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28 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Sandra Vlasta | Enlightening report versus enlightened traveller studies of the objects in question, drawn with incredible skill; further information and descrip- tions of the images are given in the text. These illustrations thus underscore the extent to which the voyage was above all an expedition with a scientific purpose, intended to gain a better understanding of hitherto unknown parts of the world, their inhabitants, and their flora and fauna. The geographical-political aspect was Captain Cook’s area of responsibility and would thus feature in his travelogue. The Forsters were hired as natural scientists, though, and this is reflected in the way the images were chosen and presented in the travelogue. Of course, this positioning with regard to the illustrations was also a way of making the best of the situation in which the Forsters found themselves. Deprived of Hodges’s paintings, the Forsters had to provide descriptions of people, actual encounters with natives, their way of life, etc., in the text. In fact, Forster dedicated large sections to these aspects, which interested him greatly. Still, this side, i.e. the humanist character of his travelogue, obviously written in the philosophical style that Johann Reinhold Forster had also had in mind, could not be rendered more vivid by actual pictures of natives. This absence is felt most strongly when Forster refers to paintings by Hodges that are included in Cook’s report alone, such as the portrait of a man with an expressive face on the island of Tahuata (Forster 1778–80, vol. 2: 16) or the painting of a turbulent landing in Tanna (Forster 1778–80, vol. 2: 215). This may give the impression that Forster’s was a disparate report, the intention of which could not be realized due to the circumstances. Forster’s trave- logue was not received this way, however. Rather, contemporary readers like Alexander von Humboldt emphasized the new era of travel writing that this book had ushered in, in which the study of nature was linked in an innovative way to comparative ethnology and geography and, furthermore, in which clarity was related to universality (see Humboldt 1862: 51). The perceived novelty of Forster’s travelogue up to that point has led critics to call him the founder of modern German travel writing (see Vorpahl 2007: 615; Keller and Siebers 2017: 14). Corre- spondingly, the images in the book can be read as an integral part of the novel versatility of Forster’s writing, which corresponded to the zeitgeist at a time when ‘humanist thinking and scientific insight were seen as two sides of the same coin’ (Vorpahl 2007: 615, my translation). Furthermore, the illustrations are an example of Forster’s emphasis on the visual aspect of our apprehension of the world, which he wrote about later in life, in November 1789, in a letter to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: Denn am Ende, mehr hat man doch nicht, als was einem durch diese zwei kleinen Oeffnungen der Pupille fällt und die Schwingungen des Gehirns erregt. Anders als so nehmen wir die Welt und ihr Wesen nicht in uns auf. Die armseligen vier und zwanzig Zeichen reichen nicht aus. [In the end, one does not have more than that which comes through these two small apertures of the pupils and stimulates the brain’s vibrations. There is no other way of perceiving the world and its essence. The pathetic twenty-four signs are not sufficient. (Forster 1981: 371; translation mine)] Here, Forster stresses the importance of the visual in our perception of the world.11 In the Eng- lish version of his travelogue, he mainly used words to describe the world, but he was perhaps retrospectively aware that this only allowed his experience to be conveyed to his readers to a 11 Accordingly, the prominence of the visual has been a major focus in travel writing studies. Only recently have other senses been taken into account as well, such as sound (Youngs 2019), touch (Jackson 2019), taste (Ober- holtzer Lee 2019), and smell (Brant 2019).