Jacques Huber (1867-1914) made nearly 40 trips during his time in Brazil
(from 1895 to 1914). Besides the scientific output of these expeditions, Huber
was a pioneer in the use of photography in the field. His journeys through the Amazon, Northeastern Brazil, and the Far-Orient, resulted valuable documents like diaries and photographs that are preserved at the Goeldi Museum and the Cantonal
Archive of the City of Basel, Switzerland.
Jacques Huber kept several diaries while in the field. These
diaries not only documented the day-to-day activities of the expedition, but
also featured numerous landscapes and portraits of the people he
encountered. Both visual records (photos and drawings) contribute to a novel
perspective on the Brazilian environment and biodiversity, while serving as relevant
sources for understanding the context of Huber’s expeditions.
In the
posdoctoral project titled “Visual cartography of Jacques Huber’s botanical
collections”, conducted at the Goeldi Museum, we retraced Huber’s steps in
three of his trips: the state of Ceará (1897), the Ucayali River (1898), and the
Purus River (1904). The objective was to identify the places the botanist
visited, the photographs and drawings he made, and the collections he gathered.
One of the results is
presented in three maps (added to the “Expeditions” section), in which viewers may
access the aforementioned information and cross-reference it for different perspectives of Huber’s journeys.
