The Wunderkind George Forster: Voyaging with Captain Cook at 10 and Dining with Benjamin Franklin in Paris in his 20s

A ten-year-old boy gallops across the Russian steppe on a Kalmyk horse, collecting plants for his father while German settlers starve in earth dugouts along the Volga. Seven years later, that same boy is standing on the deck of Captain Cook's Resolution as it crosses the Antarctic Circle for the first time in history, sketching birds and icebergs in a cabin so small he can barely turn around. By twenty-two he has circumnavigated the globe, published a book that Christoph Martin Wieland called a masterpiece and Samuel Johnson praised for its prose, dined with Benjamin Franklin in Paris, and been elected to the Royal Society. By thirty he has become the intellectual mentor to a young Prussian named Alexander von Humboldt, who would spend the rest of his life crediting Forster as the man who taught him how to see the natural world. By thirty-five he has helped found the first democratic republic on German soil during the French Revolution. By thirty-nine he is dead in Paris, abandoned by his wife, cut off from his country, and buried in a mass grave during the Terror.

Today's guest is Andrea Wulf, author of The Traveller: The Revolutionary Life of George Forster and his Search for Humanity. We discuss how Forster's father dragged him from a parish near Gdansk to Russia at ten and onto Cook's ship at seventeen, why his account of the voyage was considered the finest travel writing of the eighteenth century, and how his travels through the South Pacific convinced him that human diversity was not a hierarchy but a harmony, with all peoples entitled to the same dignity and rights. We look at how he challenged Kant, Rousseau, and Buffon before he was twenty-five, why he threw himself into the French Revolution and helped build the Mainz Republic only to watch the Terror destroy everything he believed in, and why a man who influenced Humboldt, shaped the Romantic movement, and anticipated the concept of universal human rights has been almost completely forgotten.

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