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Hendrik van Rheede

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Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakenstein(Amsterdam, 13 April 1636 – at sea, 15 December 1691) was a military man and a colonial administrator of theDutch East India Companyandnaturalist.

Hendrik Van Rheede tot Drakenstein
Born
Henricus Adrianus Van Rheede tot Drakenstein

13 April 1636
Amsterdam,Dutch Republic
Died15 December 1691
At Sea

Between 1669 and 1676 he served as a governor ofDutch MalabaratKochiand employed twenty-five people on his bookHortus Malabaricus,describing 740 plants in the region. As Lord of Mydrecht, he also played a role in the governance of the Cape colonies. Many plants such as the vineEntada rheediiare named for him.The standardauthor abbreviationRheedeis used to indicate this person as the author whencitingabotanical name.[1]

Biography[edit]

Van Rheede was born into a family of noblemen that played a leading role in the political, administrative and cultural life of the province ofUtrecht.His mother, Elisabeth van Utenhove, died in 1637 while his father, Ernst van Rheede, Council at theAdmiralty of Amsterdam,died when he was four. Hendrik Adriaan, the youngest of seven children, left home at the age of fourteen. In 1656 he joined as a soldier in theDutch East India Company(V.O.C., Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) and served alongsideJohan Bax van Herenthals(who would also take an interest in natural history).[2]Van Rheede served under AdmiralRijcklof van Goensin campaigns against thePortugueseon the west coast of India in erstwhileDutch Malabar.He gained rapid promotion becoming anensign.In 1663, during a siege ofCochin,he was ordered to arrest the old queen of Cochin Rani Gangadhara Lakshmi to keep her safe, and this act saved her life from the massacre of the royal family. The subsequent king of Cochin, Vir Kerala Verma was crowned by the VOC and Van Rheede was appointed as the 'regedore maior' or the first councillor of the kingdom of Cochin. Van Rheede maintained cordial relations with the king and helped him in administration as well as mediation with the other kingdoms of Malabar. During the next two years, van Rheede traveled extensively in Malabar on behalf of VOC to get trade monopolies from the Malabar princes by negotiations and occasionally using military forces against reluctant princes. In 1665 he was appointed as commander inJaffnaand hadJohan Nieuhofwho at the time was the Dutch chief at Tuticorin, arrested for smugglingpearls[3]and sent to Batavia for trial.

In 1667 van Rheede was back in Malabar as the Chief of Quilon to undertake the management of the Company factory there. Quilon was the centre of the pepper, cinnamon and opium trade in South Malabar. However Van Rheede did not like his work there and tendered his resignation and was transferred back to Ceylon as the first captain in command of all troops of the Company there. In 1669 Van Rheede seems to have been forced to resign from the Dutch East India Company by Van Goens.[4]The resignation was made as he opposed the repressive measures of Van Goens and instead favoured negotiation, but in 1670 he is appointed as commander of Dutch Malabar. In 1671 he fought with theZamorin of Calicut.In 1672 he had to deal with the former VOC-employeeFrançois Caron,then serving theFrench East India Company.

In 1677 Van Rheede moved to Jakarta, being appointed in the Counsel of India. He stayed for about six months but the conflict with Van Goens grew fiercer. He returned toAmsterdamin June 1678. Since 1680 he could call himself Lord ofMijdrecht(Mydrecht). In 1681 he signed a contract with the botanistsJan CommelinandJohannes Munnicksand began work on the manuscript of theHortus Malabaricus.

In 1684 he was empowered by the "directors" (Council of Seventeen) of the Company to inspect theCape Colony,CeylonandDutch Indiato combat corruption within their employees.[5]He appointed Isaac Soolmans to accompany him. They visitedSimon van der StelinCape of Good Hope,andGroot Constantia;the areaGroot Drakensteinwas named after him.[6]Van Rheede recommended measures forforestryandviniculture.Rheede, the Lord of Mydrecht, also made rules on how slaves would be treated and he decreed that slave children had to be taught to read and write with any flogging requiring permission.[7]In 1687 Governor Van der Stel opened this region to farmers. Van Rheede was a bachelor, but had adopted a girl from Malabar with an unknown Dutch father.[8]He met with Van Goens junior, an ambitious administrator on his way to Batavia. Both men didn't like each other at all. Some time before Van Goens had given orders—afraid for competition anywhere else in the world—to extirpate all the acclimatizatingcinnamon treeswhich were destined for the Amsterdam Municipal Garden. It is possible that the rare trees for theGrand PensionaryGaspar Fagelwere then also destroyed.[9]

Van Rheede sailed toColomboand after two months to Bengal. He visited many VOC trading posts, especially aroundHooghly.His next destination was theCoromandeland he stayed for one year inNagapattinam.In 1690 he founded a seminary inJaffna.Then he went toTuticorinand the Malabar. In the end of November 1691 he sailed toDutch Suratte,but died at sea, off the coast ofBombayon December 15, 1691. Some authors suggest that he was poisoned by VOC employees while others that he was sick already for a while.[10]Van Rheede was buried atSuraton 3 January 1692 in the presence of his daughter Francine and many notables. Among the attendants was also Van Rheede's secretaryHendrick Zwaardecroon,the futureGovernor-General of the Dutch East Indies.[11]

Work in natural history[edit]

Frontispieceof volume 1

Hendrik van Rheede's work on the plants of theMalabar regionbegan in 1674[12]and it was around 1675 that the draft of the first volume of theHortus Malabaricuswas produced. Since 1660, the Dutch East India Company had encouraged publication of scientific work and the documentation of the useful plants by Van Rheede would help in the fight against local diseases. The first volume of theHortus Malabaricuswas published in 1678, a compendium of the plants of economic and medical value in the south Indian Malabar region, was undertaken when "Jonkheer"Hendrik van Rheede was the Dutch Governor of Cochin and continued for the next three decades. It was published in twelve volumes in Latin, with the names of the plants written in four languages: Latin,Sanskrit,Arabic andMalayalam.[13]Mentioned in these volumes are 742 plants of the Malabar region which in his time referred to the stretch along theWestern GhatsfromGoatoKanyakumari.The ethno-medical information presented in the work was extracted frompalm leaf manuscriptsby a famous practitioner of herbal medicine namedItty Achuden.Achuden was an vaiydan ( "healer" ) of the local Ezhava tradition[14](that has in recent times been included under the label of Kerala Ayurveda[15]). He was supported by a team of three Konkani physicians: Appu Bhatt, Ranga Bhatt and Vinayaka Pandit, The compilations were edited by a team of nearly a hundred including physicians, professors of medicine and botany, amateur botanists (such as professorArnold Seyn,Theodore Jansson of Almeloveen,Paul Hermann,Johannes Munnicks,Jan Commelin,Abraham Poot,the translator of a Dutch version), Indian scholars andvaidyas(physicians) of Malabar and adjacent regions, and technicians, illustrators and engravers, together with the collaboration of company officials, clergymen (Johannes Casearius and Father Mathew of St. Joseph). He was also assisted by the King of Cochin and the ruling Zamorin of Calicut.[4]

Carl Linnaeusmade use of Rheede's work,[13]noting in the preface of hisGenera Plantarum(1737) that he did not trust any authors exceptDilleninHortus Elthamensis,Rheede inHortus MalabaricusandCharles Plumieron American plants and further noted that Rheede was the most accurate of the three.[16]Many of Linneaeus' specific epithets based on Rheede originate from Malayalam names.[17]While visiting the Cape in 1685, van Rheede considered a work on African plants of economic importance,Hortus Africanus,but this idea was never realized.[18]

Wikimedia Commons has media related toHendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakenstein.

Notes[edit]

  1. ^International Plant Names Index.Rheede.
  2. ^Wijnands, D. Onno; Heniger, Johannes (1991). "The origins of Clifford's herbarium".Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society.106(2): 129–146.doi:10.1111/j.1095-8339.1991.tb02288.x.
  3. ^Heniger (1986):22.
  4. ^abRam (2005)
  5. ^Adams (1996)
  6. ^Mentzel (1944):61.
  7. ^Fairbridge, Dorothea (1918).A history of South Africa.London: Oxford University Press. p. 56.
  8. ^Heniger (1986):87, 90.
  9. ^Heniger (1986):72.
  10. ^Heniger (1986):81.
  11. ^Drawing ofthe funeral procession of Esquire van RheedeArchived2007-09-27 at theWayback Machine
  12. ^Heniger (1986):145.
  13. ^abFournier (1987)
  14. ^Cleetus, Burton (2007). "Subaltern Medicine and Social Mobility: The experience of the Ezhava in Kerala".Indian Anthropologist.37(1): 147–172.JSTOR41920032.
  15. ^Abraham, Leena (2009). "Medicine as Culture: Indigenous Medicine in Cosmopolitan Mumbai".Economic and Political Weekly.44(16): 68–75.JSTOR40279158.
  16. ^Mueller-Wille & Reeds (2007)
  17. ^Stearn, W.T. (1988). "Carl Linnaeus's Acquaintance with Tropical Plants".Taxon.Symposium Tropical Biology: Principles and Practice.37(3): 776–781.doi:10.2307/1221114.JSTOR1221114.
  18. ^Scott, G.; Hewett, M.L. (2008). "Pioneers in ethnopharmacology: The Dutch East India Company (VOC) at the Cape from 1650 to 1800".Journal of Ethnopharmacology.115(3): 339–360.doi:10.1016/j.jep.2007.10.020.PMID18079078.

References[edit]

External links[edit]

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