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)
- The Fernweh thread — the ache for the distance that opens this episode is the same force behind Tim Cope's 10,000km ride in the shadow of Genghis Khan, Robyn Davidson's camel trek and life of nomadism, Colin Thubron's half-century of crossing borders, Levison Wood's life in adventure and Chris Arnade walking the world.
- Why we travel at all — Andrea's distinction between slow travel in an explorer's footsteps and photo-stop tourism picks up exactly where Ash Bhardwaj's 'Why We Travel' left off.
- The forgotten traveller — Forster joins James Holman, the Blind Traveller, in the catalogue's gallery of history's misplaced adventurers, from the Bryan Bashin episode.
- The great explorers — Cook, Columbus and the moral spectrum of the age of exploration, ground first surveyed with Scott Rank on the great and famous explorers of history.
- Colonial reckoning — Cook's contested legacy and the darkness Forster's attitude shines out of run straight back to Adam Hochschild on King Leopold's Ghost and Tim Butcher's Blood River journey through the Congo.
- Narrative non-fiction masters — Andrea name-checked alongside David Grann, the GOAT of narrative non-fiction, in the conversation itself.
- The serendipity question — asked now some 300 times, a thread first unspooled with Christian Busch on inviting serendipity into your life.
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...
