Credit: © The Royal Society
Image number: RS.10919
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Portrait of Maria
Date
1851-1852
Creator
Richard Spruce (1817 - 1893, British) , Explorer
Object type
Archive reference number
Material
Dimensions
height (drawing): 221mm
width (drawing): 133mm
width (drawing): 133mm
Subject
Description
Portrait of the left profile of the head and shoulders of a young woman, annotated by Spruce as 'No. 11. Maria. Barré Ind. 8 years. (Castanheiro on the Rio Negro)'.
Reproduced as Figure 17 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 Wallace notes there is no record of Spruce having stopped at Castanheiro either on his upward or downward voyage and that he probably made this drawing at a place near, called Mazarubi, where he stopped to buy farinha on his voyage up to São Gabriel.
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 Baré, or Hanera, are an indigenous people of northwest Brazil and Venezuela.
Reproduced as Figure 17 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 Wallace notes there is no record of Spruce having stopped at Castanheiro either on his upward or downward voyage and that he probably made this drawing at a place near, called Mazarubi, where he stopped to buy farinha on his voyage up to São Gabriel.
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 Baré, or Hanera, are an indigenous people of northwest Brazil and Venezuela.
Associated place