Biography
Carl Friedrich Behrens was born in Rostock, in Mecklenburg, in 1701 according to the English and German Wikipedia entries; a genealogists' discussion thread notes that the year is sometimes given as 1700. Neither his family nor his education is documented in the sources consulted. His own account, summarized in the book's listing, shows him roaming the world from adolescence, before his enlistment in the Company's troops.
In 1721, at the age of twenty-one, he enlisted as a soldier on board. The sources call him a corporal, and this book's listing describes him as a sergeant: the rank varies from one entry to another. He left the Texel on 1 August 1721 on one of Admiral Jacob Roggeveen's three ships, sent by the West India Company to look for the southern continent. The voyage ended at Batavia, where the ships were seized by the rival Company; the survivors returned to Holland, and Behrens, who had fallen ill on the way, pulled through.
The voyage earned him his place in history: he is counted among the first Europeans to have landed on Easter Island, which the expedition sighted in the spring of 1722. The entries differ by a few days on the dates of the sighting of the island (5 or 6 April) and of the landing (9 or 10 April). Behrens first drew from it a German poem in verse, published in 1728, then the prose account that is the subject of this book, Der wohlversuchte Süd-Länder, published in Leipzig in 1738 (some entries cite a first edition in 1737). It was a real success and appeared in French under the title Histoire de l'expédition de trois vaisseaux, at The Hague, in 1739.
He did not limit himself to writing. According to English Wikipedia, as early as 1728 he tried to persuade the East India Company to finance a new expedition, then wrote in Amsterdam, in 1732, a memorandum in Dutch entitled Nader onderzoek, more a plea than a travel narrative, which the Company did not take up. His testimony remained, for a long time, the most extensive one printed by a participant in the expedition.
The end of his life is poorly known. He is said to have settled in Nuremberg, where he reportedly ended up as a gingerbread maker (Lebküchler), and to have died there between 1747 and 1750; the entries agree on 1750 without giving either the day or the certain place. No collection of papers is reported in the sources consulted. His book was reprinted in Leipzig by Brockhaus in 1923, and recent scholarship devotes chapters to it, notably by Peter Gerds (2001) and Ulrike Keller (2004), as well as an article by Thomas Schwarz (2021) on the 1728 poem.
