A Most Remarkable Journey from Amsterdam to Surinam

Jever, 1732. A merchant's son, Bernhard Michael Peters soon turns from Latin to the mortars and scales of the apothecary. So begins a wandering youth from shop to shop across northern Germany: a night lost among the graves, a river in flood, a carriage overturned on the road, a suspicious master, a parsonage where the young man is offered a living in exchange for a bride.

In November 1756 he sails for Riga. Contrary winds, a long winter march, then a pharmacy to found in a town at war. On the frozen roads of Livonia, in a sleigh, he faces the wolves beside Gabrilla, his Kalmyk driver. As he is about to leave Riga, in 1760, he discovers that a Livonian pastor is a child of Jever: Koenigshaven, a former chaplain to a Russian embassy, writes him his life story, from Saint Petersburg to Irkutsk and as far as China.

Back in Germany, Peters nearly drowns on a stormy night, follows the English hospitals across Seven Years' War Westphalia, then settles in Bremen as a merchant. A last letter then arrives from Surinam, signed by his friend John Thomson: a march through the forest against a village of Maroons, and the strange story of Piter van Leiden.

The account of a simple man, pious and full of humour, who watched eighteenth-century Europe go by from the back of the shop.