François Valentijn (17 April 1666–1727) was a Dutch minister, naturalist and author who wrote for his Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën ("Old and New East-India"), a book about the history of the Dutch East India Company and the countries of the Far East.
François Valentijn was born in 1666 in Dordrecht, Holland where he lived most his life but it was his activities in the tropics, notably in Ambon, in the Maluku Archipelago, for which he is known.[1] Valentijn read Theology and Philosophy at the University of Leiden and the University of Utrecht before leaving for a career as a preacher in the Indies.
In total, Valentijn lived in the East Indies 16 years. Valentijn was first employed by the V.O.C. (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) at the age of 19 as Minister to the East Indies, where he became a friend of the German naturalist Georg Eberhard Rumpf (Rumphius). He returned and lived in Holland for about ten years before returning to the Indies in 1705 where he was to serve as Army Chaplain on an expedition in eastern Java. He finally returned to Dordrecht where he found time to write his Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën (1724–26) a massive work of five parts published in eight volumes and containing over one thousand illustrations and including some of the most accurate maps of the Indies of the time.[2] He died in The Hague, Netherlands, in 1727.
Valentijn probably had access to the V.O.C.'s archive of maps and geographic secrets which they had always guarded jealously. Johannes van Keulen II (d. 1755) became Hydrographer to the V.O.C. in the very year Valentijn's "Oud en Niew Oost-Indiën" was published. It was in van Keulen the Second's time that many of the VOC charts were published, one signal of the decline of Dutch dominance in Spice Trade.[2] One uncommon grace afforded Valentijn was that he lived to see his work published; the VOC (Dutch East India Company) strictly enforced a policy prohibiting former employees from publishing anything about the region or their colonial administration. And while, as Suárez notes, by the mid-18th Century the Dutch no longer feared sharing geographic secrets, E. M. Beekman notes how "the execution of this policy was erratic and based on personal motives".[1]
While Valentijn's maps and diagrams were prized possessions, his scholarship, judging by contemporary standards was unscrupulous. While current standards of referencing and plagiarism were not in effect during the 18th Century Valentijn's theft of the products of other scientists' and writers' intellectual labour and his passing it off as his own was very much intentional and ugly self-aggrandisement, and reveals an extreme arrogance and hypocrisy all the more exacerbated by the false modesty of his prose. Beekman describes him as an "exasperating Dutch braggart" but nevertheless cites him as an important figure and, given his writing style, diction and penchant for story, one of the greatest Dutch prose writers of the time—going so far as to suggest comparison between one of the various stories in his work and a Chaucerian tale.[1]