Carl Frederick Reimer

Carl Frederick Reimer, born at Königsberg in East Prussia, entered the Company as a private soldier in 1767, and his medical skill carried him to Ceylon as an under-surgeon; from 1777 he served as a land-surveyor with the rank of ensign-engineer, in Colombo until 1781, and rose to Director of Fortifications and Inspector of Waterworks. He returned to Ceylon in 1789 with a deputation to inspect its defensive works, and his fortification reports and drawings survive in the Dutch archives, a record of the island’s defences at the close of Company rule.

A skilful technical draughtsman and a talented artist, he is thought the likely hand behind two anonymous watercolours of the Company’s hospital at Colombo of 1772, careful studies whose author was never named. A view of Colombo of 1785 stands behind one of Jan Brandes’s own, his work thus feeding into a better-known artist’s record. He died at Batavia in 1796, far from the Prussian city of his birth.