George Forster was a man out of time: he journeyed to the far reaches of the known world and challenged the worldviews of eighteenth-century Europe with radical ideas about equality and freedom. Celebrated during his lifetime as a champion of freedom, women's rights and revolutionary ideals, he wrote against empire, racism and slavery and was one of the leaders of the short-lived Republic of Mainz.
The Traveller seeks to restore Forster as one of the great visionaries of his era. Following in Forster's footsteps from Europe to Tahiti, and drawing on a wealth of correspondence mostly unpublished in English, Andrea Wulf paints a portrait of a remarkable, passionate figure unbound by place, people or establishment. She vividly conveys his extraordinary quest to find what connects us rather than what sets us apart.