Abstract
More than five hundred folio pages of Francois Valentyn’s multivolume description of the trading empire of the Dutch East India Company, Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indien (Old and New East Indies, 1724-1726, five thousand pages in toto), are devoted to the natural history of Amboina. This essay contends that Valentyn’s nature description is not the work of a field naturalist, but rather of a scholar ordering and repackaging existing information, which was already available in a different textual format and in drawings. While the focus of this essay is on Valentyn’s compilation strategy, which targeted a non-expert readership of ‘liefhebbers’, the role of indigenous knowledge in his nature description is also discussed, arguing that it was generally subordinated to a European perspective in Valentyn’s book.
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