Australian Maritime Series, 6. Sydney, Hordern House for the Australian National
Maritime Museum, 2007. 276 pp., illus., notes, select bibliography.
ISBN 9781875567492. A$325.00.
Kindly reproduced here with permission.
The decades since the publication of J.C. Beaglehole's editions of Cook's Journals have seen belated attention paid to the writings on Cook's second Pacific voyage by Johann Reinhold Forster and his son George, the latter only 17 years old at its outset (apparently he was baptised ‘George' but German scholars refer to him as ‘Georg'). A biography of the elder Forster by Michael Hoare (The Tactless Philosopher, 1975) was followed in 1982 by his important edition for the Hakluyt Society of the naturalist's journal from the voyage, while in 1996 the University of Hawai‘i Press issued a scholarly edition of Forster's Observations Made during a Voyage round the World, first published in 1778. In 2000, the same press issued a matching edition of George Forster's A Voyage round the World (1777). Now Hordern House has published an English translation of the younger Forster's essay, ‘Cook, der Entdecker' (an earlier translation by Gerda Bell has disappeared, and another by P.E. Klarwill remains, unpublished, in the Alexander Turnbull Library). A substantial piece of more than 20,000 words, the essay was written as the introduction to the German edition of the authorised account of Cook's third voyage, published in 1787, and was intended by George Forster to replace John Douglas's ‘intolerable introduction' to the English edition. It is now issued in a handsome, and expensive, volume which contains a useful introduction, a facsimile of the German original, and a translation by a linguist identified only by his or her initials. Most Cook scholars will pass quickly over the preliminary part of the essay, in which Forster indulges in some high-flown philosophical speculation, and turn with relief to the main section. Here, there are two areas of particular interest: Forster's account for a readership of ‘landsmen and city dwellers' (of whom he was one) of sailing on one of the most famous of all discovery voyages; and his reflective assessment of Cook eight years after the explorer's death. When Forster describes life on board Cook's Resolution he includes detail - living quarters, the watch system, meals, daily routine (and daily tedium) - not normally found in the journals of professional sailors who took such matters for granted. Two examples must suffice. Forster is writing about the difficulties of exercise on board ship: ‘Countless times I found myself on the quarter deck, barely twenty-four paces long, together with twelve to fourteen others marching up and down in pairs, so that we all had to turn after twelve or fifteen paces.' A different sort of constraint was the boredom which came when men lived together for months on end in the cramped space of their mess. After a few weeks a person's ‘small store of personal adventures, anecdotes and droll or witty ideas' was exhausted; repetition could ‘barely be heard without yawning'; and thereafter ‘meals are taken in silence, except for a few banal remarks about the wind or weather'. Occasionally, there are echoes of his father's grumbles about their treatment on the voyage. Next to the captain's quarters, Forster writes, ‘there are some wooden partitions to make cabins for the First Lieutenant, the Astronomer, the Master, and the Naturalists, the comfort of which decreases in this order, so that the latter consists of six feet cubed in which a bunk, a locker and a writing desk leave just enough room for a folding stool'. There is an intensity about some of Forster's writing which is not found in his earlier account. In that, Forster wrote rather sparsely of the efforts to save the Resolution when she struck a reef off Tahiti in August 1773: ‘the officers, and all the passengers, exerted themselves indiscriminately'.
In his essay, there is more drama. ‘Everyone, regardless of rank or whatever task he might otherwise be engaged, lent a hand in winching the ship off the rock and into deeper water. Surgeons, astronomers, naturalists and draughtsmen, all of them people who normally have nothing to do with running the ship, were panting away at the capstan in temperatures of more than thirty degrees.' Forster shares some of his father's prejudices about the ‘coarse crowd of common sailors' who were his daily company, but in one of his most powerful passages he pays tribute to the daring and skill of the topmen working aloft at night and in bad weather. Elsewhere, he writes feelingly about the hazards of sailing in far southerly latitudes: ‘how often were we terrified by being able to hear the waves breaking on the ice, without being able to lay our eyes on the object of our fear'.
Forster's assessment of Cook is one of unqualified admiration. This is the more striking, and perhaps unexpected, given the disputes involving his father during and after the second voyage. Forster begins by summarising European exploration of the Pacific from Magellan's voyage onwards, and is dismissive of most of Cook's predecessors, whose voyages ‘like the obscurantist logs of their captains, monuments to ignorance and lack of ability, had spread more uncertainty than light about this part of the world'. Cook, by contrast, ‘shone the brightest of lights', and his explorations achieved more than all his predecessors put together. By 1787, this was a fairly conventional judgement, but at another and more interesting level, the essay contains an awed recollection by the young Forster of Cook's dominant personality. His eyewitness evidence provides insights necessarily lacking both in Douglas, and in the first, stilted biography of Cook by the Rev. John Kippis. Forster describes how, when Cook came on deck, he would often notice slackness in a rope or line which the officer on watch had overlooked. When officers were reckoning distance by eye, it was usually Cook's estimate that was correct. His handling of officers and men, his attention to shipboard health, and his sense of when discipline must be rigidly enforced and when it might be relaxed were all praised by Forster. Above all, he was impressed by Cook's careful planning before the voyages and his ‘iron perseverance' during them which enabled him to transform Europe's knowledge of the Pacific and its peoples, so that ‘he remains, as a mariner and discoverer, incomparable and unique, the pride of his century'.
Glyndwr Williams
The Journal of Pacific History