Dampier was acknowledged as an authoritative precursor by the scientific voyagers of the later eighteenth century,^[17] most of whom were no more interested in classifying human beings than he had been. The earliest systematic classification of the inhabitants of Oceania was the joint product of Georg Forster and his father Reinhold (1778:ii), self-styled purveyors of 'facts' over 'systems formed in the closet'. In a post-voyage treatise, Reinhold Forster proposed his well-known identification of 'two great varieties of people in the South Seas', one 'more fair' and the other 'blacker'; both seen 'living in the same climate, or nearly so'. This formal binary division of Pacific humanity had been anticipated empirically in Georg Forster's narrative of the voyage which differentiated the Malakulans of what is now north Vanuatu as 'a race totally distinct' in 'form', 'language', and 'manners' from the 'lighter-coloured nation' he had seen in the eastern and central Pacific and in New Zealand (Aotearoa). He speculatively aligned the Malakulans with the 'black race' earlier reported in and around New Guinea and wondered whether 'some other tribes' might be 'a mixture of both races'.^[18]

Similar lexical imprecision with respect to the word race is evident in Reinhold Forster's further hypotheses that 'each of the above two races of men, is again divided into several varieties, which form the gradations towards the other race'; that these 'two different tribes' might stem from 'two different races of men', probably 'the two distinct [East] Indian tribes'; and that the 'five races' of the 'fairer' tribe were 'really descended from the same original nation'. His subsequent ruminations on settlement and 'the origin of ranks' in the highly stratified societies of Tahiti, the Society Islands, and Tonga made local differences in skin colour the main ground for supposing that a 'successive' migration of 'ancient Malays' had supplanted 'the aboriginal black race' of 'cannibals' whom he equated with 'the tribe of the Papuas', 'people from New-Guinea, and its neighbourhood', and those he had seen in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu). Purportedly 'subdued' by their 'more polished and more civilized conquerors', these imagined black aborigines became 'the lowest rank' in Forster's reflections on people he had actually encountered in the eastern and central Pacific Islands. A parallel argument was put by the French navigator Jean-François de Galaup de La Pérouse (1741-1788) to explain the differences between 'two very distinct races' he thought he saw in Upolu, Samoa, in 1787.^[19]

At issue here are two modes of thinking about human differences which often intersect but are inappropriately conflated:^[20] one, emergent in the late-eighteenth century, is taxonomic and incidentally historical; the other is an older, deeply anti-Negro conjectural history of inevitable displacement of black-skinned autochthones by more civilized, lighter-skinned immigrants. The second, but not the first, was applied to Oceania by Brosses, though he was by no means its inventor. The Spanish navigator Pedro Fernández de Quirós (c. 1563-1615), who had twice traversed the Mar del Sur, 'South Sea', at the turn of the sixteenth century, proposed an early version. He recalled that in Luzon, in the Philippines, there were 'black men' who were said to be 'the aborigines' but who had been driven into remote 'corners' by invading 'Moors and other Indians'. Quirós hypothesized that these 'persecuted' people had sought and found new places to settle in New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and eventually Santa Cruz where he himself saw 'black' inhabitants in 1595.^[21] A century and a half later, Brosses prefigured Reinhold Forster, La Pérouse, and numerous others in plotting a displacement narrative to account for a supposed 'difference in the human species [l'espèce humaine]' within the same climatic zone — an anomaly in Buffonian terms. Brosses's conjectural history represented 'the native inhabitants of Australasie' as an 'old race' of 'frizzy-haired blacks', identical to 'the African negroes', and like them among the 'first inhabitants of the torrid zone'. They were 'a more brutish and savage kind of men [espèce d'hommes]' than 'foreign colonies of Malay peoples' who had driven them from 'their possessions in Asia' and gradually 'destroyed the race' — as the Spanish did to the Americans. The blacks retained sole possession only of remote 'Virgin countries', such as New Holland and other 'unknown Austral lands', though Brosses refused 'to believe that any kind of men is totally uncivilizable'.^[22] His geographical division of the Terres australes into Polynésie, Australasie, and Magellanique did not extend to systematic classification of the 'many different peoples' of this 'fifth part of the world' and it is anachronistic to recast it as anticipating subsequent dual ethnological or racial categories.^[23] But the teleological presumption of racial dispersal and destruction would haunt the subsequent project of racial taxonomy in Oceania.

Notwithstanding the invidious implications of Reinhold Forster's speculative racial history and chromatic differentiation of Pacific Islanders, his term race was evidently interchangeable with variety, tribe, and nation. A Lutheran pastor, he was committed on scriptural grounds to the conventional position 'that all mankind, though ever so much varied' is 'of one species' and 'descended from one couple'; he did not doubt that all varieties were 'only accidental'; and, like Brosses, he allowed a universal human potential to 'progress' towards 'civilization' or 'degenerate' towards 'animality'.^[24] Moreover, his flexible rankings of particular groups of Islanders were contingent on perceived indigenous behaviour and appearance rather than predetermined by biology.^[25] Yet as a naturalist, Forster sought to bolster scripture with science by explaining the 'evident difference' between the 'two great tribes' he had seen. Convinced that 'climate alone' could not produce 'any material alteration' in man except over the very long run, he hypothesized that they must be 'descended from two different races of men' and thus were products of 'a different round of climates, food, and customs'. In his narrative, Georg Forster professed agnosticism as to the 'general and powerful influence of climates' on human variation, thereby anticipating his subsequent heterodoxy on the question of human specific unity.^[26]

A decade later, in an article on Menschenrassen, 'human races', Georg Forster (1786:64‑6) dichotomized the South Sea Islanders in far harsher terms — 'these two so conspicuously different peoples', the one 'beautiful' and 'light brown', the other 'ugly blacks'. In this essay and another of similar date extolling Cook as discoverer (1985b), Forster invoked the inductive authority of his experience as global circumnavigator to lambast the teleological reasoning, deductive logic, and taxonomic terminology of his fellow-German, the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who had theorized human Racen, 'races', as permanent, hereditary divisions of a single human species with common ancestry.^[27] A fervent advocate for the 'clear-sighted and reliable empiricist' over the 'biased systematizer', Forster rejected both taxonomy and historical speculation on the 'inexplicable' question of human origins, including Kant's presumption of original unity, arguing instead for 'the most subtle nuances' within holistic, immensely complex observable nature.^[28] The term Rasse, he argued, was 'thus far undetermined' but was 'synonymous' with Varietät, 'variety', which was 'changeable' and 'accidental'. Voyagers only applied Rasse to South Sea Islanders when they were 'uncomfortable' with Varietät so that Rasse should only imply a 'crowd' of people of 'idiosyncratic character and unknown ancestry', such as the Papuaner, 'Papuans', and the 'black islanders of the Southern Seas incidentally related to them'. To this point, Forster's explication of Rasse was consistent with ambiguous eighteenth-century usages: in its gesture to Buffon's 'extended sense'; and in its echo of Reinhold Forster's equation of 'races or varieties' and conviction that 'all varieties are only accidental'.^[29]

Notwithstanding his empirical credentials and fundamental disagreement with Kant, Forster was no less enmeshed in Eurocentric logic, morality, and aesthetics than the armchair philosopher. The anthropological reflections of both men attest to a shared late Enlightenment faith in progress, reason, and the 'pre-eminence of our civilized society', though both condemned its excesses.^[30] Kant took for granted the 'greater perfectibility' of the white race and argued that a Volk, 'people', who were content to be static — such as the Pacific Islanders described by Forster — must be held back by a 'natural predisposition' and were superfluous to general human advance: 'the world would lose nothing, if Tahiti goes under'.^[31] Forster was more equivocal, less consistent, but equally ethnocentric. On the one hand, he allowed a common human capacity for progress: 'the New Hollanders' (whom he had not seen) were the 'most wretched' of all the 'races' which might 'claim to be called human'; yet they were on 'a path to civilization'; and he hoped that European colonial example might stimulate their evident 'skill and capability'.^[32] On the other hand, the abstract figure of 'the Negro in Guinea' was his extreme negative signifier. Convinced of the reality of marked anatomical differences between Europeans and Africans, Forster queried how both could be engendered by 'the same father'; he regarded sexual relations between blacks and whites with 'aversion and abhorrence'; and he pronounced that in structure 'the Negro visibly corresponds far more closely to the monkey genus than the white man'. The New Hollanders — though reportedly 'black' of skin and 'frizzy and woolly' of hair — looked less 'unpleasant' and were presumably more human because they lacked the simian facial features of his Negro stereotype. In a major deviation from the ethos of essential human similitude professed by his father, Buffon, and Kant and at odds (at least in theory) with his own egalitarian revolutionary politics, Forster hypothesized that 'the Negro' might be 'a second human species' — a position Kant rejected as extraneous and immoral but a portent of the commonplace polygenism of the nineteenth century.^[33]

Yet Forster also acknowledged that an 'ape-like man' is 'no ape' and that whites and blacks were 'closely related'. He rationalized his insinuation of multiple human species in humanitarian terms with the quixotic hope that the strategy of 'separating the Negro from white men as an originally different stock' might encourage whites to assume their paternal duties towards blacks and develop in them 'the sacred spark of reason'. And he reasserted the premise of human specific unity in his essay on Cook whose voyages, Forster claimed, had shown that 'human nature', though it varied with climate, was everywhere 'specifically the same' in 'organization', 'instincts', and 'the course of its development'.^[34]