Hendrik van Rheede

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Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Draakenstein (1636 Utrecht - Dec 15, 1691, off the coast of Bombay) was a Dutch traveller and naturalist. He worked for the Dutch East India Company to write the Hortus Malabaricus a compendium of the plants of economic value in the south Indian Malabar region.

This work was undertaken when Baron van Rheede was the Dutch Governor of Cochin. Mentioned in these volumes are plants of the Malabar region which in his time referred to the stretch along the Western Ghats from Goa to Kanyakumari. The ethno-medical information presented in the work was extracted from palm leaf manuscripts by a famous practitioner of herbal medicine named Itty Achuden. The work took 30 years to compile and was edited by a team of nearly a hundred including physicians, professors of medicine and botany, amateur botanists (such as Arnold Seyn, Theodore Jansson of Almeloveen, Paul Hermann, Jan Moninckx, Jan Commelin, Abraham Poot), Indian scholars and vaidyas (physicians) of Malabar and adjacent regions, and technicians, illustrators and engravers, together with the collaboration of company officials, clergymen (D. John Caesarius and Father Mathew of St. Joseph). He was also assisted by the King of Cochin and the ruling Zamorin of Calicut. ^[1]

His work was made use of by Carolus Linnaeus.

The Drakenstein region of South Africa was named after him because he visited it in 1685. In 1687 Governor Simon van der Stel opened this region to farmers.^[2]