In this paper, I examine the important contribution of the German naturalist Georg Forster’s A Voyage Round the World (1776/7) to eighteenth-century debates about race and the nature of humanity. Forster describes accompanying Captain James Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific, drawing on the journals of his father naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster and his experiences of working as his father’s assistant during the expedition. Nigel Leask describes A Voyage as “in many ways a milestone for romantic period travel writing, establishing the principles which would increasingly be demanded from scientific travel writers over the next half-century” [1].
            I investigate the relationship between Forster’s status as a pioneer of Romantic “scientific” travel writing and the racial taxonomy he proposes.  Forster depicts the multiplicity of Polynesian culture as a linear hierarchy, with whiteness associated with status and civility, and blackness with lowliness and labor. For instance, when describing Tahitian society, he predicts that the sun “will blacken” the skin of the laboring class “and they will dwindle away”, while the “pampered race… will preserve all the advantages of a superior elegance of form…and of a purer color by indulging their voracious appetite, and living in absolute idleness”. Forster supports this racial hierarchy with accounts of the indigenous peoples of Easter Island, the Friendly and Society Islands and New Zealand.  Forster argues that these racial differences demonstrate that South Seas societies had degenerated from their original condition of primitive virtue, and begun to emulate the inequality and corruption of European societies, forecasting that “[a]t last the common people will perceive these grievances, and…will bring on a revolution”. Forster contributes to Enlightenment thinking of the time by presenting his travel experiences as empirical data with which to address broader philosophical questions about the nature of humanity. But Forster is also proto-Romantic in his revolutionary anti-colonialism and his celebration of indigenous societies as “rough, passionate, revengeful, but likewise brave, sincere and true” [2].    I argue that Forster’s inverted model of racial hierarchies constitutes a fissure between existing Enlightenment and emerging Romantic models of race.

         [1] Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetic of Travel Writing 1770-1840: “From an Antique Land” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) p. 41.

         [2] Georg Forster, A Voyage Round the World (London: B. White, 1777) p. 367, p. 536.