Santarem
Date
May 1850
Creator
Richard Spruce (1817 - 1893, British) , Explorer
Object type
Archive reference number
Material
Dimensions
height (drawing): 204mm
width (drawing): 253mm
width (drawing): 253mm
Subject
Content object
Description
Landscape sketch of a town surrounded by forest looking towards a bay. In the distance is a church with two steeples. In the foreground are dwellings, with a figure providing scale.
Annotated by Spruce ‘Santarem, mouth of Rio Tapajoz, (at the confluence of the Tapajoz & Amazon. (Back view, from a hill near the fort, looking across the wide bay of the Tapajoz.) May, 1850. R.S. No. 3’.
Reproduced as Figure 3 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 text of the aforementioned work Spruce notes the western half of Santarem was the residence of Indian and other free people of colour who inhabited huts with mud walls or no walls at all. The population of the whole town, then the largest on the Amazon, would at that time scarcely exceed 2000.
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.
Annotated by Spruce ‘Santarem, mouth of Rio Tapajoz, (at the confluence of the Tapajoz & Amazon. (Back view, from a hill near the fort, looking across the wide bay of the Tapajoz.) May, 1850. R.S. No. 3’.
Reproduced as Figure 3 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 text of the aforementioned work Spruce notes the western half of Santarem was the residence of Indian and other free people of colour who inhabited huts with mud walls or no walls at all. The population of the whole town, then the largest on the Amazon, would at that time scarcely exceed 2000.
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.
Associated place