Credit: © The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.10947
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    Suburb of Tarapóto

    Date
    1856
    Creator
    Richard Spruce (1817 - 1893, British) , Explorer
    Object type
    Archive reference number
    Material
    Dimensions
    height (drawing): 235mm
    width (drawing): 367mm
    Subject
    Content object
    nature
       > landscape
    Description
    Landscape sketch of the approach to a village depicting several buildings with a small female figure in the distance, the scene surrounded by mountains.

    Annotated ‘No. 33 Tarapóto – southern suburb, as seen on approaching from Juan Guerra, the embarcadero on the River Mayo RS. 1856.’

    Reproduced as Figure 2 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).

    In the aforementioned work Wallace notes the conical peak on the left is probably the same as that shown in another drawing (RS.10944) as the singular Cerro Pelado when seen from a different point of view. Spruce describes Tarapoto as being established in the 1780’s and in 1856 numbering some 12,000 souls.

    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
          > Peru
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