25. Dutch East Indies

Monash University Library holds an extensive collection of 18th, 19th and early 20th century Dutch-language books relating to the Dutch East Indies. It is the largest such collection in Australia and one of the largest outside the Netherlands. The collection is invaluable for the study of Indonesia's colonial history.

Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indien, vervattende een naaukeurige en uitvoerige verhandelinge van Nederlands mogentheyd in die gewesten : Benevens eene wydluftige beschryvinge der Moluccos, Amboina, Banda, Timor, en Solor, Java, en alle de eylanden onder dezelve landbestieringen behoorende; het Nederlands comptoir op Suratte, en de levens der Groote Mogols ... / door François Valentyn (Dordrecht ; Te Amsterdam : By Joannes van Braam ; Gerard onder de Linden, 1724-26) 5 v. in 8 : 35 cm. (fol.)

After studying theology and philosophy at the Universities of Leiden and Utrecht, François Valentijn left the Netherlands for the Indies in 1685 at the age of nineteen to become a preacher. He spent sixteen years in the Indies (1685-1694 and 1706-1714), mostly on the island of Ambon, in the Moluccas. He wrote his famous eleven-volume work Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën (The Indies Past and Present)in the Netherlands between 1714 and 1724. At that time, the Dutch East India Company had depots and factories not just in the area now known as Indonesia, but also in Tonkin, Ceylon, Japan, Cambodia, the Cape of Good Hope and other places. Valentijn included information on many of these in the work. The entire book was published by 1727, and became a bestseller, attracting 650 subscribers before it appeared. For centuries it was highly regarded as an historical source on the Indies, but in current times it is valued more for its evocative anecdotes and attractive prose. One critic noted that ‘some of his pieces are true oases in the desert of eighteenth-century historical writing’.

History has not judged Valentijn kindly, and he is depicted in writings about Indies literature as an opportunistic and self-interested man. The most serious charge against him is that he made copious use of the work of other scholars without attributing his sources. He employed the ‘magpie’ approach to writing: use whatever one can find and only give attribution where the adaptation would certainly be discovered or where to do so might bring some benefit to himself.

D'Amboinsche rariteitkamer : behelzende eene beschryvinge van allerhande zoo weeke als harde schaalvisschen, te weete raare krabben, kreeften,en diergelykezeedieren, als mede allerhande hoorntjes en schulpen, die men in d'Amboinsche Zee vindt: daar benevens zommige mineraalen, gesteenten, en soorten van aarde, die in d'Amboinsche, en zommige omleggende eilanden gevonden worden... / voorzien beschreven door Georgius Everhardus Rumphius. (Amsterdam : By Jan Roman de Jonge, 1741) (fol.)

One of the writers he plagiarised was Georg Everard Rumphius (1627-1702), known as the ‘blind sage of Ambon’. German by birth, he arrived in the Indies in 1653, working for the Netherlands East India Company as a merchant on Ambon. He never left the Indies, where he was able to work on his passion for collecting samples of flora and fauna, about which he made copious notes. Blindness struck him in 1670, but this did not slow him in his collecting and describing of plants and animals of the Moluccas. The Company paid for a copyist and draftsman to assist him in his work.

His two best known works are the Ambonese Herbal (Het Amboinsch Kruid-boek) and the Ambonese Museum of Curiosities (D’Amboinsche Rariteitenkamer), which first came out in 1705. Rumphius received little money from these valuable publications, both of which appeared in print after his death.

Valentijn and Rumphius knew each other, and it seems Rumphius even taught Valentijn Malay on Ambon. Valentijn adapted and reproduced much of Rumphius’s writings about Ambon without attributing his source, and these parts form some of the most historically useful parts of Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën.

Valentijn’s reputation suffered during his life, but not from his plagiarism of Rumphius. Valentijn offered for publication a translation of the bible into Malay which appears to have in fact been the work of Melchior Leijdecker and others. The church authorities simply refused to accept that this was Valentijn’s work, despite his many representations to the contrary.