Biography

German naturalist who travelled on Captain Cook's second voyage to the Pacific. Known as Georg or George, Forster was the eldest of eight children born to Lutheran pastor Johann Reinhold Forster and his wife. The family lived in Nassenhuben (Mokry Dwór) in the Polish province of Royal Prussia. Both talented linguists with a passion for the study of nature, Johann and Georg Forster went on to work together in the field of natural history.

Aged ten George Forster accompanied his father to Russia, where Catherine the Great had commissioned Johann Forster to report on conditions at a German colony on the Volga in order to encourage further settlement. The pair also made scientific observations, with the young George collecting plants. In 1766 father and son moved to England, where Johann at first sold artifacts from their Russian travels to keep them in food and lodging. He then began teaching at the Warrington Academy, where the gifted George became a pupil. Aged only 12, George translated into English a book on Russian history by Mikhail Lomonosov, and helped with translations of scientific books to contribute to the family income when the remaining Forsters also moved to England.

The family soon moved from the North to London, where Johann's reputation as a naturalist grew. When Johann was invited to take the place of Joseph Banks on Cook's second voyage, he seized the opportunity, insisting that his son accompany him as an assistant and draughtsman. George, not yet 18 years old, boarded the Resolution in July 1772, and over the next three years was active in making collections and observations related to both natural history and ethnology. Though not a trained artist, he also made hundreds of drawings and paintings during the voyage, which covered the South Atlantic, Cape Horn, the Southern Ocean, Polynesia and New Zealand, and reached further south than any previous exploration.

Due to a disagreement between the Admiralty and Johann Forster, George Forster took the responsibility of authoring an account of the voyage on his father's behalf. A Voyage Round the World by G. Forster was published in 1777 (six weeks before Cook's official account), featuring observations on geography, natural history and the cultures of the lands visited. The book's descriptions of Polynesian people were largely free of Western and Christian bias and are thus considered anthropological in the modern sense. The Forsters also published Characteres Generum Plantarum (1776), featuring 78 illustrations of plants encountered. The published works did not earn them a great deal of money, however, and they were forced to sell Georges botanical drawings to Joseph Banks (both senior and junior Forster were inept at managing their finances and were constantly in debt). Among the thousands of specimens collected they discovered at least 260 new plants and 200 new animals, though this number seems a little low for the length of the voyage.

Forster was subsequently admitted to the Royal Society aged just 22 and embarked on an academic career in his native Germany. He began teaching natural history at the Collegium Carolinum in Kassel in 1778, then at Vilnius University in 1784. He married Therese Heyne in 1785 and from 1788 he was head librarian at the University of Mainz. Together with his friend at Göttingen University, Georg Lichtenberg, Forster founded the Göttingisches Magazin der Wissenschaften und Literatur, a science and literature periodical. Forster continued to complete translations, especially of books about exploration (including works by Captains Bligh and Cook), and published many papers on botany and ethnology. He published another volume on the botany of the Cook voyage, Florulae Insularum Australiam Prodromus (1786), containing descriptions of nearly 600 species, and submitted a thesis on food plants encountered on the voyage for his degree in medicine from Halle. In editing this work before printing, his father added a vitriolic comment on a man who had given some of their specimens to the son of Linnaeus, who had then published descriptions of the plants before the Forsters; Forster removed this in a later edition.

In 1790 Forster made a journey with Alexander von Humboldt through Flanders, Holland, England and northern France, publishing an account of the European jaunt in three volumes in 1791-1794. In these years he also became involved in liberal politics when Mainz was taken by the French in 1792, founding the Jacobin Club and playing a key role in organising the Mainz Republic. His last few years were unhappy, however, for his wife left him and in 1793, while he was visiting Paris, he was made an outlaw as Prussian and Austrian forces retook control of his home city. He suffered a stroke and died in Paris in early 1794.

Sources:
G. Forster, N. Thomas and O. Berghof, 2000, A Voyage Round the World
G. Schaefer, 2008, Cook's Log, 31(4): 5
T.P. Saine, 1972, Georg Forster.