The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet by Rumphius, Yale University Press, 拢30/$45, ISBN 0300075340
EVER FANCIED a beach holiday in the tropics? Georgius Everhardus Rumphius has
a cautionary word or two for you鈥攈ailing all the way from the 17th
century, when he wrote the first modern work on tropical fauna, The Ambonese
Curiosity Cabinet. Amazingly, this work has only now been translated into
English, by E. M. Beekman.
At first glance, Rumphius reads like a warning against the perils of
beachcombing: “鈥ne must be constantly afeared of the large Sea Killer,
the Kaiman, and if one has to go through some marshy holes, then one
can easily step on the sharp Sea Hedgehog or Sea Apples, or on the poisonous
Ican Swangi fish. Though it is true that the Kaiman does not
come onto rocky beaches, one can still easily hurt one’s feet on the sharp coral
stone, and such wounds can easily become malignant from the slivers of stone and
the burgeoning sea slime that hangs on the rocks everywhere鈥”
There’s much more to the book鈥攁nd the man鈥攖han this, however.
Rumphius was born in Germany, did some soldiering鈥攖he Thirty Years War was
tearing Europe apart at the time鈥攖hen fled to join the Dutch merchantmen,
who were Europe’s byword for peace, preferring as they did trading to armed
theology. He ended up in tiny Ambon, one of the Spice Islands in the Ceram Sea
that were then Dutch territory and are now in Indonesia.
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Rumphius nicknamed the area the “Water-Indies”. His curiosity and
intelligence were fired by what he saw there: to a European, everything was
absolutely new. As Beekman adds in the brief biography he includes with the
translation, Rumphius produced more than a methodical, Linnaean account of
families of species. Like Pliny, he wanted to convey the flavour of life
itself.
To this end, he peppered the pages with advice and digressions, a
serendipitous mixture that may well account for the book’s enduring popularity.
In fact, the book remained the authoritative natural history of the region well
into the 19th century, largely because of Rumphius’s accurate morphological
descriptions. His classifications of species may have been overthrown by later
taxonomists, but were excellent for their time. Beekman has added modern names
to the text.
Nothing, however, could improve on Rumphius’s racy accounts of island life.
Once read, who could forget his description of “Bloody and Fiery Sea-Red
Sheets”? Sailing through a host of tiny shrimp (the size of lice) in the Javan
Sea, he seems, he says, to be sailing through blood. Rumphius adds that these
shrimp are caught with cloths stretched at river mouths, then crushed and
pickled. The thick brown paste is thinned with lemon juice, forming a condiment
called “Kitsjap” by the Chinese, he tells us鈥攖he ancestor of ketchup.
Rumphius ranges over it all, from animals and plants to curiously shaped
stones. It’s the old story: many species have been lost, and imported plants
jostle out the natives. We’re privileged to share Rumphius’s world.
