Serras do Jacomîm
Date
14 December 1850
Creator
Richard Spruce (1817 - 1893, British) , Explorer
Object type
Archive reference number
Material
Dimensions
height (drawing): 134mm
width (drawing): 221mm
width (drawing): 221mm
Subject
Content object
Description
Landscape drawing of distant hills showing several peaks, the highest of which is labelled ‘A’.
Annotated top left ‘Serras do Jacomîm, on the S. side of the Rio Negro, below Castanheiro. (Western side, as seen from upper entrance of a deep bay, which these mts. half encircle. 14 Dec. 1850). R.S. These hills are granite (or greiss) – quite bare in the steepest parts – elsewhere clad with trees & palms’. Also annotated as ‘No. 7’.
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 top left ‘Serras do Jacomîm, on the S. side of the Rio Negro, below Castanheiro. (Western side, as seen from upper entrance of a deep bay, which these mts. half encircle. 14 Dec. 1850). R.S. These hills are granite (or greiss) – quite bare in the steepest parts – elsewhere clad with trees & palms’. Also annotated as ‘No. 7’.
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