Home

The Forster Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum is one of the world's great collections of eighteenth-century Pacific art and material culture. The objects were acquired by Reinhold Forster and his son George during Captain James Cook's second famous voyage of discovery from 1772 to 1775.

The material donated by the Forsters constitutes one of the most important collections of the University of Oxford. The Oxford collection is part of a larger collection of material culture the Forsters acquired during the voyage. Another large part of their collection is in the Institut für Ethnologie in the University of Göttingen, while other material they collected is dispersed among some half dozen other European collections. The collection at Oxford is regarded by specialists as the most important of the Forster collections and as one of the most important of all the collections made on any of Cook's three voyages.

Please note: the original Pacific Pathways website and server was taken offline in late December 2012. The museum is in the process of rebuilding the website and will be adding functionality to this new version of the site over the coming weeks. At present this site should be regarded as under construction, and as such some links and images may not be working correctly at present. Your patience is appreciated - keep checking back for updates.