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Cannibalism, heartbreak and Madame Guillotine: George Forster's extraordinary life
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Spencer Mizzen
He sailed to Antarctica with Captain Cook, rubbed shoulders with Benjamin Franklin, and helped found a revolutionary republic. It's little wonder then that Andrea Wolf describes George Forster, the 18th century traveler, botanist and champion of human rights, as one of the most fascinating figures you've never heard of. In this episode of the History Extra Podcast, Andrea introduces Spencer Mizzen to a life that reads like an adventure story.
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Interviewer
Andrea, it's a real pleasure to welcome you to the History Extra podcast today to talk about your new book, the Traveler. Now, the traveler in question is the naturalist, ethnographer, travel writer and revolutionary George Forester. Forster was born in a small village near Danzig in 1754 and died in Paris in 1794. And in between, packed in the most extraordinary life. So with that in mind, Andrew, what was it that attracted you to Forester that made you think, I really need to write a book about this guy?
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Andrea Woolf
Well, first of all, I think his life, and we're going to talk about that later, his life literally reads like an adventure story. I mean, he just packs in. He's only 39 when he dies, but he packs in so much, so many places. I mean, from cannibalism and the Maoris to the kind of bloodied blade of the guillotine in Paris. He meets absolutely everybody from Benjamin Franklin to Germany's most famous poet, Goethe. So the life is packed with adventures, explorations, and traveling. And then, I have to admit, I've always really liked a forgotten hero. Just like with my book about Alexander von Humboldt, it's so much more fun to write about someone not everybody has heard about. So I think those are two reasons. But really, I think it's his own voice that drew me into this story, because the way he wrote about humanity, really, and his search for our shared humanity is so unusual for the 18th century. So he was brought up at a time when Western society is deeply steeped in racism, so much so that celebrated philosophers such as David Hume or Immanuel Kant have no problems talking about black people as an inferior race, for example. And he's this. He's this voice of reason in the middle of all this racism, which is quite extraordinary. And not only that, he would also today be called a feminist. So at a time when most husbands and fathers controlled their wives and daughters or almost every aspect of their life. He was very tolerant and admired strong minded women and was a proud father of two daughters. So he was a really extraordinary and probably the most fascinating man you have never heard of, which makes him for me a very attractive kind of protagonist to write about.
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Interviewer
Okay, so let's rewind to the beginning of his life then. As we've said, your new book is called the Traveler and it seems that George Forster started traveling at very early age, embarking on a journey of I think 4000km into Russia when he was barely 10 years old. How did that come about?
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Andrea Woolf
So as you said earlier, he was born in 1754 near Gdansk, which was then Poland but then part of Royal Prussia. So they spoke German at home. And he had a father, a very difficult, tempestuous, narcissistic man who was a Lutheran priest and who was very unhappy in the kind of backwaters of kind of Royal Prussia and who had much greater ambitions for himself but also for his son. The father kind of corresponded with scholars around Europe and he took young Georg, young George, when he was 10 on this rather wild expedition through Russia. And so imagine there's, you know, this is a time when other 10 year old boys sit on orderly rows at school. And here is George Forster, age 10, accompanying his father as a botanist, galloping with fierce Cossacks across the Russian steppe and along the Volga river and they interview the German settlers there. And he sees these settlers living a very, very poor and destitute life. They're so poor that they live in earth dugouts in the ground. And that's the first time this 10 year old boy sees the harsh reality of despotism and inequality. Themes that will obsess him for the rest of his life. And then just before his 12th birthday, his father takes him to London and George becomes the family's breadwinner by translating popular best selling travel accounts. By the time he's 16, he attends the learned meetings of the Royal Society. And by the time he's 17 he joins Captain Cook's second voyage as the assistant naturalist to his father, who's the naturalist there and draftsman. So quite a CV for a 17 year old already. But he doesn't have much choice in all of this. So it's the father who's this very controlling, very volatile, hot tempered man who on the one hand gives him this extraordinary education. Let's not forget that. I mean it's his father's thirst and love for knowledge and adventure that gives George Forster this upbringing. But at the same time, he will see for the rest of his life his father literally explode into other people's faces, like friends and strangers alike. The father would just. I mean, the father explodes even when he sits in the theater and someone talks too loud. So he's a difficult, difficult man. And George Foster, almost like, as a reaction, I think, to his volatile father, becomes this quite calm personality who says, you know, I'm only really happy when I make other people happy. So there's a pattern set, really, in his childhood.
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Interviewer
So he's doing stuff that, you know, seem almost unimaginable now. He's translating Russian text into English at the age of just 12 years old, I believe. He really was a precocious child, wasn't he? I mean, when did that become evident to those around him that there was something special about George Forster?
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Andrea Woolf
He really was a bit of a wunderkind who, you know, picked up languages as easily as scientific concepts. And already, as a very, very little boy, when he was 3 or 4, it became very quickly obvious that he was smarter than his other siblings. He would walk through his father's study and kind of just look at the spines of all the books. His father was very well read and had a big library and would ask for the letters. And that's how he learned writing. And then he was. But he was also very, very happy, mostly happy outside in nature. So he would, as a little boy, collect insects and plants, and he would pester his father so much about. What is this? What's that beetle? What's that bird that. The father kind of bought all these natural history books. So by the time he was 10, he goes to and he accompanies his father. He really is the botanist in charge during that expedition. So he's the one who collects the plants and who identifies them. He presses them. So he's the botanist at the age of 10. And he has this talent for languages. He really picks up languages as they travel along. So he speaks Russian after the Russian expedition, and he learns English on the journey from St. Petersburg on the sailing boat to London. That's how he picks up English. I mean, he just goes really, really quickly. And it's something that when they travel later on the Resolution voyage, that helps him immensely because wherever they go, he'll ask the indigenous people for names, for words, for everything, and kind of takes lots of notes for this. So he learns to communicate with them kind of not in a detailed manner, but more than others.
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Interviewer
Okay, so can you tell us a little bit more about The Resolution Expedition then, please, because, you know, as you've mentioned, there is this transformational moment in Forrester's life. Can you describe the expedition, where it went and what was Forster's specific role aboard the ship?
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Andrea Woolf
So they, they left England in July 1772 and it was a, it was a three year expedition, dangerous expedition, an expedition that kind of ventured deeper into the icy polar seas of Antarctica than anyone before them. It was a voyage really of extremes. From sailing through these labyrinths of enormous icebergs to the kind of humid heat of tropical islands. They sailed around 75,000 miles, which is roughly as if they had sailed three times around the equator. They were looking for the fabled southern continent, which scientists back then believed had to exist to counterbalance the landmass in the northern hemisphere. So most scientists believe there must be this kind of huge southern continent. So as I said, it's this kind of voyage of extremes. So they came frighteningly close to icebergs on a sailing boat which can't go backwards. So it's, you know, it's really quite dangerous. They came frighteningly close to terrifying waterspouts. They sailed through storms and violent waves. They encountered Maoris. They almost died when they ate a poisonous fish. They saw the enormous, wore a martyr in Tahiti. 159 rather splendid double canoes, which for George Foster then also proved that Rousseau's idea of the kind of peaceful, noble savage can't really exist because this was clearly a nation of islanders which were at war. They made a full circuit around Antarctica. I mean, extraordinary achievement. They came within 120 miles of Antarctica, closer than anyone before them. So just imagine sailing on a sailing boat through storms and hurricanes at absolutely freezing temperatures with the ropes and rigging frozen stiff, with the sails being so frozen that they're like metal plates wearing woolen clothes that just never keeps you dry or warm. And so you can kind of understand how relieved the crew always was when they kind of arrived at the kind of more tropical islands. So what they did is they zigzagged through the South Pacific, they went three times to Antarctica, three times to New Zealand, and then they went Tahiti, Tonga, Easter island, the Vanuatu Archipelago, New Caledonia. So it's this very long, zigzaggy kind of voyage. But I think the most important thing for Foster was really that this was a voyage of human interaction. As they encountered the South Pacific islanders, he recorded their languages, he observed their customs, he enjoyed their food. He described their appearances, their jewelry, their hairstyles, their tools, their houses. And he returned with a deeply seated belief in the equality of races, which was very different to how the rest of the crew react to them. So they were. I mean, firearms were used very liberally, islanders were wounded, were killed. And Forster, being still very young, 17, 18, approached them with an unbelievably unbiased attitude, kind of really without prejudice. So where the others kind of saw indigenous people as lesser beings, as inferior beings, where they kind of looked at them, you know, with arrogant at the best, but really with brutal disgust at their worst, he didn't. He tried to understand.
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Interviewer
Yeah. So you, you write in the book, you write. In an era when most Europeans regarded indigenous people as lesser beings, even sometimes as beasts, George Forster's attitude shines out like a beacon in colonial history. So, yeah, it's his empathy and sympathy for the indigenous people of the Polynesian islands really emanates from your book. What do you think fired that? I mean, why did you. Why do you think he felt such empathy and sympathy for these people when those around him clearly never.
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Andrea Woolf
Well, you know, I obviously thought about this long and hard and I think there are several reasons. One is, I think, because he's still so young, I think it helps, you know, he isn't a kind of fully formed adult when he goes on this voyage, but he's also. I think he's been exposed to different cultures. From the age of 10, when he first traveled to Russia, and through Russia, he didn't even really understand which country he belonged to. So by the time he was 17, he'd lived in Prussia, in Russia, in England, and then he goes off on the voyage. So he has this. I think there's a built in open mind through that. He is a traveler in heart and in body and in mind. But he's really always an outsider. He's this perpetual outsider. He's always in transit himself. And the rest of his life is like this. So he's this traveler who's not anchored or bound to a place. But that also is the reason, I think, that gives him this willingness to embrace the otherness of others, which is, of course, the reason why I called the book the Traveler. Because he's not just traveling geographically, but he's also very much traveling in his mind across space and time. And he's really far ahead to many, many of his contemporaries. I think another reason is also his lack of conventional schooling. So he never went, except for a few months in St. Petersburg, he never went to a formal school. And he complains about this a lot. He complains about this lack of formal schooling. But at the same time, he also says to a friend, it allows him to philosophize in an unphilosophical manner. So he doesn't feel that he's bound to a scientific establishment, he's not bound to a particular ideology. And then last but not least, I think it might also be a reaction against his father, who was so narrow minded in a particular way. I mean, he just fought and fell out with almost everybody he encountered in his life. And it seemed that this provoked exactly the opposite in his son, who became this incredibly open minded person.
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Interviewer
And in your research for the book, you followed in the footsteps of Forrester, didn't you? Or at least visited some of the places he visited during this expedition. How did that sort of shape perception of him?
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Andrea Woolf
That was very important. So I mean, as a, as a historian, I obviously spent a lot of time at my desk in libraries and at archives, reading thousands and thousands of letters and diary entries. I mean, that is very, very important because that's the voice of your protagonist. And I have to say that George Foster's voice is very, very unusual. So in two and a half decades of doing research, I have rarely encountered letters written with such raw honesty and directness and immediacy. There's just something incredible where he, you know, the way he describes to his friends, his difficult relationship with his father, for example. So this is a man who is very open about his emotions. So all of that is kind of shapes one side of the story. But then the traveling is really quite important. I do follow the footsteps of my protagonist because I need to see the landscapes they've seen, which is sometimes quite difficult because the landscapes have obviously changed massively since they went there. So, you know, I run through European cities with 18th century engravings and maps and trying to work out where was his house and where did he work and where did he walk. And that's one thing and then. But because he was a proper traveler, I also ventured further. So I went to the South Pacific and to follow his footsteps there. And it was, I mean, going to New Zealand was really, really important for me. I had never been. So I did a five day hike along Queen Charlotte Sound where they had anchored three times to really try to understand this place. So I didn't want to just go there and have a look. So, you know, the hiking was quite important and it's such an otherworldly vegetation that it just completely took me by surprise. But then it also makes you aware of how strange it must have been for him. Because obviously I could have a look at, you know, videos or photographs. I'd seen like tree ferns and botanical gardens, but that had not prepared me for this. So that's one thing. And then I think for me, the, the most exciting moment was when we went to Dusky Sound, which is at the very southern tip of the south island of New Zealand. So there's kind of nothing in between there and Antarctica anymore. And it's a place that is one of those fjords. It's so remote and wild that we had to take a helicopter and a boat to get there. That really busted my budget. But it is so remote that the landscape is pretty much as it was when he was there. And that is something I had very a little bit in the Andes when I followed Humboldt's footsteps. But it was an extraordinary moment and it was. And we found we went to the Pickersgill Harbour, which was a small natural harbor where the Resolution first anchored when they arrived there in 1773. And there is still the tree that the Resolution used as a gangway, growing almost horizontally over the water. And we know that because we know the exact location. But we also know it because William Hodges, the expedition artists, painted this scene. And these are the moments where, you know, like something like time and space collides and it feels a bit like a fourth dimension opens up and, you know, you feel quite close to your protagonist.
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Interviewer
is there so can you tell us a little bit about the account that Forrester wrote about the expedition, which is called A Voyage Round the World? I think, I think I'm right in saying that this kind of helped catapult him to a degree of fame across much of Europe. So what was it about the account that really struck a chord with so many people back in Europe?
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Andrea Woolf
So he's, you know, you could also say that he's really one of the first proper travel writer or travel journalists. He comes back with an account that is not nautical, which a lot of those explorations accounts are very nautical. I mean, his descriptions sing off the page. He writes like a poet about landscape and about the people. It is beautiful because sometimes when you read 18th or 19th century writing, you can see that it's beautiful, but it still feels a bit hard to read. For us, it's just so different. This just reads beautifully, absolutely stunningly. And where earlier explorers such as Christopher Columbus, for example, really struggled to describe South America as anything much than green or the indigenous people, anything much than being naked, which for him kind of equated uncivilized. George Foster even turns Antarctica into shades of purple and green and blue. He calls it I paint with words, and he really does. And so, you know, as the readers were kind of turning the pages, they could almost hear the haunting creak of icebergs or the sound of a nose flute that was played by a woman with her nostrils. So he brought this strange World into the parlors of Europe in a way that people really didn't. Hadn't encountered before. And it made him famous. I mean, everybody in Europe wanted to meet this young explorer. I think it helped that he was very, very young. I mean, he was only 20 when they returned. He was 22 when he published A Voyage around the World. And he goes on these. You know, he goes to Paris, he goes to Vienna, and he goes to Germany. And he is invited to, you know, one party after another. There are people who wake each other up at night when he arrives in the towns. They're like, wake up. You don't want to miss George Foster. So he is this superstar, and especially in Germany also, where no German had ever been on a circumnavigation of the world. So he's really the first to come back with these stories about these people. And the way he talks about them is very, very different to earlier explorers because he's deeply interested in their culture. And his description. He's an intuitive ethnographer, and his description to this day are seen as the best accounts of Polynesian culture before European contact. So he's very. He sees them as humans. He does not see them as savages or barbarians as, you know, something slightly more than a monkey. He sees them as equal humans. And that is completely and utterly unusual. And for me, that was something that is, in our current climate, that makes him really just stand out from the darkness of colonial history. He really tries to find what connects us rather than what sets us apart. So he sees unity in our diversity. Not the sameness that makes us all alike, but a bond that should hold us together in our humanity.
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Interviewer
And so he goes from this relative anonymity to sort of rubbing shoulders with Benjamin Franklin, having arguments over points of philosophy with Immanuel Kant. How did he deal with that fame? Did he lap it up? Or is he. You know, did it make him slightly uncomfortable?
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Andrea Woolf
I think he quite liked it because, you know, don't forget he has this kind of very controlling father. So until he's 22, he's really in the dark shadow of his father. His father calls the shots. His father decides, we're going to go on the resolution, and I'm only going to join if my son can come with me, not asking George. And then when they come back, his father falls out with the British Admiralty and says to his son, you are going to write this account about this book. So when he's 23, George escapes from this dark shadow of his father and he moves to Germany and that's when he really starts being celebrated and he enjoys it. He goes from one party to another. And we have some wonderful diary entries where he describes these parties and all the, you know, and he goes, and he goes like, oh, you know, it's almost too good to be true. And then he ends up eventually in Vilnius, which is then part of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, as a professor for natural history. And he absolutely hates it because after these kind of very thrilling and exciting years during the voyage, but then also afterwards when he's kind of, you know, fated across Europe, he's really in the backwaters. And that's one of the reasons why he picks a very public fight with Emmanuel Kant about the human races. Because he thinks, well, at least I can keep myself in the minds of other people. So I think that he likes the fame. He does not mind it. He does like it.
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Interviewer
You're right that Forrester wasn't afraid to admit to weakness and sadness. Do you think he experienced much in his own life? Was he, you know, despite his undisputed talent, his great celebrity, was he prone to periods of self doubt?
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Andrea Woolf
Yes, he is. It's a very unhappy life, actually, which is. It made writing this book in part very, very hard because on the one hand you have this kind of very adventurous sense and you have a really good person, which is nice to write about. A person who's, you know, who proves, you know, we tend to think that bigotry and racism was almost inevitable in the 18th century, but his life proves that it's a choice. It is not an unavoidable way of understanding the world. So he's a. In that respect. He was a wonderful protagonist to write about. But then there are deeply, deeply sad letters. He goes through long periods of today, we probably call it depression of kind of, they called it. He said, like, you know, I'm melancholic. I'm, you know, I'm spiraling into this kind of darkness. His health was pretty ruined when they came back, so they had scurvy. The kind of. The long, long months on the damp, cold ship near Antarctica gave him kind of rheumatism for the rest of his life. He had stomach problems for the rest of his life. So physically he comes back kind of quite damaged. And then he really suffers from self doubt. He never thinks that he's good. He is a spendthrift, so he spends a lot of money on books and clothes. He does love to dress fashionably, which is the reason that he constantly. He reviews books, he writes essays, just to kind of make money. And he feels he never has enough time to write his proper books. So he suffers from that. And then he has a deeply, deeply unhappy marriage to his wife Teresa, whose. You know, that was that. I think for me that was. That was the great disappointment when I was writing this book, because my last book in Magnificent Rebels, there was a great female protagonist, Caroline Schlegel, who's this kind of fiercely independent, kind of fabulous woman who just basically does whatever she wants. And Theresa Foster is her childhood friend. That's one of the reasons I kind of came across them. And she and Teresa later, after Forster's death, she becomes the first female newspaper editor in Germany. So, I mean, she's wild, free spirited, educated, with a great love of books, but also with a great love of men. So she embarks on all these affairs which, you know, are terrible for George Foster, and he's so in love with her that he accepts them. So they're two major affairs where he accepts a third man in his marriage and eventually they end up being separated. And Theresa has, while she's still married, while she still lives with George Foster, one of her lovers moves in with them. She has two children with him. So that all is just terrible and makes him deeply, deeply unhappy. And there are moments when you read this and you think, oh, come on, just stand up for yourself. But. But the problem is that Theresa kind of outlives him by many, many years and she really edits and destroys a lot of letters trying to cast herself as the victim in this relationship. And so sometimes George Foster comes across a little bit where you think, why is he not saying anything? And then you think, well, probably if he accused her of something, that was one of the letters she would have destroyed. So it's slightly distorted and we don't know exactly what he did, but he writes about her to other people too. So we know that he was, you know, he loved her deeply and he admired her. I mean, she was brilliant and educated and fascinating and, you know, had this wild temperament. And he loved it. He loved strong women, which makes him kind of, again, I think, quite a nice person.
- [34:10]
Interviewer
Okay, here's a quick note for our listeners. If you'd like to hear Andrea discuss the life of another German polymath, then check out our podcast interview with her about the extraordinary life of Alexander von Humboldt, who influenced generations of scientists, including Charles Darwin. I'll leave the link to that episode in this podcast show's notes. Andrea Forrester is remembered today not just as a naturalist, ethnographer and A travel writer, but also as something of a revolutionary. When did he start becoming more politically engaged?
- [34:52]
Andrea Woolf
Well, I mean, what is political? So I would argue that from the moment he begins writing, his writings are political. Even the Voyage around the World, because he's very critical about European imperialism. For example, again and again in A Voyage around the World he says the intercourse that has occurred between Europe and the South Seas has been very detrimental to the South Seas and I wish Europeans had never arrived there. So he's critical about that. He's very critical about white supremacy. So he fights against white supremacy, he fights against slavery in his writings again and again. Says it's truly repugnant and inhuman and unnatural. So all of that is political, but he becomes overtly political where he is trying to actually change how a nation is governed after the French revolution. So in 1789 he lives in Mainz, which is only 80 miles away from the French border, about 20 miles west of Frankfurt. He's the librarian of the university there. And then the French Revolution happens. It's this kind of very pivotal event in Europe that leaves no one really unaffected. And when the French revolutionaries declare all men equal, they at least promise the possibility of a new social order built on the power of ideas and freedom. And George Foster watches this, I mean literally 80 miles away across the border. And it's for him, it's like the unfolding of a gripping drama. He watches and there is suddenly the possibility of a new reality where freedom and liberty and equality is part of daily life. He becomes a great supporter of the French Revolution. His writings become more political. And then there's war in Europe. A lot of European countries are kind of trying to kind of stop the French and their kind of terrible ideas. So in October 1792, the French invade Mainz. And instead of being worried about this, George Forster welcomes the invaders and decides that he's going to be part of this. And he wants to establish a German Republic based on the example of the French Republic. And he becomes the vice president of the administration. He organizes the first election on German soil, the first free election on German soil. And he becomes a co founder of the Mainz Republic, which was Germany's first republic. Very short lived, just a few months, but he's very much at the forefront. So he's someone who all his life has been very clear about his beliefs. But that's the moment when he stands up for his beliefs and he risks life and livelihood really. I mean, he's eventually accused of treason and ends up in, in Paris with this, as always. At the center stage of history. I mean, he's always extraordinary how he's always there where stuff is happening.
- [38:03]
Interviewer
And what did his involvement in the Mainz Republic? What did that do to his reputation across the wider German states?
- [38:10]
Andrea Woolf
It was terrible. There was one thing about supporting what was happening in France, but it was something very, very different to try to initiate a revolution in Germany. So even people who had supported the French Revolution were absolutely shocked when he stood up in Mainz at the lecterns and gave these kind of speeches. And, I mean, he's very vocal. He kind of talked about that monarchs were kind of the scum of the human race and degenerate. And, you know, it was a choice between ruin and poverty or freedom and brotherhood. So he was very, very clear. And all his friends basically turned away from him. Theresa, his wife, took it as the opportunity to separate from him finally and said, it's too dangerous to be married to a revolutionary.
- [38:55]
Interviewer
So he goes to Paris following the revolution, and things start to turn ugly. There's the onset of the Terror. Hundreds are losing their lives to Madame Guillotine. Did the bloodletting and the chaos that enveloped France in the early 1790s, did that in any way lead him to question his own faith in the Revolution?
- [39:17]
Andrea Woolf
So he arrives in Paris in spring 1793. So this is just when, you know, very shortly afterwards, the kind of the brutal Reign of Terror really starts in earnest. And first of all, he's shocked, absolutely shocked by the bloodshed. I mean, luckily for us, he writes these very, very long letters to Teresa, who amazingly remains his best friend or his kind of most trusted correspondent. And he describes his frustration. But with time, he says, you know, what is the alternative? The alternative would be a return to despotism and inequality, and he doesn't want that. He does not like it. I mean, he's not someone who likes violence, but he accepts it for the greater good. That will come at the end of this, as he believes. So even when around him, more and more people kind of die on the guillotine, and British people he hangs out with who get, you know, they get imprisoned, they die. One of his fellow delegates from the Mainz administration who lives with him in Paris, he gets guillotined, but he remains kind of faithful in the ideals of the revolution. He compares it to a hurricane as a force of nature which will destroy some of it in its wake. But it needs to happen. He's slightly naive in the end, I think, when he almost doesn't want to open his eyes to the bloodshed too much anymore. But I think it is because he's seen a lot of inequality in his life. And he said, we cannot go back to this.
- [41:03]
Interviewer
And he dies in 1794 while the bloodletting is still playing out in Paris. As we've just said, his reputation in Germany at the time had been tarnished because of his support. What about his reputation in Germany today? How did the people of Germany look upon George Forster today?
- [41:25]
Andrea Woolf
Well, I think he's very unknown, basically, because he was seen as a traitor in Germany. He was really written out of history, I mean, very, very deliberately so. It was only in the 1950s, so 200 years after his birth, that historians in East Germany looked at him and his role in the Mainz Republic because they were really trying to find, you know, proper revolutionaries. They can kind of halo. And they named the first German Antarctic station after him in the 1980s. And there's this huge research project that began in the 1950s in East Germany, collecting all his letters, all his works, which, you know, resulted in an 18 volume edition of his letters and his works. And then West German historians also became more and more interested. But he's not even in Germany. He's not a household name. But I think he really deserves to be known because he's, you know, his ideas are just so important. Not just his unshakable belief in humankind, which I, you know, for me is really his most important legacy, this deep seated belief in the equality of races. But he also, he was one of the first to use the concept and term human rights. So when the American, and later the French Revolutionists, they still excluded women, non Europeans, slaves. But George Foster was already in 1777 when he was writing A Voyage around the World. He was writing about the general rights of mankind. He compared humans once to harp strings and he said, well, they all have a different length and because of that, it creates this kind of great variety of harmonies and melodies. And he said, were they all of one length, the richness of the music would be gone. So our diversity really makes this symphony of humankind. So I find his life very moving. And I think what I also really like is that he's not this flawless, perfect, shining hero on a pedestal. You know, he's, you know, he made mistakes, he had his flaws, but somehow he managed to throw off the chains of prejudice that were so common at his age. Which for me is an encouragement that we, you know, we have also the agency to imagine differently and to think differently to what everybody else thinks.
- [43:58]
Interviewer
Well, Andrea, hopefully your new book will really help bring what was an extraordinary life back into the spotlight. Thank you so much for talking to me today. That was absolutely fascinating.
- [44:08]
Andrea Woolf
Thank you for having me.
- [44:12]
Spencer Mizzen
That was Andrea Woolf speaking to Spencer Misen. Andrea is a German British historian whose books include the award winning the Invention of Nature, Alexander von Humboldt's New World. You can find out much more about George Forster's remarkable escapades in Andrea's new book, the Traveler the Revolutionary Life of George Forster and His Search for Humanity.
- [44:42]
Commercial Narrator
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- [45:26]
Andrea Woolf
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