Rumphius records Ambon's medicinal and recreational cannabis

Around 1700, the blind German-Dutch botanist Georg Everhard Rumphius, confined to Ambon in the Moluccas, wrote down everything the island’s Moors did with cannabis — and produced the most detailed early account of the drug anywhere east of India.^[1][2]

Names from every shore

His chapter lists the names like harbour manifests: Latin Cannabis Indica, “fool’s herb”, Malay Ginji, Persian and Indian Bangue, Arabic Axis, Turkish Asarath.^[2] The plant grew in Ambon gardens from Javanese seed, though it would not propagate beyond two generations there.^[2] Use, however, was thoroughly naturalised among the Moors across India and the islands.^[2]

How they took it

The commonest way, following Garcia da Orta, was to press juice from leaves and seed, mix it with areca and betel, and drink it — inebriating and stirring the senses, and stronger still when the dried leaves were smoked with tobacco.^[2] For pleasant dreams and deep sleep they added nutmeg, mace, cloves, the best camphor and opium: the composition called Majub, the same, Rumphius notes, as the Turks’ Maslach.^[2] For lust, a different mix — Ginji seed with musk, amber and sugar.^[2]

Rumphius watched the smoking himself. Some smokers turned utterly furious, wanting nothing but to fight and smash things; others, of moister and more melancholic temperament, began to weep, with sardonic laughter and threats.^[2] The vertiginous drunkenness the Malays called Hayal was, he wrote, a state fit for kings, who could not bear the burden of rule without sometimes exhilarating themselves so.^[2]

Medicine and a quarrel

The Hituese Moors begged the male root from his own garden to chew against virulent gonorrhoea, and boiled green leaves with cloves and nutmeg for chest oppression, asthma and pleuritic stitches; others simply steeped dry leaves in hot water and drank the liquor, ayer hayal, to get drunk.^[2]

Then came the quarrel. Garcia da Orta and Cristóvão da Costa held that lust-inducing bangue could not be true Cannabis, since Dioscorides taught that hemp extinguishes lust.^[2] Rumphius answered drily: Ginji is Indian hemp all right — but the lust comes not from the plant, rather from the commotion of the senses and above all the amber and musk mixed into it.^[2]

From Ambon gardens to kings’ exhilaration, the chapter shows a complete drug culture a century before prohibition reached the archipelago — whose later colonial history continues on Indonesia’s page.^[1]