Credit: © The Royal Society
Image number: RS.10920
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Portraits of two Hupda women
Date
July 1853
Creator
Richard Spruce (1817 - 1893, British) , Explorer
Object type
Archive reference number
Material
Dimensions
height (drawing): 255mm
width (drawing): 206mm
width (drawing): 206mm
Subject
Description
Portraits of the left profile of the head and shoulders of two young women both wearing necklaces, annotated by Spruce as 'No. 11 [& No.11+] Macú Indians. Two sisters (?) the oldest apparently 16 yrs. old [top figure], the youngest 9 yrs. [bottom figure] – brought from Rio Içanna in June 1853 by the Commandante of Marabitanas. Their village had been destroyed – the men all killed - & themselves with other women & children carried away captive'. The top figure is also annotated 'The nose slightly too large'.
Reproduced as Figures 30 and 31 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 notes that neither of the young women understood Portuguese or Lingoa Geral but with the aid of signs he obtained from them ‘a good many words of their language’ but unfortunately, the note book containing them was lost.
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 Hupda, Hupd'äh, people are an Amazonian indigenous people who live in Brazil and Colombia.
Reproduced as Figures 30 and 31 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 notes that neither of the young women understood Portuguese or Lingoa Geral but with the aid of signs he obtained from them ‘a good many words of their language’ but unfortunately, the note book containing them was lost.
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 Hupda, Hupd'äh, people are an Amazonian indigenous people who live in Brazil and Colombia.
Associated place