Biography
Bernhard Michael Peters was born on 15 March 1732 in Jever, a small town in East Frisia, in the Jever territory, then attached to the principality of Anhalt-Zerbst. According to his own account, his father Christian was a merchant and his maternal grandfather, the magister Carl, a theologian. The boy soon turned from Latin to the apothecary's art, and his training took place on the job, from place to place, rather than at a university.
Reference notices describe him as an apothecary. His youth, as his memoirs tell it, is that of an itinerant employee across northern Germany. In November 1756 he sailed for Riga, where he founded a pharmacy with a partner, from 1757 to 1760, in the midst of the Seven Years' War. He then passed through Westphalia, where he served, by his own account, in the hospitals of the English army, and settled as an apothecary in Bremen, around 1763 according to the same account. A bibliophile's note adds that he spoke English, which would have counted in his recruitment for Surinam.
The journey that made his name dates from 1783. According to the bibliophile's note consulted, Peters was on his way to Riga when he learned in Amsterdam that the hospital of Paramaribo was looking for an apothecary. He sat an oral examination at the West India House (West-Indisch Huis) and signed on for six years. His health declined, and his good service earned him an earlier return: he came back to Amsterdam in 1784, then went back to Germany. The book is titled, in German, Eine besonders merkwürdige Reise von Amsterdam nach Surinam und zurück nach Bremen, and it appeared in Bremen. The present volume is its sequel: according to our record, it was published in Bremen in 1790 and contains the author's youth as well as two letters, that of Pastor Koenigshaven and that of John Thomson, written from Surinam in 1787.
Peters writes as a simple man, pious and fond of a joke, far from learned literature. His account is peopled with companions whose names are sometimes masked, and a bibliophile's note mentions the unverified rumour of an annotated copy in the Landesbibliothek of Oldenburg that would lift this anonymity. The sources consulted say nothing of his convictions or of any other work from his hand: we therefore do not assert any.
On the end of his life, the sources remain thin. The register of persons in the Niedersächsische Bibliographie gives 1793 as the year of death, with Bremen followed by a question mark, and the Deutsche Biographie, which refers to the GND authority record, gives no date of death. We therefore keep 1793 with reservation. We have found neither the place where any personal papers are kept nor a modern edition of his book: the original is rare and appears in only a small number of university libraries.
