Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World
Forster, a former pastor who had become a Fellow of the Royal Society after writing several papers on natural history, and his son Georg had accompanied James Cook as naturalists on board of HMS Resolution.
On the other hand, it was dismissed by Forster's opponent William Wales and the later Cook scholar John Beaglehole, and for a long time was not given much recognition.
As a book containing results obtained after first hand observation, geographers including David Stoddart more recently considered it among the first works of modern geography.
[3] On the 4,000 km (2,500 mi) journey, he was accompanied by his ten-year old son Georg Forster, who helped his father collect, name and identify hundreds of species of plants.
[5] They then moved to England, where Forster wrote a paper on the natural history of the Volga region, which was presented to the Royal Society, and obtained a teaching position at Warrington Academy in June 1767.
On this voyage on board of HMS Resolution, they circumnavigated the world, crossing the Antarctic Circle for the first time in history, and discovered and visited many islands, especially in the South Pacific Ocean.
He also expected, based on pre-voyage promises made by Daines Barrington, the Vice President of the Royal Society, to write the official account of the voyage, which was likely to sell well and bring a large financial reward.
[14][15] After the efforts to write a narrative had fallen through, Forster started working on Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World, now as a separate publication.
[32] The book received praise in contemporary reviews, and was recognised by German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and philosopher Immanuel Kant for its influence on modern geography and ethnology.
About Forster and his Observations regarding the South Pacific, he wrote in his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man [de]:[34] "The Ulysses of these regions, Reinhold Forster, has given us such a learned and intelligent account of the species and varieties of the human race in them, that we cannot but wish we had similar materials for a philosophico-physical geography of other parts of the world, as foundations for a history of man.
"[41] The author of the only scholarly biography of Forster and editor of his journal from the Resolution journey, Michael Hoare, called the book "one of the first modern works to attempt to incorporate the totality of phenomena into a single, if tentative, system"[42]—a characterisation shared by the historian Anne Mariss[43]—and also "the most important systematic contribution to modern geography before Humboldt's Cosmos".
