Credit: © The Royal Society
Image number: RS.10921
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Portraits of Ramon Tussarí and a Maquiritare girl
Date
January 1854
Creator
Richard Spruce (1817 - 1893, British) , Explorer
Object type
Archive reference number
Material
Dimensions
height (drawing): 183mm
width (drawing): 107mm
width (drawing): 107mm
Subject
Description
Portraits of the left profile of the head and shoulders of two Maquiritare people, annotated by Spruce as [top] 'Ramon Tussarí, chief of the Maquiritari Inds on the Rio Cunucunúma. (Orinoco). Appary [apparently] above 50 yrs old. The river Cunucunúma runs along the western foot of the Duida Mts (8000 ft.) and enters the Orinoco many days’ journey above the cataracts. I was on it from Dec. 29, 1853 to Jan. 5, 1854, & was wrecked in its rapids'.
In the aforementioned work Spruce describes a two day visit to Tussarí, ‘a remarkable man’. In this work the lower figure is titled ‘Maquiritari girl, (14 years old)’.
Reproduced as Figures 37 and 38 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).
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 Ye'kuanan, also called Maquiritare, are a tropical rainforest tribe who live in the northeast of Roraima State, Brazil.
In the aforementioned work Spruce describes a two day visit to Tussarí, ‘a remarkable man’. In this work the lower figure is titled ‘Maquiritari girl, (14 years old)’.
Reproduced as Figures 37 and 38 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).
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 Ye'kuanan, also called Maquiritare, are a tropical rainforest tribe who live in the northeast of Roraima State, Brazil.
Associated place