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Collecting with Cook: the Forsters and Their Artifact Sales Ruth

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Collecting with Cook: the Forsters and Their Artifact Sales Ruth Collecting with Cook: The Forsters and their Artifact Sales Ruth Dawson The first official scientist ever appointed and paid by the British Government to sail around the world was a diligent but difficult German named Johann Reinhold Forster (1729-1798). For his efforts and expenses he was paid the almost lavish sum of £4000. In other ways too, the appointment was astonish- ingly generous on the government's part: Forster was given no specific instructions or assignments, required to submit no report of his findings, and permitted to keep all his records and his collections. More concerned, it seems, about his rights than his duties, Forster expected on his return to receive another lucrative appointment as well, as author of the official account of the voyage; the handsome volumes would be subsidized by the Admiralty but sold to the public at the profit of the writer. And, as an additional financial bonus, Forster expected to sell artifacts and specimens from the immense collection he had gathered on the trip. Yet in the years after the Resolution returned to England, Forster—with his spendthrift ways and his offensive quarrelsomeness towards all authority—saw the money and opportunities disappearing at an alarming rate. The £4000 were mostly gone before he even returned from the trip.1 Then after a prolonged argument with the Admiralty he was rejected as the official reporter and indeed forbidden to write any narrative account of the voyage.2 In an obvious evasion of this order, he set his gifted son George, who had accom- panied him as assistant and draftsman, to write his own account in the elder Forster's stead. Through a frenzy of hard work George was able to see his two unauthorized volumes, entitled, Voyage round the World, in His Britannic Majesty's Sloop, Resolution, reach the bookstores a few weeks before the official account, but the public evidently preferred the illustrated government version, which was written by Cook himself with the help of an editor. Nevertheless, it is this well-written and perceptive work and his translation of it into Ruth P. Dawson is an Assistant Professor in the Honors Program and Assistant Director of Liberal Studies at the University of Hawaii at Monoa. German which eventually established George Forster (1754-1794) as an expert on the Pacific and which began his reputation as a writer, especially in German.3 Meanwhile, two years after the voyage, only the collections remained as a source of money. A young German doctor and natural scientist, Carl Heinrich Titius (1744-1813), who visited the Forsters in 1777, described the "sheets of plants, animals, and insects from the South Seas painted from nature, the most beautiful shells from there, and also weapons, art works, and tools of the inhabitants of Tahiti and other southern islanders," and added, "All this they want to sell to fanciers for cheap prices." With forgiveable lack of prescience Dr. Titius warned: "Since the newly discovered islands really offer no particular trading prospects, it is not probable that journeys will be made there very frequently; therefore people will find little opportunity other than this one to obtain the rarities of those regions."4 In one sense, Dr. Titius' warning was correct. After the visits of the Europeans and the reception of their presents, especially iron tools, the cultures of the islands were trans- formed. The collections made on the early voyages and the descriptions written by those first travelers have become priceless records of what the Polynesian and Micronesian cultures were like before the arrival of the white strangers. It is a sale of such artifacts by their young collector, George Forster, that interests us here. Together the two Forsters worked energetically during the trip gathering specimens and artifacts. William Wales, the astronomer on the voyage and one of the people with whom Forster often quarrelled, vividly describes their collecting in a pamphlet he wrote attacking the elder Forster. Wrote Wales, Dr. Forster takes occasion to ridicule, in very pointed terms, the eagerness of the seamen for curiosities. It may be remarked, that there can be no good reason given why the seamen should not be as fond of curiosities as himself. None purchased those things with more avidity than he did. He knows well, that even when the purchasing of those things was strictly forbid, and that neither seamen nor officers presumed to attempt it, he and his son frequently purchased them out of the cabin windows. While their methods of collecting were one source of contention, the value of the "curiosities" also caused problems, as Wales indicates: ". the seamen had another motive for purchasing those things, and which [Dr. Forster] had not. They well knew, from experience, that if they were fortunate enough to buy a more curious weapon, or thing of any kind, than he had done, that they could afterwards sell them to him for two, three, and even four dollars, and sometimes more than that." Slightly later Wales adds: "For I again assert, that no person on board the ship shewed more eagerness after those things than Messrs. Forsters did, neither did any person, I believe, bring home so large a quantity."5 Whatever the cost of an item on board ship, Dr. Forster was no doubt confident it would be immeasurably more valuable once the voyagers returned to England, where dealers and collectors would bid for the best. The immi- grant German already had experience of this sort. When he and his then twelve-year-old son originally came to England in 1766 he sold artifacts brought along from Russia, where the restless pair had spent the previous year and a half. On their return from the voyage with Cook almost everyone on board the Resolution must have brought back items to sell, as even Wales obliquely admits. Only a few months after the ship reached England a prominent British shell collector, Henry Seymer (1754-1800), wrote about one way in which some of the rare finds from the second voyage were dispersed: "Saturday last I rec[eive]d a Catalogue of Shells, brought by the Resolution, which are to be sold this week at Langfords; it consists of 480 Lots, not all shells, but Arms, ornaments, Utensils &c: of the Natives, intermixt; a Cargo which a dealer, one Jackson, bought at Portsmouth & of which I dare say he will make 400 pr. Ct. [per cent] tho I know most of the capital things have been dispos'd of some time [ago]. Cook and Forster I dare say secur[e]d the best before they came home, & will make a fine penny of them."6 Evidently it was no secret what lucrative trade this could be. While the Forsters were indeed planning to profit from their collections and were sometimes overzealous in acquiring them, they were also serious scientists and true scientific collectors. Of all the portraits of participants on Cook's three voyages of discovery, the painting of the Forsters is the only one that depicts its subjects at their work, performing actual scientific fieldwork in the tropics.7 Unlike other collectors on the voyages, George Forster often men- tioned in his account what items they had collected, when, and where. Added to this useful information are meticulously prepared copper plates showing a number of the artifacts as they appeared soon after being brought to England. (Although the plates were commissioned and supervised by the Forsters, they were paid for by the Admiralty and so appeared in the official account rather than in their own.) In short, for both scholarly and commercial reasons the Forsters had worked hard to assemble a superb collection. Because they gathered almost every sort of new object that they encountered, including, as Titius pointed out, a herbarium, shells, and artifacts, and because the collection is relatively well documented, it is of enormous interest today for what it can show of South Pacific cultures and environments—some, such as Tanna, completely undisturbed by previous European contacts, others, like Easter Island, found half a century before and then lost again, and still others, especially Tahiti, already growing familiar with ships from France, Spain and England. Exactly what objects the Forster collections once included is not fully known. Even at the time the items could be difficult to identify. The shell collector Seymer remarked in his letter, "This catalogue is as unintelligible as usual, insomuch that I don't know the meaning often articles in it." The fault did not lie entirely with an ignorant dealer's inability to describe. After all, what was industrializing England—with its steam engines, new canals, and plans for an iron bridge—to make of dogtooth necklaces, wooden headrests, and sharkskin drums? Assigned as usual any onerous duty, including the preparation of catalogues when portions of the collection were dealt out, the younger Forster himself wrote lists containing almost no description, although he of all people knew where and how the objects were used and had seen the world to which they belonged. Regrettably, neither Forster ever got around to preparing a complete catalogue of any of their collections. Titius' praise for the low price of the rarities clearly indicates the Forsters' increasingly urgent need for money in the two years since their return. As more time passed, the collectors gradually dispersed what they had so pains- takingly gathered. At his own death in 1798, four years after the death of his son, Reinhold Forster owned only a small remnant of 157 items, which his widow sold to a museum in Gottingen. With unintelligible or absent descrip- tion at the start, followed by numerous undocumented sales and gifts, changes in the fashions of collecting, and the passage of two hundred years, it is easy to understand why identifying original Polynesian and Melanesian artifacts has become such a difficult task.
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