Exploded Convictions, Perished Certainties: the Transformational Experience of the South Seas in Georg Forster's a Voyage Round the World

In July 1772, seventeen-year-old Georg Forster embarked on Captain Cook’s Resolution to accompany and help his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, who, after Sir Joseph Banks’s withdrawal and upon his recommendation, had become the chief scientist of Captain Cook’s second voyage to the South Seas (1772–5). Barely five years later, Georg Forster, still only twenty-two, published his voluminous account of this voyage of discovery, entitled A Voyage Round the World – according to Nigel Leask ‘a milestone for romantic period travel writing’. ¹ Robert L. Kahn, the editor of the Voyage in the Akademie Ausgabe of the works of Forster, considers it ‘the finest work with regard to style and power of expression to have come out of the three expeditions of Cook and one of the greatest travelogues written in any tongue or age’ ² – an assessment with which Bernard Smith concurs: Forster’s Voyage, writes Smith, is ‘the best written account to issue from all three of Cook’s voyages.’ ³