Isacq is fiction based on the early life of the author's direct ancestor Johannes Augustinus Dreyer (1689–1759). Commencing with a long flashback from the Cape of Good Hope in 1738, it novelizes his adventures in the five years from 1708, when he was a student at the University of Rostock, to 1713, when he signed on with the Dutch East India Company as an adelbors, or midshipman, under the Catalan alias Isacq d’Algué (“of Alghero”). He would go by this alias for many years at the Cape, until he admitted his real identity in his last will and...