Overberg Region

For Ryk Tulbagh (Rijk Tulbagh) (1699–1771), Dutch governor of the Cape Colony from 1751 to 1771. When only 16, he emigrated to the Cape as a Dutch East India Company employee on a five-year contract to be used as needed. The governor, Maurice Pasques Chavonnes, recognised the young man’s ability and gave him an administrative post as assistant clerk of the secretary of the political council, the start of a career that ended in his being made governor of the Cape. He was a responsible governor who, inter alia, codified the slave laws of the country with set rules for slave management. He corresponded with Linnaeus in 1763 and sent him seeds, and several birds. The town of Tulbagh is named after him.

La. utriculus = small bag, bladder-like; aria = pertaining to; referring to the insectivorous leaf sacs. The small insect-trapping sacs are attached to the underground leaves. ‘Bladderwort’.

From the Latin subulatus = ‘awl-shaped’; i.e. the organ is slender and narrowing to a point

For William Watson (1715–1787), English physician, apothecary, botanist and naturalist. He introduced the work of Linnaeus and his botanical classification system to Britain. He was the first scientist to observe the flash of light from the discharge of a Leyden jar and to show that electricity could pass through a vacuum and that it had a positive and negative charge; he coined the word ‘circuit’. His articles, entitled Experiments on the Nature of Electricity, appeared from 1745 onward in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, of which he became a member (1741) and vice president (1772). Both he and Benjamin Franklin discovered some of the same characteristics of electricity at the same time, but independently. The two men became friends.

For Christoph Carl Friedrich von Wurmb (1742–1782), Saxony-born German naturalist and Dutch colonial administrator, who worked in Indonesia (Java) as a merchant in the service of the United East India Company. Later, in 1778, he moved to Batavia, where he became the first secretary and director of the Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen (Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences) in charge of its library and small botanical garden, donated by a member. A keen naturalist – he had a special interest in palm trees – Wurmb was the first traveller to publish accurate observations on the Bornean orangutan in its adult state (it had never before been seen at that time and initially thought to be a new species). He called this animal ‘Pongo’, named after the Mpongwe nation.

From the Latin spicatus = ‘spiked’