The first European to find
Rafflesia was the ill-fated French explorer
Louis Auguste Deschamps. He was a member of a French scientific expedition to Asia and the Pacific, detained by the Dutch for three years on the Indonesian island of
Java, where, in 1797, he
collected a specimen, which was probably what is now known as
R. patma. During the return voyage in 1798, his ship was taken by the British, with whom France was at war, and all his papers and notes were confiscated.
Joseph Banks is said to have agitated for the return of the stolen documents, but apparently to no avail; they were lost, turned up for sale around 1860, went to the
British Museum of Natural History, where they were promptly lost again. They did not see the light of day until 1954, when they were rediscovered at the Museum. To everyone's surprise, his notes and drawings indicate that he had found and studied the plants long before the British. It is thought quite possible the British purposely hid Deschamps' notes, to claim the 'glory' of 'discovery' for themselves. Arnold contracted a fever and died soon after the discovery, the preserved material being sent to Banks. Banks passed on the materials, and the honour to study them was given to
Robert Brown. The
British Museum's resident botanical artist
Franz Bauer was commissioned to make illustrations of the new plants. Brown eventually gave a speech before the June 1820 meeting of the
Linnean Society of London, where he first introduced the genus and its until then two species. Brown gave the
generic name Rafflesia in honour of Raffles. Bauer completed his pictures some time in mid-1821, but the actual article on the subject continued to languish.
William Jack, Arnold's successor in the Sumatran Bencoolen colony, recollected the plant and was the first to officially
describe the new species under the name
R. titan in 1820. It is thought quite likely that Jack rushed the name to publication because he feared that the French might publish what they knew of the species, and thus rob the British of potential 'glory'. Apparently aware of Jack's work, Brown finally had the article published in the
Transactions of the Linnean Society a year later, formally introducing the name
R. arnoldii (he ignores Jack's work in his article). Because Jack's name has
priority,
R. arnoldii should technically be a synonym of
R. titan, but at least in Britain, it was common at the time to recognise the names introduced by well-regarded scientists such as Brown, over what should taxonomically be the correct name. This was pointed out by the Dutch
Rafflesia expert
Willem Meijer in his
monographic addition to the book series
Flora Malesiana in 1997. Instead of sinking
R. arnoldii into synonymy, however, he declared that the name
R. titan was "incompletely known": the plant material used by Jack to describe the plant has been lost. In 1999, the British botanical historian
David Mabberley, in response to Meijer's findings, attempted to rescue Brown's names from synonymy. This is known as '
conservation' in taxonomy, and normally this requires making a formal proposal to the committee of the
International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN). Mabberley thought he found a loophole around such a formal review by noting that while Brown was notoriously slow to get his papers published, he often had a handful of pre-print pages privately printed to exchange with other botanists: one of these pre-prints had been recently bought by the
Hortus Botanicus Leiden, and it was dated April 1821. Mabberley thus proposed that this document be considered the official
effective publication, stating this would invalidate Jack's earlier name. For some reason Mabberley uses 1821, a few months after Brown's pre-print, as the date of Jack's publication, instead of the 1820 publication date in Singapore. Confusingly, the record in the
International Plant Names Index (IPNI) still has yet another date, "1823?", as it was in the
Index Kewensis before Meijer's 1997 work. Mabberley's proposals regarding Brown's name were accepted by institutions, such as the
Index Kewensis. Mabberley also pointed out that the genus
Rafflesia was thus first validated by an anonymous report on the meeting published in the
Annals of Philosophy in September 1820 (the name was technically an unpublished
nomen nudum until this publication). Mabberley claimed the author was
Samuel Frederick Gray. However, as that is nowhere stated in the
Annals, per Article 46.8 of the code of ICBN, Mabberley was wrong to formally ascribe the validation to Gray. The validation of the name was thus attributed to one Thomas Thomson, the editor of the
Annals in 1820, by the IPNI. Mabberley admitted his error in 2017. This Thomson was not the botanist
Thomas Thomson, who was three years old in 1820, but his
identically named father, a chemist, and
Rafflesia is thus the only botanical taxon this man ever published. ==Regional names==