaps unwittingly committed by the strangers, and revenged it.’

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by | 23 July 2026 · 6:20 am

Cannibalism in New Zealand, 1773

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 148-151:

A week later, on 21 November, a group of Māori women paddled out and told the Resolution crew that they were worried. Their men, the crew learned, had left to attack their enemies. Who those opponents were remained unclear, but the next morning dozens of Māori warriors, their cheeks painted red, arrived in a flotilla of eight canoes packed with cloaks, weapons and greenstone objects to trade with the Resolution. Suspecting that the warriors must have raided a neighbouring settlement to sell their goods to the Europeans, George wrote, ‘I am much afraid that their unhappy differences with other tribes, were revived on our account’.

In any event, it was time for the Resolution to leave and the next morning Cook took a few men to a neighbouring island to collect sea celery, wild spinach and other greens as provisions for the long journey. Some officers rowed to a nearby cove to trade. When they pushed their boat ashore, they saw the Māori warriors from the previous day, and also something round and red impaled on a stick, possibly an organ, maybe a heart. As they looked around, they found more organs and intestines scattered on the ground—and to their horror a human head from which the lower jawbone was missing. The skull had clearly been fractured by something blunt, perhaps a club. The victim seemed to have been an adolescent boy. As the officers stared at the bloody heap, the Māori skewered the lung and showed them more body parts. When the officers asked what had happened, the warriors told them that there had been a fight with their enemies. With words and gestures, they explained that they had killed the boy and eaten parts of him, but they too had lost men, pointing at some weeping women nearby who were cutting their foreheads with sharp stones as they lamented the dead.

For Europeans, cannibalism seemed inconceivable. ‘In accordance with human nature,’ said Immanuel Kant, Germany’s most respected philosopher, ‘there cannot be many [man-eaters], or, more likely, perhaps none at all.’ As explorers had returned from South America and the South Pacific in previous centuries, there had been rumours and the occasional suspicious body parts but no one had ever actually observed the practice. In January 1770, during the Endeavour voyage, the Māori had confirmed that they did indeed eat people by picking up a human bone and pretending to bite into it. They ‘shew us that they had eat the flesh they bit a[nd] naw’d the bone and draw’d it thro’ their mouth and this in such a manner as plainly shew’d that the flesh to them was a dainty bit’, Cook had recorded in his logbook. The graphic demonstration had been enough to convince the crew. Richard Pickersgill, who had also travelled on the Endeavour, had noted that the ‘Barbarrous cruelty these savages is guilty of which ought to make them to abhord by all who may have occasion to tutch at these Islands’. This didn’t stop him from trying to purchase the half-eaten head now, so that he could take it to London to show his friends. He offered a nail and a bargain was struck.

When the men returned to the Resolution, Pickersgill placed his grisly purchase on a railing and soon everybody on board had gathered to examine it. Another group of Māori had come to the Resolution to trade and they now asked for the head so that they could eat it, but the new owner refused. Second Lieutenant Charles Clerke, who was known and liked for his practical jokes—‘a genal favorite’, as young Elliott said—proposed an experiment. Taking a sharp knife, he cut off one cheek and handed it to the Māori, but they gestured that they only consumed cooked flesh. After debating what to do, Clerke put the cheek on a gridiron and grilled it over the fire in the galley kitchen.

Transfixed the crew of the Resolution watched the Māori eat the cheek. Some goaded them, and others were revolted. Some even seemed tempted to try a bite themselves. A little later, when Cook returned from gathering wild vegetables, he demanded that the spectacle be repeated. He wanted to prove the rumours once and for all. ‘Being desireous of being an eye wittness to a fact which many people had their doubts about’, Cook wrote in his logbook, ‘I concealed my indignation and ordered a piece of the flesh to be broiled and brought on the quarter-deck where one of these Canibals ate it with a seeming good relish.’ Describing the scene as calmly as a scientific experiment at the Royal Society in London, Cook concluded ‘that the New Zealanders are Canibals can now no longer be doubted’.

Hitihiti was appalled and ‘Metamorphosed into the Statue of Horror’. Crying inconsolably, he hid in a cabin and it took George several hours to calm his friend. George was also shocked but refused to regard the Māori as heartless barbarians, determined to understand their motivation. It couldn’t be hunger, given the abundance of fish in Queen Charlotte Sound and the Māori’s productive vegetable gardens. Perhaps, then, the motive was revenge. Weighing up the arguments, he noted: ‘The New Zealanders never eat their adversaries, unless they are killed in battle; they never kill their relations for the purpose of eating them; they do not even eat them if they die of a natural death, and they take no prisoners with a view to fatten them for their repast.’ Although he might never know their exact reasons, ‘the action of eating human flesh, whatever our education may teach us to the contrary, is certainly neither unnatural nor criminal in itself.’

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by | 22 July 2026 · 8:06 am

Polynesian Explorers with Cook, 1773

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 133-135:

On 18 September 1773, after a month in the Society Islands, the Resolution and the Adventure sailed west. The crew were sad to leave. Fourteen-year-old Midshipman John Elliott, so dismissive of the Māori in New Zealand, had thought Tahiti a paradise—‘the Men being all fine’, he wrote in his journal, and ‘the Women beautiful, compaired with all those that we had seen, of the Middle Size, zingy, suple figures, fine teeth and Eyes, and the finest formed Hands, fingers, and Arms that I ever saw’. The stores were filled with fresh fruit, vegetables and water, and on Huahine they had bought plenty of livestock. The Resolution left with 209 pigs, thirty dogs, and fifty fowls on board, and so many bananas that the deck looked like a tropical orchard. The men felt rested and healthy—except those suffering from venereal diseases.

They also had two new crew members: Hitihiti, who had boarded the Resolution on Raiatea, and Mai on the Adventure. Mai was in his mid-twenties, a tall and slim man with long black hair and small hands ornamented with tattoos. Originally from Raiatea, Mai had fled to Tahiti as a boy after invaders from Bora Bora had overthrown the Raiateans. A few years later, in 1767, he had been wounded during the bloody battle between the Tahitians and the Dolphin crew—the jagged scar below his ribs a lifelong reminder of the encounter. He then returned to Raiatea, but he was captured and taken to Bora Bora, from where he escaped to the island of Huahine. By his own account, he had assisted one of the high priests and travelled between the islands, but mostly he was burning to avenge Raiatea against Bora Bora. During the Dolphin attack he had seen and painfully felt the violent power of European guns. So when the Resolution and the Adventure arrived at Huahine, Mai had asked if he could travel to England to procure firearms in order to fight against the Bora Borans.

Mai was affectionate and full of energy, quickly becoming popular with the Adventure crew who nicknamed him Jack. They were especially impressed by his fishing skills and couldn’t believe how much more he was able to catch compared to them. James Burney, the Second Lieutenant on the Adventure, believed that Mai’s curiosity and strength made him perfectly suited for an expedition. George also thought him intelligent, if sometimes too hot-tempered. He preferred the company of seventeen-year-old Hitihiti, who was also liked by the rest of the crew. Elliott was struck by his handsome looks, declaring him ‘in every respect a very superior sample of this Country than Omai’. Mai and Hitihiti were not particularly fond of each other—presumably because Hitihiti was originally from Bora Bora, which had invaded Mai’s Raiatea—and they engaged with each other as little as possible.

Both islanders had to adjust to their strange new lives. Cooped up below deck in the airless space where the sailors slept, his hammock swaying to the rhythm of the Resolution’s pitch, Hitihiti became seasick. How different it was to sail on this cavernous ship compared with a Polynesian outrigger canoe. He only felt better when he ate some pieces of raw dolphin, which he dipped into a bowl of seawater, and some of the fermented breadfruit balls which he had brought on board. On the Adventure, Mai was homesick and then terrified when he saw most of the crew assembling on deck the day after he had come on board. The captain’s solemn voice, the men lacing their fingers in prayer and tracing a cross from forehead to their shoulders, convinced him that this was some kind of ritual and that they were going to offer him as a human sacrifice. It took a while, Burney said, to understand why Mai was so scared and to convince him that this was just the ship’s normal Sunday service.

Despite the initial difficulties, over the next weeks the two islanders became part of the crew, respected and valued. On the Adventure, Burney, who had been at sea since the age of ten, looked after Mai. Burney enjoyed Mai’s tales from the Society Islands even if he was exaggerating—‘he is a Small matter addicted to romancing.’ On the Resolution, George and Hitihiti struck up a friendship. Roughly the same age, they talked and taught each other side by side at a table, George’s wavy dark-brown hair tied into a ponytail next to Hitihiti’s tight black curls. Hitihiti helped George to review his vocabulary from the Society Islands and George in turn taught Hitihiti English. They learned from each other.

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by | 21 July 2026 · 5:41 am

Forster’s First Impressions of New Zealand

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 93-96:

George was a gifted linguist, quick to learn Māori names and words as he pointed at plants, animals, clothing, weapons and jewellery, asking to be told what they were called and keen to understand the Māori way of life. He noted the striking tattoos—‘strongly carved with spirals in the face’—and their clothing and hairstyles. Some of the women wore caps made of brown feathers, while others had tattooed lips with several rows of blue punctures on their chin. There were young men with ‘amazing bushy hair, which hung wildly over their faces’, and others who tied it back and often decorated it with white feathers or carved bone combs. George described their canoes and clothing—‘an apron, made of their close-wrought cloth, covered with red feathers, faced with white dog-skin, and ornamented with pieces of the ear-shell’—and watched them dance ‘alternately extending their arms, and stamping with their feet in a violent and almost frantic manner’.

Equally fascinated by nature, George recorded black oystercatchers with bright red bills and feet strutting along the beach, and the long-necked shags, part of the cormorant species, roosting on rocky outcrops. Falcons with brown-and-cream-flecked plumage glided above him, and the noisy ka-hek-ka-hek-ka-hek call of the Fluttering Shearwater echoed across the water. He shot birds and caught fish which he painted, and collected plants to press. One evening, he and his father caught a small tawny-brown spotted owl with beautiful golden-yellow eyes as they scrambled through the dense forest, and a few days later the now extinct slate-grey South Island kōkako, a bird slightly smaller than a pigeon with prominent orange wattle flaps under its beak.

The forests were thick and lush, an entangled web of evergreen trees and ferns that seemed prehistoric. Ancient rimus soared high—with dangling spiky foliage which almost looked like Spanish moss from a distance. There were giant pukatea that stood firm with their huge buttress roots and cabbage trees with dense tufts of long sword-like leaves at the tip of their branches, which the Māori used for weaving, the roots an important food source. Tree ferns laced the sky—ponga with crowns of large fronds with a silvery underside that glowed in the moonlight and the even taller mamaku which grew up to 60 feet high.

A lively trade was soon established between the Europeans and the Māori. Glass bottles, nails, hatchets and European clothes were exchanged for carved fishing hooks, tools, jewellery, weapons, cloaks—and sex. The Māori were particularly keen on glass bottles and European shirts, George observed, admiring how ‘they were not inclined however to make disadvantageous bargains, and demanded the best price for every little trifle which they offered for sale’.

But when the Māori men presented their women to the sailors, George was appalled. The women were reluctant but, no matter how much they cried, the Māori men decided whether or not they had sex with the Europeans. Like Cook (who worried that his men would introduce vice and disease), George blamed the crew for having started this sex trade. He doubted whether the Māori ‘ever debased themselves so much as to make a trade of their women, before we created new wants by shewing them iron-tools’. Nothing could excuse the crew’s behaviour. Who was worse, George wondered, the Māori men who forced their women to have sex, or the Europeans who partook?

…

‘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,’ George now wrote. Less than two months after praising how the Resolution crew had shown the Māori at Dusky Sound the advantages of European improvements—tree felling, repairing, painting—George’s attitude had drastically changed. It was an extraordinary statement for the time. More typical was young John Elliott, who was convinced that the Māori were ‘ferocious Cannibals’ who ‘work themselves into a frenzey, foaming at the mouth’, and Anders Sparrman, who declared that they had a ‘desire to tear their enemies’ limbs apart with their teeth’.

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by | 20 July 2026 · 5:19 pm

Furneaux’s Adventure in New Zealand

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 91-92:

After losing sight of the Resolution among the Antarctic icebergs, Captain Furneaux had sailed the Adventure to Tasmania, a large island about 150 miles south of Australia which the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had sighted and visited in 1642. The French had landed there in 1772, but the Adventure was the first British ship to anchor. For a few days they charted parts of the eastern coast, stopping briefly to fill up their water stores. They saw some abandoned huts and overgrown pathways but didn’t encounter any inhabitants. From there the Adventure sailed east to New Zealand’s Queen Charlotte Sound, where they arrived in early April 1773, two months after their separation from the Resolution.

Like a vast river estuary, the opening of Queen Charlotte Sound was eight miles wide but narrowed as it stretched inland. Sheltered by mountains, the waters within were calm. Steep ravines, rocky headlands and densely forested ridges serrated the coastline where some of the mountains dropped in perpendicular cliffs into the sound, and others sloped down towards long beaches. The water was dark with thin azure bands along the shallow edges. When the Adventure reached the rendezvous point at Ship Cove, a natural harbour with a wide sandy beach and a freshwater stream, they discovered trees carved with the names of the Endeavour’s crew but no sign of the Resolution. Over the next six weeks, Furneaux’s men repaired their ship, took on supplies, and also met a great number of Māori who lived in nearby settlements.

The Māori had carefully approached the Adventure in canoes. ‘Tobia Tobia,’ they called out, using their name for Tupaia—the high priest and navigator from Raiatea, an island near Tahiti—who had joined Cook on his previous voyage and travelled with the Endeavour to New Zealand in 1770. As Māori and Tahitian were related languages, Tupaia had not only assisted Cook with his navigation but also acted as the Endeavour’s translator. In Māori tradition, Raiatea was also their ancestral homeland so they felt a reverence for Tupaia. Having seen him work as interpreter, guide and navigator, most of the Māori had regarded Tupaia as the Europeans’ leader. In the intervening three years, stories about Tupaia, and the Endeavour’s thundering cannons and her pale-skinned crew, had been recounted by the Māori across New Zealand. And so they asked the Adventure crew—some of whom understood a few Māori words because they had been part of Cook’s first expedition—about Tupaia and were saddened to hear that he had died during the Endeavour voyage.

…

The next morning, at 5 a.m., the Resolution turned into Queen Charlotte Sound. Once past the entrance Cook fired a cannon and to their delight another answered. A few hours later, they saw the Adventure in Ship Cove. That evening the two ships anchored next to each other and the men celebrated their reunion.

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by | 19 July 2026 · 8:44 am

Translating for the Royal Society

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 51-53:

At the end of 1770, the Forsters moved back to London, taking lodgings next to Reinhold’s old school friend Woide, who had moved to Somerset House Stable Yard near the Thames. On 13 December, three days after their arrival, father and son went to the Royal Society, the nexus of British scientific enquiry where, since its foundation in the 1660s, fellows met to learn about new scientistic discoveries and exchange ideas with like-minded men. Reinhold Forster knew the Royal Society well, having attended the weekly meetings during their first stay in London. But now he wanted to introduce his son and present George’s translations (though Reinhold’s name was on their covers). So they made their way to Crane Court, a short fifteen-minute walk from their lodgings in a little cul-de-sac off Fleet Street, where the fellows met every Thursday. The president directed the meetings from a large armchair at one end of a long table, with a bust of the Society’s first royal patron, King Charles II, behind him, while the fellows sat on green-upholstered benches around the table.

At only sixteen George now found himself in the same room with some of the greatest minds in England. Almost every Thursday he accompanied his father to the Royal Society, where he sat under the watchful eyes of the portraits of illustrious previous fellows: the periwigged former president and mathematician Isaac Newton; the philosopher Francis Bacon in a lace ruff and embroidered velvet coat; and the architect Christopher Wren, who rebuilt London after the Great Fire of 1666. At these meetings George heard scholars talk about the physics of light, rare birds in the East Indies, new comets, the latest telescopes, tumours in pregnant women and subterranean geological formations. He saw animals preserved in spirits, pinned insects, a stuffed sea lion and a 24-foot snake, as well as the skeletons of a crocodile and an ostrich. He was receiving instructions unlike any other sixteen-year-old. As father and son attended the weekly meetings and published translations, their names soon spread across the scholarly world. Then, in February 1772, a little more than a year after their return to London, Reinhold was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and became officially part of the British scientific establishment.

George continued to work, translating eight volumes in total, while his father wrote and published numerous essays on botany, insects, zoology, antiquities, geography and mineralogy. ‘If I didn’t have a son of seventeen who helped me with translating,’ Reinhold admitted, ‘I couldn’t possibly do all this work.’ George began to feel like a ‘translation-machine’, but the reviews were glowing. ‘He writes our language,’ the Critical Review applauded (praising Reinhold, since only he was credited), ‘with propriety; always with perspicuity, the great requisite in the communication of scientific learning’. Another critic even declared George’s translation of Bougainville’s A Voyage Round the World ‘superior to the original’.

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by | 18 July 2026 · 8:15 pm

George Forster’s Early Youth

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 27-28:

George Forster was ten when he went on his first expedition.

He was a slender boy, small for his age, but what he lacked in physical strength he made up for in tenacity during the five months that he and his father travelled through Russia. In charge of collecting and identifying plants, the ten-year-old would wander off alone, eyes wide open, searching for new discoveries—sometimes climbing trees, at others keeping his head near the ground to study the vegetation with a magnifying glass. When he returned to the tent with full bags, he would press the samples he had found between paper, carefully arranging blossoms and leaves so that he could classify them later. Soon his collection had risen to 700 specimens.

While other children sat on hard benches in orderly rows at school, learning by rod and rote, George found himself galloping on small Kalmyk horses across the Russian steppes and wading through marshes on the banks of the Volga river. He watched a violent wildfire race across the vast grasslands to the east, its ravenous flames consuming everything in its path. He remembered the terror he felt that day for the rest of his life. Instead of studying arithmetic or conjugating Latin verbs, he observed flocks of black herons, wild boars and wolves, and huge Bactrian camels used by the nomadic Kalmyks as pack animals, which evoked the stories of the Arabian Nights and Ali Baba. He met Muslim Tatar traders along the Volga, fierce Cossack warriors from the open steppes to the east who wore sheepskin hats, baggy trousers and colourful caftans, and German settlers so destitute that they lived in earth dugouts in the ground. Near today’s Russian border with Kazakhstan, he marvelled at Lake Elton, a huge shallow salt lake with a shoreline encrusted in a thick white layer like snow, against water which algae had turned blood red. And in the Ryn Desert just north of the Caspian Sea, he felt piercing winds whip across the dunes, as wild as the land itself.

Russia was on a different scale from the flat gentle countryside where George had been raised near Gdansk, in today’s Poland. Everything here was vaster and emptier. The skies, lakes and land were bigger, the distances immense, and the weather extreme. He feasted his eyes and tasted new foods. He ate wild asparagus, drank fermented mare’s milk—‘of a nauseous or disagreeable Taste’—and enjoyed the refreshing juice of bog cranberries mixed with water and honey after the long dusty days on horseback.

This was not like learning from the books he loved. He could see, smell and feel that he had entered another world. The food had a different flavour, the languages were unfamiliar, and the people looked nothing like those at home. In Russia, he absorbed a new and very foreign country for the first time. At the age of ten, he became a traveller.

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