Introduction: Romantic Writing and Ecological Knowledge

Abstract

George Forster’s voyage around the world (1777/1782) became a classic of early German Romanticism in part because it provided a compendium of novel ecological knowledge. Readers including Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt were captivated by the youthful author’s enthusiastic depiction of sites from the voyage of HMS Resolution (1772–1775), which included numerous scenes of first contact. In 1774, Captain Cook’s ship anchored off several islands in Vanuatu (New Hebrides) and New Caledonia that had not been noted by earlier European voyagers, allowing Forster and his naturalist father, Johann Reinhold, time to investigate the unfamiliar ecologies of these islands. The longest chapter of the Voyage documents their two-week stay on Tanna (Vanuatu). The active volcano on this island offered them the chance to collect more evidence for their evolving hypothesis that all the islands in the South Pacific were of volcanic origin. The island’s people, however, deliberately led them astray each time they sought to approach the smoking crater of Mount Yasur. The Forsters were not happy about this, but their grudging acknowledgment of the indigenous intervention conveys two key points of traditional ecological knowledge concerning the volcano. First, the Tannese had good reasons for respecting the crater of their active volcano. Second, they understood that the same volcano fed the vents appearing elsewhere on the island that the European naturalists were attempting to probe with their trowels and thermometer, warning them that these volcanic vents “would take fire, and resemble the volcano, which they called an assoòr.” Regarding this ecological episode and many others like