The earliest known descriptions of the broad-billed parrot were provided by Dutch travellers during the Second Dutch Expedition to Indonesia, led by the Dutch Admiral Jacob Cornelis van Neck in 1598. They appear in reports published in 1601, which also contain the first illustration of the bird, along with the first of a dodo. The description for the illustration reads: "5* Is a bird which we called the "Indian Crow", more than twice as big as the parroquets, of two or three colours". The Dutch sailors who visited Mauritius categorised the broad-billed parrots separately from parrots, and referred to them as ""Indische ravens"" (translated as either "Indian ravens" or ""Indian crows"") without accompanying useful descriptions, which caused confusion when their journals were studied. The Dutch painter Jacob Savery lived in a house in Amsterdam called ""In de Indische Rave"" (Dutch for ""in the Indian raven"") until 1602, since Dutch houses had signboards instead of numbers at the time. While he and his brother, the painter Roelant Savery, did not paint this species and it does not appear to have been transported from Mauritius, they may have read about it or heard about it from the latter's contacts in the court of Emperor Rudolf II (Roelant painted other extinct Mauritian species in the emperor's menagerie).