Credit: © The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.10911

    Portrait of Anássado

    Date
    21 August 1852-28 June 1853
    Creator
    Richard Spruce (1817 - 1893, British) , Explorer
    Object type
    Archive reference number
    Material
    Dimensions
    height (drawing): 220mm
    width (drawing): 133mm
    Subject
    Description
    Front facing pencil portrait of the head and shoulders of a young girl annotated by Spruce 'Anássado = Avô das Aváres (Grandmother of the Macaws). Tariana Ind. 6 years. Grand-daughter of Wiáca, niece of Cáali. (Iauaraté-cachoeira, Rio Uapes. A little girl seated in a hammock. The arms &c, much out of drawing, but the face like. - She wears a white stone bored lengthwise, like all of royal race - Young girls on the Uaupés have their hair cut across the forehead, at the height of the eyebrows). R.S.' Also annotated that 'The eyes too far apart'.

    Reproduced as Figure 21 in Notes of a botanist on the Amazon & Andes: being records of travel on the Amazon and its tributaries, the Trombetas, Rio Negro, Uaupés, Casiquiari, Pacimoni, Huallaga, and Pastasa; as also to the cataracts of the Orinoco, along the eastern side of the Andes of Peru and Ecuador, and the shores of the Pacific, during the years 1849-1864 edited by Alfred Russel Wallace, volume I (London, 1908).

    In the aforementioned work Spruce records Anássado as daughter of the chief of the Tariana tribe, Callistro, who is depicted in the same work.

    Richard Spruce (1817-1893) British botanist was not a Fellow of the Royal Society. He spent fifteen years collecting in the Amazon of Brazil and the Andes of Peru and Ecuador between 1849-1864, and observing the indigenous people and their cultures, learning 21 different languages while away.

    Spruce was already in South America when he was employed by a Kew Gardens-India Office project to secure seeds of the cinchona tree, whose bark yielded the antimalarial drug quinine. In 1860 he shipped around 100,000 dried seeds and over 600 young plants out of Ecuador. A year later, Ecuador adopted laws to protect its cinchona trees from mass exportation.

    The Tariana or Taliaseri are an indigenous people of the Uaupés River in the Amazon region of Brazil and Colombia.
    Associated place
    <The World>
       > South America
          > Brazil
    <The World>
       > South America
          > Ecuador
    <The World>
       > South America
          > Peru
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