Georg Eberhard Rumphius arrived in Indonesia on Ambon Island in 1654 as a merchant for the Dutch East India Company and almost immediately began cataloguing the plants of the Spice Islands. He would spend the rest of his life there, eventually producing the Herbarium Amboinense, a six-volume catalogue of some 1,200 species that remains a foundational reference for the flora of the Moluccas. The Europeans called him Plinius Indicus, the Pliny of the Indies and made him a membe