Type : Guyana, anonyme s.n. (T: non localisé! [GOET ex hb. G.Mey.?]).
Guyana, Essequibo River, near Rockstone, 04/11/1979, P.J.M. Maas & L.Y.Th. Westra 3936 (NT: U [désigné par A. J. M. Leeuwenberg, Rev. Tabernaemontana, 2: 384. 1994]; INT: K, MO-022256 [photo], NY, WAG-3382336).
D'après J.H. Wiersema (Pl. Biol., 17(s1):
5-9.
18/06/2014): "According to Ek (1990) the collections that were the
basis of Meyer’s (1818) Primitiae Florae Essequeboensis are not of
Meyer, but those of Ernst Rodschied, a German physician in the Dutch
colony of Rio Essequebo from 1790 until his death in 1796 (fide Stafleu
& Cowan
1983)
or 1802 (fide Wagenitz 1982) and the author of a treatise on the
medicinal plants of the colony (Rodschied 1796). Many of Rodschied’s
collections indicate Arowabisch Island or Hamburg Plantation, both
associated with what is now Tiger Island near the west bank of the mouth
of the Essequibo River in present-day Guyana.
However, Meyer (1818)
mentions other specimens he received from the elder Mertens of Bremen,
with whom he may have become acquainted through his son, then a medical
student at the University of Göttingen (Postels 1836). Although Ek
(1990) indicates the elder Mertens to have collected in Essequibo in
1809, and similarly Roth (1817), in describing two new species of grass,
attributed their origin to ‘Essequebo. Mertens’, more likely the
collections involved came from Mertens’s herbarium. No account of any
New World expeditions by him appear in a biography prepared by his son
(Mertens 1844), which does, however, indicate that Mertens lectured that
same year on Bolingbroke’s (1807, 1809) trip to Essequibo, Berbice and
Demarara. Perhaps his interest in that region was stimulated by a
receipt of specimens. After his death in 1831, Mertens’s herbarium was
transferred to St. Petersburg and is now at LE (Mertens 1844; Stafleu
& Cowan 1981)."
