After two days of favorable sailing, they landed in Santos. Florence was then tasked with organizing the transport from the coast to Porto Feliz, in the interior of the São Paulo province, from where the scientific expedition would depart by the Tietê River in June of the following year, heading toward Cuiabá. Initially, the plan was to travel overland from Santos to Mato Grosso, and then to navigate from the Amazon Basin to the Orinoco via the Casiquiare Canal. However, for strategic reasons, Baron Langsdorff decided that the expedition should follow a fluvial route, from the Tietê to the Amazon, crossing only a few leagues overland once terrestrial routes had already been traveled by other explorers, while the river routes were used solely for commercial purposes and were therefore unexplored in terms of scientific content.

Thus was born the title of the most valuable document produced during the four years of the Langsdorff Expedition. Although hired as the second draftsman, Florence meticulously documented the expedition’s daily life and left behind an extensive and important iconography of Brazil. Entitled “Voyage Fluvial du Tiété à l’Amazonie” (River Journey from the Tietê to the Amazon), this section of his illustrated compendium, L’Ami des Arts, recounts the ordeals of the “arduous, troubled, and unhappy pilgrimage through the vast interior of the Empire of Brazil,” which ended with his return to Rio de Janeiro in 1829.

The Langsdorff Expedition, however, did not return to Rio de Janeiro intact. Stricken with mental illness, the baron had to be sent urgently back to Europe, where he died in 1852. Taunay, the first draftsman, also met a tragic fate, drowning while trying to cross the Guaporé River on horseback after heavy rain in early 1828. Countless other anonymous members of the expedition likely suffered the same misfortunes of tropical waters and forests.

In addition to Taunay’s painful death and the baron’s mental illness, the natural history materials collected during the expedition were never published as a single work, and the remaining biological specimens are apparently poorly labeled. The disorganization of the collected material is a direct consequence of Langsdorff’s illness, since the person traditionally responsible for organizing the collections was the leader of the expedition. For these reasons, Paulo Vanzolini, a notable 20th-century Brazilian scientist and composer, classified the Langsdorff Expedition as a “complete disaster.” Despite his harsh and certainly exaggerated criticism, Vanzolini acknowledged that “the expedition produced a beautiful landscape and anthropological iconography,” referring to the meticulously crafted works of Taunay and, especially, Florence.

Upon returning to Rio de Janeiro, Florence left one of the versions of his travel report at the Taunay family’s home, where it remained stored and forgotten until 1874. It was accidentally rediscovered by Alfredo de Taunay during a move and then translated and published in the journal of the Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute under the title: “Sketch of the journey undertaken by Mr. de Langsdorff into the interior of Brazil, from September 1825 to March 1829. Originally written in French by the second draftsman of the scientific commission, Hércules Florence. Translated by Alfredo d’Escragnolle Taunay.” Nearly half a century after the survivors’ return, Florence’s diary was the first, and for a long time the only, literary account of the Langsdorff Expedition.

It is evident, therefore, that Florence and the Taunay family played a central role in the later recognition of the Langsdorff Expedition as one of the most important socio-ecological expeditions ever carried out in Brazilian territory. However, Florence’s importance to science and the arts goes far beyond his documentary role in the arduous and lengthy journey.

After the expedition, Florence lived in Campinas (SP) until his death in 1879, where he dedicated himself prolifically to studies and inventions, despite limited resources and a lack of recognition at the time, given the difficulty of promoting his work from the periphery of industrial capitalism.

One of Florence’s first challenges after the expedition was to publish his work on Zoophony, now a recognized field of biological sciences known as bioacoustics. The idea of zoophony was to transcribe animal sounds into formal musical notation—that is, using scores. Clearly, the expedition left a permanent mark on Florence, as zoophony was his attempt to more precisely document the beauties he could not draw.

“One would have to travel, as I did, for more than three years through the vast territories of Brazil to know how impressive it is to hear a multitude of animals, each with such different sounds.”

To make his studies on the voices of nature public, Florence delved deeply into graphic processes and created the so-called polygraph, a a technique that combines the printing press with engraving processes and that allowed printing without large, heavy machinery. His prototype was built in 1831 and perfected until 1838. But in 1833, Florence achieved his most significant graphic breakthrough: photography.

Without any contact with the developments made in Europe, particularly by Niépce and Daguerre, Florence independently invented photography in Brazil, was piorneer in the use of gold salts for image fixation and was also the first to coin the term photographie—impression through light. He immediately recognized his experiment as an art form, but was overshadowed by the inventions in Europe, who achieved similar image fixation around the same time, though with greater resources and visibility, with oficial support in the centre of capitalism.

“I gave this art the name photography, because in it, light plays the main role.”

But the broad recognition of photography as an art form was not so immediate. It faced resistance in Europe, even as it gradually came to dominate the field of documentary work. It took a few decades for this tool to fully replace the work of draftsmen, the same function attributed to Florence in the Langsdorff Expedition, and more than a century and a half for access to photographic devices, already in digital form, to become popularly widespread.

Just as photography has undergone drastic changes since Florence’s experiments, the landscapes depicted during the Langsdorff Expedition have also been intensely transformed, especially over the last 50 years. In that Rio de Janeiro, ruled by the Imperial family at the time of the Aurora’s departure, hills were occupied by marginalized communities, coastlines were overtaken by luxury buildings, land was reclaimed from the sea, and the population grew from 140,000 inhabitants to 6.7 million. In the Brazilian interior, rivers were dammed, riparian forests were cleared, animals became extinct or lost much of their habitat, originary peoples were displaced, cities expanded at a dizzying pace, and very little of what Florence once drew remains the same as it was two centuries ago.