Georg Eberhard Rumphius

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Georg Eberhard Rumphius (1628-1702), the "blind seer of Ambon", was a German-Dutch botanist employed by the Dutch East India Company. He is best known for his authorship of Herbarium Amboinensis, a catalogue of the plants of the island of Ambon (then in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia), published posthumously in 1741.

The formal botanical author abbreviation Rumph. is applied to plants he described.

After going blind in 1670, Rumphius continued work on his six-volume manuscript with the help of others. His wife and child were lost to an earthquake shortly after. In 1687, with the project nearing completion, the illustrations were lost in a fire. Persevering, Rumphius and his helpers first completed the book in 1690, but the ship carrying the manuscript to the Netherlands was attacked by the French and sank, forcing them to start over from a copy that had fortunately been retained. The Herbarium Amboinensis finally arrived in the Netherlands in 1696. However, "the East India Company decided that it contained so much sensitive information that it would be better not to publish it." [1] It finally appeared in 1741, thirty-nine years after Rumphius's death.