Debarquement
"Landing" (caption translation). This image shows newly arrived Africans being landed from small boats in a harbor in Brazil. Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802–1858) was a German painter, famous for his works depicting landscapes and ethnographic subjects in the Americas, in the first half of the nineteenth century. Rugendas arrived in Brazil in 1822, hired as an illustrator for Baron von Langsdorff's scientific expedition. Rugendas remained on his own in Brazil until 1825, exploring and recording his many impressions of daily life in the provinces of Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro, and quickly the coastal provinces of Bahia and Pernambuco on his journey back to Europe. He produced mostly drawings and watercolors. He returned to Europe and between 1827 and 1835 he published his book with the help of Victor Aimé Huber. For an analysis of Rugendas' drawings, as these were informed by his anti-slavery views, see Robert W. Slenes, African Abrahams, "Lucretias and Men of Sorrows: Allegory and Allusion in the Brazilian Anti-slavery Lithographs (1827-1835) of Johann Moritz Rugendas," Slavery & Abolition, 23 (2002), p. 147-168. The same illustration was also published in the Illustrated London News (Aug. 6, 1842; vol. 1, p. 193), inexplicably with the caption "Hill Coolies Landing at Mauritius." The commercial house Corbis sells this image from the Illustrated London News, with the same caption, and authors/publishers who purchase from Corbis repeat the erroneous identification as a scene from the British colony of Mauritius, e.g., J. P. Rodriguez, Chronology of World Slavery (ABC-CLIO, 1999), p.142.
Image Title
Debarquement
RegID
SI-OB-767
Date
1830s
Title
Debarquement
Source
Johann Moritz Rugendas, Voyage Pittoresque dans le Bresil. Traduit de l'Allemand (Paris, 1835; also published in same year in German). Reprinted in Viagem Pitoresca Atravé do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1972). Images shown on this website, and in color from original water colors, in Viagem Pitoresca Atravé do Brasil (Editora Itatiaia Limitada, Editora da Universidade de Sao Paulo, 1989). Both the 1835 French and German original editions were published in black/white.
Language
French
Item sets
Slave Sales & Auctions: African Coast & the Americas
Spatial Coverage
South America--Brazil
Reproduced In
Johann Moritz Rugendas, Voyage Pittoresque dans le Bresil. Traduit de l'Allemand (Paris, 1835; also published in same year in German)
Researchers
Jerome Handler; Michael Tuite; Henry B. Lovejoy Graduate Research Assistants: Tiffany Beebe; Travis May
Identifier
H012