Career
He published a few books and several articles concerning his work in the East Indies. In these he describes the geography, zoology, linguistics and ethnography of the islands. In late 1839 he enlisted in the Dutch Harderwijk, and soon afterwards was stationed in the Netherlands East Indies as a military cartographer, tasked with making topographical surveys.
He spent 30 years of his life working in the East Indies.
From 1840 until 1856, Rosenberg was a topographical draughtsman on Sumatra and its neighboring islands. Afterwards he was a civil servant, working as a cartographer and surveyor in the Moluccas and western New Guinea.
Rosenberg had a keen interest in ornithology, and beginning in the 1860s, collected specimens in the Indies for study and classification by Hermann Schlegel at the natural history museum of Leiden. He returned to Europe in 1871, and died in the Hague, Netherlands in 1888.