The Seasoned Traveler of the Southern Lands

On 1 August 1721, three ships leave the Texel under Admiral Jacob Roggeveen. Their mission: to find at last the southern continent, the land that maps have promised since Quirós and that no one has ever set foot on. Aboard is a young German from Mecklenburg, Carl Friedrich Behrens, who has been roaming the world since the age of thirteen.

He tells everything: the crossing of the Line and the first ravages of scurvy, the skirmish with the Portuguese in Brazil, the ice of Cape Horn, the desert island of Juan Fernández where men still look for traces of Robinson. Then, on 6 April 1722, Easter Day, an unknown island rises out of the Pacific. On the shore stand long-eared stone statues, crowned, before which the inhabitants prostrate themselves.

What follows is a slow crossing of the dying: the African Galley smashed on the reefs, archipelagos where shots are exchanged on the beach, a decimated crew. At the end of the road, Batavia, the Dutch capital of Asia, holds a reception the survivors did not expect. Behrens discovers there a city of ramparts and merchants, the shadow of a conspiracy, and the power of a Company that rules from Ceylon to the Cape of Good Hope.

Published in Leipzig in 1738, his account is the testimony of a man from the ranks about a Dutch expedition sent in search of the southern continent. What is left of a dream when the sea has worn it down to the bone?