Resolution

A novel of Captain Cook's discovery to Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii, through the eyes of botanist George Forster.

A. N. Wilson

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782398295
• Subtopic: Literature General

A. N. Wilson's powerful new novel explores the life and times of one of the greatest British explorers, Captain Cook, and the golden age of Britain's period of expansion and exploration.

Wilson's protagonist, witness to Cook's brilliance and wisdom, is George Forster, who travelled with Cook as botanist on board the HMS Resolution, on Cook's second expedition to the southern hemisphere, and penned a famous account of the journey. Resolution moves back and forth across time, to depict Forster's time with Cook, and his extraordinary later life, which ended with his death in Paris, during the French Revolution.

Wilson once again demonstrates his great powers as a master craftsman of the historical and the human in this richly evoked novel, which brings to life the real and the extraordinary, brilliantly drawing together a remarkable cast of characters in order to look at human endeavour, ingenuity and valour.

PART ONE

Setting Forth

The bride hath paced into the hall,
Red as a rose is she

I

1772

NALLY SAID,

—They’re almost human. The hands. The eyes . . .

Nally had already named his monkey Plunkett. The choice of name had not been explained. George felt it would be a mistake to become too fond of ‘his’ monkey. Life was cheap at sea. Only a few days previous, one of the carpenters, Henry Smock, filling a scuttle, had fallen from the side and sunk in the briny without a trace. More upsetting, because more poignant, had been the fate of a swallow who had followed the ship from St Iago, which was where they had bought the monkeys. After a hundred and sixty miles at sea, the bird was still with them, sheltering, when able, in the rigging. On one occasion, rain and seawater in the foremast had collected in gallons, so, when the sails were oriented, a torrent had fallen, carrying the drenched bird with them. George had wrapped it in a piece of cloth, taken it back to the cabin, nursed it back to life. Reinhold, who was entirely capricious – and could easily, in another mood, have deplored sentimentality bestowed on a bird – entered enthusiastically into its cult, even encouraging it to visit the Captain and to fly about indoors while they all dined together on Sauer Kraut and dressed albatross (shot the previous day by the master, Mr Gilbert). Even Captain Cook, who was as capricious in his mysterious way as Reinhold Forster – though with that silent Yorkshireman the whims and prejudices were held secret, whereas Reinhold wore more on the surface than was ever prudent – yes, even the Captain liked the swallow; called it a ‘fine little man’. When, however, some days later, one of the cats got it, he was impatient with Reinhold’s displays of emotion.

—It was a swallow – a bird. You let a bird loose – what do you expect a cat to do?

While Reinhold, the ship’s naturalist, was saying, at the same time, talking through the Captain,

—You think it was no accident? That the bird was not introduced to the cat – to be blunt, fed to it? You think there are not some very cruel, ill-natured people on this ship?

—Ay – and some difficult ’uns ’n’ all, was Cook’s response.

So with the monkey, George was trying not to fall in love. The unnamed little fellow was holding a piece of raw potato, Nally’s gift. Nally said,

—No, Plunkett, you got yer own spud!, and he lightly cuffed his monkey out of the way.

George’s monkey seemed to appreciate the attention given to it. He sat still on the side of one of the rowing boats, while George, cross-legged on a coil of rope, intensely transmitted its likeness into a sketch-book.

—I mean, said Nally, the hands are like our hands, the eyes – well, you can see they’re thinking something all right. There must be some link between them ’n’ us?

—I’m sure there is, Mr Nally.

—George, I keep telling you to call me Nally, or Pat, but not Mr Nally.

—And, George laughed, my father keeps telling you not to call me George.

—It seems daft.

They both laughed. George was seventeen, Nally a bit older, probably nineteen. Nally had been in the Navy since he was twelve.

—You couldn’t look at that monkey now and say he didn’t have a soul.

George had not sounded out his father on this difficult theme. George’s job, apart from keeping Reinhold Forster company, was to draw the wildlife. Reinhold, lanky and clumsy in his gait, was coming on deck again now, brandishing a quarto volume of Edwards’s Natural History, the wind catching its pages.—You must keep that cabin tidy, my son! Cabin! Bloody dog-kennel I’d prefer to call it.

George cast an embarrassed glance at Nally who, with the ninety-one other seamen, was squashed in the small and fearful discomfort of the hold, for whom a cabin of his own would have been an undreamed luxury. Nally, a hollow-cheeked young man with curly black hair and very green eyes, gave nothing away: indeed the clumsier Reinhold was, the more impassive was Nally’s expression.

—Your books and mine, your sketches – all muddled and stuffed higgledy-hog. It is difficult enough to find things even if we were to keep them in some kind of order. But my point. This engraving in Mr Edwards’s book. If you please! The Simea sabaea of Linnaeus which is sitting in front of you! Has not Edwards so much as set eyes on such a monkey? This is what we must ask ourselves.

—Well, I’m sure I never saw a man draw like young Mr George, said Nally pleasantly.

—He’s learning, said Reinhold. His stiff manner implied that there was something almost offensive about being addressed by a sailor, albeit his personal servant. Nally had been assigned to this role on their first day. Reinhold was obliged to pay for the privilege. He had objected, saying that it was the least the Admiralty could do, to supply the ship’s naturalist with a servant. Captain Cook had merely pointed out the simple regulations, and silenced further objections with a long sniff. Nally divided his time between his duties as an able seaman and his valeting and waiting upon the Forsters.

—Young Mr Forster is doing his job, Nally, said a pink-faced fifteen-year-old midshipman harshly, and yours is to be up the mainmast where you were asked to be.

—Ay, ay, sir.

The midshipmen were all gentlemen and spoke differently from the sailors. George, only half used to institutional life, marvelled at Nally’s quiet acceptance of this young puppy’s superior status. For a moment, George took his eye off the monkey and watched Plunkett and Nally, with more or less equal expedition, climb the rigging by the mainmast. Within minutes, they had become little stick-silhouettes against the sky.

Behind his monkey’s grey head – for though called green monkeys, there was more grey than green – George watched the rhythmic swell and dip of the everlasting sea. It was a week since they had left the islands of Cape Verde and now were speeding through choppy waters south-east and south-east by east, with strong westerly winds behind them. And all they could see was the limitless ocean, an emblem already, to the seventeen-year-old boy, of his very existence. They had always been moving, he and his father . . . It was years later that he asked himself how his mother might have felt about the arrangement. George was the eldest of a large brood. There were five younger siblings in the parsonage-house in that bleak village in East Prussia. That his father wished to escape the place, had never wanted to be there in the first place, that went without saying. The burdens of his father’s disappointments, these he could only begin to assess when he had endured disappointments of his own, just as the impenetrable relationship between his father and mother never came into any focus until his own unhappy marriage took shape. How could they have been happy, Reinhold and Justina? Johann Reinhold Forster, moody, selfish, book-mad and ambitious: he’d dreamed of being a great man of Law, or a Professor of Oriental languages in Berlin – just as – after the voyage with Captain Cook – he’d hope to become the Director of the British Museum. Only when George was a man who’d confronted his own professional setbacks could he begin to imagine the bitterness of his father, the linguist and botanist and would-be polymath, obliged to take holy orders as a means of earning a living, and reading the prayers to peasants in the hamlet of Hochzeit-Nassenhuben . . .

There was something of his near namesake Faust in Reinhold Forster’s nature. Filling his study at Nassenhuben with many volumes, in many languages, on a variety of subjects he somehow wanted . . . mastery. No demonic contract was made – but there were moments of luck when the elder Forster would seize a chance. Once George was able to toddle, his father was never alone. The child learnt to read with his nose pressed close to a huge folio of Luther’s Bible, and before he was six, he was reading the sentences back to his father and translating them into Latin as he went. It was the cleverness of his first little son, George, that was Johann Reinhold’s ticket out of the village parsonage into the greater world. Father and son could become a Double Act. Johann, like Herr Mozart, could parade his little boy around Europe as an Infant Phenomenon. From his earliest years George began to acquire languages. His father conversed with him in Latin and pummelled him with a cudgel if he failed to understand. At family meals, the Latin conversations continued, deliberately shutting out George’s mother from what they were saying.

—We have been at large, we Forsters, for a hundred years – we must stop drifting – and build a monument.

It was true. They had always been adrift, always journeying. George, for all his multifarious talents as linguist and scientist, would be famous as a traveller. The restlessness, the everlasting discontent of father Reinhold entered his own soul also, was part of the very atmosphere in which the family itself existed. George came into the world as a foreigner – from a long line of foreigners. Deprived of their modest lands and possessions in English Yorkshire by Oliver Cromwell – for the seventeenth-century Forsters, no less than their eighteenth-century European descendants, had the unerring instinct to support the wrong side in history. They had fled to Prussia. Germanized for more than a century before George’s birth, by their century and mode of residence, his father was the Lutheran pastor of a village near Danzig. The Seven Years War was in progress when George was born – in ’54 – Danzig and Pommerellen were occupied by Russian troops. Reinhold, with his gift for getting to know ‘everyone’ – and then quarrelling with them – befriended the Russian consul.

In the streets of Danzig where Reinhold went to hobnob with notables, you heard a multiplicity of languages – Russian, of which George had a smattering even as a young infant, English, Polish, as well as their mother tongue. Almost as soon as he could walk, George became his father’s companion on those trips to ‘the town’, as he called it. (Later, when he became fluent in English, George would note how southerners and a few of the more sophisticated northerners would use the single word ‘town’ to describe London, whereas in Warrington, their next residence after Nassenhuben, ‘Are ye’ – or more often – ‘Art goin’ to tarn’ – would mean Liverpool.)

In ‘die Stadt’, in the back room of the pawnbrokers, you would also hear that language which used so to puzzle George’s childish ears, so like, and so unlike, German it was, as the ringleted old moneylenders, whose fur hats and shawls bespoke an exotic East, a universe away from the Forsters’ Lutheran domestic simplicities, spoke in subdued tones, their bearded bright-eyed faces suggestive of an ancient pre-European world where the priest Ezekiel had seen the glory of their God beside the Euphrates, or the more minor prophets, Nahum or Obadiah, had held the corruptions of the rulers to account. Or, their intelligent expressions as they shrugged and weighed one point against another might have resembled that of their co-religionist Spinoza as he laboured over lenses in Amsterdam and meditated upon the very nature of moral reality. It was a while before the infant George figured out they were probably, in reality, wondering how Pastor Forster could possibly repay his already ascending obligations. Far from regarding the moneylenders of Danzig as sinister beings, George grew up accurately considering them the indulgent godfathers of his father’s insatiable bibliomania. The Forsters’ few items of family silver, brought to Prussia from the English Civil War a hundred years since, had long ago been converted into an impressive collection of Coptic manuscripts. Reinhold had made himself a master of the tongue, and of their theology, of Egyptian geography, and of travel literature from Pausanias to Marco Polo. He’d studied Michaelis’s Travels and Biblical Philology – indeed believed Philology to be the clue to the Bible. Some of the pawnbroker minor prophets – the Obadiahs or Nahums of backstreet Danzig – shared Reinhold’s book-passion and had even been invited to the parsonage at Nassenhuben to see the collection, had turned over the quartos and folios with astonished admiration.

—Please, please! His father would proudly indicate the top of his chest of prints, where a book-stand indicated a Gutenberg Bible and a folio of Josephus, illustrated with copper engravings which depicted the Roman army of Titus despoiling the treasures of Jerusalem. No one present was so indelicate as to suggest that the Coptic grammars, the folio of Pius I’s Travels, the Hebrew lexicons and mathematical treatises on display had all been paid for by exchanges, some rash, some judicious, of Frau Forster’s few remaining family jewels, or the silver including a goblet made in York and said by pious family legend to have been drunk out of by the Royal Martyr himself a short while before the Battle of Marston Moor. The author of the Book of Proverbs might well have been purely metaphorical in intention when he stated that the merchandise of wisdom is better than the merchandise of silver, or when he calculated that wisdom was more precious than rubies. His co-religionists in Danzig, when faced with the prosaic necessity of deciding the matter on a business footing, had felt constrained to calculate just how many books of wisdom on Pastor Reinhold’s shelves could be paid for by just how many of Frau Forster’s rubies.

George would always remember the day when the prophet Nahum, far from rolling his eyes at his client’s extravagance (as was the wont of some of the other minor prophets of the jewellery quarter), actually suggested the purchase of all purchases – the book which determined the course of George Forster’s life.

—Herr Pastor, you will never guess what came into Eyck’s [the bookseller’s] yesterday morning.

Reinhold, fondling George’s six-year-old head with one hand and mopping his brow with the other, which clutched a handkerchief, had replied,

—Herr Rosenthau, I have not come to town to ask you for more money, merely to ask for an extension of the loan. I do not know how I can have spent so much.

It was a sentence he heard so often on his father’s lips and which he would often himself repeat!

—Herr Pastor – there was genuine kindness in the prophet. He was a man of business but not a shark and he had been inspired by many of the pastor’s interests, above all, his knowledge of Egypt – Herr Pastor, I want you to have this book, as a gift from us for you have been one of our best customers.

The prophet had not actually placed coins into Reinhold’s hands. He knew that to give money, as such, to the pastor was like pouring water through his fingers. He had written a guarantee on a piece of paper and Reinhold, as fast as George’s six-year-old legs could run – had hurried to Eyck’s shop in Johann Nepomukgasse agog to see what the prophet had bought them – for Nahum had playfully withheld the title of the volume prized above rubies. And there it was! A magnificent quarto of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735), the first great work of taxonomy. For the first time since Aristotle – but with so much more scientific accuracy and discipline – the attempt had been begun to categorize each genre of fish, bird and beast, each family of plant and tree, to classify and to define each species. It was a gift of stupendous generosity from the old prophet. For Reinhold and George Forster it became an invaluable tool, almost, for father and son, their raison d’être: for, from now onwards, they would scarcely walk outside the parsonage-house without the specific aim, not only of identifying every bird, fish, leaf and petal itemized in Herr Linné, in so far as such flora and fauna were to be found in East Prussia, but also – this was the challenge – they would set out to find species which had escaped the notice of the great Swedish botanist. In Reinhold, the lust for knowledge was a twofold thing, everlastingly co-existent with the pleasure of putting another in the wrong.

With what joy, if George’s beady little eyes found a finch or a reed or a wild blossom un-noted in Linnaeus, would the pastor dispatch a letter to Sweden informing the great man of yet another lacuna in his survey. They always had a reply, even if Linné sometimes needed convincing that, for example, Baltic bog moss (Sphagnum balticum) really was slightly different from the commoner moss, Sphagnum recurrum. Most of the species George saw had already been noted in Linné’s book – but it was by reading it that he learnt to be what we call a scientist, but what the eighteenth century called a natural philosopher. (‘The tactless philosopher’ was one of Reinhold’s nicknames when they were living in London, on their return from voyaging with the Captain.) With his father George also helped the botanist Gottfried Reyger prepare his work on the flora of Da...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Also by A. N. Wilson
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Part Five
• Part Six
• Part Seven
• Afterword