Credit: © The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.10931
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    Saõ Gabriel village

    Date
    July 1852
    Creator
    Richard Spruce (1817 - 1893, British) , Explorer
    Object type
    Archive reference number
    Material
    Dimensions
    height (drawing): 185mm
    width (drawing): 288mm
    Subject
    Content object
    nature
       > landscape
    Description
    Landscape view of the village of Saõ Gabriel, with Serras de Curicuriarí in the background and a thatched roof building in the foreground.

    Annotated ‘[Number] 10 [Rio] Negro. Brazil. [Sao] Gabriel, with Serras de Curicuriarí. [(As] seen from a few yards E. of the church, looking down the river, July, 1852). R.S.’.

    The left hand side of the paper has been trimmed.

    Reproduced as Figure 15 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 August 1852 Spruce wrote to fellow botanist George Bentham FRS reporting that he was never so near dying of hunger as at Saõ Gabriel. His last news from England was a year old and he seemed to have taken his last leave of civilisation.

    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
    <The World>
       > South America
          > Brazil
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