Credit: © The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.10942

    A riven rock in the Casiquiari river

    Date
    December 1853
    Creator
    Richard Spruce (1817 - 1893, British) , Explorer
    Object type
    Archive reference number
    Material
    Dimensions
    height (drawing): 160mm
    width (drawing): 217mm
    Subject
    Content object
    nature
       > landscape
    Description
    Landscape sketch of a large rock riven in to two masses in a river.

    Annotated at bottom of page ‘A riven rock in the river Casiquiari, about 150 yards above the Laja de Capibara. Dec. 1853. R.S. 24. “Like cliffs that storms have rent asunder, apart they stood, the scars remaining; But neither ever found another to free the hollow heart from paining!” Coleridge’.

    Also annotated to give an indication of scale.

    Reproduced as Figure 34 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).

    Object history
    Spruce spent 15 years exploring the Amazon from the Andes to its mouth, collecting plants on behalf of botanists including Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker FRS and George Bentham FRS. He was one of the first Europeans to visit many of the places from which he collected. Spruce was not a Fellow of the Royal Society.
    Associated place
    <The World>
       > South America
          > Venezuela
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