One River

In 1974-75, Wade Davis and Tim Plowman traveled the length of South America, living among a dozen Indian tribes, collecting medicinal plants and searching for the origins of coca, the sacred leaf of the Andes and the notorious source of cocaine. It was a journey inspired and made possible by their Harvard mentor, Richard Evans Schultes, the most important scientific explorer in South America in this century, whose exploits rival those of Darwin and the great naturalist explorers of the Victorian age. In 1941, after having identified ololiuqui, the long-lost Aztec hallucinogen, and having collected the first specimens of teonanacatl, the sacred mushroom of Mexico, Schultes took a leave of absence from Harvard and disappeared into the Northwest Amazon of Colombia. Twelve years later, he returned from South America, having gone places no outsider had ever been, mapping uncharted rivers and living among two dozen Indian tribes. He collected some twenty thousand botanical specimens, including three hundred species new to science, and documented the invaluable knowledge of native shamans. The world's leading authority on plant hallucinogens, Schultes was for his students a living link to a distant time when the tropical rain forests stood immense, inviolable, a mantle of green stretching across entire continents. It was a world greatly changed by the time Davis and Plowman began their journey, nearly thirty years later, and changed further today.

Richard Evans Schultes was arguably this century's foremost botanist and the father of ethnobotany--the study of plants and medicinal knowledge of indigenous peoples. He inadvertently inspired the 1960s drug culture with the publication of his scholarly journals on hallucinogenic plants. A meticulous scientist, his research on Columbia's rubber-producing hevea trees led to America's mass-production of rubber during World War II, which ultimately contributed to victory. Davis, one of Schultes's most devoted students, recounts the great botanist's life--from his research along hundreds of miles of forested rivers and his jungle treks while shattered by malaria to his intuitive gift with Amazon shamans and his relationship with such cult figures as Timothy Leary and William Burroughs.

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