Andrea Wulf

speaker

625 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 8 Jun

Andrea Wulf’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 356 | Andrea Wulf on Enlightenment, Nature, Romanticism, and Modernity · 8 Jun 2026 podcast

So when he returns, he kind of looks through botanical books in libraries and he finds that there were some...

breadfruit trees with seeds in Indonesia.

So he comes to get two conclusions.

One is they must have been transported by someone across the ocean to the South Pacific islands and the sophistication of the agricultural methods

of the Polynesians is extraordinary there because through selective breeding, they basically turned the kind of original smaller breadfruit, which has seeds into this kind of larger nutritious kind of bigger breadfruit tree.

So he, you know, and then he looks at the languages and he sees, well, they're kind of connected.

Sometimes it's just one letter that is different.

So you have like Va'a, which is the Kanu in Tahitian or Vaka in Tongan or Waka in Maori.

So he works that out.

And then, so where others, where other explorers see this empty language,

South Pacific Ocean with like a few islands, he sees threats of migration.

So he sees how everything is connected.

So just as Humboldt sees that nature is connected, he sees that really more as an ethnographer, how everything, how humans are all connected.

So there's two ships.

It's the Resolution, which is the bigger ship, and the Adventure.

All together, it's 200 men under Captain Cook.

and they set sail in July, 1772.

And as I said earlier, they're trying to find this kind of Southern continent and they end up doing a full circuit around Antarctica because Cook wants to work, you know, wants things, if I do one proper circuit and I can't find land, then, you know, if there's a Southern continent, it's covered in ice and that's no good for the British.

There's nothing they can exploit.

And so it is so it's a three year voyage.

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