Johan Coenraad van Hasselt (1797, Doesburg

Doesburg

Doesburg Doesburg Doesburg (Dutch is a municipality and a city in the eastern Netherlands in the province of Gelderland. Doesburg received city rights in 1237 and currently has 11,602 inhabitants (1 January 2007, source: CBS). The city is situated on the right bank of river IJssel, at the...

-1823) was a Dutch

Dutch people

The Dutch people are an ethnic group native to the Netherlands. They share a common culture and speak the Dutch language. Dutch people and their descendants are found in migrant communities worldwide, notably in Suriname, Chile, Brazil, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and the United...

 physician

Physician

A physician is a health care provider who practices the profession of medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, injury and other physical and mental impairments...

, zoologist, botanist and mycologist.
Coenraad van Hasselt studied medicine at the University of Groningen

University of Groningen

The University of Groningen , located in the city of Groningen, was founded in 1614. It is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands as well as one of its largest. Since its inception more than 100,000 students have graduated...

.

In 1820 he went on an expedition to the island of Java

Java

Java is an island of Indonesia. With a population of 135 million , it is the world's most populous island, and one of the most densely populated regions in the world. It is home to 60% of Indonesia's population. The Indonesian capital city, Jakarta, is in west Java...

, then part of the colonial Dutch East Indies, with his friend Heinrich Kuhl

Heinrich Kuhl

Heinrich Kuhl was a German naturalist and zoologist.Kuhl was born in Hanau. He became assistant to Coenraad Jacob Temminck at the Leiden museum. In 1817 he published a monograph on bats and in 1819 he published Conspectus psittacorum...

, to study the fauna and flora of the island.They sailed from Texel

Texel

Texel is a municipality and an island in the Netherlands, in the province of North Holland. It is the biggest and most populated of the Frisian Islands in the Wadden Sea, and also the westernmost of this archipelago, which extends to Denmark...

 on 11th July, stopping at Madeira

Madeira

Madeira is a Portuguese archipelago that lies between and , just under 400 km north of Tenerife, Canary Islands, in the north Atlantic Ocean and an outermost region of the European Union...

, the Cape of Good Hope

Cape of Good Hope

The Cape of Good Hope is a rocky headland on the Atlantic coast of the Cape Peninsula, South Africa.There is a misconception that the Cape of Good Hope is the southern tip of Africa, because it was once believed to be the dividing point between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. In fact, the...

  and Cocos Island

Cocos Island

Cocos Island is an uninhabited island located off the shore of Costa Rica . It constitutes the 11th district of Puntarenas Canton of the province of Puntarenas. It is one of the National Parks of Costa Rica...

 and arriving in Batavia on December 1820. Kuhl died after eight months, van
Hasselt continued the work for another two years before dying (like Kuhl) of disease and exhaustion. This followed a journey to Bantam

Bantam

Bantam may refer to:* Bantam , a small variety of poultry* Bantamweight, a weight class in boxing-Places:* Bantam , a city and former sultanate on Java island, in Indonesia...

. They sent the Museum of Leiden

Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie

The Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie was a museum in Leiden, The Netherlands. It was founded in 1820 by Royal Decree, formed from a merger of several existing collections. This happened at the instigation of Coenraad Jacob Temminck, who saw the museum primarily as a research institute...

200 skeletons, 200 skins of mammals from 65 species, 2,000 bird skins, 1,400 fish, 300 reptiles and amphibians, and many insects and crustaceans .

Works

• Heinrich Kuhl and Johan Coenraad van Hasselt. 1820. Beiträge zur Zoologie und Vergleichende anatomie (Contributions to zoology and comparative anatomy). Ed. Hermann. 212 pp.
• 1820 Dissertatio medico-anatomical observation of metamorphosi inauguralis exhibens quarumdam partium Ranae temporariae ... Ed apud I. Oomkens. 51 pp.