by A. N. Wilson
—This is true, but what arrangements Mrs Forster will have made in our absence . . . We shall have to see, Nally. We must . . .
—But she’s not going to have engaged a valet, is she, sir?
—There is also the question of where you would sleep, Nally, where you would sleep.
—Land AHOY!
The voice, high in the rigging near the mainmast, broke through the complaints of Mr Wales, who was saying to the Captain,
—and he told me – me who brought all the chronometers and measuring equipment with me – apart from what you had collected from Greenwich – that he knew of an instrument maker in Berlin—
—Not now, Mr Wales.
Cook had applied his telescope to his sharp eye. That instrument, which had shown him the tall pines of Norfolk Island, the mountains of New Zealand, the statues of Easter Island and the limitless crags of ice on South Georgia, now revealed the Lizard. It was 28th July.
—Nally thinks I shall be much at court.
—Is that what you want, Vati?
—The King might insist upon it. He might well wish me to take on the running of the Botanical Gardens at Kew—
—Instead of running the British Museum.
—Both, I find, are likely. And for that, maybe Nally is right, maybe I do require a valet.
—We’d miss Nally if he wasn’t there.
Reinhold’s face screwed into puzzlement.
—What do you mean? he said.
The next morning, the 29th, they scudded past the Lizard, and had begun to pass a large number of ships, plying to windward in order to get out of the Channel. The mood of the sailors was heady. Spontaneous outbursts of song accompanied all their tasks.
Come cheer up my lads, ’tis to glory we steer,
To add something new to this wonderful year.
To honour we call you, as freemen not slaves,
For who are so free as the sons of the waves . . .
—There’s nothing beats a sense of homecoming, and sure that’s a fact, said Nally.
—I suppose so. Only I’m not really coming home, am I, Nally?
—Oh, get off with you, George, wherever I am, there’ll be home for you.
They passed Eddystone Lighthouse. As they sailed along, they could make out people on the shore, see the outlines of English trees and hedges and the bright green of fields. They anchored at Spithead on the 30th. A post-chaise was waiting to take Captain Cook to the Admiralty. It was Sunday morning, but George felt the church bells would have been ringing for them whenever they’d arrived.
—Well, Dr Forster, I am going to London, said Captain Cook. Is this where we part?
—No, no, said Reinhold firmly. There will be more than enough room for myself and my son, in the carriage with you, Kapitän.
—Well, I’m not so . . .
—Ja, ja. And Nally can go above – on top, oben.
—Nally? What the devil are you bringing Nally for? asked the Captain.
—Your luggage, Kapitän, can follow with ours, said Reinhold, with a lordly, sweeping gesture of his hand.
—Sure it can, said Nally.
AFTERWORD
TEN YEARS AFTER SHE PUBLISHED ADVENTURES ON A JOURNEY to New Holland, Therese Huber completed the short sequel, entitled The Lonely Deathbed. Both were translated into English by Rodney Livingstone (Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1966).
This book began, in my head, when I discovered, in a second-hand bookshop in the Charing Cross Road, The Resolution Journal of Johann Reinhold Forster in Four Volumes, edited by Michael E. Hoare for the Hakluyt Society (London, 1982). The London Library generously consented to acquire, at my request, Georg Forster’s Werke in vier Bänden (Insel-Verlag, Leipzig, 1970).
I have also learnt much from Ulrike Bergmann’s Die Mesalliance (Edition Büchergilde, Frankfurt am Main, 2008), Kurt Kersten’s Der Weltumsegler, Johann Georg Adam Forster, 1754–1794 (Francke Verlag, Bern, 1957) and Ludwig Uhlig’s Georg Forster, Lebensabenteuer eines gelehrten Weltbürgers (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 2004). Anyone wanting to know about Captain Cook is indebted to the great J. C. Beaglehole, whose The Life of Captain James Cook (Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1974) has been often read, together with Philip Edwards’s selection of Beaglehole’s edition of The Journals of Captain Cook (Penguin Classics, London, 1999).
Readers of these books will know that I have not invented very much in this novel. For dramatic effect – to increase the pace of George’s brainstorm – I have brought forward the execution of Adam Lux to July 1793. In fact, he was beheaded in November. The characters of Major Manson and of Nally have been made up, and I have followed what is only the inference of Forster scholars, that George and Caroline Michaelis had an affair. After the Germans reoccupied Mainz, Caroline was briefly arrested and imprisoned in Kronberg. Her friendship with George was one of the charges brought against her. She was rescued by one of her admirers, August Wilhelm Schlegel, who took her to live near Leipzig until her son was born. She later became Schlegel’s wife at Jena.
George’s exquisite drawings are still in the British Museum. Incidentally, although all German books call him Georg, his father registered his birth as George and called him George. Though he published his German books as Georg, he published in English under the name George, and – anyway, I came to know him, and to love him, as George.
Each section begins with a quotation from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Mr Wales, the astronomer on the Resolution who got along so badly with Reinhold Forster, taught mathematics at Christ’s Hospital, regaling his pupils with memories of the great voyage when ‘ice, mast high came floating by as green as emerald’. One of those boys was Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
CAMDEN TOWN
May 2016
