“He’s an intuitive ethnographer,” Andrea Wulf says of George Forster, the subject of her new book, on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “As they travel across the South Pacific and stop at all these different islands, he records the islanders’ languages, he observes their customs, he describes their appearances, their jewelry, their tools, their houses, and brings back such detailed accounts that they, to this day, are regarded as the best accounts of Polynesian culture before and around first European contact. He doesn’t demonize, but he also doesn’t romanticize. He very clearly says: Good and evil is in all societies. We find all these different shades of human life and human experiences in all societies.”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with returning guest Andrea Wulf, about The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, a narrative and intellectual biography of the German polymath George Forster—a botanist whose investigations of the breadfruit disclosed the history of Polynesian migrations; a prose stylist whose account of Cook’s second voyage helped invent the genre of travel writing; an intellectual pugilist who quarreled with Rousseau and Kant and influenced Coleridge and Von Humboldt; a revolutionary whom Friedrich Engels called “the German Thomas Paine.”

The ad-free, unabridged edition of this episode, available on the Lapham’s Quarterly Substack, includes an epilogue about Forster’s Parisian exile during the tumult of the French Revolution.

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