parutions 2000

… celui qui a eu la chance de partir et d'avoir vingt ans dans les mers du Sud en compagnie du capitaine Cook. ☐ Jean-Jo Scemla, “ Georges Forster l'Européen : du voyage autour du monde à la Révolution française ” Les Temps modernes, n° 523, février 1990

NOTE DE L'ÉDITEUR : George Forster's A Voyage round the world presents a wealth of geographic, scientific, and ethnographic knowledge uncovered by Cook's second journey of exploration in the Pacific (1772-1775). Accompanying his father, the ship's naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster, on the voyage, George proved a knowledgeable and adept observer. The lively, elegant prose and critical detail of his account, based loosely on his father's journal, make it one of the finest works of eighteenth-century travel literature and an account of prime importance in the history of european contact with Pacific peoples. The Forsters' publications reveal the sophistication and enthusiasm they brought to their observation of Polynesian peoples as well as a sensitivity to the moral ambiguities of contact.

ROD EDMOND : […]

Forster's Voyage, of all the eighteenth-century accounts of the Pacific, probably best demonstrates the complex transactions and recognitions that accompanied every Pacific landfall […].

George Forster's Voyage has many different kinds of significance. Chronologically it was the first published account of Cook's second voyage. George was not subject to the same Admiralty controls as his father [Johann Reinhold] and his work appeared six weeks before the official record. Thomas and Berghof give a meticulous account of its complex history of publication and reception. More significant is George's nuanced understanding of his own « speaker-position ». Reflecting on travellers' tales he wrote : « two travellers seldom saw the same object in the same manner, and each reported the fact differently, according to his sensations, and his peculiar mode of thinking. It was therefore necessary to be acquainted with the observer, before any use could be made of his observations ». Accordingly, Forster continued, « it was necessary for every reader to know the colour of the glass through which I looked ». Forster's lens is a very interesting one. Thomas and Berghof place him at the intersection of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, his « horizon of expectation » informed by Goethe and Sterne's Sentimental Journey, his influence on Herder, Blumenbach and Kant palpable.

[…]

Cook's account of his second voyage is often dull. J. R. Forster's Journals are fresh but clumsily written ; his Observations is a meditation on the voyage but not the thing itself. George's Forster's Journey combines the immediacy of experience with developed reflection upon it, and is much better written than anything by either Cook or his own father.

[…]

My point is not that George's account demonstrates more insight than the others, but to show how experience and reflection are working together in a way not often found in his father's work, and hardly at all in Cook's. And, characteristically, George's is the most engaging and provocative of the three. Both editors and publishers are to be thanked and congratulated for making available this invaluable, handsome, scholarly and user-friendly edition.

☐ Journal for Maritime Research, November 2001