Credit: © The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.10935
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    An Indian drum

    Date
    November 1852
    Creator
    Richard Spruce (1817 - 1893, British) , Explorer
    Object type
    Archive reference number
    Material
    Dimensions
    height (drawing): 220mm
    width (drawing): 133mm
    Subject
    Content object
    Description
    End view of a drum showing decorative patterns in red and blue, supported by a stand. At either side of the drum is a vessel or pot.

    Annotated ‘Indian Drum (end view) (Jaguarraté-cachoeira, Rio Uaupés.) Called Duliṕiru by the Tariana Inds., Tuatí by the Tucano Inds., Turucána by the Barré & other Indians on the Rio Negro, Tunduli by the Jibaros (Ecuador), and Huáncar in the Empire of the Incas’.

    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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