Kundige inlanders – Indigenous Contributions to Jacob Breyne's (1637–1697) Work

During the seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company employees often made it their task to collect rare exotic plants in the colonies that reachlied the botanical gardens in their native country and from there, the rest of the world. One of them was Willem ten Rhijne, a doctor and botanist, who acquired plants not only for the garden in Amsterdam but also for the scientist Jacob Breyne, a citizen of Gdańsk. A fracture of their correspondence is kept in the Gotha research library, encompassing five letters from Ten Rhijne, written between 1680 and 1686. Those documents draw attention to the titular kundige inlanders, indigenous experts on botany. Analyzing these documents, this article argues that indigenous scientific systems influenced the works of Breyne to a retraceable extent but also emphasizes that their impact was heavily mediated by his and Ten Rhijne's understanding of themselves as European scientists and the latter's association with the company.