A Brill Calendar: May 3

Reinwardt's Oratorio

Few consequences of Napoleon’s rise & fall were as vital for the new Kingdom of The Netherlands as a 19th century colonisation of the Indonesian archipelago, the ‘Nederlandsch-Indië’.

No present without past: mercenaries and employees of the United East-Indian Company VOC made their presence felt for centuries, albeit as private experts in mercantile exploitation, rather than as state-endorsed missionaries of Christian religion and European education.

When Caspar Georg Carl Reinwardt (Lüttringhausen, Westphalia, June 3 1773 – Leyden March 6 1854) delivered as Leyden Professor his sensational first ‘Oratio’, on May 3 1823, he embodied his age as well as his scholarly discipline.

Since the first year of the century he had settled in what was then called the Batavian Republic, first teaching at Harderwijk and Amsterdam. During Louis-Napoleon’s short reign as ‘King of Holland’, (1806 – 1810), he acted as Director of His Majesty’s ‘Hortus’ and the ‘Ménagerie’ of exotic animals. When, in 1814, a brand-new nation inherited the bankrupt remains of the VOC – with great hopes for prosperity ‘in patria’ – Reinwardt founded on Java island in the municipality ‘Buitenzorg’ (‘without worry’) a vast garden. ‘’s Lands Plantentuin’, was organized as test-bed and display for the blessings bestowed on the colonizer by the goddess Flora; and the endeavour started in 1817.

Reinwardt collected a wealth of rare botanical materials ‘in situ’: not only in Java, but also in the Moluccas, on Timar and on Celebes. It is seldom that scholarly collecting foundered more sadly. Although Caspar returned to Leyden himself safe & sound, four ships transporting his stupendous anthology became victims of the wrath of Neptune and the rest never prospered in Leyden’s ‘Hortus botanicus’.