In August 1772, a little more than a month into Capt. Cook's second voyage around the world, Cook's men noticed that a small bird was following them: Hirundo rustica, commonly known as the barn swallow. In the confused swallow's mind, HMS Resolution had become land, and the bird could not be persuaded otherwise. At night, it would roost in one of the gun ports or the woodwork of the stern; during the day, unfazed by the incessant rain, it resumed its aimless travel. Georg Forster, the 17-year-old son of the expedition's official naturalist, took pity on the soggy animal. He dried it and let it loose in the steerage, where it feasted on flies. Soon the swallow came and went as it pleased. But then, as suddenly as it had shown up, it was gone. Someone must have killed his little bird, Forster lamented, and fed it to one of the ship's cats.
Though it wasn't evident yet, that compassionate youth would become one of the most original thinkers of the Enlightenment, amply deserving of Jürgen Goldstein's marvelous biography, “Georg Forster: Voyager, Naturalist, Revolutionary.” Born near Danzig (now GdaÅ?sk, Poland) and raised in England, Johann Georg Adam Forster (1754-94) was the ultimate cosmopolitan. His account of his travels, “A Voyage Round the World,” published in English in 1777 and then translated by the author into his native German, vividly records both the deprivations and the glories of Cook's expedition. Few had written about the sea the way Forster did: thick, impenetrable fogs; giant waves, whipped into spirals by punishing winds; fields of ice suffused with purple as darkness fell; columns of white light illuminating the sky at night. And amid it all, crowded into the small space of a converted coal freighter, 100-odd shuddering men, their stomachs devastated by moldy food, holding on to frozen ropes with their bare hands. A human life was worth less here than the life of a wet bird.
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