Credit: © The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.10939
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    The pueblo of Sta Isabel

    Date
    February 1854
    Creator
    Richard Spruce (1817 - 1893, British) , Explorer
    Object type
    Archive reference number
    Material
    Dimensions
    height (drawing): 207mm
    width (drawing): 255mm
    Subject
    Content object
    nature
       > landscape
    Description
    A pencil landscape of the Indian pueblo of Sta Isabel depicting seven buildings with vegetation in the background and mountains in the far distance.

    Annotated top left ‘Pueblo de S. Isabel, with Cerro Tibiali. Rio Pacimoni. RS. Febr. 1854'. Annotated bottom left 'No. 19. Indian village at head of R. Pacimoni. (Not far from sources of Orinoco)’.

    Reproduced as Figure 41 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 pueblo comprises 14 houses and is principally inhabited by Cunipusana Indians.

    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
          > Venezuela
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