Disputing Descendancy: Prae Adamitae on Ambon in the 1680s
Portrait of Rumphius taken from his Herbarium Amboinense
One day in 1684, two employees of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) went for a walk and had an argument about a book. Robertus Padtbrugge (1637–1703) and Georg Eberhard Rumphius (1627–1702) lived and worked on the island Ambon, where they hiked up the mountain range Soya. The book that provoked their quarrel was Isaac de la Peyrère’s Prae Adamitae (1655), which challenged the notion of Adam being the first human to have lived. In doing so, the book refuted a major tenet of orthodox Christian thought of the time: that all humankind was bound together through the mutual descent from Adam and Eve. La Peyrère’s book has long been associated with early modern ideas of race, but its reception was slow, controversial, and contingent, taking place in distant spaces. While Rumphius strictly rejected the book’s assumptions and the existence of Preadamites, Padtbrugge did not.
When Padtbrugge and Rumphius went for a walk that day, they had known each other for two years and seem to have been on good terms. Ambon had been in the VOC’s hands since the early seventeenth century. Rumphius, who became a famous naturalist, arrived in 1657. With significant local aid[1], he was a keen observer, collector, and describer of his natural surroundings. Padtbrugge arrived in 1682 as governor of the archipelago. The book and the argument it sparked showed the two that they had irreconcilable stances towards human descendancy, how to read the Bible, and where to look for material evidence of Scriptural history.
Prae Adamitae was a contentious text, and Padtbrugge and Rumphius were not the only ones disputing its meaning and veracity. The book was flexible in its meaning and read differently from its publication onward. Many contemporary scholars refuted the book, including the great linguist and biblical critic Richard Simon.[2] In the wake of such controversy, La Peyrère even had to travel to Rome, seek forgiveness from Pope Alexander VII, and rebut his theses.[3] Yet, the book remained sensitive and a source of dispute for over two centuries.
Cover page of Prae Adamitae
On Ambon, the book raised the question: Even if the world had been populated before Adam, how could the Preadamites’ descendants still be alive after the Deluge? The Deluge was generally believed to have devastated the world as divine punishment, leaving only Noah, his three sons, and their three wives alive, for they escaped the Flood on the Ark. However, according to Rumphius, the followers of La Peyrère,
who uphold and defend the Præadamites, want to make us believe that the Deluge did not sweep over the whole earth, for it would have drowned their invented Præadamite people, but that there was a high mountain of water, which only covered Palestine, Syria, Armenia, Arabia, and the neighbouring countries where the descendants of Adam lived[4]
Prae Adamitae presented Biblical wonders not as universal but as local occurrences. And the Deluge equally did not spread over the whole world, affecting only select places from the Old Testament. But Rumphius thought it was absurd that the Deluge would not have covered the whole Earth. And he knew how to refute this reading of the Book of Genesis.[5]
Petrified clams depicted in Rumphius’s Amboinsche Rariteitkamer
It may not have been a coincidence that the dispute occurred on the mountain range Soya. Evidence to refute the Preadamitic theory was to be found on mountains. Rumphius had been shown stones resembling clams from the sea in the mountains of Ambon. They were found on cliffs far above sea level, not only on Ambon but worldwide, as Rumphius knew from Spanish writings and Chinese informants. The origin of these “mountain clams” (chama montana) related directly to the Preadamitic theory. Rumphius determined that the mountain clams had not “grown” in the cliffs and that the ancestors of the Ambonese had not carried them up. Indeed, the Ambonese could only laugh about the idea that someone would think their ancestors would have been so deranged as to carry such heavy clams up the mountains. Thus, the clams did not grow in the soil and were not brought there by humans, Rumphius claimed.[6] The only way the sea creatures that had later turned to stone could have arrived in the mountains was through a flood.[7] And the Scripture did not fail to mention such a flood. The Deluge brought the creatures of the sea to mountain ranges worldwide. In their petrified form, these clams provided proof of the Deluge’s universality, and Rumphius accordingly also called them Father Noah’s Clams. Simultaneously, their presence proved to Rumphius that all human beings stemmed from Adam.
Rumphius’s evidence did not convince Padtbrugge. We know of the dispute between Padtbrugge and Rumphius through the account of the Dutch missionary François Valentyn, who arrived on the island in 1686. According to him, “Padbrugge, a physician by training, was a son-in-law of the well-known Mister Peyrerius, Author of the booklet on the Praeadamites, whose dangerous feelings the honourable [Padtbrugge] shared”.[8]
Padtbrugge thus seems to have known La Peyrère personally, and his heterodox conviction of Prae Adamitae’s theses may have stemmed from their relationship. He reconciled his profound knowledge of human bodies and his experience with dissection—which he had acquired during his studies in Leiden—with the book.[9] And like Rumphius, Padtbrugge had an interest in naturalia. He sent specimens of scorpions, grasshoppers, and numerous more insects to his lifelong friend Jan Swammerdam.[10] But the natural world of Ambon did not lead Padtbrugge to the same conclusions as Rumphius. His reading of Prae Adamitae opposed Rumphius’s. Even though the two stayed on the island for many years—Rumphius for the remainder of his life, Padtbrugge left in 1687—this dispute marked the end of their friendship.[11]
La Peyrère’s Prae Adamitae was disputed for a long time and in many places. Later, Prae Adamitae became a standard reference for American physicians and naturalists discussing human descendancy. Josiah Clark Nott (1804–1873) and others read Prae Adamitae as a polygenist work to corroborate their racial theories.[12] In the hands of Nott, Charles Caldwell, Samuel George Morton, Samuel A. Cartwright, George Gliddon, and Louis Agassiz, Prae Adamitae became a book filled with ideas of race. This, however, was not what divided Padtbrugge and Rumphius on their walk in the mountains of Ambon in 1684. Their falling-out shows how early modern race-making was a product not just of racism but also of deeply held views about naturalism, historical evidence, and the Bible, as well as personal relations, antagonisms, and disputes.
Jan Becker
Jan Becker is a PhD student in History at the European University Institute in Florence. He is a convenor of the EUI’s History of Science and Medicine Working Group. Jan’s research focuses on surgery, human difference, and the circulation of medical knowledge in the Dutch empire of the second half of the seventeenth century.
Twitter profile @JanBecker_
[1] Genie Yoo, ‘Wars and Wonders: The Inter-Island Information Networks of Georg Everhard Rumphius’, The British Journal for the History of Science 51, no. 4 (2018): 559–84, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087418000742.
[2] Richard H. Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676): His Life, Work, and Influence, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 80–81.
[3] Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676), 14.
[4] Georg Eberhard Rumphius, D’Amboinsche Rariteitkamer (Amsterdam: François Halma, 1705), book 2, lemma XXIX: Chama montana sive Noachina, Vader-Noachs Schulpen, 136. In the original: “ons willende wys maaken, dat de vloed niet over den geheelen aardbodem gegaan zy, want daar door zouden haare verdichte Præadamitische menschen verdronken zyn, maar dat ‘er een hooge waterberg geweest zy, dewelke alleenlyk Palestyna, Syrien, Armenien, Arabien, en de naast aangelegene landen bedekt heeft, namentlyk daar de nakomenlingen van Adam woonden”, https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/41006027.
[5] For a brief account of Rumphius’s reading of the Bible, see Charlotte Kießling, ‘Babylonische toren, slangenhoofd en witte buffels: Over Bijbelse en mythologische verwijzingen in Rumphius’ D’Amboinsche Rariteitkamer (1705)’, Indische Letteren 32 (2017): 183–97, https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_ind004201701_01/_ind004201701_01_0017.php.
[6] Rumphius, D'Amboinsche Rariteitkamer, book 2, lemma XXIX, 135–36.
[7] According to Rumphius, the chama montana had not formed as stones but turned to stone. See M. J. S. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Palaeontology, Second Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 1–100; Paula Findlen, ‘Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe’, Renaissance Quarterly 43, no. 2 (1990): 313, https://doi.org/10.2307/2862366; Gijsbert M. van de Roemer, ‘The Serious Naturalist and the Frivolous Collector: Convergent and Divergent Approaches to Nature in D’Amboinsche Rariteitkamer’, Early Modern Low Countries 3, no. 2 (2019): 225–26, https://doi.org/10.18352/emlc.111.
[8] François Valentyn, Oud en nieuw Oost-Indiën. Beschryving van Groot Djava, ofte Java Major [...], volume 4, 2 (Dordrecht/Amsterdam: Joannes van Braam/Gerard onder de Linden, 1726), book 5, 110. In the original: “Heer Padbrugge, een Artz van zyne Studie, was een behuwde Zoon van den bekenden Heer Peyrerius Schrijver van het boekje over de Praeadamiten, aan wiens gevaarlyke gevoelens zyn Ed[ele] mede vast was”
[9] Nuno Castel-Branco, ‘Physico-Mathematics and the Life Sciences: Experiencing the Mechanism of Venous Return, 1650s–1680s’, Annals of Science 79, no. 4 (2022): 458, https://doi.org/10.1080/00033790.2022.2086301.
[10] Jan Swammerdam, Bybel Der Natuure (Leiden: Isaak Severinus et al., 1737), 60, 96, 213, 219, 298, https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/244745#page/281/mode/1up; Eric Jorink, Het ‘Boeck Der Natuere’: Nederlandse Geleerden En de Wonderen van Gods Schepping, 1575–1715 (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2006), 329.
[11] Valentyn, Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indië, volume 4, 2, book 5, 110. In the original: “Na dit geschil was 'er tusschen deze twee Heeren noit de rechte vriendschap geweest.”
[12] Terence D. Keel, ‘Religion, Polygenism and the Early Science of Human Origins’, History of the Human Sciences 26, no. 2 (2013): 3–32, https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695113482916.