A fantastic voyage with Captain Cook's illustrator

Some of the most exquisite natural history drawings in the stupendous collection housed in the British Museum were done by a German boy aged 17 called George Forster (his father called him George not Georg because the family was originally English, escaping this country as Royalists after their defeat in the Civil War).

- AN Wilson

He did these marvellous drawings and paintings as a boy on board Captain Cook's ship HMS Resolution: a branch of breadfruit from Polynesia; Matavai Bay in Tahiti; and the birds! Parrots from Tonga, a blue petrel, a tūī from New Zealand. The 1772-73 voyage's aim was to discover Antarctica. In the end, having been wedged in ice for days, Cook decided he could not risk the lives of his crew and so they never discovered the icebound continent.

Forster's drawings only survive in London. All his other artworks, and his voluminous diaries, notes, travel writings and political manuscripts were burnt in Mainz by the invading French revolutionary army, headed by the moustachioed General Custine.

Forster was by then the university librarian in Mainz. Custine was eventually guillotined for losing French control of German-speaking lands. (There was, of course, no such country as Germany in those days.)

But for a brief while Forster had taken part in the declaration of a revolutionary republic in what had previously been a prince-bishopric.