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Stated First Edition, first printing. Text in English. Hard cover, 8vo in quarter black cloth over green paper-covered boards, titles in gold to spine, in pictorial dust jacket showing botanical art by the subject, George Forster. xxi, 484pp. [485], including maps, illustrations in black and white, and color as well as extensive notes and useful travel bibliography. CONDITION: Fine, like new. Provided in a mylar protector.**A biography detailing the remarkable boyhood and coming of age of Polish-Prussian born draughtsman and naturalist GEORG[E] FORSTER (1754-1794), who, most notably, accompanied his father, naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster, on Captain James Cook's second Pacific voyage of 1772-75 aboard the HMS Resolution, visiting the South Pacific, New Zealand, Vanuatu, Tonga, Tahiti, and the Easter Islands, as well as several attempts at navigating further southward towards the as-yet uncharted Antarctica, only to be thwarted by icebergs. These experiences became the basis of Forster's own future fame and intellectual celebrity once published in his 1777 book, "A Voyage Around the World". (Some of his scientific observations were said to have been directly reworked into Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," for instance.) Hundreds of his botanical and zoological studies and watercolors are now in the collections of London's Natural History Museum. From the blurb: " From an early age it was clear that George Forster possessed a brilliant mind. At just ten years old, he became a botanist when he accompanied his irascible father Reinhold, on a wild expedition to Russia. By the time he was twelve, the pair had moved to London, and the young boy soon became the breadwinner by publishing translations of the most popular travel accounts of the day." Beyond these amazing youthful achievements as a linguist, naturalist, artist and writer, then, Wulf explores how George Forster's unconventional life path also formed unusually independent political and social views in support of things like race and sex equality. His travel fame gained him access to, and admiration of, many of the Enlightenment era's best thinkers, among them Benjamin Franklin, Goethe, Pepys, Samuel Johnson, and Alexander Humboldt. Also highly recommended, Wulf's "The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession," (2008) and "The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World" (2015). It is a pleasure to once again launch into the intellectual history of the early years of scientific exploration through the lens of these remarkable individuals.
Ref: BIOG 9828
$40.00