Forster's About the Breadfruit

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 276-278, 282-283:

‘I would be far more useful to the world if I were to embark on another great voyage,’ he told a friend in November 1783, a few months after leaving the Rosicrucians. Weren’t there enough people who could sort, classify and regurgitate what had already been discovered? But if he couldn’t travel to distant continents and islands, he could explore them with his mind and imagination—and in Kassel in early 1784 he published his groundbreaking About the Breadfruit. In what was ostensibly a botanical treatise, he illustrated how the tendrils of botany reached into culture, ethnography, history, linguistics and human migration. A brilliant and original piece of scholarship, About the Breadfruit reveals George’s visionary thinking, the work of a man way ahead of his time.

George had first encountered the breadfruit during the Resolution voyage.* It was a tropical fruit which grew on large trees on many of the South Pacific islands they had visited. He had enjoyed the dishes made with the abundant breadfruit—cooked on hot stones or fermented into a dough which was baked like bread—but he had also noticed that they had been seedless. With no seeds, the breadfruit trees on Tahiti, Tonga, Tanna and Malakula, George explained in his essay, could only be propagated by cuttings from suckers that grow off the tree’s roots. During the many months they had spent in the region, George had not seen a single wild breadfruit tree—all of them had been planted by humans.

That made him wonder where breadfruit trees originated and how they had arrived on the islands. Searching Göttingen’s vast library, George had then discovered several botanical volumes which contained descriptions of wild specimens with seeds and small fruits with little flesh from Indonesia and the Philippines. If Tahiti, Tonga, Tanna and Malakula had no indigenous breadfruit trees with seeds, the only explanation was that they must have been exported from Southeast Asia, travelling thousands of miles across the ocean to the South Pacific islands. For George this proved two things. Firstly, the sophistication of the islanders’ agricultural methods—as there was apparently no seedless variety in Southeast Asia, they must have bred and transformed the originally small fruit into the large nourishing crop he had tasted. Just as cereals and fruits had been domesticated through selective breeding in Europe, so the South Pacific islanders had used cuttings from trees with larger fruits to facilitate the slow changes over the centuries—‘bit by bit’.

His second conclusion was even more striking, for the history and movement of the breadfruit enabled George to develop a stunning understanding of Polynesian migration. The breadfruit’s journey, and its cultivation from a small fruit with spiky skin, seeds and little flesh, to the larger seedless variety found in Tahiti, Tanna and the other islands, was proof that the Polynesians had migrated east from Southeast Asia across the Pacific—a theory confirmed more than 200 years later by DNA and archaeological studies. As people had boarded their canoes to travel to distant islands, they had packed their most valuable crops and animals. ‘The breadfruit tree,’ George wrote, ‘could only have been brought eastwards by humans.’

About the Breadfruit also illustrates how differently George thought from other scientists and explorers of his day. During the Endeavour voyage Joseph Banks had also taken note of breadfruit trees but his interest was economic. Struck by the ease of cultivation and rich harvests—‘Bread fruit is procurd with no more trouble than that of climbing a tree,’ he had written in his journal during the Endeavour’s stay in Tahiti—Banks lobbied both George III and Parliament to send an expedition to the South Pacific to transfer breadfruit tree seedlings from Tahiti to the West Indies in order to feed the slaves on British sugar plantations. Where Banks saw a nutritious high-yielding food plant that could fuel the engine of the British Empire, George Forster saw evidence of Polynesian migration.

...

The differences George observed in the people of Vanuatu and New Caledonia, compared to those on more easterly islands, was the result of intermingling between the descendants of the first migration wave and later Polynesian settlers. George could have not known the complex details of these migration patterns, but more than two centuries ago he worked out the broad outlines by studying the diaspora of Polynesian languages and the history of the breadfruit tree. He could only guess their reasons—‘oppression by their own people, or foreign conquerors, or superstitious legends, or some other cause’—but he was convinced that these great ancient navigators and their families had set out on purpose to find new islands to colonize and had not drifted there by accident. ‘I cast a glance at a map of that part of the world,’ he wrote in About the Breadfruit, ‘I survey the vast Pacific Ocean, and find that the most distant, solitary, and scattered islands are not only inhabited by people, but occupied by the very same people… I confess, I cannot convince myself that a storm, or a series of similar coincidences, is sufficient to satisfactorily explain this widespread dispersion of one and the same people across such a vast ocean from New Zealand to Easter Island.’

The people of the South Pacific, George realized, were connected rather than separated by the ocean. Where others saw tiny islands spread across the vastness of the Pacific, he brought them together with the threads of migrations. Building on what he had seen as a young man, George had matured into a bold and original thinker. It would take more than two hundred years for the world to catch up with him.

• As the first to publish the botanical description of the breadfruit from the South Pacific islands shortly after their return in 1775, George and Reinhold had their name attached to it for posterity—Artocarpus communis J.R. & G. Forst.

Forster's A Voyage Round the World

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 229-231:

By the end of 1776, less than four months after he had written the first word, the manuscript of A Voyage Round the World arrived at the printer. Publication was eagerly awaited—the naturalist Gilbert White (who was the publisher’s brother) excitedly informed friends and family at the end of January 1777 that publication was imminent. George felt no sense of relief because he had to begin the German translation immediately.

Reinhold had signed a contract with a German publisher who had travelled from Berlin to London in the previous summer. Karl Spener was an ambitious young man who had taken over his father’s firm at the age of twenty-three and who had met the Forsters already before the Resolution voyage when he visited England in 1771. Spener was only five years older than George and would become a trusted friend. George, Reinhold decided, would translate his own book, a daunting prospect given the many years in which George had spoken only English—he didn’t even converse in German with his family (and for the rest of his life, his father would speak and write to him in English). George’s letters to friends and acquaintances in Germany were always peppered with English words and his written German had become erratic. ‘I just have to ask one thing,’ he wrote to Spener with apprehension, ‘can the Berlin printers spell correctly?’ Someone would need to correct the final manuscript.

George was ill, exhausted, and had lost so much weight that even Reinhold Forster had to admit his son might need some assistance. It arrived in the form of Rudolf Erich Raspe, a brilliant eccentric who had fled the German state of Hesse-Kassel after it was discovered that he had been stealing and selling ancient coins from the collections of his employer, Landgrave Friedrich II. With news travelling slowly, Raspe wangled himself onto the guest list of the Royal Society but was soon expelled. He would later write the hugely successful Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia — a whimsical satire in which the eponymous protagonist performs such feats as riding on a cannonball, shooting a stag with cherry stones (the stag subsequently grows a cherry tree between his antlers) and visiting the moon. For the moment, Raspe was to work with George on the German translation of A Voyage Round the World. Progress was woefully slow and Raspe was often ill. Like his fictional character Munchausen, he also had a tendency to exaggerate and lie, coming up with excuses for his failure to deliver and reasons to borrow money from the Forsters. George spent a lot of time merging the voices of two translations into one and the collaboration ended in anger. Raspe, George told Spener, liked only himself and believed that others existed entirely to serve him.

The English edition of A Voyage Round the World was published on 17 March 1777. Six weeks later, Captain Cook’s own Voyage Towards the South Pole appeared, printed in a larger format and illustrated with more than sixty engravings after the drawings by William Hodges, the expedition artist—but the images of animals and plants were copied from George’s drawings which Banks had bought. It was one thing that George hadn’t been allowed to use Hodges’ evocative landscapes and depictions of indigenous people (as his father believed had been initially agreed with the Admiralty), but quite another that he couldn’t use his own drawings after Reinhold had sold them. But to see them published in Cook’s book now was a terrible blow.

Thankfully, the reviews of George’s A Voyage Round the World were mostly positive, with several writers commenting that they felt as if they were actually travelling on the Resolution. George was delighted. Samuel Johnson, one of the great literary figures of the age and the author of A Dictionary of the English Language, called the book ‘a great affection of fine writing’. Johnson’s friend and biographer James Boswell declared that ‘he carries you along with him’. Those who compared the two books favoured George’s A Voyage Round the World. ‘Captain Cook’s own narrative is a mere sailor’s journal,’ wrote one reviewer, but he was disappointed by the lack of illustrations in George’s account. ‘Every page of it abounds with life and character,’ raved the reviewer for The Town and Country Magazine, ‘painted with all the force of language.’ More than a dozen reviews were published in England, several with long extracts.

Rather than wait for the German translation, many German reviewers also read the English edition. Most admired the book, describing it as ‘ravishing’ and ‘admirable’, but there were also critical voices. One took offence at George’s description of the Dutch East India Company as ‘cruel and ambitious spice merchants’, and another disliked the favourable depiction of indigenous people, complaining about his ‘acerbic allusions to the cruelty, harshness and vices of the Europeans’. Confident about his arguments and portrait of the islanders, George sent a public reply to one of Germany’s leading newspapers, asking: ‘Why not deliver eulogies on virtues? They may appear anywhere—in a beggar’s hut or a palace, in Europe or Tahiti.’ He had no interest in repeating tedious prejudices against the indigenous people—‘I therefore show real virtues among savages, where in similar cases vices prevail among civilized people.’

The most glowing German review came from Christoph Martin Wieland, a distinguished writer who declared George nothing less than a poet. In an extensive commentary, published over three issues of the Teutsche Merkur, one of Germany’s most important journals, Wieland pronounced A Voyage Round the World a thrilling book. The descriptions were painterly and humanistic, executed with intensity and enthusiasm. It was a masterpiece. As always, Reinhold attempted to take the credit, insisting that he had shaped his son. ‘I alone was his leader, his teacher,’ he later said to Wieland, ‘who awakened the dormant spark of divinity in him.’

Within six months, pirated French and Swedish translations were available, followed by Spanish and Russian editions, and then even more French editions. None were authorized. Soon the book was declared a classic but it didn’t sell enough copies to support Reinhold’s spending habits, and of course they never received any money from the pirated translations. People loved pictures, George admitted, and at two guineas A Voyage Round the World cost the same as Cook’s generously illustrated and Admiralty-subsidized account. Father and son would have to find other ways to finance their life in London.

European Nationalist Revolts in 1905

This week's edition of Culture.pl contains an article by Zachary Mazur written in 2022 that heralds his new book entitled To Kill a Spy: Everyday Nationalism and Political Violence in Fin-de-Siecle Europe from Amsterdam University Press's CEU Press imprint later in 2026. Here are excerpts from most of the text of the article, without illustrations.

For decades, the Revolution of 1905 has been tucked away in history books as a mere ‘dress rehearsal’ for the Soviet rise in 1917. But for the Poles, Jews, Lithuanians and Ukrainians living under the Tsarist yoke, 1905 wasn’t a rehearsal for someone else's drama – it was their own leading role. It was the moment the modern mass nation was born, an epoch-making explosion of culture and defiance that shattered imperial censorship and provided a blueprint for the independent states that would follow.

The catalyst: a war of hubris & machine guns

On the eve of the revolution, the Russian Empire was engaged in an embarrassing war with Imperial Japan. The two powers fought over control of northeast China (Manchuria) and the Korean peninsula. The Japanese, from the European perspective, were an upstart Asiatic power that had only recently emerged from isolation and the variable dark ages of feudalism. Fuelled by an unapologetic anti-Asian racism, most people expected that the tsar’s Russia would destroy the Japanese army in a matter of weeks when the war began.

Instead, Russian troops faced continuous setbacks. Japanese commanders used trenches and machine guns – new technologies of the day – to break the will of their opponents. On the seas, Japan’s gunships destroyed the Russian Pacific fleet, leading to an epic journey for the Baltic fleet around the horn of Africa, 18,000 nautical miles.

After the nearly 8-month ocean voyage, Russia’s sailors again faced a thrashing in May 1905. With two fleets destroyed and numerous losses on land, Russia admitted defeat in the summer. US President Theodore Roosevelt invited the sides to negotiate peace in New Hampshire at an American naval base and the Treaty of Portsmouth ended the Russo-Japanese War in September 1905.

On the home front, the people of the Russian Empire took the brunt of the war effort. Among the newly formed urban working classes, a concomitant economic slowdown put severe pressure on the people as they faced unemployment and hunger. Already in 1904, there were anti-war protests in Warsaw and in a few other cities around the Russian-controlled partition of the Polish lands.

The true beginning of the revolution, however, came when Russian subjects led by a charismatic young Orthodox priest tried to petition the tsar in January 1905. A crowd of calm marchers solemnly moved toward the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, and despite the fact that the tsar was not even there, the guards panicked and opened fire on the people. The resulting mayhem and death became the rallying cry for radicals all over the empire. The tsar had tried to cultivate an image of a benevolent father figure, but after ‘Bloody Sunday’, even his most fervent supporters were disillusioned.

A hotbed of revolt: strikes & the October Manifesto

For the next two years following the events of January 1905, protests and strikes broke out all over the Russian Empire. The Polish part of the empire, that included the large cities Warsaw, Łódź, Radom, Kielce, Piotrków and Białystok, was the most industrialised region. As a result, it was poised to be a hotbed for revolutionary activity. Organisers went to work gathering support for strikes, and confrontations with police often turned violent. In Łódź, a huge centre for textile manufacturing, workers fought pitched battles on the streets with barricades and makeshift weapons.

General strikes, where whole industries stopped work, and especially striking railroad workers, forced the hand of the tsar. Finally, he had to give up some concessions to the protestors. In October, the tsar issued a decree that allowed for limited democratic freedoms of press and assembly and the formation of a parliamentary assembly, called the Duma. Though many of the protestors felt that this did not go far enough and continued their fight for further privileges, the so-called October Manifesto created an outpouring of publications, theatre and cultural life that the Russian Empire had never seen before.

Prior to this moment, censorship had been stifling, strictly regulating the languages in which books could be published or theatre performed. Lithuanian, Yiddish and Ukrainian had been banned for decades. While the suppression of the Ukrainian language continued – seen as a threat to the Russian 'heartland' in a policy of identity erasure that remains tragically relevant today – Lithuanian, Yiddish and other suppressed languages finally began to gain legal recognition within the empire.

The linguistic renaissance: breaking the imperial silence

Lithuanians gained the right to publish newspapers in the Latin alphabet as early as the spring of 1904, but the popular press exploded thanks to the Revolution of 1905. The proliferation of daily newspapers, such as the Vilniaus žinios (Vilnius News) signalled the beginning of a mass Lithuanian culture. The first great national assembly of Lithuanians took place in Vilnius, with 200 delegates, between 4 to 5 December 1905. All sections of society – from Belarus, East Prussia (where many Lithuania speakers lived as well) – took part.

They ended by demanding political autonomy for Lithuania, and to have their own provincial parliament with boundaries defined on ethnographic terms. Lithuanian scientific and artistic associations grew at the time, establishing the cultural arms of the Lithuanian national movement. These became vital just a few years later for the establishment of the independent Lithuanian state after World War I.

Yiddish too experienced a renaissance (or naissance) based on new-found freedoms in cities with large Jewish populations, such as Warsaw, Łódź and Vilnius. The tsarist authorities lifted bans on Yiddish printing and theatre in 1905, allowing for the creation of art and literature in a vernacular that practically all Jews used on a daily basis. Finally distinctly Jewish art could move to the public stage and reach audiences that had never experienced such forms of culture. The demand was clearly there, since four new theatres popped up in Warsaw almost immediately after the ban was lifted. In Mokotów, there was Bagatela, Elizeum on Karowa Street, Jardin d’Hiver on Chmielna and Muranower on Bonifraterska, all performing exclusively in Yiddish. Sholem Aleichem’s play Scattered and Dispersed saw its debut at this time (directed by Mark Arnshteyn). Yiddish dailies also appeared, and their content shows the popularity of theatre at the time. Jardin d’Hiver was playing two shows per day, with the exception of Shabbat. In 1908, the dedicated journal Teater Velt (Theatre World) appeared. All this newfound energy for Yiddish culture caused a modernisation of the language and uniformity that did not exist before among the Jews of the Russian Empire. This emergence also allowed for literary theatre to grow. On top of that, American actors with new plays written in New York came over and were the most commercially successful pieces.

Shadows of the revolution: the Pimps’ Pogrom

In the midst of the social upheaval and suffering, people looked for scapegoats to blame leading to one of the most bizarre episodes of the revolution: the Pimps’ Pogrom. In the working class Warsaw neighbourhood of Wola (today the site of skyscrapers, giving it the nickname ‘Hong Kong’), a seedy underworld of pimps, prostitutes and the men who frequented these establishments operated with the approbation of the local police.

In the Russian Empire, the sex trade was officially regulated, requiring both brothels and individual prostitutes to register with the police. Pimps supported the Tsarist status quo rather than the revolutionaries, as they could turn a profit under the state’s protection. Consequently, the sex trade was seen as an extension of the Russian regime and its police – the same officers who beat protesters and fired into crowds. The violence, however chaotic, was a strike against the very infrastructure of Russian control.

A song from that time:

Oj, lumpy to szpiedzy, [Oh the pimps are spies]
Prowokatorzy; [Provocateurs]
Chodzą na 'giełde', podsłuchują [They go to the market, eavesdropping]
potem donoszą na policje [then they tell the police]

It’s unclear what exactly sparked the riots against the brothels, but at the end of May 1905, a series of events led workers to destroy dozens of brothels, leaving at least 15 people dead. They moved from one house to the next, destroying furniture, smashing mirrors, tearing up clothes and bedding.

In one bordello, the sex workers put up a fight. A prostitute grabbed a copper pipe and hit a rioter over the head with it. In response, someone stabbed her with a knife and she died on the spot. In another brothel, the pimps fled, leaving the girls alone. Frightened for their safety, they hid under beds and in closets. The rioters pulled them out and beat them. The women yelled hysterically, called them names and cried: ‘What do you want from us? What did we ever do to you?’

Although a majority of the pimps and prostitutes were Jewish, both Polish and Jewish workers gathered on the streets to exact vengeance. In this way, it was very different from anti-Jewish pogroms, many of which took place in the context of the revolution. Some historians see this event as a moral crusade, while others claim that the association of the pimps with the Russian police was the strongest motivator. There were also witnesses who claimed that competing pimps were the most virulent rioters, so some plain old business competition was at play too.

These events brought attention to problems with prostitution in the Polish lands, sparking some difficult public discussions about issues that were normally left undisturbed. It also inspired several poems, such as Leo Belmont’s Po Pogromie (After the Pogrom) and novels, mostly published in Yiddish.

Rounding Cape Horn, 1774

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 201-202:

The seas here are notoriously dangerous, with the warmer water and weather fronts of the tropics colliding with the cold southern seas. Where the Atlantic and Pacific oceans meet, gale force winds whip across the water, and with no landmass in the southern seas to block them, waves can build for hundreds of miles, growing in strength and height until they reach Drake’s Passage, the narrowest point between South America and Antarctica. Cook knew what to expect from these angry seas where hundred-foot waves were not uncommon. Vessels disappeared or were shipwrecked here: lost in fog and hurricanes, crushed by icebergs, swallowed by waves, or smashed against rocky cliffs.

Unlike many other ships, the Resolution was lucky, and at 6 a.m. on 29 December 1774, she passed Cape Horn without incident. To George’s delight thirty humpback whales and several hundred seals played in the waves nearby. The whales came so close that when they spouted, the Resolution was enveloped by the reeking stench of half-digested krill. George watched mesmerized as the giant animals breached, leaping out of the water and then twisting onto their backs, landing with such force that the sounds their bodies made were like explosions. Repeatedly slapping their tails and fins against the surface, the whales made the water boil.

On 3 January 1775 they left the South American coast and turned east to cross the southern Atlantic towards Cape Town. Two weeks later, they spotted an island on the horizon and made their way towards it. Mountainous with craggy steep cliffs, it was icy and windswept. Its only inhabitants seemed to be large flocks of seabirds—albatrosses, petrels and shags among them—along with seals and penguins. Larger than any of the penguins George had seen so far, these were also tame. He measured them, recording that they were 39 inches tall, with black heads and yellow ear patches. He identified them as King Penguins, but ornithologists suggested later that this might be an altogether new species: the Emperor Penguin—Aptenodytes forsteri, named after the Forsters.*

Cook named the island South Georgia, after George III, and hoisted the Union Jack, taking possession for the king and his heirs while the marines fired their muskets into the air ‘to give greater weight to this assertion’, George wrote drily, ‘to the utter amazement of the seals and pinguins, the inhabitants of these newly discovered dominions’. Then, instead of turning north-east on a straight line towards South Africa, Cook stayed on an easterly course, skirting along the higher latitudes, still in search of the Southern Continent.

• Several other species which they found during the Resolution voyage were named after the Forsters, including the New Zealand fur seal (Arctocephalus forsteri), the Yellow-eyed Mullet (Aldrichetta forsteri) and the genus Forsterygion—a small fish from coastal New Zealand. Other species named after them are a hawkfish (Paracirrhites forsteri) and a North American tern (Sterna forsteri).

Explorers Return to Europe, 1775

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 207-208:

Before they had left England, it had been decided that the Resolution would return via Cape Town—which was why friends and families had sent letters there to wait for the crew on their arrival. The men devoured fresh food and letters and news. They read piles of old newspapers to catch up. ‘Sweden delivered from the yoke of aristocratical tyranny’, George was glad to learn. In the so-called Swedish Revolution, the young king Gustav III had been the mastermind in a coup d’état which had ended the stronghold that the nobility had exercised over the monarchy. He was not intending to take away freedom, the king had said, but wanted to stop aristocratic despotism and establish ‘a right kind of Liberty that only can make you, my dear subjects, happy’. Like other enlightened rulers at the time, he had then begun to reform the justice system and economy, as well as instituting limited religious freedom.

France had a new king: at the age of nineteen, Louis XVI had succeeded his grandfather in May 1774 during the second visit of the Resolution to Tahiti. Poland had lost vast swathes of land when Russia, Prussia and Austria had divided around a third of the country between them. Having added a huge territory to Prussia in the Polish partition, the Prussian king was, George noted, ‘resting from his triumphs’. George also read that Russia and the Ottoman Empire had signed a peace treaty in July 1774, ending the war that had begun in 1768. With Russia gaining land and the right to protect Christians in the Muslim realm, the treaty marked the beginning of the decline of the once powerful Ottoman Empire, which for long had controlled large parts of south-east Europe and the Middle East. George was optimistic. After the long years of war in Europe, peace seemed finally possible. Everything ‘promised general happiness to the human race’.

But trouble was brewing in the British colonies in North America. In December 1773 a group of colonists had dumped more than 300 chests of tea—the entire shipment of three East India Company vessels—into Boston harbour in protest against Britain’s new tax regulations on tea. A month later the rebels had tarred and feathered a British customs collector. On 5 September 1774, just as the Resolution had landed in New Caledonia, the colonists had convened the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia—a congress of elected colonial delegates—to discuss how best to respond to British rule in North America. Frustrated by the lack of parliamentary representation and economic restrictions, the delegates called for a boycott of British goods and recommended that each colony establish its own militia.

There was also news from the Adventure, which had stopped in Cape Town on her way to England exactly a year earlier, in March 1774. The men of the Resolution were horrified to learn that ten crew members had been killed and eaten by the Māori, but Cook refused to pass judgement until the news had been confirmed. He had always found the Māori to be brave and open-minded, ‘but they are a people that will never put up with an insult if they have an opportunity to resent it’. George agreed. John Rowe, one of the officers who had been cannibalized, had always shown a brutal disregard for indigenous people and ‘been exceeding desirous of firing upon them’. The Māori must have been provoked. ‘The whole tenour of their behaviour to Europeans, seems to acquit them of treachery and cruel malevolence,’ George wrote, ‘it is therefore greatly to be suspected that they took umbrage at some affront, perhaps unwittingly committed by the strangers, and revenged it.’

Forster's Impressions of Easter Island

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 163-165:

Perplexed by the huge stone statues they found here—human figures with extremely large heads and no legs, several metres high—George suspected that they were held in veneration. They asked the islanders ‘and from what we could understand, we concluded that they were monuments erected to the memory of some of their areekees, or kings’*—ariki was the Polynesian word for chief (or ari‘i in Tahitian). Usually able to adjust his viewpoint, these statues seemed just too baffling to George to appreciate. ‘The workmanship of this figure was rude,’ he wrote, ‘a European artist would have been ashamed of them.’ Where he had thought Tongan woodcarvers the equals of England’s best craftsmen, these statues showed ‘the arts in their infancy’.

George noted that the islanders here looked similar to the Tahitians except for their very elongated and pierced earlobes which almost reached their shoulders—‘in order to bring it to this size, they wore a leaf of a sugar cane, which is very elastic, rolled up in it like a scroll; by which means it was always on the stretch.’ They also had barkcloth, favoured red as a colour, had tattoos, and prepared their food not unlike those islanders the Resolution crew had met across the South Pacific islands. Their vocabulary revealed a common root with Māori and Tahitian words, he realized, and Hitihiti was delighted to be able to converse with them. Despite being thousands of miles away from New Zealand and Tahiti, George was certain that the islanders had ‘one common origin’.

Their faces were painted brown with streaks of white shell lime and some men wore large bushy caps made of brown gull feathers—almost ‘as large as the full bottomed wigs of European lawyers’. Some were dressed in tattered blue jackets and European hats, which they had traded with the Spanish explorers who had stopped here four years previously—‘indubitable testimonies of the visit which the Spaniards had made to this island’. Headdresses were regarded as sacred in Polynesia and the islanders snatched Hitihiti’s black cap as well as Hodges’ hat while he was sketching the statues. On another occasion, an islander grabbed Reinhold’s plant bag, and one of the marines shot and wounded him. Though Reinhold mentioned the incident briefly in his journal, George wrote about the moral implications—it was tragic ‘that Europeans too often assume the power of inflicting punishments on people who are utterly unacquainted with their laws’.

Trading proved difficult. Not only had the marine injured a man but the islanders had few provisions to spare. When the crew tried to bargain, the islanders tricked them by selling baskets of potatoes in which the bottom layers had been filled with stones. The islanders had no interest in beads or nails, but were keen on coconut shells and Tahitian barkcloth. Hitihiti once again advised the men to buy red feathers to barter with when they returned to Tahiti and purchased himself as many feather caps as he could find. The Resolution remained on Easter Island only three days because there was not enough food for them to stay any longer. Hitihiti added another stick to his journal bundle and ‘remembered Easter Island with this observation, tàta maïtaï, whennùa èeno, that the people were good, but the island very bad’.

* Today it is believed that the statues were carved between AD 1250 and 1500 as representations of ancestors and sacred spirits. Historians and archaeologists have speculated that the introduction of Polynesian rats and deforestation led to conflict, war, starvation and the societal collapse on Rapa Nui.

Cannibalism in New Zealand, 1773

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 148-151:

A week later, on 21 November, a group of Māori women paddled out and told the Resolution crew that they were worried. Their men, the crew learned, had left to attack their enemies. Who those opponents were remained unclear, but the next morning dozens of Māori warriors, their cheeks painted red, arrived in a flotilla of eight canoes packed with cloaks, weapons and greenstone objects to trade with the Resolution. Suspecting that the warriors must have raided a neighbouring settlement to sell their goods to the Europeans, George wrote, ‘I am much afraid that their unhappy differences with other tribes, were revived on our account’.

In any event, it was time for the Resolution to leave and the next morning Cook took a few men to a neighbouring island to collect sea celery, wild spinach and other greens as provisions for the long journey. Some officers rowed to a nearby cove to trade. When they pushed their boat ashore, they saw the Māori warriors from the previous day, and also something round and red impaled on a stick, possibly an organ, maybe a heart. As they looked around, they found more organs and intestines scattered on the ground—and to their horror a human head from which the lower jawbone was missing. The skull had clearly been fractured by something blunt, perhaps a club. The victim seemed to have been an adolescent boy. As the officers stared at the bloody heap, the Māori skewered the lung and showed them more body parts. When the officers asked what had happened, the warriors told them that there had been a fight with their enemies. With words and gestures, they explained that they had killed the boy and eaten parts of him, but they too had lost men, pointing at some weeping women nearby who were cutting their foreheads with sharp stones as they lamented the dead.

For Europeans, cannibalism seemed inconceivable. ‘In accordance with human nature,’ said Immanuel Kant, Germany’s most respected philosopher, ‘there cannot be many [man-eaters], or, more likely, perhaps none at all.’ As explorers had returned from South America and the South Pacific in previous centuries, there had been rumours and the occasional suspicious body parts but no one had ever actually observed the practice. In January 1770, during the Endeavour voyage, the Māori had confirmed that they did indeed eat people by picking up a human bone and pretending to bite into it. They ‘shew us that they had eat the flesh they bit a[nd] naw’d the bone and draw’d it thro’ their mouth and this in such a manner as plainly shew’d that the flesh to them was a dainty bit’, Cook had recorded in his logbook. The graphic demonstration had been enough to convince the crew. Richard Pickersgill, who had also travelled on the Endeavour, had noted that the ‘Barbarrous cruelty these savages is guilty of which ought to make them to abhord by all who may have occasion to tutch at these Islands’. This didn’t stop him from trying to purchase the half-eaten head now, so that he could take it to London to show his friends. He offered a nail and a bargain was struck.

When the men returned to the Resolution, Pickersgill placed his grisly purchase on a railing and soon everybody on board had gathered to examine it. Another group of Māori had come to the Resolution to trade and they now asked for the head so that they could eat it, but the new owner refused. Second Lieutenant Charles Clerke, who was known and liked for his practical jokes—‘a genal favorite’, as young Elliott said—proposed an experiment. Taking a sharp knife, he cut off one cheek and handed it to the Māori, but they gestured that they only consumed cooked flesh. After debating what to do, Clerke put the cheek on a gridiron and grilled it over the fire in the galley kitchen.

Transfixed the crew of the Resolution watched the Māori eat the cheek. Some goaded them, and others were revolted. Some even seemed tempted to try a bite themselves. A little later, when Cook returned from gathering wild vegetables, he demanded that the spectacle be repeated. He wanted to prove the rumours once and for all. ‘Being desireous of being an eye wittness to a fact which many people had their doubts about’, Cook wrote in his logbook, ‘I concealed my indignation and ordered a piece of the flesh to be broiled and brought on the quarter-deck where one of these Canibals ate it with a seeming good relish.’ Describing the scene as calmly as a scientific experiment at the Royal Society in London, Cook concluded ‘that the New Zealanders are Canibals can now no longer be doubted’.

Hitihiti was appalled and ‘Metamorphosed into the Statue of Horror’. Crying inconsolably, he hid in a cabin and it took George several hours to calm his friend. George was also shocked but refused to regard the Māori as heartless barbarians, determined to understand their motivation. It couldn’t be hunger, given the abundance of fish in Queen Charlotte Sound and the Māori’s productive vegetable gardens. Perhaps, then, the motive was revenge. Weighing up the arguments, he noted: ‘The New Zealanders never eat their adversaries, unless they are killed in battle; they never kill their relations for the purpose of eating them; they do not even eat them if they die of a natural death, and they take no prisoners with a view to fatten them for their repast.’ Although he might never know their exact reasons, ‘the action of eating human flesh, whatever our education may teach us to the contrary, is certainly neither unnatural nor criminal in itself.’

Polynesian Explorers with Cook, 1773

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 133-135:

On 18 September 1773, after a month in the Society Islands, the Resolution and the Adventure sailed west. The crew were sad to leave. Fourteen-year-old Midshipman John Elliott, so dismissive of the Māori in New Zealand, had thought Tahiti a paradise—‘the Men being all fine’, he wrote in his journal, and ‘the Women beautiful, compaired with all those that we had seen, of the Middle Size, zingy, suple figures, fine teeth and Eyes, and the finest formed Hands, fingers, and Arms that I ever saw’. The stores were filled with fresh fruit, vegetables and water, and on Huahine they had bought plenty of livestock. The Resolution left with 209 pigs, thirty dogs, and fifty fowls on board, and so many bananas that the deck looked like a tropical orchard. The men felt rested and healthy—except those suffering from venereal diseases.

They also had two new crew members: Hitihiti, who had boarded the Resolution on Raiatea, and Mai on the Adventure. Mai was in his mid-twenties, a tall and slim man with long black hair and small hands ornamented with tattoos. Originally from Raiatea, Mai had fled to Tahiti as a boy after invaders from Bora Bora had overthrown the Raiateans. A few years later, in 1767, he had been wounded during the bloody battle between the Tahitians and the Dolphin crew—the jagged scar below his ribs a lifelong reminder of the encounter. He then returned to Raiatea, but he was captured and taken to Bora Bora, from where he escaped to the island of Huahine. By his own account, he had assisted one of the high priests and travelled between the islands, but mostly he was burning to avenge Raiatea against Bora Bora. During the Dolphin attack he had seen and painfully felt the violent power of European guns. So when the Resolution and the Adventure arrived at Huahine, Mai had asked if he could travel to England to procure firearms in order to fight against the Bora Borans.

Mai was affectionate and full of energy, quickly becoming popular with the Adventure crew who nicknamed him Jack. They were especially impressed by his fishing skills and couldn’t believe how much more he was able to catch compared to them. James Burney, the Second Lieutenant on the Adventure, believed that Mai’s curiosity and strength made him perfectly suited for an expedition. George also thought him intelligent, if sometimes too hot-tempered. He preferred the company of seventeen-year-old Hitihiti, who was also liked by the rest of the crew. Elliott was struck by his handsome looks, declaring him ‘in every respect a very superior sample of this Country than Omai’. Mai and Hitihiti were not particularly fond of each other—presumably because Hitihiti was originally from Bora Bora, which had invaded Mai’s Raiatea—and they engaged with each other as little as possible.

Both islanders had to adjust to their strange new lives. Cooped up below deck in the airless space where the sailors slept, his hammock swaying to the rhythm of the Resolution’s pitch, Hitihiti became seasick. How different it was to sail on this cavernous ship compared with a Polynesian outrigger canoe. He only felt better when he ate some pieces of raw dolphin, which he dipped into a bowl of seawater, and some of the fermented breadfruit balls which he had brought on board. On the Adventure, Mai was homesick and then terrified when he saw most of the crew assembling on deck the day after he had come on board. The captain’s solemn voice, the men lacing their fingers in prayer and tracing a cross from forehead to their shoulders, convinced him that this was some kind of ritual and that they were going to offer him as a human sacrifice. It took a while, Burney said, to understand why Mai was so scared and to convince him that this was just the ship’s normal Sunday service.

Despite the initial difficulties, over the next weeks the two islanders became part of the crew, respected and valued. On the Adventure, Burney, who had been at sea since the age of ten, looked after Mai. Burney enjoyed Mai’s tales from the Society Islands even if he was exaggerating—‘he is a Small matter addicted to romancing.’ On the Resolution, George and Hitihiti struck up a friendship. Roughly the same age, they talked and taught each other side by side at a table, George’s wavy dark-brown hair tied into a ponytail next to Hitihiti’s tight black curls. Hitihiti helped George to review his vocabulary from the Society Islands and George in turn taught Hitihiti English. They learned from each other.

Forster's First Impressions of New Zealand

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 93-96:

George was a gifted linguist, quick to learn Māori names and words as he pointed at plants, animals, clothing, weapons and jewellery, asking to be told what they were called and keen to understand the Māori way of life. He noted the striking tattoos—‘strongly carved with spirals in the face’—and their clothing and hairstyles. Some of the women wore caps made of brown feathers, while others had tattooed lips with several rows of blue punctures on their chin. There were young men with ‘amazing bushy hair, which hung wildly over their faces’, and others who tied it back and often decorated it with white feathers or carved bone combs. George described their canoes and clothing—‘an apron, made of their close-wrought cloth, covered with red feathers, faced with white dog-skin, and ornamented with pieces of the ear-shell’—and watched them dance ‘alternately extending their arms, and stamping with their feet in a violent and almost frantic manner’.

Equally fascinated by nature, George recorded black oystercatchers with bright red bills and feet strutting along the beach, and the long-necked shags, part of the cormorant species, roosting on rocky outcrops. Falcons with brown-and-cream-flecked plumage glided above him, and the noisy ka-hek-ka-hek-ka-hek call of the Fluttering Shearwater echoed across the water. He shot birds and caught fish which he painted, and collected plants to press. One evening, he and his father caught a small tawny-brown spotted owl with beautiful golden-yellow eyes as they scrambled through the dense forest, and a few days later the now extinct slate-grey South Island kōkako, a bird slightly smaller than a pigeon with prominent orange wattle flaps under its beak.

The forests were thick and lush, an entangled web of evergreen trees and ferns that seemed prehistoric. Ancient rimus soared high—with dangling spiky foliage which almost looked like Spanish moss from a distance. There were giant pukatea that stood firm with their huge buttress roots and cabbage trees with dense tufts of long sword-like leaves at the tip of their branches, which the Māori used for weaving, the roots an important food source. Tree ferns laced the sky—ponga with crowns of large fronds with a silvery underside that glowed in the moonlight and the even taller mamaku which grew up to 60 feet high.

A lively trade was soon established between the Europeans and the Māori. Glass bottles, nails, hatchets and European clothes were exchanged for carved fishing hooks, tools, jewellery, weapons, cloaks—and sex. The Māori were particularly keen on glass bottles and European shirts, George observed, admiring how ‘they were not inclined however to make disadvantageous bargains, and demanded the best price for every little trifle which they offered for sale’.

But when the Māori men presented their women to the sailors, George was appalled. The women were reluctant but, no matter how much they cried, the Māori men decided whether or not they had sex with the Europeans. Like Cook (who worried that his men would introduce vice and disease), George blamed the crew for having started this sex trade. He doubted whether the Māori ‘ever debased themselves so much as to make a trade of their women, before we created new wants by shewing them iron-tools’. Nothing could excuse the crew’s behaviour. Who was worse, George wondered, the Māori men who forced their women to have sex, or the Europeans who partook?

...

‘I fear that hitherto our intercourse has been wholly disadvantageous to the nations of the South Seas; and that those communities have been the least injured, who have always kept aloof from us,’ George now wrote. Less than two months after praising how the Resolution crew had shown the Māori at Dusky Sound the advantages of European improvements—tree felling, repairing, painting—George’s attitude had drastically changed. It was an extraordinary statement for the time. More typical was young John Elliott, who was convinced that the Māori were ‘ferocious Cannibals’ who ‘work themselves into a frenzey, foaming at the mouth’, and Anders Sparrman, who declared that they had a ‘desire to tear their enemies’ limbs apart with their teeth’.

Furneaux's Adventure in New Zealand

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 91-92:

After losing sight of the Resolution among the Antarctic icebergs, Captain Furneaux had sailed the Adventure to Tasmania, a large island about 150 miles south of Australia which the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman had sighted and visited in 1642. The French had landed there in 1772, but the Adventure was the first British ship to anchor. For a few days they charted parts of the eastern coast, stopping briefly to fill up their water stores. They saw some abandoned huts and overgrown pathways but didn’t encounter any inhabitants. From there the Adventure sailed east to New Zealand’s Queen Charlotte Sound, where they arrived in early April 1773, two months after their separation from the Resolution.

Like a vast river estuary, the opening of Queen Charlotte Sound was eight miles wide but narrowed as it stretched inland. Sheltered by mountains, the waters within were calm. Steep ravines, rocky headlands and densely forested ridges serrated the coastline where some of the mountains dropped in perpendicular cliffs into the sound, and others sloped down towards long beaches. The water was dark with thin azure bands along the shallow edges. When the Adventure reached the rendezvous point at Ship Cove, a natural harbour with a wide sandy beach and a freshwater stream, they discovered trees carved with the names of the Endeavour’s crew but no sign of the Resolution. Over the next six weeks, Furneaux’s men repaired their ship, took on supplies, and also met a great number of Māori who lived in nearby settlements.

The Māori had carefully approached the Adventure in canoes. ‘Tobia Tobia,’ they called out, using their name for Tupaia—the high priest and navigator from Raiatea, an island near Tahiti—who had joined Cook on his previous voyage and travelled with the Endeavour to New Zealand in 1770. As Māori and Tahitian were related languages, Tupaia had not only assisted Cook with his navigation but also acted as the Endeavour’s translator. In Māori tradition, Raiatea was also their ancestral homeland so they felt a reverence for Tupaia. Having seen him work as interpreter, guide and navigator, most of the Māori had regarded Tupaia as the Europeans’ leader. In the intervening three years, stories about Tupaia, and the Endeavour’s thundering cannons and her pale-skinned crew, had been recounted by the Māori across New Zealand. And so they asked the Adventure crew—some of whom understood a few Māori words because they had been part of Cook’s first expedition—about Tupaia and were saddened to hear that he had died during the Endeavour voyage.

...

The next morning, at 5 a.m., the Resolution turned into Queen Charlotte Sound. Once past the entrance Cook fired a cannon and to their delight another answered. A few hours later, they saw the Adventure in Ship Cove. That evening the two ships anchored next to each other and the men celebrated their reunion.

Translating for the Royal Society

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 51-53:

At the end of 1770, the Forsters moved back to London, taking lodgings next to Reinhold’s old school friend Woide, who had moved to Somerset House Stable Yard near the Thames. On 13 December, three days after their arrival, father and son went to the Royal Society, the nexus of British scientific enquiry where, since its foundation in the 1660s, fellows met to learn about new scientistic discoveries and exchange ideas with like-minded men. Reinhold Forster knew the Royal Society well, having attended the weekly meetings during their first stay in London. But now he wanted to introduce his son and present George’s translations (though Reinhold’s name was on their covers). So they made their way to Crane Court, a short fifteen-minute walk from their lodgings in a little cul-de-sac off Fleet Street, where the fellows met every Thursday. The president directed the meetings from a large armchair at one end of a long table, with a bust of the Society’s first royal patron, King Charles II, behind him, while the fellows sat on green-upholstered benches around the table.

At only sixteen George now found himself in the same room with some of the greatest minds in England. Almost every Thursday he accompanied his father to the Royal Society, where he sat under the watchful eyes of the portraits of illustrious previous fellows: the periwigged former president and mathematician Isaac Newton; the philosopher Francis Bacon in a lace ruff and embroidered velvet coat; and the architect Christopher Wren, who rebuilt London after the Great Fire of 1666. At these meetings George heard scholars talk about the physics of light, rare birds in the East Indies, new comets, the latest telescopes, tumours in pregnant women and subterranean geological formations. He saw animals preserved in spirits, pinned insects, a stuffed sea lion and a 24-foot snake, as well as the skeletons of a crocodile and an ostrich. He was receiving instructions unlike any other sixteen-year-old. As father and son attended the weekly meetings and published translations, their names soon spread across the scholarly world. Then, in February 1772, a little more than a year after their return to London, Reinhold was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and became officially part of the British scientific establishment.

George continued to work, translating eight volumes in total, while his father wrote and published numerous essays on botany, insects, zoology, antiquities, geography and mineralogy. ‘If I didn’t have a son of seventeen who helped me with translating,’ Reinhold admitted, ‘I couldn’t possibly do all this work.’ George began to feel like a ‘translation-machine’, but the reviews were glowing. ‘He writes our language,’ the Critical Review applauded (praising Reinhold, since only he was credited), ‘with propriety; always with perspicuity, the great requisite in the communication of scientific learning’. Another critic even declared George’s translation of Bougainville’s A Voyage Round the World ‘superior to the original’.

George Forster's Early Youth

From The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 27-28:

George Forster was ten when he went on his first expedition.

He was a slender boy, small for his age, but what he lacked in physical strength he made up for in tenacity during the five months that he and his father travelled through Russia. In charge of collecting and identifying plants, the ten-year-old would wander off alone, eyes wide open, searching for new discoveries—sometimes climbing trees, at others keeping his head near the ground to study the vegetation with a magnifying glass. When he returned to the tent with full bags, he would press the samples he had found between paper, carefully arranging blossoms and leaves so that he could classify them later. Soon his collection had risen to 700 specimens.

While other children sat on hard benches in orderly rows at school, learning by rod and rote, George found himself galloping on small Kalmyk horses across the Russian steppes and wading through marshes on the banks of the Volga river. He watched a violent wildfire race across the vast grasslands to the east, its ravenous flames consuming everything in its path. He remembered the terror he felt that day for the rest of his life. Instead of studying arithmetic or conjugating Latin verbs, he observed flocks of black herons, wild boars and wolves, and huge Bactrian camels used by the nomadic Kalmyks as pack animals, which evoked the stories of the Arabian Nights and Ali Baba. He met Muslim Tatar traders along the Volga, fierce Cossack warriors from the open steppes to the east who wore sheepskin hats, baggy trousers and colourful caftans, and German settlers so destitute that they lived in earth dugouts in the ground. Near today’s Russian border with Kazakhstan, he marvelled at Lake Elton, a huge shallow salt lake with a shoreline encrusted in a thick white layer like snow, against water which algae had turned blood red. And in the Ryn Desert just north of the Caspian Sea, he felt piercing winds whip across the dunes, as wild as the land itself.

Russia was on a different scale from the flat gentle countryside where George had been raised near Gdansk, in today’s Poland. Everything here was vaster and emptier. The skies, lakes and land were bigger, the distances immense, and the weather extreme. He feasted his eyes and tasted new foods. He ate wild asparagus, drank fermented mare’s milk—‘of a nauseous or disagreeable Taste’—and enjoyed the refreshing juice of bog cranberries mixed with water and honey after the long dusty days on horseback.

This was not like learning from the books he loved. He could see, smell and feel that he had entered another world. The food had a different flavour, the languages were unfamiliar, and the people looked nothing like those at home. In Russia, he absorbed a new and very foreign country for the first time. At the age of ten, he became a traveller.

How Much Polish in Esperanto

This week's newsletter from Culture.pl contains several articles on language, one of which, by Mikołaj Gliński, answers How much Polish is there in Esperanto? Here are some excerpts:

The Slavic Esperanto lexicon is generally considered to derive from two Slavic languages, both of which Zamenhof knew very well – Russian and Polish. While Russian, as he later recalled, was his favourite during his early days, as well as the language of the larger part of his linguistic output, Polish was the language spoken in Warsaw, where Zamenhof would eventually spend most of his life. And it’s actually these two languages that make up the 1% of Slavic in Esperanto vocabulary. The problem is that sometimes identifying the original language is very hard if not simply impossible.

While Esperanto words like barakti (to flounder, from барахтаться barahtat’sja), gladi (to iron, from гладить gladit’), krom (except, from кроме krome), or vosto (a tail, from хвост) are easy to identify as of Russian origin (they simply don’t appear in Polish), and others like kolbaso can be considered as coming from Russian based on their phonetic build-up (Rus. kolbasa, compare Pol. kiełbasa), there are also some that can be really problematic. This goes for words like celo (aim), bulko (bun), klopodo (effort), kaĉo (porridge, from kasza / каша kaša), prava (right [in opinion], from prawy / правый pravyj), or svati (to matchmake, from swat / сват svat). Due to their almost identical forms in both languages, it seems hardly possible to tell from which language Zamenhof took the original root.

...

And yet the group of Esperanto words which are usually identified as Polish loan words is significant. It includes such words as:

• barĉo – borscht (from barszcz),
• ĉu – whether (from czy),
• krado – a grating (from krata),
• luti – to solder (from lutować)
• pilko – a ball (Polish piłka)
• ŝelko – suspenders (from szelki)
• [via] moŝto – [your] highness (from Polish mość),

While this is a rather diverse bunch, comprising elements of clothing, sport items, local food, and a grammatical particle, some of these words can be more interesting than others, and actually instructive in telling us something about how Zamenhof saw the component languages of Esperanto, in this case Polish.

...

One of these words is moŝto. It certainly isn’t a word of particular prominence or frequency in contemporary Esperanto. In fact, it’s a word you’re not likely to use at all, unless you’re addressing high authority, or... a king. The latter was Zamenhof’s case – he used the word (precisely: Lia reĝa moŝto) when addressing the king of Spain Alfonso XIII speaking at the Esperanto Congress in Barcelona in 1909. Yet it is this word that also happens to offer interesting insights into the role of Polish in the Esperanto system.

The word goes back to the Polish word mość, one of many honorific lexemes used (historically) in Polish. In early modern Poland, the phrase was required as an obligatory form of address between and to members of the Polish nobility (szlachta). Used and abused, this linguistic habit was part of the more widespread social and cultural phenomenon known as szlachtomania (nobility-mania), a real scourge of early-modern Polish society.

...

While Zamenhof on the one hand made sure that addressing people in Esperanto would be as democratic as possible (Esperantists address each other by a simple vi (you), much like in contemporary English, and unlike in Polish), he also reserved a mode of speaking when addressing the highest royal authority. In finding the right word he somewhat naturally turned to Polish. A choice well justified, as Polish is perhaps the only Slavic language (along with Czech) to have developed an elaborate honorific system that distinguishes between who you’re talking to, based on your age and social status (historically, class of society).

That Polish is at the core of Esperanto honorific usage is best exemplified in the phrase via reĝa moŝto, which translates as Your Majesty, and can be seen as quite a direct calque from the Polish: wasza królewska mość...

Is Ĉu Polish?

But perhaps the most interesting and telling case of a Polish Slavic influence on Esperanto is the particle ĉu (whether, if). This little but important word goes most likely back to the Polish czy, otherwise it comes up only in Belarusian (ці/tsi) and is not used in other Slavic languages. Interestingly the same particle (צי, tsi) surfaces also in Yiddish, a language Zamenhof was surely familiar with.

Much the same as in Polish, ĉu in Esperanto is used primarily to introduce a question. Like in this example:

Imagine you find yourself somewhere in Eastern Europe. But is it Russia or Belarus, Poland or Croatia, Slovenia or Slovakia? Find out how much you know about Slavic languages and we’ll see if you’re able to make your way through Slavic Europe.

Ĉu li aŭ ŝi amas min? [Does he or she love me?]

Whereas in French or English, asking a question involves inverting the word order and/or inserting an auxiliary particle, which as many struggling language learners surely know, can be quite complicated, Esperanto simply puts ĉu in front of the phrase or subordinate clause, the sentence basically stays the same. This is exactly how ‘czy’ operates in Polish and Yiddish.

But ĉu is also interesting because it opens us on the issues of syntax – as most structuralists would tell you, language is not really about vocabulary. This helps to pinpoint the more thorough impact of Slavic, and Polish in particular, on the fundamental grammatical structures in Esperanto. Like say, the accusative...

Is Esperanto’s accusative Slavic?

Esperanto is somewhat notorious for its rather free word order. This goes for noun + adjective order (adjective noun) but also, and more importantly, the structural order of subject, object and verb in a sentence. The latter in Esperanto is very flexible, even if the word order which is usually recommended is SVO. This flexibility, which allows for great liberty in constructing Esperanto sentence, is actually facilitated through the presence of the accusative. Compare these examples:

The boy bit the dog

La knabo mordis la hundon

La knabo la hundon mordis

La hundon la knabo mordis

La hundon mordis la knabo

Mordis la hundon la knabo

Mordis la knabo la hundon

The presence of the accusative case (marked by the -n ending) was a bone of contention in early discussions among Esperantists (and partially led to a schism in the early Esperanto movement, see Ido). But Zamenhof always remained a strong advocate of the accusative. As Professor Żelazny explains, he thought it was a key tool in allowing bigger flexibility for Esperanto sentences, which was particularly important in poetry, which Zamenhof admired so much. The accusative affix allowed for greater flexibility in the Esperanto word order and thus multiplied the rhyming potential of it, which otherwise would be very limited.

As a result, Esperanto’s word order is very fluid (although naturally some positions are preferred by users) just like it is in Slavic languages. And while it’s obviously impossible to trace back the invention to Polish or Russian (German also has the accusative,) the Esperanto sentence shares a general similarity with the rather free syntax of Slavic sentence.

This is showcased in the early translation of The Pharaoh by Bolesław Prus. As Walter Żelazny notes, it was La Faraono, translated by Kazimierz Bein, that became a kind of model for much of the literature later written in Esperanto.

...

Semantic calques

A more subtle influence of Slavic languages on the structure of Esperanto, and more precisely its morphology, can be traced in the semantic build-up of Esperanto word formations, like senanima, senforta, or senfunda. While all these words are built from Esperanto (sen-) and Romance elements, they are actually semantic calques from Slavic languages, but again telling whether it’s Polish or Russian may be next to impossible.

• senanima – heartless, callous [calque of Rus. бeздyшный or Pol. bezduszny]
• senfunda– bottomless [calque of Rus. бeздoнный, Pol. bezdenny]
• senforta – powerless [calque of Rus. бессильный / Pol. bezsilny]

A similar ‘subliminal’ influence of Slavic semantics can be seen in the meaning and functioning of some words. One oft-cited example is the Esperanto word plena ‘full, complete’, which looks Latinate in form (French plein(e), Latin plen- ‘full’), but has the semantic range of Russian полный polnyi ‘full, complete’, as can be seen in the phrase plena vortaro ‘a complete dictionary’, a usage not possible with the French or Latin words. And one could add that it’s also how the word pełny is also used in Polish.

Phonetics

Another area of a possible Slavic influence is phonology. As Walter Żelazny explains: “The Esperanto phonological system is almost entirely Polish.” That’s why, as Żelazny claims, the majority of Poles, as the majority of Slavs, should not have to learn any vowels. In fact, all the sounds which you can find in Esperanto are also in Polish, including diacriticical signs: ĉ (Polish cz), ĝ (dż), Ĵ (ż), Ŝ (sz), ŭ (ł).

Alphabet

A bit surprisingly, Polish influence is also traceable in the Esperanto alphabet and orthography. The Esperanto alphabet consists of 28 letters, with each letter standing for one sound. Apart from diacritical letters, its peculiarities include the letters C and J. Pronounced as ‘ts’ and ‘y’, respectively, they may at first seem a bit counter-intuitive for many Esperanto learners, but they are best explained on the grounds of the Polish alphabet. It is a common experience of many Polish learners that these letters to the English eye are false friends. (As to further Slavic influence in the Esperanto alphabet, compare the letter ŭ in Esperanto and Belarusian).

...

Accent

But perhaps the best and most convincing example of the overall influence of Polish – and not Slavic languages – on the shape of Esperanto is its accent. The accent rule was included already in the first edition of Unua Libro, the first Esperanto handbook, published by Zamenhof in Warsaw in 1887. Among the 16 cardinal principles of Esperanto the one No. 10 reads:

The accent falls on the last syllable but one (penultimate).

The penultimate accent just happens to be one of the characteristic features of Polish, differentiating it sharply from other local Slavic languages, like Russian (which has unpredictable stress) or Czech (initial accent) as well as from French, which accents the last syllable pronounced. That’s why some practitioners of Esperanto claim that Polish pronunciation of Esperanto is the most natural and closest to the Esperanto standard. But this is of course rather a matter of individual taste.

Ukraine Invasion Begins, Feb. 2022

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 152-154:

Putin’s address was aired on Russian television in the early hours of February 24, on the eighth anniversary of Putin’s decision to start the Crimean annexation in 2014. He expected the results to be as quick, decisive, and positive as they had been then.

Putin concluded the speech with an appeal to Russian citizens: “I believe in your support and the invincible force rooted in love for our Fatherland.” The key motifs of his address, including the denazification of Ukraine, would be picked up and popularized by the Russian media in the days and weeks to come, although it was difficult to change the propaganda line right away. Leonid Slutsky, the head of the Russian State Duma Committee on Foreign Affairs, denied the invasion even on the very day it began. “We do not intend to unleash any war. We are not going to invade Ukraine as we are being accused of in Ukraine itself, and not only there,” he told journalists. As he spoke those words, Russian columns were moving toward the Ukrainian capital.

The Russian assault on Ukraine began shortly before 4:00 a.m. Kyiv time on February 24, 2022, on multiple fronts. The citizens of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Zaporizhia, Zhytomyr, Mykolaiv, and Kherson, to list only the main regional centers, woke up to the sound of explosions—Russian aviation and missiles were attacking airfields and military installations all over the country. Radio and television covered the news on the basis of posts in social media from around Ukraine. There were also reports of Russian amphibious landings in Odesa on the Black Sea and Mariupol on the Sea of Azov. Those later turned out to be false.

The Russian armed forces bombarded Ukrainian command and control centers, air defenses, and critical infrastructure with more than 100 short-range ballistic missiles launched from the air and from the sea. Columns of Russian tanks and personnel carriers began to cross the Ukrainian borders from Belarus toward Kyiv, from Russia toward Kharkiv, and from the occupied Crimea toward Kherson and Nova Kakhovka in the south. Tens of thousands of troops were suddenly on the move. Ukraine, where neither the government nor the general population believed in the possibility of large-scale Russian aggression, was in for a rude awakening.

The entire military operation, underpinned by Putin’s belief in the nonexistence of the Ukrainian nation and the desire of Ukrainians to live under Russian rule, was modeled on the Russian takeover of the Crimea. In the first echelon of ground troops advancing on Kyiv immediately after the paratroopers were units of riot police, and in burned-out tanks and vehicles Ukrainians would find parade uniforms of Russian soldiers prepared for a victory march down Kyiv’s main avenue, Khreshchatyk. The soldiers had rations for only two or three days, as they were promised that the operation in Ukraine would take no longer. Since the invasion was billed as a mission of liberation, the officers and soldiers were ordered not to show any hostility whatever to the local population. They were told that the military operation was ordered to prevent the installation of NATO bases in Ukraine.

“Orders have been given to the Russian army not to assault cities or their inhabitants. The leadership of the Russian Defense Ministry emphasizes that the population of a fraternal country has nothing to fear from the Russian army,” confided the political consultant Sergei Markov to a reporter on the second day of the invasion, February 25, 2022. Regarding the further plan of the action, Markov suggested: “All groupings of the Ukrainian Armed Forces will be surrounded (mainly from the air) and given an ultimatum. They will have to surrender their arms. If everything proceeds normally, a process of disarmament will begin. Wherever normality does not prevail, those groupings will be destroyed. I think that most subunits of the Ukrainian Armed Forces will surrender their weapons. Part of them will continue to offer resistance. Those are the neo-Nazi military subunits.”

That was not just Markov’s plan but Putin’s as well. In his address at the start of the war, Putin had appealed to the Ukrainian military to lay down their arms. But the Ukrainian army continued to fight. Not a single unit would surrender, to say nothing of switching sides. Putin and his propagandists like Markov were in for a rude awakening.

Russia Boosts Ukrainian Nationalism

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 131-134:

The eight years of hybrid warfare that Russia had waged against Ukraine in the Donbas, divided by the Minsk agreements, turned Ukraine into a different country and society from those of 2014. A country divided by issues of history, culture, and identity when the Crimea was annexed was now united by the desire to defend its sovereignty, democratic order, and way of life at almost any price.

The war had changed the electoral map of Ukraine. The first wartime presidential elections, held in May 2014, yielded unprecedented results: Petro Poroshenko won in the first round with 55 percent of the vote—the first time this had happened since 1991. Even more important, Poroshenko carried 187 precincts out of 188 remaining under Ukrainian control. The dividing line of the previous presidential elections, which had split Ukraine in half between pro-European and pro-Russian candidates, was now gone. The war had produced a much more homogenous country.

Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and takeover of significant portions of Ukraine’s Donbas removed the traditionally most pro-Russian areas, with the greatest number of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine, from Ukrainian political and cultural space. Those areas had also served as bases for Russia-friendly political parties. Russia did its utmost to support former allies of the ousted president, Viktor Yanukovych, but they were divided and weak after losing a significant part of their electoral base. The forces led by the Ukrainian businessman and politician Viktor Medvedchuk, who was close to Putin, also remained weak despite the support of television channels and newspapers funded with Russian assistance.

The growth of Ukrainian political identity began with the rejection of symbols of the Soviet past. The Maidan protests of 2014 unleashed a wave of demolition of monuments to Vladimir Lenin, the main symbol of communist and, in the eyes of many, Russian domination of Ukraine. More than 500 such monuments were toppled by anti-communist activists in the first half of 2014, mostly in the center of the country. The rest, more than 1,500 that remained in the regions of southeastern Ukraine controlled by Kyiv, were removed in the course of the next few years by decision of parliament, which adopted the so-called “decommunization laws” prohibiting the public display of communist symbols.

Ukrainians survived the Russian onslaught during the first stage of the war, in 2014–15, by uniting across ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural lines. The war itself also promoted popular identification with the Ukrainian language and culture. Since Putin’s official rationale for invading Ukraine was the defense of Russian speakers, many Ukrainians and Russians who knew Ukrainian but used Russian as their language of preference began to switch to Ukrainian as an act of defiance. The number of those self-reporting their use of Ukrainian at home and at work spiked in 2014–15. That number returned to the previous norm once the immediate danger of all-out invasion passed, but readiness to adopt Ukrainian as the dominant language of government and education remained. In 2019, parliament adopted a new law making the Ukrainian language mandatory for government officials and public-sector employees. The Russian Foreign Ministry protested, claiming that the law would deepen divisions in Ukrainian society. That did not prove to be the case.

City and village bookstores were flooded with Ukrainian-language books, reducing Russian-language publications to secondary status. Works on Ukrainian history and culture began to top bestseller lists. Before the war, the government had spent little or no money on the promotion of Ukrainian culture abroad; now it created a special Ukrainian Institute under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Its task was to emulate Germany’s Goethe Institute and similar agencies in other countries, familiarizing foreign countries with the Ukrainian language and culture. At home, the Ukrainian Cultural Fund and the Ukrainian Book Institute were charged with supporting cultural events and promoting Ukrainian publications.

In 2018 the government provided strong support for the unification of the two branches of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that were independent of the Moscow Patriarchate, which still dominated Orthodoxy in Ukraine, while striving to restrain competition between them. President Poroshenko attended the unification council of the two churches, which were placed under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople—a major blow to the prospect of continuing Russian Orthodox hegemony. Moscow protested and severed ties with the Patriarch of Constantinople but could do little more to maintain its position. The newly united Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) had mass popular support, and, given the ongoing if undeclared war with Russia, many Orthodox Ukrainians preferred a church independent of Moscow. The transfer of parishes from the Moscow Patriarchate to the OCU began in the first months of 2019.

Active government involvement in matters of language, memory politics, and religion met with substantial criticism not only from traditionally pro-Russian political forces but also from part of the country’s liberal establishment. Nevertheless, it was either supported or accepted by the population at large. After Russia’s aggressive weaponization of issues of culture and history in 2014–15, much of the population agreed that the new laws and policies were necessary elements of nation-building, designed to prevent further Russian aggression.

The new Ukrainian government fulfilled the promise of the Revolution of Dignity by moving closer to the European Union and Euro-Atlantic institutions, including NATO. The association agreement that had triggered the Maidan protests in 2017 was signed in June 2014. In March 2017 the European Union Council granted Ukrainians visa-free travel to the EU. The EU member nations provided badly needed financial assistance, altogether up to $14 billion, to help Ukraine deal with its losses of territory, population, and economic assets. An additional $2.2 billion came from the United States. Washington became the main sponsor of reform in the Ukrainian security sector, providing $1.6 billion for that purpose alone. Ukraine was rapidly acquiring a new professional army, and the government placed NATO membership back on its agenda by including it in the Ukrainian constitution.

Russia Annexes Crimea, 2014

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 118-119:

On March 18, 2014, Vladimir Putin delivered one of the most consequential speeches of his career. Addressing a joint session of the lower and upper houses of the Russian parliament—the deputies of the State Duma and the members of the Federation Council, joined by regional leaders and representatives of Kremlin-controlled civic organizations—Putin asked the deputies to approve a law annexing the Ukrainian Crimea and the city of Sevastopol to the Russian Federation. Two days after the referendum, Putin was ending the Crimea’s short-lived independence by annexing the peninsula—the first annexation of a sovereign nation’s territory in Europe by a foreign state since World War II.

In his speech, Putin declared that the Crimean self-defense units had taken the initiative to bring about reunification, and the people of the Crimea had decided their fate, preventing Sevastopol from being turned into a NATO military base. He took advantage of the opportunity to remind NATO and the West of all the injustices allegedly committed against international law and Russia, from the bombing of Serbia to the recognition of Kosovo’s independence, as putative justification for Russia’s actions in the Crimea, and denounced the “color revolutions” as coups engineered by the West.

Putin made an unprecedented appeal to Russian nationalism. This was a marked departure from his earlier statements and pronouncements, in which his main addressee and point of reference was the multiethnic Russian political nation embodied by the citizens of the Russian Federation, referred to as rossiiane rather than ethnic russkie. Now he claimed that Russia and the Russians were the greatest divided nation in the world. After the fall of the USSR, said Putin, when “Crimea ended up as part of a different country . . . Russia realized that it was not simply robbed, it was plundered.” “All these years,” he declared, “citizens and many public figures have come back to this issue, saying that Crimea is historically Russian land and Sevastopol is a Russian city.”

There were also elements of the speech that appealed to Russo-Ukrainian unity, despite Putin’s attack on Ukraine and annexation of part of its territory. “Orthodoxy,” claimed Putin, “predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilization, and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.” He even declared that Russia was taking the Crimea on behalf of both Russians and Ukrainians to prevent its loss to a third party. “Crimea is our common historical legacy and a very important factor in regional stability,” Putin went on. “And this strategic territory should be part of a strong and stable sovereignty, which today can only be Russian. Otherwise, dear friends (I am addressing both Ukraine and Russia), you and we—Russians and Ukrainians—could lose Crimea completely, and that could happen in the near historical perspective.”

Putin made a hybrid argument for the annexation: appealing to Russian history, territory, and identity, he invoked the legacy of empire to claim the Crimea under the banner of Russian ethnic nationalism, while also maintaining that Russians and Ukrainians were Slavic brethren. The latter was meant to exploit the sense of Russo-Ukrainian unity to which many citizens of Russia and Ukraine subscribed. Putin assured Ukrainians that Crimea was a unique case—a part of Ukraine historically, culturally, and ethnically belonging to Russia. The rest of Ukraine was safe. “Do not believe those who want you to fear Russia, shouting that other regions will follow Crimea,” declared Putin. “We do not want to divide Ukraine; we do not need that.” In fact, the division of Ukraine was exactly what Putin undertook in the weeks and months following his Crimean speech.

In conclusion, Putin asked the Russian parliamentarians to ratify the treaty and create two new constituent entities within the Russian Federation, one for the Crimea, another for the city of Sevastopol. The parliament complied, and on March 21 Putin signed the law integrating the Crimea and the city of Sevastopol into the Russian Federation. The annexation of the Crimea was now a fait accompli, carried out in accordance with the Russian constitution but in blatant violation of international law and treaties signed by Russia, including the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and the Russo-Ukrainian Friendship Agreement of 1997.

Reviving Russian Slavic Eurasianism

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 102-104:

Putin adopted many elements of traditional and revived Eurasianism as parts of his world view. In his official pronouncements he spoke repeatedly of Russia as a unique multiethnic civilization not only different from the West but opposed to it in history, culture, and values. But he also embraced with equal if not greater enthusiasm the ideas of a different group of Russian thinkers who juxtaposed Russia to the West predominantly as a Eurasian Slavic or Russian civilization. That trend of thought, represented by such figures as Aleksei Khomiakov, Ivan Kirievsky, and Konstantin Aksakov, predated Eurasianism, going back to the first decades of the nineteenth century, which produced one of the most consequential schisms in Russian intellectual history, that between Westernizers and Slavophiles. The former insisted that Russia’s destiny lay with the West, while the latter emphasized Russian uniqueness, rooted in history, language, culture, and nationality.

The nationality that the Slavophiles called Russian was in fact East Slavic. In imperial Russian terminology, it consisted of Great Russians, or Russians per se, Little Russians or Ukrainians, and White Russians or Belarusians. The model of a tripartite Russian nation, which the Russian historian Alexei Miller calls a “big Russian nation,” was adopted by the imperial elites in the second half of the nineteenth century and became part of the ideological credo and personal belief, as well as identity, of many of the country’s political, religious, and military leaders. The Russian Revolution put an end to the dominance of the tripartite nation in Russian political and ethnonational thought. In 1922, Lenin resisted Joseph Stalin’s attempts to incorporate non-Russian republics into the Russian Federation and insisted on the creation of a Union state in which those republics would be distinct polities with rights equal to those of Russia.

The idea of a big Russian nation went into the Russian emigration along with the White Guard generals defeated by the Bolshevik Red Army and the intellectuals who supported their vision of Russia, one and indivisible. Among the émigrés was General Anton Denikin, whose memoirs would make a strong impression on Vladimir Putin, and the philosopher Ivan Ilyin, an admirer of fascism, whose article, “What the Dismemberment of Russia Promises the World,” would become a frequently quoted source in the speeches and pronouncements of Putin and other Russian officials. Ilyin argued that one day Russia would gather its lands back under its tutelage.

The key figure who linked the imperial thinking of the past with a plan for dealing with post-Soviet Russian challenges and realities was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In his essay of 1990, Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals, Solzhenitsyn called for the separation of the eastern Slavs from the non-Slavic republics of the Soviet Union and the formation of a “Russian Union” consisting of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and northern Kazakhstan. If one followed Ernest Gellner’s definition of nationalism as the establishment of congruence between political and ethnonational borders, then Solzhenitsyn’s “reconstructed” Russia was to become quadripartite. But his plan never materialized, and several years later Solzhenitsyn went on to question the legitimacy of the Ukrainian borders. In his essay Russia in Collapse (1998), Solzhenitsyn argued for the annexation of eastern and southern Ukraine, denouncing its “inordinate expansion onto territory that was never Ukraine until Lenin: the two Donets provinces, and the whole southern belt of New Russia (Melitopol–Kherson–Odesa) and the Crimea.”

Putin was an admirer of all these writers and shared many of their ideas. In May 2009, less than a year after the invasion of Georgia, he made a public show of his admiration for imperial Russian thinkers. Despite rainy weather, he showed up in the company of numerous reporters at the cemetery of the Donskoi Monastery in Moscow to lay flowers on the graves of General Denikin and his wife, along with the grave of Ivan Ilyin and that of Ivan Shmelev, another Russian émigré writer whose remains had been returned to Russia. Putin also laid flowers on the grave of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who had died in Moscow the previous year.

Referring to General Denikin, whose grave he honored first, Putin encouraged one of the reporters accompanying him at the ceremony to read Denikin’s memoirs. “Denikin discusses Great and Little Russia, Ukraine,” said Putin. “He writes that no one may meddle in relations between us; that has always been the business of Russia itself.” Denikin was in fact following Aleksandr Pushkin, who had attacked the West for criticizing Russia’s assault on Poland after it rebelled against the empire in 1830. If Pushkin referred to Russo-Polish relations, Denikin referred to those between Russia and Ukraine. In Putin’s view, it was up to Russia to decide how to conduct its relations with a weaker neighbor. The Slavic roots of the two peoples became his excuse to condemn any Western support for Ukraine.

NATO's Bucharest Summit, 2008

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 87-89:

As NATO leaders arrived for the Bucharest summit on April 2, 2008, Russia’s vocal protests against membership for Ukraine and Georgia were on their minds. Putin came to the Romanian capital in person to take part in the meeting of the Russia-NATO summit and warn the members of the alliance against extending invitations to the two post-Soviet republics. “The emergence of a powerful military bloc at our borders will be seen as a direct threat to Russian security,” Putin told President Bush. Bush was not particularly impressed. Before going to Bucharest he made a stopover in Kyiv, where he told the Ukrainians: “Your nation has made a bold decision, and the United States strongly supports your request.”

But key European members of NATO, France and Germany in particular, blocked the decision advocated by the United States and supported by the new East European members of the alliance to grant Ukraine and Georgia a Membership Action Plan. “We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO,” read the declaration before making it clear that no accession would take place any time soon. The MAP was promised but not given on the basis that the two potential applicants still had to meet some specific criteria in order to qualify. “[W]e will now begin a period of intensive engagement with both at a high political level to address the questions still outstanding pertaining to their MAP applications.”

The matter was postponed and would not return to the NATO agenda at the next summit or the one after that. Everyone knew that the decision to deny MAP to the two post-Soviet republics was a concession to their former master, Russia. Otherwise it was impossible to explain why the Bucharest summit invited Croatia and Albania to join NATO. For the two countries now perceived as threats by Russia, NATO’s non-decision on their membership was the worst possible outcome of the summit: their applications had been postponed indefinitely, leaving them with no protection from the alliance that they had publicly stated they wanted to join. While Russia would not dare to attack NATO, it could easily attack its aspirants, and it did so.

On August 8, 2008, a few months after the Bucharest summit, Russia launched a war on Georgia, ostensibly in defense of the Georgian enclave of South Ossetia, which had seceded from Georgia in the early 1990s. The Russian attack allegedly came as a response to the actions of the Georgian army, which had been ordered into South Ossetia, but there was no doubt that the war was directly linked to the outcome of the Bucharest summit. Russia had established official relations with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two Georgian provinces that it was now “defending,” almost immediately after Putin’s return from the Bucharest summit. The Georgians fought back under the leadership of President Mikheil Saakashvili, who had been educated in Ukraine and the United States, but the Russian army, larger and superior to Georgia’s, moved deep into the country and threatened to occupy its capital, Tbilisi.

On August 12, Yushchenko, together with the leaders of Poland and the three Baltic states, flew to Tbilisi to show support for Saakashvili and his country. That day the Russian advance was stopped by means of a ceasefire negotiated by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. Russian troops eventually left a good part of the occupied territory but stayed in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, ostensibly protecting the independence of the two provinces from Georgia and perpetuating its territorial division. That undermined Georgia’s chances of ever joining NATO, as the alliance was reluctant to accept any state with unresolved territorial issues. The Russian war on Georgia became the first instance of its initiating a major war beyond its borders. It sent a clear signal to the West that Russia was prepared to use military force to stop any expansion of the alliance. It also demonstrated to other post-Soviet republics that NATO would not come to their rescue in case of Russian attack.

The decision of the Bucharest NATO summit, coupled with the outcome of the Russo-Georgian War, dealt a devastating blow to Ukrainian aspirations to join the alliance. The changing of the guard in Washington and the inauguration of Barack Obama as president in January 2009 led to a thorough revision of all elements of US foreign policy and an attempted “reset” of US-Russia relations. In January 2010 Viktor Yushchenko, defeated in the first round of that year’s presidential elections, left office to make way for Putin’s old favorite, Viktor Yanukovych. The new president promptly dropped NATO membership from the Ukrainian foreign-policy agenda and signed a deal that was devastating for Ukrainian security because it extended the presence of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol until 2042.

The Bucharest summit put Ukraine in the most vulnerable position that it had experienced since declaring independence. Without nuclear weapons and NATO membership, Ukraine found itself at the mercy of Russia, which saw the ambiguous offer of membership extended to Ukraine by the Bucharest summit as a threat to its own security. Ukraine was a lone warrior on open ground pursued by hostile forces, running to take shelter in a secure fortress, only to find its gates closing because of disagreements among its defenders.