In July 1772, seventeen-year-old Georg Forster embarked on Captain Cook's Resolution to accompany and help his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, who, after Sir Joseph Banks's withdrawal and upon his recommendation, had become the chief scientist of Captain Cook's second voyage to the South Seas (1772–5). Barely five years later, Georg Forster, still only twenty-two, published his voluminous account of this voyage of discovery, entitled A Voyage Round the World – according to Nigel Leask ‘a milestone for romantic period travel writing’. Robert L. Kahn, the editor of the Voyage in the Akademie Ausgabe of the works of Forster, considers it ‘the finest work with regard to style and power of expression to have come out of the three expeditions of Cook and one of the greatest travelogues written in any tongue or age’ – an assessment with which Bernard Smith concurs: Forster's Voyage, writes Smith, is ‘the best written account to issue from all three of Cook's voyages.’

But A Voyage Round the World is not only remarkable for its style. It is also a radical intervention into the burgeoning European discourse of the South Seas, and of Tahiti in particular, as it was established by Jean Louis Antoine de Bougainville's Voyage autour du monde (1771) and John Hawkesworth's redacted compilation An Account of the Voyages … (1773) – a discourse with which young Georg Forster was thoroughly familiar: after all, it was he who had translated de Bougainville’s seminal account into English, in the same year that the Resolution set sail to discover the great southern continent, terra australis incognita, or, as Captain Cook thought more likely, to once and for all disprove its existence.