Credit: © The Royal Society
Image number: RS.10922
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Portrait of Huanéau
Date
June 1854
Creator
Richard Spruce (1817 - 1893, British) , Explorer
Object type
Archive reference number
Material
Dimensions
height (drawing): 185mm
width (drawing): 112mm
width (drawing): 112mm
Subject
Description
Portrait of the left profile of the head and shoulders of a woman, annotated by Spruce as ‘No. 13. Huanéau. (A very old Guahibo woman, seen at the cataracts of Mayupres). June 1854. R. Orinoco, Venezuela. R.S. Her only article of clothing was the two strings of red beads I threw over her neck to induce her to keep still’. Also annotated ‘(To come in Chap. VII. p.11. mss)’.
Reproduced as Figure 43 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 Guahibo, or Guajibo, people are an indigenous people native to Los Llanos, or savannah plains in eastern Colombia and southern Venezuela.
Reproduced as Figure 43 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 Guahibo, or Guajibo, people are an indigenous people native to Los Llanos, or savannah plains in eastern Colombia and southern Venezuela.
Associated place