A Brill Calendar: June 15

Few scholars have been as disaster-prone as Georg Eberhard Rumphius (Wölfersheim, Cleves 1627 – Ambon, The Moluccas, June 15 1702).

The author of a classic work in botany, ‘Herbarium Amboinense’, endured more misery than may be imagined by run-of-the-mill fiction.

As a 19-year old recruited – by deceit – for a military campaign in Brazil, he managed to return to his parental home after three years, only to undertake the sad task of burying his Dutch-speaking mother in 1651. Soon after Georg enlisted with the East India Company (VOC) for a voyage to Ambon, never to return to Europe. Put to work as ‘junior merchant’ in a civilian rather than maritime VOC branch, he was charged with studying the commercial potential of the regional fauna; a curious dispensation for this hard-nosed, no-nonsense organization.

Tirelessly, the autodidact slaved away at what became his vocation: to become an ‘Indian Pliny’. Rumphius went blind in 1670; and a year later lost both his wife and child in an earthquake. In 1687 the superb illustrations, vital for a monograph, were lost in a fire; a second version took three more years. The ship carrying the priceless manuscript to Holland in 1690 came under French attack and sank; luckily one copy had been retained in Batavia, Java. When that exemplar arrived at last in Holland, in 1696, it fell under VOC embargo, since it involved sensitive competitive information. When it was lifted, the author had died, while interest in the subject-matter had waned. Rumphius’s Magnum Opus saw print almost two generations later.

It is seldom, that oblivion lasted so long; reigning virtually unopposed. Yet, there is comfort in what the ‘American Scientist wrote, early 2009: “We must accept that, for at least the tropics, Rumphius deserves much of the fame now accorded to Linnaeus.” At least three modern scholarly disciplines – economic botany, tropical forest taxonomy and ethnographic documentation – were founded by this incomparable 17th century hero of rational inquiry.