This scrapbook is the first of eight, completed by Jenny Hjelm, the mother of Swedish explorer Rolf Blomberg (Stockholm, 1912 – Quito, 1996). For decades Jenny collected and organised the newspaper articles written by and about her son that were published in the Swedish press, and a few from the local press that Rolf sent her with his letters. At the Blomberg Archive we like to think that this was the founding gesture of the institution, long before the idea of organising a documentary collection and becoming legally constituted arose.
The album was completed between 1934 and 1936. It is a composite documentary unit containing 57 articles on Rolf Blomberg’s first major transatlantic voyage as a naturalist and collector of species for museums in the Galapagos and the Ecuadorian Amazon. Also included are multiple announcements about his first book “Underliga Maniskor Och Underliga Djur” (Strange People and Strange Animals) and about the lectures Blomberg always gave on his return from his travels, twenty years before the first experimental Swedish television broadcasts and only ten years after the founding of Swedish Radio (Sveriges Radio).
Most of the articles in this album are about Galápagos. Some deal with nature and others describe the daily life of the settlers who inhabited the islands at the time, mostly Europeans who, after World War I, were looking for a return to paradise lost on the islands. Several articles mention the disappearance of the eccentric Baroness Wagner from Floreana Island.
After an eight-month stay in the Galapagos, Blomberg continued his journey along the Napo River in the Ecuadorian Oriente, where he continued his work as a naturalist and had the first of several encounters with the indigenous people of the jungle. In his articles on the Amazon, Blomberg also discusses informal mining and the unequal relationship between settlers and indigenous people, illustrating these themes with cartoons he drew himself.
His plan to return to Europe included crossing the continent by following the route of the Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana down the Amazon River to the Atlantic Ocean, but in the middle of the journey his canoe capsized and he lost most of the species he had collected and the photographs he had taken. For this reason, two years later he repeated his voyage across the Equator.
In 1936, during his second trip, he made his first two short documentary films: “Vikingar på sköldpaddoarna” (Vikings on the Tortoise Islands) in the Galapagos and “I kanot till huvudjägarnas land” (By Canoe to the Land of the Head Reducers) in Shuar territory in the Ecuadorian Amazon. As a result of this trip, he also published his second book: “Högkvarter hos huvudjägare” (Camping among the headhunters).
This time, he desisted from returning to Sweden via the Amazon River to its mouth, which would only happen on his second expedition to Brazil in 1965.
AUTHOR OF THE TEXT
María Inés Armesto / Blomberg Archive
NAME OF IBERARCHIVES PROJECT
“BLOMBERG ARCHIVE / LATIN AMERICA: Public Access Online Catalogue”.
Bibliography
– BLOMBERG, R. (1936) “Underliga Maniskor Och Underliga Djur” (Strange People and Strange Animals). Stockholm: Gebers.
– BLOMBERG, R. (1938) “Högkvarter hos huvudjägare” (Camping among the headhunters). Stockholm: Gebers.
Photographs:
