Credit: © The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.10934
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    Two views of an Indian drum

    Date
    November 1852
    Creator
    Richard Spruce (1817 - 1893, British) , Explorer
    Object type
    Archive reference number
    Material
    Dimensions
    height (drawing): 133mm
    width (drawing): 220mm
    Subject
    Description
    Annotated ‘Indian Drum. Seen at Iauaraté, on the Rio Uaupés, in the house of the Tuchana Callistro. R.S. Nov. 1852.’.

    The left hand view shows the drum from side on supported by a stand. The top of the drum has been decorated with a red circular geometrical pattern. The right hand view is annotated ‘Opposite side of drum, showing the orifices through which it has been scooped out. Hollowed’. Also annotated ‘Dulípiru Tuatí. 15a.’ and an indication of scale is given.

    Reproduced as part of 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 II, 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.
    Associated place
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