Аннотация

Author Ina Seidel poetically dramatizes the life of 18th century German explorer George Forster. Destined to grow up a distinguished man of science who, while little more than a boy, accompanied that great seaman, Captain Cook (with what a bold, masterly brush is his portrait, in his rather stolid, but inspiring incorruptibility, outlined) through the heat of the tropics and the everlasting ice of the Polar Seas, this little lad’s, George’s, soul had, by dint of his joyless, unnatural upbringing, suffered some kink that never smoothed out in later life and was, no doubt, the true cause of his subsequent misfortunes, because he had lost faith in himself. But here and there—just as on dull days the clouds may, of a sudden, lift for a minute or two, a sunbeam flash, a blackbird pipe—the poet allows him little respites, all the more heartrending by contrast, when he gives his inexorable father the slip and at his mother’s hands, finds what a little boy of this sort needs most, play, sleep, and love, a great deal of love.

Johann George Adam Forster was a German naturalist, ethnologist, travel writer, journalist and revolutionary. At an early age, he accompanied his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, on several scientific expeditions, including James Cook's second voyage to the Pacific. His report of that journey, A Voyage Round the World, contributed significantly to the ethnology of the people of Polynesia and remains a respected work. As a result of the report, Forster, who was admitted to the Royal Society at the early age of twenty-two, came to be considered one of the founders of modern scientific travel literature.