Eenige bijzonderheden omtrent Cannabis sativa, var. indica (Boorsma 1892)
More actions
| Author | W. G. Boorsma |
|---|---|
| Language | Dutch |
| Published | 1892 |
| Publisher | G. Kolff & Co. (in Teysmannia, deel III, ed. H. J. Wigman) |
| Place | Batavia |
| Volume | III |
|---|---|
| Pages | 792–799 |
| Regions documented | Java (environs of Batavia, historical); Bantam (17th-century export); Sumatra |
| Varieties described | Cannabis sativa var. indica; ginji (Malay, after Rumphius); ganja, bhang and charas (British India) |
| Preparations | Leaves smoked with tobacco; leaf and seed juice taken with betel (pinang); spiced compounds with nutmeg, mace, cloves, camphor and opium; seed with musk, amber and sugar; bhang drink; charas |
| Uses documented | Intoxicant, medicinal, fibre (contrasted) |
| Digital facsimile | View on the Internet Archive |
|---|---|
| Original held at | Harvard University Botany Libraries (copy scanned for the Internet Archive) |
Eenige bijzonderheden omtrent Cannabis sativa, var. indica ("Some particulars concerning Cannabis sativa var. indica") is an eight-page article by the pharmacologist W. G. Boorsma published in 1892 in Teysmannia, the horticultural and agricultural journal edited from 's Lands Plantentuin at Buitenzorg, in its third annual volume (derde deel).[1][2] It is a general account of the hemp plant written for a colonial readership: it summarises the plant's botany and geography, the history of its use in Asia and Europe, the Indian trade grades and preparations and the chemistry then attributed to its effects. Its value for the record of cannabis in the Indonesian archipelago lies in three short passages. Boorsma reproduces, in the original Dutch, the personal observations of Rumphius on cannabis intoxication on Ambon in the 17th century. He adds three statements about the archipelago of his own day: that hemp had formerly been grown around Batavia and that this cultivation had "disappeared without trace"; that on Sumatra hemp was grown so that its leaves could be smoked with tobacco; and that Indian hemp appears to have been brought into Europe from Bantam in the 17th century.[1]
As a text written by a colonial scientist for the readers of an agricultural journal, the article is evidence of how the plant was understood at Buitenzorg in the 1890s as much as of the plant itself. Its historical passages (the Indra legend, Herodotus on the Scythians, the Haydar story and the "Assassins" etymology) repeat the standard European literature of the period rather than report Boorsma's own research. Its picture of the archipelago is drawn at second hand. Modern readers use it in that double light: as a witness to three statements about Java, Bantam and Sumatra and as a sample of the received ideas that the later, field-based survey of 1913–1918 set out to test.[3]
The article's own term is hennep or Indische hennep; where the wiki paraphrases it, cannabis is used.
Origins
Teysmannia described itself as a popular scientific journal for agriculture and horticulture, edited by H. J. Wigman, hortulanus of 's Lands Plantentuin, and published at Batavia by G. Kolff & Co. The third volume, for 1892, carries the article among contributions on coffee, dadap disease, kemiri nuts and nematode diseases of crops.[2] The article is signed "Dr. W. G. Boorsma" and carries no statement of his post. Boorsma later headed the Pharmacologisch Laboratorium of the Department of Agriculture, Industry and Trade at Buitenzorg, in which capacity he wrote the 1915 report on Indian hemp that became his second article on the subject.[4]
The piece opens on p. 792, immediately after P. van Romburgh's note on kemiri games, with the heading Eenige bijzonderheden omtrent Cannabis sativa, var. indica and closes on p. 799 with the author's signature; the volume index enters it under Cannabis.[2]
The article
The article is not divided into sections. It runs as a single essay in the following order: the paradox of a plant that is at once an indispensable fibre crop and "over a large part of the earth the principal intoxicating stimulant"; the botanical question of whether Cannabis indica is a separate species or a variety of C. sativa (Boorsma follows the view that it is a variety); a Central Asian homeland "between the Ural mountains and the Himalaya"; a survey of ancient references (a Chinese text of about 500 BCE distinguishing seed-bearing and flowering plants, the Hindu legend of Indra's gift, Herodotus on the Scythians, Dodonaeus's Cruydtboek on "Kemp-saedt"); the plant in the Islamic world, including the Haydar story and the derivation of "assassin" from haschischin; the Netherlands Indies, through Rumphius; Napoleon's Egyptian campaign and the entry of the drug into European medicine from British India "about thirty years later"; European fibre cultivation; the dioecy of the plant and the Indian practice of removing male plants; the Indian grades ganja, bhang (sidhee, subjee) and charas, and the Central Asian nasha; the physiological effects, with O'Shaughnessy's report of catalepsy after one grain of resin; and finally the chemistry.[1]
Boorsma's own contribution is the selection and the archipelago paragraph. He reports no experiment, analysis or field observation of his own and names no informant for the statements about Batavia, Sumatra and Bantam.
Cannabis of the archipelago as documented by Boorsma
Rumphius quoted
The longest passage on the archipelago is a set of quotations from the Dutch text of the Herbarium Amboinense, introduced with "Ook in Nederlandsch-Indië is het gebruik van hennep als genotmiddel niet onbekend gebleven" ("In the Netherlands Indies too the use of hemp as a stimulant has not remained unknown").[1] Boorsma quotes Rumphius on the "Narre-kruijd" that "the Indians" hold to be their Nepenthes, taken to drive away sorrow and on its use "bij de Mooren door gantsch Indien" ("among the Moors throughout the Indies"). He then paraphrases the modes of consumption Rumphius describes:
Volgens Rumphius wordt het sap van de bladen en de zaden, met pinang gemengd, genuttigd, of de droge bladen worden met tabak gerookt; veelal mengt men er dan verschillende specerijen onder: notemuskaat, foelie, nagelen ook kamfer en zelfs opium; zaden worden voor hetzelfde doel gemengd met muskus, amber en suiker.— Boorsma 1892, p. 795
He adds, in his own words, that the Malay name of hemp is ginji: "In het Maleisch heet de hennep ginji, zegt Rumphius" ("In Malay hemp is called ginji, says Rumphius").[1] He then quotes Rumphius's first-person account of intoxication at length: some who smoked the leaves in tobacco "gantsch razende wierden, en niet dan vegten en smijten wilden" (became wholly raving and wanted nothing but to fight and throw things), while others "wat vochtiger en melankolijker van humeuren" began to weep, grimace and yet threaten; that the "dolmakende kragt" (maddening power) lies in the leaves and not in the seed, which can be eaten in small quantity without harm; and that the seed therefore needs the spices, "het welk de Mogullen, Persianen en Turken beter weeten te doen dan de slegte Mooren van deze Eilanden" ("which the Mughals, Persians and Turks know how to do better than the simple Moors of these islands"), with a closing reference to "Garzias" (Garcia ab Orta) on the compound's use by military officers.[1] The corresponding Latin and Dutch text is in volume V of the Herbarium Amboinense.[5]
The framing in these passages is Rumphius's and, behind him, Orta's: "Narre-kruijd" (fool's herb), "Mooren" for the Muslim population and "slegte" (simple, poor) for the islanders' pharmacy are 17th-century judgements that Boorsma reproduces without comment.
Java, Bantam and Sumatra
The article's only statements about cannabis in the archipelago of Boorsma's own time occupy one paragraph:
Wat Java betreft, vindt men opgegeven, dat hennep vroeger in den omtrek van Batavia gekweekt werd; nu is die cultuur spoorloos verdwenen: zij leverde blijkbaar niet die voordeelen op, welke men zich aanvankelijk er van voorstelde. Op Sumatra wordt hennep aangekweekt om de bladen, met tabak gemengd, te rooken. Uit Bantam schijnt in de 17e eeuw Indische hennep in Europa ingevoerd te zijn.— Boorsma 1892, p. 796
That is: hemp is reported ("vindt men opgegeven") to have been grown formerly around Batavia, a cultivation that had since "disappeared without trace" and had evidently not yielded the advantages first expected of it; on Sumatra hemp is grown so that the leaves can be smoked mixed with tobacco; and from Bantam, Indian hemp "appears" to have been brought into Europe in the 17th century. Boorsma gives no source for any of the three. The Batavia and Bantam statements are hedged ("vindt men opgegeven", "schijnt"); the Sumatra statement is not. The 1918 survey later found that Bantam was among the regions where Indian hemp was unknown and confirmed cultivation on Sumatra's west and east coasts and in Aceh.[3]
Indian grades and preparations
Most of the article's material on preparations concerns British India rather than the archipelago. Boorsma describes the removal of male plants at flowering by a specialist he calls the "doctor ganja"; the flowering tops of the female plant "known as ganja or gunjah, in trade also guaza", smoked with tobacco in a dose of 3 to 4 grams; bhang (sidhee, subjee) as the cheaper product of larger leaves, smoked with pepper and cucumber and melon seeds or, mainly, made into an intoxicating drink; charas or churrus as the crude resin, which he says is collected by men in leather suits walking through the crop; nasha as a similar Central Asian product; and butter-based edible compounds sold as sweets, "to which the name haschisch is now generally given".[1] He states that the strongest physiological action belongs to the upper, young parts of the female plant during flowering and that the content of active matter falls quickly after fertilisation.[1]
Chemistry
The closing paragraph reports the state of chemical knowledge, not any analysis by Boorsma:
Onderzoekingen naar de bestanddeelen, die de eigenaardige physiologische werking van Cannabis indica veroorzaken, hebben aan het licht gebracht, dat zij een vergiftig basisch lichaam, choline, bevat, hetwelk ook in verschillende andere planten is aangetroffen, en voorts twee stoffen, cannabine en cannabinon, die als slaapwekkende middelen tegenwoordig in de geneeskunde toepassing vinden.— Boorsma 1892, p. 799
Choline, "cannabine" and "cannabinon" were the substances then credited in the European literature with the drug's action; the article does not say that any Indonesian material had been examined. Boorsma ends by doubting whether all the phenomena of hemp intoxication can be explained from these constituents.[1]
Reception and historiography
The article has no recorded contemporary reception. Its main afterlife is Boorsma's own: the survey of Indian hemp in the Netherlands Indies that he completed in 1915 on a commission from the Director of Agriculture and published in 1918 opens from the same starting point, "Op Java schijnt voorheen eenige cultuur van Indische hennep in de buurt van Batavia te hebben bestaan" and replaces the second-hand geography of 1892 with reports from every residency.[4][3]
On this wiki the 1892 article is cited for the Rumphius quotations and for the Batavia, Sumatra and Bantam statements. Two cautions apply. The article contains no chemical analysis of Indonesian cannabis, so it cannot support claims about the constituents of Sumatran or Javanese material. And its Bantam sentence says only that Indian hemp appears to have been brought into Europe from Bantam in the 17th century; any characterisation of that trade as the earliest export of Indonesian cannabis, or as commercial in scale, is an inference the article does not make.
Legacy
The article is the first Dutch-language treatment of cannabis in the archipelago after Rumphius that the wiki has located, and the first to bring the Herbarium Amboinense passage back into a colonial scientific journal. Its Batavia statement records a former cannabis cultivation around the city that the 1918 survey repeats and that no other source on the wiki mentions. The 1918 survey, the 1924 Aceh ordinance and the 1927 narcotics ordinance make up the rest of the colonial documentary sequence.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 Boorsma, W.G. (1892). "Eenige bijzonderheden omtrent cannabis sativa, var. indica". Teysmannia (in Nederlands). III: 792–799.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Wigman, H.J., ed. (1892). Teysmannia (in Nederlands). Vol. III. Batavia: G. Kolff & Co. – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Boorsma, W.G. (1918). "Over het voorkomen en het gebruik van Indische hennep in Ned.-Indië". Teysmannia (in Nederlands) (VI): 324–334.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Boorsma, W.G. (1917). "Pharmacologisch laboratorium". Jaarboek van het departement van landbouw, nijverheid en handel 1915 (in Nederlands). Batavia: Landsdrukkerij. pp. 21–29.
- ↑ Rumphius, G.E. (1747). Herbarium Amboinense (in Latina). Vol. V. Amsterdam: Franciscus Changuion, Hermannus Uytwerf. pp. 208–211, t. LXXVII.