Resolution: A Novel of the Boy Who Sailed With Captain Cook
Any book by A. N. Wilson is a rewarding read, but be warned! Resolution was the ship in which Captain Cook sailed on his second voyage to the Antarctic and the South Pacific in 1772-75, and there is a picture of it on the cover. The cover also describes the book as ‘a novel of the boy who sailed with Captain Cook’ and promises ‘the life and times of one of our greatest explorers… seen through the eyes of a young man who sailed with him’.
This is indeed the story of the ‘boy’ (he was 20 years old at the end of the voyage), but it is the story of his whole life from childhood in East Prussia to his early death in Paris. Only three of his 38 years were spent on Resolution, although the book he wrote about it is his main claim to fame.
The subject of the book is George Forster, who despite his name was a German botanist of distant English descent. Wilson tells his life story not in chronological order but as a series of episodes which flit backwards and forwards in time and space, as George might have remembered them in his last years. Sometimes we are on Resolution, sometimes in London, Mainz or Paris. Resolution is not just the name of a ship but a motif for George’s life.
There is not very much about Captain Cook and a lot about the Romantic Movement in Germany, the French Revolution and George’s unhappy marriage. Like most of Wilson’s books, this is fictionalised history rather than historical fiction with few invented characters. It is interesting, informative, evocative and emotionally authentic, but it is only incidentally about the ship and its captain.
