The Turkey Buzzard’s nest
Date
December 1852
Creator
Richard Spruce (1817 - 1893, British) , Explorer
Object type
Archive reference number
Material
Dimensions
height (drawing): 206mm
width (drawing): 255mm
width (drawing): 255mm
Subject
Description
Sketch of a large Indian house with a thatched roof and several scattered utensils outside including a pot and a frame.
Annotated ‘No. 17. House, called Urubú-Coará (i.e. Turkey Buzzard’s nest) above the Pino-Pinô cataracts on the Rio Uaupés. (There is tall forest at back). Dec. 1852. See ground-plan on a separate sheet’.
Reproduced as Figure 18 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 this as the residence of one of the most powerful Indians on the Rio Uaupés, a Tariana named Bernado. Its church-like fabrics ‘would seem anciently to have been the normal habitations of these Indian; and it contains, besides the families of his sons and daughters, those also of numerous dependents’.
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. 17. House, called Urubú-Coará (i.e. Turkey Buzzard’s nest) above the Pino-Pinô cataracts on the Rio Uaupés. (There is tall forest at back). Dec. 1852. See ground-plan on a separate sheet’.
Reproduced as Figure 18 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 this as the residence of one of the most powerful Indians on the Rio Uaupés, a Tariana named Bernado. Its church-like fabrics ‘would seem anciently to have been the normal habitations of these Indian; and it contains, besides the families of his sons and daughters, those also of numerous dependents’.
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