Curious Worldview

Andrea Wulf | Around the World With Cook at 17, Dead a Traitor at 39, Forgotten for 200 Years.

• Ryan Faulkner • Episode 232

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Andrea Wulf was born in India to German parents, grew up in Hamburg, and became a writer through pure serendipity... 

She has since become one of the finest narrative historians today: The Brother Gardeners, Founding Gardeners, Chasing Venus, then The Invention of Nature, her life of Alexander von Humboldt, which won fifteen international awards including the Costa Biography Award, the Royal Society Science Book Prize and the LA Times Book Prize, followed by Magnificent Rebels and now her new book, and the subject of our interview today, The Traveler, which brings alive George Forster, the man Humboldt himself credited with making him an explorer, and the most open mind of the 18th century.

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It’s an enormous pleasure to have spoken with Andrea, we discussed...

  • Fernweh — the German word for the ache for the distance, and why it's Andrea's "main condition of being"
  • Living voyeuristically through the subjects of her books, and why she had to write about a traveller again after Magnificent Rebels in the pandemic
  • Who was George Forster: the wunderkind who taught himself to read off book spines, was a working botanist on a Russian expedition at ten, and translated a Russian history book into English at twelve.
  • Why Forster was unique among explorers: Columbus's "green" and "naked" vs Forster painting Antarctica in blue, purple and green
  • Dying at thirty-nine in disgrace — written out of history in Germany as a traitor, in Britain as a critic of empire — and the East German rediscovery of the 1950s
  • James Cook's moral ledger: firearms as display of power, even-handed punishment of crew and islanders, the property concept he couldn't see past, and his genius as navigator and scientist
  • Forster and religion: what he actually grasped of Māori and Tahitian cosmology, the Lutheran upbringing, the Rosicrucian detour, and the Bible as "a book of oriental fantasy"
  • Serendipity: the borrowed London house that made her a writer


Curious Worldview (catalogue connections to this ep)

Timestamps...

00:00 — Fernweh: the ache for the distance, the word that opens the episode and defines her whole career

02:37 — Living voyeuristically through her subjects; writing Magnificent Rebels during the pandemic; why she had to return to a traveller

09:41 — Why Forster was unique: Columbus who could only say "green" and "naked" vs the storyteller who painted Antarctica in colour; neither idealising (Rousseau) nor demonising

13:34 — The six weeks that changed him: Dusky Sound's "art and industry to these savages" to Queen Charlotte Sound's "we bring death and disease"

15:48 — Dead at 39, a traitor; written out of history in Germany and Britain; the East German rediscovery

20:15 — The Humboldt imprint: A Voyage Round the World, the 1790 journey through Europe, shovelling sand in revolutionary Paris

23:33 — Cook's morality: firearms, even-handed punishment, what Cook couldn't see about Tahitian property that Forster could

31:09 — Science aboard an imperial expedition; the real treasure Forster brought home: all humans are one species

36:53 — The wunderkind: a working botanist at ten, translating Russian history into English at twelve

40:00 — The breadfruit deduction: seedless trees to a correct theory of Polynesian migration

43:43 — Forster and religion: what he actually understood of the Māori cosmos, the Rosicrucian years, the Bible as "oriental fantasy"

48:27 — Do modern explorers exist? Polymaths, the deep ocean, E.O. Wilson

56:37 — The resurrected question: witness any conversation in history → Forster and Humboldt in a carriage through revolutionary France

57:58 — Serendipity...

SPEAKER_00

I uh I first learned the word fernver when I was reading your Humboldt book. So what is Fernware and also how often do you feel it?

SPEAKER_02

Well, fernvieh is a fabulous German word, which is kind of a little bit the opposite of homesick, I would say. So fan means distance, and we is the pain. So it's the pain you feel, the longing you feel for the distance. It's not wonderlust. See fanweh you could, for example, have when you sit at a beach and you look over the sea, across the horizon, you feel this kind of longing to be somewhere. That's Fanvi. And I think it's one of those beautiful German compound words, which to put two words together and they kind of create something new. I think I, you know, I have this all the time. That's kind of one of the my main conditions of being, or something like that. It c I think it runs in our family also. So it's it's this longing to be in a in a place. It's not so much in a different place to where you are now, but to be in a place that is different, that is maybe strange or that is curious. So yeah, so I think it's uh it's something that that drives me, but that clearly drove people like Alexander von Humboldt or George Foster too.

SPEAKER_00

My understanding is that a part of it is almost an indifference about where it is you might be longing for. It's just simply over there and something else and totally new and different.

SPEAKER_02

Exactly. Exactly. It is just a different place to where you are now. It is not it is not a precise country you long for in that moment. It's not like you sit at the beach and you think that I wish I'd be in Thailand now or something like that. It is more that you don't, you know, you want to be in a strange, different place that is different to where you are now.

SPEAKER_00

Along the lines of the asking me asking you about when or how often in your life does Fernvar creep into the door, I couldn't help but think about you rather than the subject of the book at one particular moment. But George Foster, to sort of start off his career, he's got this incredible linguistic talent and he is translating all of these tales of adventure. And a part of that was he himself, you speculating rather, that he starts to live voyeuristically through these manuscripts that he's translating. And I couldn't help but think at the time, how much is Andrea voyeuristically living through the subjects of her own books?

SPEAKER_02

Definitely, that is definitely part of it. I do, I do like to write about a traveler, as you can tell from my books. And um, you know, the book that I wrote in between George Foster and Humboldt, that's Magnificent Rebels, which is about a group of philosophers who were all hanging out in this small German town, uh, Jena, in the at the end of the 18th century. That's the opposite. They were traveling in their mind. That was a great book to write during the pandemic, which was obviously not planned. And luckily, I'd done most of the research when the pandemic hit, but it kind of felt like the right book to write then. And I could have never written Humboldt or the or The Traveler during the pandemic. But after that, it was for me very, very clear that I needed to write another book about a traveler, an explorer, because it's just so you know, because you travel in your mind with them. And then of course you also have this great excuse to follow their footsteps where you have to travel to all in the name of research. Um and I do like that kind of traveling very much, much, much more than a normal vacation, because it gets me to places that I normally wouldn't go to, and it gets me to places in a slightly different way. So a lot of it involves walking, um, which I love anyway, but it's also a very different way of traveling. I think our traveling has become very, very fast. We travel, um, you know, we it is all about to see as much as possible in the shortest possible time. And we all go to places that are, I don't know, you know, where others have been already, where um you take a photograph and you share it on social media just at the same place where everybody else has done it because it looks so photogenic. And I like a very different type of travelling. So I don't, you know, I don't need to climb the highest mountains. That I'm not interested in that. But it is spectacular to go to places where these explorers have been and then to try to understand their achievement by walking the same path, I suppose. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00

And it's kind of equally adventurous or engaging for the mind and the soul to visit any random town in Mount Etna, as it is necessarily going to Rome, you know, but for whatever reasons the tastes are homogenized, and therefore the experience is rather homogenized as well, unless you intentionally lead away from it.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, exactly. I mean, you have all these beautiful Greek islands, for example, like Santorini, who used to be these kind of quiet, sleepy places, and now you have like you know, queues of tourists kind of trying to take the same picture. So, I mean, uh you know, I know that I'm very privileged to do this, like, you know, I I do my research, but it's it's I don't, you know, I I pick my I pick my destinations very carefully because of course I can't afford traveling through the whole South Pacific or all of South America. So I So what I do is I I I research and I write the first draft of the book, and then I kind of know which are the places that were really, really important for my protagonists and which are the places I'm writing about. So for example, in The Traveler, I really wanted to go to the Marquesas Islands, but in the book, you know, I mentioned them in one paragraph, and they only stayed there, you know, a few days. So it was clear that I Tahiti is much more important for the for the book and but also for Foster. So that that then decides the destination. So it's not always what I want, it's also what what the research demands or what the protagonist demands, but also sometimes practicalities. I really, really wanted to go to Tanai, the Vanuatu archipelago, but they had um a cyclone and the Vanuatu Air, the kind of local airline, had gone bust, and it would have been really, really difficult. I would have had to take a ship to go down there, and then they say, you know, it's hurricane season at the moment, so you should really calculate like an extra couple of weeks just in case you get stuck. And so I didn't go, but I will go one day. I mean that that's what I did with Humboldt also. There are quite a lot of places I didn't go to during the writing of the book, but then I was invited, for example, to do talks later. So you, you know, the traveling stays with you and the book stays with you. The book is not finished just because you've written the last word, I suppose.

SPEAKER_00

And I suppose there must also be a feeling that to do it really properly, you'd you have to get in a wooden ship and spend weeks at sea and be able to tell what the experience looks like from the deck when you finally see land after weeks of the trouble and the pain and the just the brutal cold and the food and the miserable company, you know.

SPEAKER_02

Um, there's certain there there's certain things I'm quite happy not to do. And of course we can't, you know, we can't, you know, with Alexander von Humboldt, I always say, you know, he's he's this Prussian aristocrat, and I, you know, I am not a wealthy Prussian aristocrat, so there's no way I can afford five years of traveling as he does. Or in the case of George Foster, I I can't spend three years just traveling, sailing around the world. Because he also obviously went to other places, so like European cities are important. So I take photocopies of 18th century maps and engravings trying to work out where, you know, where was the house he lived in or the place he worked and where did he walk, these kind of things. Um so it's not always far away. It can also be in London, for example. So the the house he lived in London is today Curry House. So, you know, you find these places, and that's it.

SPEAKER_00

No, totally, totally. Also exciting. The um The Travellers, rather, the Traveller, the Rebel book, the Humboldt book, it's all in a same sort of 100-year time frame. Is there travelers is this just because this is now the era of ships and international travel and also with the fact that it's Europeans who are recording everything that they see so scrupulously? But I just imagine across all the research you've done, people von Humboldt may have mentioned in certain manuscripts calling back to travel in the in the 2000, 3000 years before that. People that just jump off the page at you as this is an incredible story of someone who has a similarly charismatic character as George or von Humboldt, where they're multidimensional beings. They're not just purely there for glory or money or whatever. Um, individuals like this who you think deserve to have their story told, but no one's necessarily done it.

SPEAKER_02

Well, you know, if if I would know these people, I would know the next book I'm gonna write, which I don't at the moment. So if you come across someone, please let me know. So I think, if I'm perfectly honest, I think both Humboldt and George Forster are very, very unusual for their time and their thinking. George Forster is someone who, unlike other explorers or Europeans, really does not see indigenous people as lesser or inferior beings as most of his contemporaries. Or if you look at someone like Christopher Columbus, for example, who struggled to describe South America as anything but green. I mean, that's literally what he can say about the landscape. And then you have George Foster, who is this born storyteller who paints with words, who even turns the icy world of Antarctica into shades of blue, purple, and green. Christopher Columbus describes the indigenous people as naked. I mean, that is literally his description. And that for him means uncivilized. That's the, you know, that's the adjective he uses. And then you have George Forster who understands everybody to be a equal human. And that is incredibly unusual for the time. So he is someone who sees that different cultures have different value systems, that because of that he can't, he understands he can't use and he refuses to use European morals as a framework to judge them. So he keeps this incredibly open mind where he says, vice and virtue are relative concepts. You know, who am I to judge? I don't know, so for example, the Maori when they witness cannibalism, or everybody gets very upset about the Tahitians for stealing knives and tools and bedlining. And he tries to keep an open mind. So I think he's very, very unusual. And you will be hard-pressed to find a lot of travelers across the past who traveled with such an open mind and who have this willingness to really understand and who are not idealizing nor demonizing. And I think that's the important thing because you have someone like Rousseau, for example, who comes up with this, you know, idealized image of the peaceful, noble savage, you know, the the the man in its in his natural state, who in his natural state who is unaffected by civilization and therefore good. And the more we are become civilized, the more immoral we become. Those are the ones who idealize, and then you have the ones who demonize, who basically describe indigenous people as half humans or half-animal. And George Foster does neither. And and so he does neither. And I think that is incredibly unusual, especially at a time when racism is deeply steeped in Western society.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it was lovely to read all the anecdotes about how he could infer merit on what was totally unusual behavior from the standards and experiences of his time in these people, and and even go further than just infer the merit, but uh draw the conclusion that it was in fact better judgment than how they behaved. And you could you could just tell, like, I really liked George. He had this inst in he had this in incessant curiosity, clearly quite a lot of energy, it felt like quite a lot of optimism as well. Can you imagine having a father like that and to have to travel with him for years, to be constantly embarrassed by him? Um But the point was George is rather tacking on to the end of your statement that there was something special about him in the fact that he was so curious and non-judgmental and slow to form an opinion, it's looked like.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. He's uh non-judgmental. I think that's the that's a very good characteristic of him. He is someone who by traveling he learns that everybody's the same. And there's a very telling example. So when he is a child of the Enlightenment when he arrives. So when they arrive in New Zealand in um Dusky Sound for the first time, so this is after four months in the kind of icy polar seas of Antarctica, the ship is battered, and Cook, as they anchor, sets up all these workshops at shore. So you have the carpenter, the sailmaker. So there's the sound of you know, busyness everywhere, echoing through the forests, and saws and hammers, and and George Foster looks at it through absolutely through the lens of the Enlightenment, which is, you know, where progress is the kind of big buzzword. And he says, look at this, we bring art and industry to these savages. And then six weeks later, when they are in Queen Charlotte Sound at the northern tip of the South Island, he completely changed. Like what he writes is completely different because he's spent the last six weeks with the Maori and he's spoken to them, and he's kind of learned some bit of their languages, and he understands suddenly what hold on a second, these are not barbarians, and we will not bring progress to them. Quite the opposite. We will bring death and disease to them. And he changes so quickly, it is unbelievable. Just within these six weeks, he then says, I wish the intercourse between the Europeans and the South Sea Islanders would have never happened because it, you know, it's not good for them. It's you know, it's just bringing death and disease to them. So it completely changed direction because he understands, having spent six weeks with them, that they're human beings and that they have exactly the same right to dignity, freedom, and equality. And I think that's that's what traveling can do to you if you keep an open mind. You can actually learn something about the world. And he is the, you know, I think one of the greatest examples of that.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so he is this tremendous fellow, and he traveled the world with James Cook, which anyone in Australia, New Zealand will know who that is. Um, but he died in absolute squalor at 39 years old, I think. And with not only no money and failure around him, but his reputation in absolute tatters. So was his was his reputation ever rebilitated, or is this actually the first time in 200 years that a glowing profile of this person has been presented?

SPEAKER_02

No, it has happened before, at least in Germany. So in the in the late 1950s, East German historians basically rediscovered George Foster. So until then, he's really written out of history because he committed, you know, he was accused of treason, he initiated a German republic, which was obviously not popular in uh in the German states at the end of the 18th century. Yes. Well, he co-founded the first German Republic, which was very short-lived, but you know, he's the co-founder. He was the vice president of this republic. So he's written out of history. He's written out of history in Britain because a German who, you know, criticized British imperialism was never going to be very popular. But in Germany, he gets rediscovered in the late 90s by East German historians, but mostly for his role as a revolutionary in this short-lived Mainz Republic. They're not that interested in his voyages. Um and so we know about him, but very, very few people actually know him or know about him. So there are few academics who know about him. He's when I I mean, it was already with Alexander von Humboldt like this, when I told fairly educated people, I'm writing a book about Alexander von Humboldt, they'd go like, Who's that? And I'll go, like, well, Humboldt Karen, for example, have you heard of this?

SPEAKER_00

Um and George Forster's like one of the most brilliant men of history.

SPEAKER_02

Exactly. But George Forster is even more forgotten than Alexander von Humboldt. And I think one of the reasons is that he dies when he's very young. So he, as you say, he dies when he's 39. And if you look at Alexander von Humboldt, his most important works he wrote after he was 39. And Humboldt himself, who was a great admirer of George Forster, he said had Forster lived a longer life, he would have been much more famous. Um, and it would have I think the his legacy would have been more lasting than it in the end was. But I, you know, I I do love a forgotten hero. It's much more fun to write about someone who's been forgotten than someone everybody has heard about. So I think what I'm really trying to do with this book is to put Foster back on the, you know, pedestal really where he belongs in this in the temple of nature, science and ethnography. Is and I'm not saying that he's this god we should worship. You know, he has his flaws and his mistakes and he m misjudges situations. But he is a I mean, he he his attitude really shines out of the darkness of colonial history. And we tend to say that bigotry and racism was almost inevitable in the 18th century. That's just how people thought. But I think George Forster's life is really the proof that it is it was a choice, just as it still is a choice. It is not an unavoidable way of seeing the world. To be r a racist is a choice. And even in the late 18th century, when a lot of people around you were racist, you still made a choice to follow their lead or to think differently, and he thought differently.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that he did. Um and Humboldt dedicates a rather writes quite a nice dedication to Foster at one stage. And we don't have to go into who Alexander Humboldt was. There is a book for that, The Invention of Nature. But uh, do you know how much uh George's worldview, and not necessarily an education in the sciences, but his his the moral glasses through which he viewed the world and his enormous curiosity and his kindness, if we can infer that you know he was a really kind man. Do you know how much of that imprinted onto Humboldt as well? Is there a way for you to know?

SPEAKER_02

Yes, because Homer writes about it. So Humboldt is 15 years younger than Foster. And um, as a young boy, he reads Foster's book, A Voyage Round the World, which is Foster's account of the voyage on the resolution. And it's a it's a beautiful book. As I said earlier, he he's a born storyteller. So it's a his language is evocative and sensual and lively. And as you leave through the pages, you it's almost like you can hear the kind of haunting creaks of icebergs, you can hear the music that the Tahitians play. So it's he really is a born storyteller and an intuitive ethnographer, so the way he describes Polynesian culture. So Humboldt says that it was these descriptions of these distant places that kind of created in him the longing to travel to distant places, that fanvy we talked about earlier. So he says again and again, and he doesn't only say it once, he says it and he writes about it, that George Foster is the reason why he went on his own five-year exploration of South America. But it's not only that, because Foster and Humboldt traveled together through Europe in 1790 for four months. And Humboldt said that as they were traveling, he would see what they are seeing through Foster's eyes. And Foster has this so he sees humankind as this interconnected web. This kind of you know, the the the the the world Is not divided into virtuous and immoral, but is this complex tapestry woven from all the shades of human lives and experiences. And that really becomes important for Humboldt's way of seeing nature. So just as George Foster sees how humans all hang together, this is how Alexander von Humboldt understands how nature all hangs together. So he is quite formative, I think, for Humboldt. And Humboldt says this again and again: how important Foster was. Also in guiding his ideas about or his political thinking. They traveled together to Paris in July 1790. So this is a this is just before the first anniversary of the storming of the Basti. And they see how all the French people are working together to build this kind of huge amphitheatre for the first anniversary celebrations. And they help, they're kind of cart some sand. These are kind of these earthenwork amphitheatres. And and Humboldt is very much influenced by the French Revolution and believes in the ideals of the French um revolution. And that is something that he sees through the eyes of George Forster, who is a fervent supporter of the French Revolution, so much so that he establishes a German republic. So I think we cannot underestimate the importance of George Forster on Humboldt.

SPEAKER_00

And s speaking of maybe the moral character of some of these great explorers, because there's copious amounts of stories of explorers then even almost through to today, where the reason why they're going someone, the reason why they're going somewhere is to extract treasure or dominate influence. Because this is a man who I have obviously heard of. I'm an Australian. I've never read any books about him. I've never listened to anything actually about him, never watched any documentaries about him. And I just was under the impression he's another one of these Columbus types. I knew he probably wasn't as brutal. I know that the way the treatment of the Aboriginal people was was not akin to the treatment of a lot of other indigenous races that Europeans stumbled upon 200 years, 250 years ago. But all that being said, was where do you put James into this into this tapestry from a moral perspective, alongside your heroes of Humboldt and Forster?

SPEAKER_02

Well, James Cook is definitely in the spectrum of explorers of that time, certainly more open-minded and less brutal. Certainly. But that does not mean that no firearms were used. Cook very clearly says that the power of firearms shows the indigenous people our power. So that's what they do. And during the second resolution voyage, second voyage, there are several islanders that are wounded and that are killed. So that you know that is very, very, very clear.

SPEAKER_00

But it sorry to interrupt you there, Andrea, but it came across as if he it was a display of force to diminish tensions, not necessarily the wanton killing because this is a savage and we can do with him what we will.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. And and Cook is is um always so if anyone gets wounded or killed on purpose by the crew, he punishes the crew. So he he tries to be even-handed there. And he he will try, you know, he will punish the crew for stealing, for example, just as he will punish the Tahitians for stealing. What Cook doesn't do, what George Foster, for example, does, is the to try to understand that maybe the concept of property might be different in Tahiti to European concepts of property. And that's why they what Cook thinks what they're doing is stealing, is maybe not stealing for them. And Foster has a more open mind there. But Cook tries to, you know, he tries to understand, he tries to be even-handed. I mean, he still is obviously a European with all his preconceived ideas, but he is not, he doesn't, he doesn't normally arrive and thinks these are all barbarians. He does not think that. He tries to be a bit more even-handed. But he also gets furious and upset and he kind of overreacts sometimes. But on the whole, for example, so Forster's father is also traveling with them, and Reinhold Forster is a very tempestuous, difficult man. And unlikable. Yeah, very unlikable. He's a great he was a great person to write about, though. So so George Forster, so the younger Forster, does when he sees his father and Cook together, you get a sense of that he admires Cook's calm and more peaceful nature very much over his father's kind of difficult, difficult personality.

SPEAKER_00

I I got the feeling that Cook was just like a savant of the seas. It was for the love of the ship and the exploration. That's what he was in it for. Not necessarily to to just blow his legacy all over the world about this is now called my land and my land and this is for the king and look how rich we're gonna be and all the rest. Which does endear me a little bit more to him.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, he is, I mean, as I said, uh of the many explorers, he is definitely on the kind of better side of things. And he is a he's a very calm commander, also, you know, it's quite unflappable, which certainly helps in these situations. And there are moments, for example, when they are on a small island and they arrive and there are lots of warriors and there's shooting and there's fighting, and then in the end he withdraws and he decides that you know there's there's no way we can we can you know stay on this island without bloodshed and it's not worth it. So he also understands his limitations, I think. And he's you know, he's a he's a very fair captain who tries to treat his crew not with brutality. So he's and he's a scientist. I mean he really is a scientist. I mean his observations, his scientific observations, his calculations are so precise. If you think about it, I mean they went to he went to Tahiti in 17 um in 1769 to measure the transit of Venus on his first voyage. And then four years later, on the second voyage, he sails from New Zealand to Tahiti, quite a distance, as we all know, and he finds it. I mean, this is how precise his his measurements and calculations are. I mean, it's a it's the it's a it's I mean he's a masterful navigator at 100%.

SPEAKER_00

What do you make there for of his legacy today in Australia and New Zealand?

SPEAKER_02

Well, I mean, I don't live in Australia. I just kind of saw that his I'm not quite sure if his statues have been pulled down, but they've d certainly been there's been like stuff thrown at them, no? I mean, for a long time he was this Yeah, so he's kind of celebrated as the kind of discoverer of Australia, which, you know, to me I find it a bit odd because, you know, Yeah, the Dutch were in the 1500s, right? Yeah, but you know, it's a bit like when I went to Tahiti. I just arrived, uh I arrived in March, and they had they were celebrating, I mean, it's a national holiday, the arrival the arrivals of the missionaries. And I was I I was well surprised about that because I thought like, wow, they kind of pretty much destroyed Polynesian culture on Tahiti, and it's a national holiday.

SPEAKER_00

Um, it takes on a different meaning though. You know, why why do we celebrate so many of the traditions we do? It's an excuse to drink and eat good food and have a day off work. I I don't know if you're actually celebrating the arrival of the missionaries. But a little bit more on the legacy of James Cook question, because the there there is a stark difference between the relationship the English settlers have with the indigenous um cultures of both Australia and New Zealand. Uh New Zealand feels it's much more respected and incorporated into not only the political tapestry of the country, but as well the cultural tapestry. Whereas it's quite desolate in Australia. Um it it it's become like a it feels like rather it's a it's a token ornament, but there's no real meaning underneath it.

SPEAKER_02

Well, I you know, I think the thing is this, you know, I think James Cook genuinely did not sail to lay claim on lands. I mean, that was part of his mission, but that's not you know what he was really interested in. He was he was interested in, for example, on that second voyage to find the fabled southern continent because scientists believed that there should be one to counterbalance the land in the northern hemisphere.

SPEAKER_00

Awesome. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Of course, of course, why I mean, I think for Cook it was really the scientific discovery. But of course, once you find this southern continent, what do the British want to do with that? Of course they want to exploit it. You know, there might be treasures there, um, there might be kind of valuable plants there, there might be important minerals or spices there. So that's the reason why they went across the world. And of course, there are always some people on board of these ships, like George Foster or Cook, who are also deeply curious and interested, and who are not interested in these, I don't know, riches that will come along with that. But they're still part, and we have to acknowledge that, they're still part of a very imperial expedition. That's what they do. And then there are some of them, there are some of them who will make something different out of it, such as George Forster, who who returns and says, Well, actually, all humans are equal. That's what he comes home with. This is this, you know, this is the treasure he brings back, is the understanding that all humans are one species, which is not what everybody thought at that time.

SPEAKER_00

And it is, it is uh an inevitability once this type of exploration does start happening, but that is the slow decline, the beginning of the slow decline of the homogene homogeneity of uh so many of our cultures and so many of our experiences. Um, the things we interface with, the way we look and the way we dress, and kind of broadly the way we think. And it is it is such a I feel at least, it's a tremendous loss that I can't jump on, whether it be a plane or a boat, who knows, and go over to Fiji and have a genuine experience, despite the risk of it all, you know. Um, but um, Andre. There's a uh quite a lot of Swedes that make their way into the book. And I believe they feature in von Humboldt's work as well. So where did the Swedes come into this as contributors in the global exploration?

SPEAKER_02

Well, I think when you live in a small land in Scandinavia in the northern hemisphere, your fanvy, your longing for the distance might be quite big. Uh, I think that's one reason. But I think it has a lot to do with Karl Ineos, with the famous Swedish botanist who set out to order nature by imposing a classification system on it. And he had all these apostles who they were really caught like that, who would venture out into the world and collect plants and then send them back to him so that he could name the world, literally. So they kind of pop up everywhere, really. If you write about naturalists, you're bound to kind of in the 18th century, you're bound to come across a Swedish person. So in this case, it is a Swedish botanist, Anders Sparmann, who is in South Africa at the time when the resolution anchors there. And um he is clearly a man with a liking for adventure, so he offers his services. And uh Reinhardt Foster thinks, I could do with another assistant botanist, and he pays him. So he joins the he joins the um the resolution. I rather liked him. He's he's this guy who he clearly loved food. So he would turn everything he sees into some kind of food-related kind of image. Even when they when they're in Antarctica, and um I mean they're spending four months in the kind of uh labyrinth of icebergs, and it's freezing cold. Um, the rigging is kind of frozen stiff, the sails are as cook says like metal plates, the temperature in the cabins is only kind of like I think two degrees warmer than outside. They wear woollen clothes, it's wet. I mean, it's just absolutely miserable. They have no fresh food, they eat like weevil-infested biscuits and muggets in their peas. But he sees the um the um the icicles on the rope, and then he turns that into, you know, this looks like sugar confectioner our bakers kind of make. And you think that wow, you know, I mean, he's just maybe it's because he's so hungry that he just sees all the time. When they see birds, I mean, this is a naturalist, I mean he's a botanist, but still, you know, he immediately where the others describe them, he goes like, ooh, and they made a really nice um pie. So he just, you know, they were like they're fat and juicy. So he just sees food everywhere. He was a fun person to write about. And he becomes George Foster's friend. They are kind of they're not exactly the same age. I mean, George Foster was very, very young. He was 17 when he joined the resolution. Um, and Anders Sparman is in his early 20s, but they they get on really well and they continue after the resolution voyage also to to write to each other.

SPEAKER_00

Well, George, he he seemed to be such a polyglot. Do you know if this is just a god-given well not god-given, but is this just a born with talent? Or did he was there something particularly studious about him? Or was it just unusual? It's like a feature of his personality.

SPEAKER_02

I I think he's a bit of a Wunderkind who really picks up languages as easily as some scientific concepts. And we have some rather wonderful descriptions of his early childhood where he well, he loved being outside and he would always pick up everything, like beetles and little um like bits of leaves and acorns and stuff like that. And he always wanted to know what is that and what is that, and he asked so much that his father in the end um bought one of Carlinos' natural history books so that he could actually identify all the things his little boy was finding. And so so he he begins. So George at a very young age trains almost himself to be a botanist, and he learns he learns reading and writing very early, but he just looks at his the books his father has in his study, and he he teaches himself to read by just reading the kind of the titles on the spine. But by the a by the time he's ten, he's a botanist. I mean he literally is a botanist. So he accompanies his father on this wild expedition through Russia at the age of ten as the botanist. That is his job. He he collects plants, he presses them, he identifies them and he describes them. So I think to come back to your question, I think he is a particularly bright child and human being. Um he is and the the way he picks up languages, for example, so he learns English on the sea voyage from St. Petersburg to London. That's when he and so by the time they arrive in London, he speaks English. And then six months later, he translates a Russian history book into English at the age of twelve. So he is he's very he's very, very, very good with languages.

SPEAKER_00

Wundegan stuff for sure. It's a shame we never got to see what he made of the Aboriginal people of Australia, to have interacted with them and to be able to draw whatever his big um big ethnographic conclusions might be for why the Maoris are so distinctly different: culture, the way they look, their traditions to the Aboriginals, despite them being relatively small distance apart. Obviously, back then it's a huge distance, but nonetheless, because he's seeing this similar expression of a tip type of humanity across all the Pacific Islands. Little does he know the enormous efforts that all the Polynesians went through to get to those various islands, but to have then gone over to Australia and noticed these stark differences, it just would have been amazing to have seen that observation.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. They never went to Australia, so he couldn't. But he was, I mean, since you're talking about this, he I mean, he was an incredibly Prussian scientist. So what he does is so as they travel through the South Pacific to all these different islands, he looks at the distribution of language, he compares the different languages, but he also looks at the distribution of the breadfruit tree, which I think is really fascinating. And from that, he develops a theory of Polynesian migration that, as we know today, is correct. So he doesn't know the dates, but he knows the kind of rough movement, which is pretty extraordinary. So he what he does is he sees or he eats breadfruit trees on many of the islands, and he notices that none of them have seeds, and he can't see a single wild specimen, which means that they could only have been cultivated by humans, by cuttings. That makes him wonder well, where do they come from? Why why are there these breadfruit trees, which are clearly not here in the wild? And then when they return to Europe, he looks through botanical volumes and he discovers that there are wild breadfruit trees with seeds in Indonesia and in the Philippines. And for him, there are two conclusions to draw out of this. One, Polynesian ancestors must have brought breadfruit trees, cuttings or seeds, from Indonesia across the South Pacific. So that's the Polynesian migration. And he also says it means that they have very sophisticated agricultural methods because it's basically selective breeding. So what we've done in Europe with wheat, they've done with the breadfruit who they've turned the small seeded breadfruit into the kind of large, you know, very nourishing big cr that the Polynesians grow on the South Pacific Islands, which is without seeds. And I that's just an shows you what kind of mind he has. So he looks at something that is kind of on the first side a botanical issue, the breadfruit tree, but he spins from that a cultural theory of Polynesian migration. Yeah, no, it's it's enormous.

SPEAKER_00

And then further down the reasoning would have been the appreciation for the the canoes that these people were traveling on when George has been over these waters on the big ship and noticed the distances are incomprehensibly large and just so much more impressive. And then I imagine because he's thinking in this manner, he has a lot more respect across the various people that he is meeting. Because he realizes like, you know, they do some things much better than we do some things.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, and he sees, you know, he understands that. So, okay, so they crossed an ocean with these canoes, they must be masterful navigators. Um I mean, Cook already knew that when on the Endeavour they had uh Topaya with them, who's from Rayatea, so in today's French Polynesia, who not only you know helped them to interpret different languages, because of course the languages were similar. So Topaya, who's from Rayatea, was able to communicate with the Maoris in New Zealand because the languages were so similar. But he was also a master navigator who told them where different islands were. So I think it is very clear for Cook, but obviously also for Foster, that there are some very sophisticated methods and cultures in these in the South Pacific. These are not savages or barbarians.

SPEAKER_00

Brutes and savages, yeah. Like they were treated. So what about religion? Obviously, it's it's a moment in history. People are religious, they believe in some denomination of Jesus and God. But so a detail that stood out to me in the book, which I uh Had no idea of was the sort of founding myths that the Maoris, or maybe this particular tribe of Maoris that we were writing about at the time, believed. And it was very it reminded me so much of the Norse mythology. Basically, there are a couple of gods, and from their bodies, actually, the earth is expressed. And you're essentially living on the body of this uh of this person. So it made me think George is a really smart guy. He's a naturalist. He's been by this time, I think everyone's been evolution-pilled, right? Darwin's done the big book. Is that the case? No. Nope.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, sorry.

SPEAKER_00

Darwin is nature.

unknown

Okay.

SPEAKER_00

Pretty darn. Well then scratch Darwin. But nonetheless, he's observing nature and he's observing a lot of different outcomes in people. And he must start questioning this book, which has very few people in mind in the way that it's presented. And now he presumably would have studied various religions around the world, perhaps understood what the Norse believed, the Scandinavian countries, of which he's met many of them, who will probably speak proudly of their origin and their history. And then he hears this story from the Southern cultures. Did you, is it possible to glean in your research George starting to form a more form his worldview around what he believes religiously and how that influences the way that he behaves with people as well?

SPEAKER_02

That's a really interesting question. So I think one thing to say first is that we now know the Maori cosmos or the Tahitian cosmos, but George Foster didn't. So what he understands is that they have that they believe in gods and spirits and that they have several, not just one. But he does and he understands that certain things or animals, rocks, birds, that they can be sacred for the Polynesians. But he doesn't understand, for example, the kind of the layers of heaven or something like that. So he he really doesn't. So we have to be very careful not to kind of assume with hindsight that he knew that. Um he is the son of a Lutheran priest, so his father is a Lutheran priest, and he um and he, as far as I know, continues believing in God for the rest of his life. It goes through different iterations. So there's a there's a moment after the return when he's in his early 30s, when he lives in one of the German states where he becomes for a few years a member of the so-called Rosicrucians, which is a secret brotherhood closely related to the Freemasons, but also so there on the one hand, they are alchemists who are trying to turn base metals into gold, but they also believe that there is that that God is in nature, nature is God, and that science helps us to understand the divine, the God in nature. But then he becomes very disillusioned with that and he uh turns away from it. And there there are moments later when he calls the Bible a um a book of an oriental fantasy. So he I think he always believes in a divine force in nature, and he started off with you know being a Protestant, but he does become illusioned. But he does not I don't think it's because he's talking to others about their different belief systems. I think it's something that is his own delusionment after disillusion after after the experience with the Rosicrucians.

SPEAKER_00

It makes sense. A guy as curious as that, uh you think over a long enough timeline he's inevitably going to start questioning these stories, which he's seen so much contradictory evidence for. When you say uh he he said it was a book of the Orient, is he is the Middle East the Orient in his world? Or is the Orient always been China? Okay.

SPEAKER_02

No, I think it's the Middle East for him.

SPEAKER_00

Uh today, the great explorers. Because we don't have a cook, we don't have a um a Magellan, we have yourself, and we have David Grant, and we have wonderful authors who are sort of bringing this world back to us. But do we have modern explorers anymore?

SPEAKER_02

Oh my god, I d I think it's a really, really difficult question. I think some of the there are some of the scientists who are going deep into the ocean, maybe. Um I mean, we know less of the deep ocean than we know of space. Um so so maybe them. Um but I think it's also there's a lot of explorations in your mind, maybe.

SPEAKER_00

Um I think that's you're assuming the premise there is that exploration needs to be discovery, which isn't the case. So it's not about places we haven't been, like the bottom of the ocean and so forth. Okay. Or even going to the moon.

SPEAKER_02

Well, um I think I find it very, very difficult to find someone in modern times to do something like this because we live in such different times, and I think the, you know, these these men were all polymath. I mean, George Foster was a real polymath, just as um Alexander von Humboldt was a polymath. And and it's obviously much harder today to keep all these kind of different disciplines in your head because knowledge has expanded so exponentially. So I find I've I find it I find it difficult. I always thought Eo Wilson was kind of a mind like this, but he's obviously not alive anymore. But someone who ostensibly looked at ants and then could spin a whole world from that. So yeah, I I don't know if I can answer your question in a in a really meaningful way.

SPEAKER_00

We'll help you answer it. If George were 20 today, same character, same capacity as an individual, what would he be doing?

SPEAKER_01

Um I'm sure he would not be interested in AI.

SPEAKER_02

That I can tell you. I don't know. I honestly I tell you, I find these questions really, really, really hard because it means that you have to put a person into another time. You need to be a novelist to be to be doing that, not a non-fiction writer, because that's time traveling, that just doesn't exist in reality. So I find it really, really hard to imagine. You know, it's the it's the same when people say, like, what would Humboldt say about the climate crisis today? No, no. I don't know. I mean, I know that he was a really into technology, so maybe he would have liked the internet. I think they all they I think they all would have certainly enjoyed how easy communication is, how easy you can ax have access to knowledge. I mean they they you know, George Foster was completely broke by the end of his life because he spent so much money on books. It would be cheaper today that I know. Yeah. But again, I don't think I can answer this question in any kind of thrilling or exciting way.

SPEAKER_00

No problem. Uh, before I finish off with the last two questions I like to ask, uh was there something from this story or about the process of writing the book that you think would be worth discussing that I didn't mention?

SPEAKER_02

Maybe his relationship with his wife, Therese, because I think that shows again how he different he was to other men of his time. So he's um I mean, today I think he'd be called a feminist. No, he when he's someone who really, really believes in the equality between men and women. So he doesn't not just believe in the equality across humans, but also men and women. He is he's a proud father of daughters. When all his friends write to him, like, Oh, I'm so sorry you didn't have a son, he's like, Why? I can educate my girls just as I could educate a son. And he accepts his wife's numerous affairs. So it's a it's so Theresa is this the daughter of a celebrated German scholar, she's educated, she strong-minded, she's wild, she's free-spirited, and she has this great love for books, but also for men, which turns out to be a bit of a disaster for the for the marriage. So it's this very unhappy marriage, and it's and it's really quite tragic to see because George really loves her deeply. And so she has these affairs, and then she ends up in the end, she has an affair with one of his friends, and she has two children with him, which George accepts as his children. And in the end, she kind of asks for divorce. So it's this, you know, I when I started this book, I was so looking forward writing about Theresa because she, you know, she's a fabulous character, but she turned out to be quite a mean-spirited person who also rewrote history. She she destroyed, as she says herself, a laundry basket full of letters. Letters which insinuate that she wanted a divorce, a separation, that she had affairs. I mean, luckily, luckily, George Foster wrote letters to many people, so we know exactly what happened because she couldn't destroy all these, all these letters. And and he's um, I mean, his letters, I think I've never in my entire career as a historian have encountered letters like this. So he has a there are kind of raw emotions on the page. He's so open about his feelings, and there's an immediacy and directness to his words that is very, very, very unusual. So it allowed me to write a book where I'm, I mean, I it's almost like I'm in his head. Very different to Alexander von Humboldt. Alexander von Humboldt writes very rarely something personal in his letters, and it's you know, it's mostly about his science. So it's it was much, much harder to kind of grasp him as a as a man. And in Foster's case, that is completely different because he's so honest with himself and the wider world around him. So that was um, that was quite something. And he writes a lot, and he has a lot of diary entries in in which he describes, you know, all the attention he gets when he's this kind of young explorer coming back, and you know, all the women want to kind of hang out with him and dance with him, and and he, you know, he writes about his champagne headaches and and you know, just the parties he's going to, and it's just so much joy. But then he also will write to friends how miserable he is, how unhappy he is, um, how how he feels about Theresa, how he feels about his terrible father. So you really get to know him in a very, very different way than normally.

SPEAKER_00

Wow. I I I didn't I didn't glean all of that from it. Did he did he sympathize with his mother? Could he put himself in the shoes of just how awfully difficult her life would have been?

SPEAKER_02

We know very, very little about the mother, sadly. We do know that she must have been a very patient woman for being married to Reinhold, who leaves her for years on end. Like with six children, she has to convert.

SPEAKER_00

She had seven kids in nine years.

SPEAKER_02

Unboke. Exactly. And and Reinhold only seems to be interested in his older son, George. There are a few men so we don't have we have only two letters that George writes to his mother. So those letters somehow got all lost. Sometimes he mentions her in a letter to his father, and he'll go, like, you know, how is mother? Is she is she okay? So he cares for her. Um he feels very, very guilty when he leaves England when he's 23. He feels very guilty leaving his siblings and his mother with his father. So he cares for them, but we don't know much about the mother, sadly. But I'm sure that some of George's kindness must have come from his mother's side because it can't have come from his father's side.

SPEAKER_00

Um I I I used to ask, I there are two questions I ask every guest. Rather, there's one question every guest. And I think it must have been years since I last asked this, because so many of my early guests were themselves some type of investigative journalist or uh written a book about a historian or an explor or an explorer. And so this made a lot more sense. But it just came back to me. I really need to ask you because I think you'll get a kick out of it potentially. Uh the premises is that you can witness a conversation. You don't partake, you just get to watch. Any two people of history, any language barrier doesn't matter at all. Who are the two people?

SPEAKER_02

I think it has to be George Foster and Alexander van Humboldt as they traveled through Europe. Um, those two utterly brilliant minds together in a carriage, you know, driving through, say, Holland or something like that. Or driving through no, driving through revolutionary France. Exactly. That's it. So Humboldt and Foster together in a carriage, driving through revolutionary France, seeing all these people um on the streets shouting like vive la république. Um, and then I want to know what how they how they discuss this. Definitely, I would love that.

SPEAKER_00

Finally, Andrea, what is the role that serendipity has played in your life?

SPEAKER_02

Everything. I mean, serendipity I think is one of my all-time favorite words. Um I think it is so important how um stuff happens to you, but then also how you grasp what serendipity throws um into your way. So I um I mean serendipity while I'm in London, for example, you know, I'm I was brought up in Germany, but I have a very good friend who lives in London, and she basically one day just said, like, you know, s come and stay in my house while I'm away. And and I I was a single mom, I had a six-year-old daughter, and I was just like, why not? And you know, had I not done that, I would have never become a writer. Because I I became a writer because English is such a writerly language. I would have never, ever, ever become a writer in Germany. Never. I mean, I write in English and someone else has to translate it into German, and I never really liked it from a translation. So yeah, I think serendipity is incredibly important.

SPEAKER_00

Story. I've asked that now, I guess, yeah, 300 times, and uh I love it that it's one of your favorite words. A lot of the times I have to explain what serendipity means. But that's a a brilliant example. Yeah. Just because it, you know, I mean, beside the point. But yeah, look, I loved the Humboldt book. You know how often I was writing to you to try and interview about that several years ago. Um, but as well, the George Foster book, it's called The Traveler, I believe, right?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah. Uh but as well, The Traveler. Just uh an an awesome way to romanticize exploration without feeling guilty about it. So I really enjoyed it. And thank you so much for uh giving me your time as well.

SPEAKER_02

Thank you. It was a pleasure.