The Low Countries. Jaargang 12

Science

‘The only use of these flowers is to be a delight for the eyes’
Rumphius' Orchids

In 2002 the foundation of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was commemorated with a great exhibition in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum on The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 1600-1950. For almost two centuries, from 1602 until its demise in 1799, the VOC, operating from Amsterdam, was the mainstay of the Dutch seaborne empire in Asia. Its traders were schooled in the new arts of bookkeeping and commercial reporting, and the VOC was the leading purveyor to Europe of colonial wares such as tea, coffee, tobacco, porcelain, indigo, sea shells, precious stones and tropical hardwood, textiles, amber, and, of course, the spices on which it had the monopoly.

The VOC was also a producer of culture. Quite a few of its directors subscribed to the ideal of the Mercator sapiens, the learned merchant, proclaimed in 1632 by Professor Caspar Barlaeus in Amsterdam. One of the merchant scholars to figure prominently in the Rijksmuseum exhibition was the mayor of Amsterdam and VOC director Nicolaas Witsen (1641-1717), who is also portrayed in John Wills' recent study 1688, A Global History (2001). Witsen was at the centre of a worldwide network of contact and exchange between VOC men working in many different fields of new knowledge - mapmakers, painters, geographers, interpreters, bible translators, doctors, astronomers and other colonial scientists such as the botanist of India's Malabar coast Van Reede tot Drakenstein (1636-1691), the expert on Asian languages Herbert de Jager (1636-1694) and the VOC historian Francois Valentijn (1666-1727).

In addition, Witsen was a patron of Georg Rumphius (1627-1702), the founder of Indonesian botanical exploration, whose work and portrait were also on display in the Rijksmuseum. For half a century, from 1653 until his death, Rumphius lived on the island of Amboyna, where despite severe misfortune - he lost his sight in 1670, he lost his family in an earthquake in 1674, his manuscripts were lost at sea in the 1690s, and after his death his works were comprehensively plagiarised by Valentijn - he led a life of

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great scholarly productivity. In Amboyna he did the botanical field work that underpinned his descriptions of the natural world of South East Asia, which became known in Europe through his extensive scholarly correspondence. In 1681 he was elected a member of the Academia Curiosorum Naturae in Vienna, as the ‘Pliny of the Indies’.

Rumphius' enduring fame rests on two books. His first great work, The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet, was published posthumously in Dutch in Amsterdam in 1705. It contained a description of the shells, corals, minerals and precious stones of the Moluccas - objects which held a great fascination for his contemporaries, as one can see today in the curiosity cabinet in Rembrandt's House in Amsterdam. Rumphius' second magnum opus was the Ambonese Herbal, published between 1741 and 1750 in a seven-volume edition in Latin by Joannes Burmannus, director of the hortus botanicus in Amsterdam. Modelled on Pliny's classic, it is a natural history of Eastern Indonesia, a treasure chest full of herbal knowledge and indigenous remedies which is of great value both to botanists and ethnographers.

In 1999 Professor E.M. Beekman published a monumental scholarly edition in English of Rumphius' Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet. In 1981 he had already published The Poison Tree, a selection of writings on the natural history of the Indies from both of Rumphius' books. Continuing this labour of love, Beekman is currently working on an English edition of the Ambonese Herbal, and as a first instalment he has now published Rumphius' Orchids.

This little book contains all 48 of Rumphius' descriptions of South East Asian orchid species, and is illustrated with twenty fine drawings. For each orchid, Rumphius gives us a description and classification of the plant, plus its name in Latin, in Malay, in other languages of the region such as Javanese, Balinese and Madurese and in European languages such as Portuguese, Italian and Dutch. Wherever possible he systematically compared his own observations and information on these orchids, from the Moluccas and Java to China, with descriptions of similar plants in India and Latin America provided by his fellow botanists in Europe. This is followed by information on the plant's location, and by details about its uses, both medical and economic. Here Rumphius gives a wide variety of local lore and indigenous stories, as well as his notes on the symbolism of flowers in Indonesian culture.

For each of the beautiful flowers included here Rumphius was the first European to give an expert botanical description. He was also the first to describe in detail what epiphytes are, what orchid seed is, how orchids propagate, and how some species exist in symbiosis with ants. In this respect, Beekman's book offers an important correction to the historical record of South East Asian orchid studies, where Rumphius is often ignored. By happy coincidence,



as Beekman mentions, the double white orchid (Phalaenopsis amabilis), first described by Rumphius as the Vliegende Duive (Flying Dove), is today the national flower of the Indonesian Republic.

One of the great attractions of Rumphius' Orchids is the inclusion, wherever possible, of local lore. This has created text layers of considerable complexity, and Beekman is particularly good at resolving the many linguistic and etymological puzzles it has

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caused. Like a second Hobson-Jobson he has managed, for example, to overcome the confusing Dutch misspellings produced by manuscript copiers and far-away printers, identifying the words concerned as coming from the South China dialects spoken by the Chinese living in Amboyna in Rumphius' days. Among the multilingual delights of this book is the discovery that through Rumphius' descriptions the Indonesian word for orchid, anggrek, has entered into botanical Latin as angraecum. Beekman has also gone out of his way to render Rumphius' striking Dutch as accurately as possible in English, thus doing justice to the poetic quality of his scholarly writing.

Rumphius' Orchids is a wonderful tribute to the Blind Seer of Amboyna.

Reinier Salverda

Rumphius' Orchids. Orchid Texts from The Ambonese Herbal by Georgius Everhardus Rumphius (Translated, edited, annotated, and with an introduction by E.M. Beekman). New Haven (ct) & London: Yale University Press, 2003. 172 pp. isbn 0-300-09814-6.
Zandvliet, Kees (ed.), De Nederlandse ontmoeting met Azie 1600-1950. Amsterdam / Zwolle: Rijksmuseum / Waanders Publishers, 2002. 461 pp. isbn 90-400-8716-4.