Dutch surgeon and botanist with the Dutch East India Company. Ten Rhyne (also spelt ten Rhijne) explored southern Africa during the early days of Dutch settlement in the Cape before travelling to Japan and Indonesia. Little is known of his early life. He attended school in Deventer and studied medicine at the University of Franeker from 1664-1666, completing his degree in Leiden in 1668. Recruited by the Dutch East India Company as a physician, he travelled to the Cape of Good Hope in 1673. Here he collected plants with Jacob Breyne before sailing for Batavia. He was not there long, however, before he was sent to Japan, where he was based at the Dutch trading post of Dejima, Nagasaki, for two years. He collected a number of plants here and made observations on camphor and tea, which he communicated to Breyne, who subsequently published ten Rhyne's notes in Exoticarum plantarum centuria prima (1678). Following this sojourn he sailed back to Batavia, Java, where he would spent the rest of his days.

In Batavia ten Rhyne served not only as a physician but also as a teacher, interpreter and in the judiciary. He was appointed governor of the leper colony in 1677 and from 1681 until his death was the official Inspector of Lepers. He visited western Sumatra in 1679 and 1680, on the latter occasion with the Danish surgeon H.N. Grimm. As well as his early plant collections from Indonesia, he authored a number of works (mostly medical), including the first account of acupuncture by a European and An Account of the Cape of Good Hope and the Hottentotes (1686) describing the Khoikhoi people (Hottentots). He helped with Rheede's Latin descriptions in Hortus Malabricus (1679-1703) and corresponded with several leading botanists of his day, including Rumphius, whose Herbarium Amboinense he contributed to. He generously shared his knowledge and contacts with the Jesuit missionary and naturalist Georg Kamel, with whom he helped to produce a manuscript found in the Natural History Museum, London, entitled "Icones fruticum et arborum Luzonis". Breyne forwarded specimens from ten Rhyne to James Petiver, which is how they came to be at BM.

Sources:
R.A. Reyes, 2009, "Botany and zoology in the late seventeenth-century Philippines: the work of Georg Josef Camel SJ (1661-1706)", Archives of Natural History, 36(2): 265-266
H.A.M. Snelders, 2008, "Ten Rhyne, Willem " Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, online edn:
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-2830904268.html, accessed 9 September 2010
M.J. van Steenis Kruseman, "Cyclopedia of Collectors", Flora Malesiana, online edn:.