Piedra del Cocuí
Date
3 April 1853
Creator
Richard Spruce (1817 - 1893, British) , Explorer
Object type
Archive reference number
Material
Dimensions
height (drawing): 207mm
width (drawing): 255mm
width (drawing): 255mm
Subject
Content object
Description
Landscape sketch of a river in the foreground with a mountain in the distance.
Annotated ‘No. 12 Piedra del Cocuí, as seen from the Destacamento on opposite side of Rio Negro, in the evening of Apr. 3, 1853. RS. A detachment of 4 or 5 soldiers, commanded by a serjeant (sic), from Marabitanas, occupies a rancho on the right margin of the Rio Negro, and guards the actual frontier of Brazil, which is the parallel of latitude passing through Cocui’.
Reproduced as Figure 32 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 aforementioned work Spruce notes the Piedra del Cocuí, or Hawk’s rock, is about a thousand feet high.
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 ‘No. 12 Piedra del Cocuí, as seen from the Destacamento on opposite side of Rio Negro, in the evening of Apr. 3, 1853. RS. A detachment of 4 or 5 soldiers, commanded by a serjeant (sic), from Marabitanas, occupies a rancho on the right margin of the Rio Negro, and guards the actual frontier of Brazil, which is the parallel of latitude passing through Cocui’.
Reproduced as Figure 32 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 aforementioned work Spruce notes the Piedra del Cocuí, or Hawk’s rock, is about a thousand feet high.
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