The Traveler: One Man’s Epic Quest to Discover Our Shared Humanity

Bestselling historian Wulf (Magnificent Rebels) offers a revelatory biography of the little remembered but brilliant polymath and naturalist George Forster, presenting him as a “thinker far ahead of his time.” Born in 1754 into an Enlightenment-era Europe fired by “the conviction that they could control nature,” by age 19 Forster was the “assistant naturalist” aboard Captain Cook’s Resolution. What distinguishes his writings of this period, Wulf notes, was his growing horror at his shipmates’ abusive treatment of the Indigenous people they encountered and his rejection of the idea of European dominion over the natural world and Indigenous people. Forster went on to be among the first Europeans “to talk about what we now call human rights,” Wulf writes, eventually becoming an influential proponent of the French Revolution during his later years, when, working as a librarian in Germany, he devoted himself to publishing books and reviews arguing for the scientific validity of egalitarian politics. In a narrative that reads partly like a scientific adventure story, partly like a revolutionary bildungsroman, Wulf traces Forster’s mental journey—drawing on his published works and private diaries and letters—as well as his literal journey, following his path throughout Europe and the South Pacific, trying to imagine the world from his perspective as “a crosser of borders, a dreamer of worlds” who was able to see “the connections rather than divisions.” Readers will be rapt by this immersive recreation of an intellectual awakening. (June)