ABSTRACT
Johann Georg Adam Forster (1754–95), known as George, was born near Danzig. His father nurtured in him an interest in the natural world. He moved with his father to England in 1766. George assisted his father in translating Louis Antoine de Bougainville's A Voyage Round the World, which described the French navigator's visit to Tahiti in 1768. Certainly Forster's Voyage is one of the more attractively written and compelling accounts of eighteenth-century Pacific exploration and, with its downbeat view of British expansionist ideology, is more in tune with modern postcolonial sensibilities than Cook's more patriotic version of events. The Voyage is a profound and poignant meditation on the benefits and demerits of civilisation and the relations of European culture with that of the South Pacific peoples they encountered.
