A propósito de la conferencia que dictó en Bogotá esta semana el etnobotánico Wade Davis —invitado por El Espectador y el Banco de la República—, el ex presidente Belisario Betancur rememora sus anécdotas en la selva con el fallecido conservacionista Richard Schultes.

Richard Evans Schultes Richard Evans Schultes hizo uno de los mayores inventarios de la biodiversidad amazónica. Sus investigaciones fueron recopiladas en el libro ‘El río’.

“Oh selva, esposa del silencio, madre de la soledad y de la neblina…”

José Eustasio Rivera(Citado por Schultes).

“Mañana llega el gringo”, nos dijeron aquella tarde de comienzos del año de 1953, en la maloca en donde nos había dado posada una pareja de colonos blancos. Estábamos de regreso a Jinogojé, después de haber navegado desde la madrugada por el misterioso río Apaporis —afluente del río Vaupés y éste del Amazonas—, para conocer los raudales imponentes de Jirijirimo. Había sido un día cálido, lleno de miedos de las agresivas pirañas que no perdonan piel ni herida y devoran toda huella de sangre como atraídas por un magnetismo frenético. “Sí, mañana llega el gringo”. Llegaría por el río. Nosotros lo habíamos hecho por aire, aquella vez al igual que tantas otras veces a lo largo de varios años, en los cuales nos subyugó la selva como a los personajes de La Vorágine de Rivera.

1.- El comienzo de una amistad

El hidroavión Catalina que nos llevó pertenecía a la pequeña compañía de nombre operático, “Aída”, por “Aerolíneas de la Amazonia”, fundada por el empresario Miguel Dumit en Manizales. Su tarea consistía en llevar víveres y medicinas a poblados y colonos en el mar verde de la Amazonia y la Orinoquia, y traer fibra de caucho y plantas medicinales a Bogotá.

(El piloto estrella era el alto y rubio capitán Liebermann, a quien llamaban “el rey de la selva”, porque conocía todos los ríos del Llano y de la jungla, y sabía dónde acuatizar. Por cierto que el misterioso Liebermann murió de un ataque cardiaco, al aterrizar en Medellín, en el aeropuerto Olaya Herrera, el viejo hidroavión Catalina, que él alcanzó a llevar hasta el final de la pista, donde dobló la cabeza).

En efecto, al día siguiente, llegó el gringo. “Me llamo Richard Evans Schultes”, me dijo. “Soy botánico; busco plantas medicinales y caucho”. De mi parte le expresé: “Me llamo Belisario Betancur, soy periodista, trabajo para el periódico El Siglo, de Bogotá”. Y le presenté a otro periodista, también de El Siglo: se trataba de Enrique Gómez Hurtado.

En el libro de Wade Davis El río, de más de 600 páginas, editado por el Fondo de Cultura Económica de México, se cuenta esta historia.

Comenzó entonces una amistad, para mí enriquecedora, que se prolongaría hasta la muerte de Schultes en Boston.

Eran los primeros meses de 1953. Schultes llevaba doce años continuos en la Amazonia y pasaría muchos más. El presidente de Colombia era el doctor Laureano Gómez, quien nos había recomendado para El Siglo temas como el medio ambiente y la preservación de la biodiversidad.

2.- El aprendizaje

Los estudios de Schultes en la Amazonia no cesaban, en busca de plantas medicinales, del caucho; y de siembra de pedagogía entre funcionarios y entre tribus, que lo respetaban y lo querían como a uno de los suyos, por la unción ante sus costumbres, sus leyendas, sus mitos, sus chamanes. Y por la celosa vigilancia y respeto que ejercía sobre la identidad de los aborígenes.

En un nuevo encuentro con Schultes en la localidad de “Tío Barbas”, en el Alto Vaupés, su exposición científica y pedagógica, ante misioneros de varios credos, funcionarios e indígenas, estuvo llena de sabiduría y de coraje, porque al tiempo que descorría velos sobre plantas alimenticias, hacía rectificaciones antropológicas sobre el comportamiento de los macunas, de los cuales sostenía que no es cierto que sean traicioneros, sino que son altivos, arrogantes y orgullosos de su identidad.

Mucho aprendí de su sabiduría y de la familiaridad y simplicidad con que se refería a sus hallazgos. Disfrutaba de sus continuas visitas tanto como sus contertulios en Bogotá, en los Llanos Orientales, en la selva. Y muchas fueron las enmiendas que, no obstante su discreción, se alcanzaron en el tratamiento de las comunidades indígenas por parte de las autoridades y de los misioneros en los distintos credos religiosos, gracias a sus prudentes observaciones.

3.- Las tertulias

¡Qué tardes de tertulia, aquellas en las que Schultes y Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, con su esposa la profesora Alicia Dussán, llenaban el ambiente de ciencia y de anécdotas. Para mí, aquellos encuentros son inolvidables, el profesor siempre hospedado en la discreta “Pensión Inglesa” de la señora Gaul en Bogotá; tanto como los ratos deleitosos cuando llegó de Boston con su esposa a recibir la Cruz de Boyacá, que en su modestia no se cansaba de preguntar por qué se le había concedido. Para corresponderme, con el consentimiento de otros botánicos, entre ellos el profesor García Barriga, bautizó con el nombre de “Betancuria” un arbusto hasta entonces desconocido. Era la abundancia de su generosidad, porque antes nos había dedicado El reino de los dioses, su bello libro, del cual se habla más adelante, a Mariano Ospina Hernández, a Miguel Dumit, a don Rafael Wandurraga, empresario de Leticia de trato delicado con los indígenas, y a mí.

Sea este el momento de agradecer a Schultes, además, el Museo de Orquídeas del Amazonas en cristal de Bohemia que empresarios checos, admiradores del gran botánico, le regalaron para la Universidad de Harvard.

4.- El hálito amazónico

Como prólogo al descomunal y fascinante libro de Margaret Mee Flores do Amazonas, publicado en Editorial Record de Río de Janeiro por el gobierno del Brasil, el profesor Schultes escribe palabras consagratorias y definitorias, en el sentido de que la parte más rica en biodiversidad está en la frontera colombo-brasileña, “el paraíso verde” que la pintora Mee recogió en acuarelas indescriptibles “para gentes que tal vez nunca sentirán el hálito de la brisa amazónica”, dice Schultes. Agrega que aquel “desierto de árboles” que hay quienes toman por un “infierno verde”, contiene, sin embargo, los componentes de la mandioca, principal fuente de carbohidratos como el manihot escutenta; y que el teobroma cacao, base del chocolate, se da en abundancia y se agrega a la alimentación de las distintas tribus aborígenes. Concluye con la afirmación rotunda de que no es cierto que el coco se dé solamente en los litorales, como suele creerse, porque él encontró millares de palmas de coco en la selva.

Con El Navegante Editores, dirigido por mi hija la doctora Beatriz Betancur; y con la Fundación Ospina Pérez, dirigida por el ingeniero Mariano Ospina Hernández, hicimos en diciembre de 1989 la publicación de la obra El reino de los dioses, paisajes, plantas, pueblos de la Amazonia colombiana, con textos y fotos de Schultes, y conceptos de científicos y novelistas, entre ellos José Eustasio Rivera, traducida del inglés por el propio Ospina Hernández. Ojalá se reeditara esta preciosa obra, completamente agotada.

En ella Schultes, con palabra escueta, relata un episodio que vivió al superar una de las cachiveras o raudales del Apaporis. Dice que “la lancha hace agua en forma alarmante; un joven indígena achica continuamente y el chapoteo nos mantiene despiertos toda la noche… El paso de los primeros rápidos fue muy difícil y peligroso…. Temí que no lo lograríamos cuando quedamos balanceándonos en una roca afilada…”.

5.- Uno de los grandes fundadores

Es admirable la exposición “La Amazonia perdida”, organizada por el Museo de Arte del Banco de la República; con el Smithsonian National Musseum of Natural History, con la curaduría de Wade Davis, autor de los libros The lost Amazon y El río; con el profesor Chris Murray, fundador de la “Galería Govinda”; y con el apoyo de El Espectador y el Banco de la República. El texto de Sonia Archila, que sirve de guía al “Viaje fotográfico del legendario botánico”, es un exquisito complemento de las impresionantes fotografías de Schultes.

En palabras del profesor Mark Plotkin, director de Conservación de Plantas en el Fondo Mundial de la Vida Silvestre, “a medida que avanza el movimiento conservacionista internacional pasando de la defensa de animales raros a la preservación y estudio de los grandes ecosistemas tropicales que sostienen la vida en el planeta, el estatus de Schultes va cambiando de ser un mero influjo importante, a ser uno de los grandes fundadores”.

¡Loor a Richard Evans Schultes, uno de los grandes fundadores y apóstol de la Amazonia colombiana!

La Amazonas Perdida
Por: Agencia EFE

El museo estadounidense Smithsonian presenta la selva colombiana con fotos de los años 40 tomadas por el botánico Richard Evans Schultes.

La Amazonas Perdida, exposición
Foto: Agencia EFE
El botánico Richard Evans en canoa por el río Guainía en 1948.

El Museo Smithsonian presenta las fotos del botánico en la exposición La Amazonas Perdida.

El museo Smithsonian, de Washington, exhibe la Amazonía colombiana con 38 instantáneas tomadas en los años cuarenta por el botánico Richard Evans Schultes.

‘La Amazonas perdida’ estará abierta hasta el próximo 31 de octubre y en ella el público podrá apreciar desconocidos parajes y secretos de las tribus que habitaban en estas zonas a mediados del siglo pasado.

Richard Evans Schultes recorrió en la década de los cuarenta y principios de los cincuenta, la Amazonía colombiana con la misión de explorar territorios desconocidos por cualquier naturalista contemporáneo. A lo largo de doce años, este científico de la Universidad de Harvard trazó en el mapa ríos inexplorados, vivió con dos docenas de tribus indígenas y recopiló alrededor de 25.000 especies botánicas, incluyendo 300 nuevas especies y más de 2.000 plantas medicinales.

De este modo, la muestra del Museo Nacional de Historia Natural del instituto Smithsonian exhibe los descubrimientos y observaciones que Schultes pudo captar con su cámara Rolleiflex.

La cuarentena de imágenes, varias especies de herbario, artículos personales y la cámara fotográfica que lo acompañó durante su travesía conforman la sustancia de la exposición.

‘La Amazonas perdida’ subraya, además, el trayecto del eminente botánico que le proporcionó un gran prestigio mundial en el campo del caucho, y las plantas medicinales, tóxicas y alucinógenas.

Sus instantáneas en blanco y negro evocan a la era en la que las lluvias tropicales eran inmensas y los habitantes de la selva recurrían exclusivamente a las plantas, no solo como alimento sino también para saciar sus necesidades médicas y espirituales.

Además de sus famosos itinerarios por la Amazonas, el botánico Richard Evans Schultes es conocido por su trayectoria profesional durante seis décadas en la Universidad de Harvard.

The war on drugs has failed. And it’s high time to replace an ineffective strategy with more humane and efficient drug policies. This is the central message of the report by the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy we presented to the public recently in Rio de Janeiro.

AP

A soldier stands next to packages containing marijuana at an army base in Cali, Colombia, August 2008.

Prohibitionist policies based on eradication, interdiction and criminalization of consumption simply haven’t worked. Violence and the organized crime associated with the narcotics trade remain critical problems in our countries. Latin America remains the world’s largest exporter of cocaine and cannabis, and is fast becoming a major supplier of opium and heroin. Today, we are further than ever from the goal of eradicating drugs.

Over the last 30 years, Colombia implemented all conceivable measures to fight the drug trade in a massive effort where the benefits were not proportional to the resources invested. Despite the country’s achievements in lowering levels of violence and crime, the areas of illegal cultivation are again expanding. In Mexico — another epicenter of drug trafficking — narcotics-related violence has claimed more than 5,000 lives in the past year alone.

The revision of U.S.-inspired drug policies is urgent in light of the rising levels of violence and corruption associated with narcotics. The alarming power of the drug cartels is leading to a criminalization of politics and a politicization of crime. And the corruption of the judicial and political system is undermining the foundations of democracy in several Latin American countries.

The first step in the search for alternative solutions is to acknowledge the disastrous consequences of current policies. Next, we must shatter the taboos that inhibit public debate about drugs in our societies. Antinarcotic policies are firmly rooted in prejudices and fears that sometimes bear little relation to reality. The association of drugs with crime segregates addicts in closed circles where they become even more exposed to organized crime.

In order to drastically reduce the harm caused by narcotics, the long-term solution is to reduce demand for drugs in the main consumer countries. To move in this direction, it is essential to differentiate among illicit substances according to the harm they inflict on people’s health, and the harm drugs cause to the social fabric.

In this spirit, we propose a paradigm shift in drug policies based on three guiding principles: Reduce the harm caused by drugs, decrease drug consumption through education, and aggressively combat organized crime. To translate this new paradigm into action we must start by changing the status of addicts from drug buyers in the illegal market to patients cared for by the public-health system.

The Lost Amazon

The Photographic Journey of Legendary Botanist Richard Evans Schultes

April 17, 2008 through November 2, 2008

Based on Wade Davis’ and Chris Murray’s The Lost Amazon, this exhibit presents thirty-eight of Schultes’ photographs accompanied by evocative quotations from Davis and Schultes. The exhibit also includes Schultes’ Rolleiflex camera, several herbarium sheets from the Museum’s collection that use specimens Schultes collected, and personal items from the Schultes family.

More about the exhibit here.

Kamsá apprentice with a “drunken snake” psychoreactive tree datura blossom, Sibundoy, June 1953

More images from the book are here.

TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an annual conference in Long Beach, California in which “the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers” (according to the TED website) are asked to give the “talk of their lives.”

TED speakers have included Jane Goodall, Al Gore, Bono, Bill Clinton, Richard Dawkins, Peter Gabriel, Stephen Hawking and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis, author of One River. (And that’s just the fairly famous folks — other speakers include circus composer Sxip Shirey and Nigeria’s first female Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.)

The YouTube video link below is to Davis’ February 2008 TED talk on what he terms the “ethnosphere,” a term he coined in his book Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanshing Cultures. From a 2003 NPR interview:

The thought was to come up with a concept that would suggest to people that just as there is a biosphere, a biological web of life, so too there is a cultural fabric that envelops the Earth, a cultural web of life. You might think of the ethnosphere as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, intuitions and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. The ethnosphere is humanity’s great legacy. It is the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes, the symbol of all that we are and all that we have created as a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species.

[YouTube= ]

From Davis’ related 2002 Commonwealth Club of California talk, Vanishing Cultures, Enduring Lives:

As a young anthropologist, fresh out of college, I never understood how I was expected to turn up at some village - perhaps of the Barasana in the northwest Amazon of Colombia, a people who believe that metaphorically and mythologically they came up the Milk River from the east in sacred canoes dragged behind the bellies of the anaconda - and announce that I was there for six months. They were going to house and feed me and I was there to study their private lives; if someone did that to us, turning up on our doorstep, we’d call the police. So I early on learned to seek the proper conduit to culture: the right way or the right metaphor to break down the inherent barrier that existed by definition between myself and a people with whom I found myself living as a guest. If, for example, I wanted to live with the Barasana - a people so dependent on the forest that cognitively they do not distinguish the color blue from the color green because the canopy of the heavens is equated to the canopy of that forest - the obvious conduit to culture, the metaphor, was the botanical realm, and that’s why I became a plant explorer.

*******

My job description as the first park ranger was deliciously vague: wilderness assessment and public relations. In two four-month seasons I saw eight people. There was no one to relate publicly to, so with my horse I simply wandered. I came upon an old native grave at the headwaters of the Stikine River that said, “Love Old Man Antoine, died 1926.” Curious as to the origin of the grave, I paddled my canoe across the headwater lake chain to a hunting camp where I found this man Atehena, a Gitxsan elder whose name means “he who walks leaving no tracks.” Alex had buried the man, a legendary shaman, there in 1926. Intrigued by this link in a single generation between a living elder that I could actually speak with and an old shaman of the landscape, I quit my job as a park ranger and tried for two further seasons to pry from Alex’s memory the myths of the origin of the land.

Alex was happy to speak of survival: When the winters blew so cold the families had to decide which of the young would live and which would be abandoned to the wolves to die. But he never remembered any legends or stories until one day, by chance, one of our hunters killed a moose, took the trophy and abandoned the carcass in the bush. I put my canoe on the float of our plane, flew to the headwaters of this particular river, chased away a pack of wolves from the kill and came with 1,800 pounds of moose meat, which Alex admired when he saw me land at our shore. As we went to get the horses to drag the meat to the smokehouse to cure it for his winter supply he suddenly said, “Gee it’s a funny thing. I think I got a story for you. Come by my place tonight.” And that night I began to record 30 years of trickster/transformer tales of We-gyet, the anthropomorphic figure of folly, of Gitxsan lore. All these tales were stories of moral gratitude played out against landscape. I once asked old man Alex how long the cycle of tales was, and he said that as a child he’d ask his father the same question and to figure it out they’d snapped on snow shoes in March, a time of good ice, and begun to walk from one end of their lake to the other - 20 miles there, 20 miles back - and the story wasn’t halfway done. To measure the duration of a sacred tale, you can’t simply set a time piece; you must move through sacred geography, telling the story as you go along.

*******

Voodoo is most certainly not a black magic cult. If I asked you to name the great religions of the world you would say - Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity - but there’s always one continent left out: sub-Saharan Africa, the tacit assumption being that African people had no religion. By ethnographic definition they did, and all voodoo is a distillation of very profound religious ideas that came over during the tragic Diaspora of the slavery era. It became sown in the fertile soil of the new world. In many ways voodoo is a quintessentially democratic faith, because the individual not only has direct access to the divine, they actually - through the act of spirit possession, through the ritual moment invoked by the power of the song, the rhythm of the drums, the intensity of the prayer - become the god themselves. You see remarkable evidence of faith, such as people handling burning embers with impunity, an astonishing example of the mind’s ability to dominate the body that bears it, when catalyzed in a state of extreme excitation.

Transcript of Davis’ Commonwealth speech is here.

Visit my website here. 

I’ll start with an appreciation of Dr. Wade Davis, whose mentor Richard Schultes made the Amazon journeys that helped inspire the movie.

I couldn’t tell you the year Wade Davis first brought good things from strange lands into my life; it seems so long ago. I guess it started with The Serpent and the Rainbow, a book that my little small-town mountain library somehow had.

The book had nothing to do with the horror movie loosely based on it that I’d watched with my best friend, laying on the bed in her bedroom one afternoon. Comparing the silly schlock of the movie with the humor, adventure and spirit of inquiry and intercultural curiosity that soaked that book through was one of my first encounters with the idea that something needs to be lessened and debased before it can be consumed by the masses.

Or in the case of Serpent, used only as a taking-off point for a wild fiction a fraction as interesting as the wholly true adventures of a young ethnobotanist tracking down proof of, and the recipe for, zombie poison.

More after the jump.
Yes, once a young scientist really was given grant funds and sent packing for Haiti to track down the truth about zombies.

If I recall correctly, Davis got farther in his Haitian ethno-/anthropological research than anyone ever had before because of a lucky similarity between voudun (”voodoo”) rites and a Native American ceremony he’d participated in, making the voudun priest think the young scientist might be worthy of more truth than other Western researchers had been told.

I remember some of the ingredients to make a zombie: a toad and a snake, buried alive together in a jar to froth up, in anger and death, the poisons each contained. An extract from the datura plant, a poisonous nightshade tropical with a long, fragrant drooping white trumpet of a flower I sometimes see in my home, the American South.

I remember Davis both found and did not find the truth about zombies. Zombies, according to Davis, are very real — and very much alive. They are living people poisoned to enter a state that mimics death, pronounced dead, buried alive and dug up after “death.”

Their existence after “death” as zombies is predicated on culture-based belief: They are rural people who grew up thinking zombies are real, so once they are poisoned, buried and revived (and possibly brain-damaged from lack of oxygen), they believe themselves to be undead servants of whomever digs them up. Zombies.

It is horrible to talk about this happening to living, talking, breathing people.

Witnessing the creation of a zombie would necessarily mean tacitly inviting the infliction of serious mental and physical distress on someone, so, as I recall, Davis declined the offer to be present at the creation of a zombie. But though he skipped that final graveyard step he collected a shortlist of Haitian poisons that could slow breathing, paralyze muscles, mimic death.

He found zombie poison and was one step away from meeting a zombie. A debased, poisoned rural person believing he or she was dead.

It wasn’t the thrill of chasing zombies that made me love the book. It was that its hero chased after a natural explanation. It was Davis’ sense of adventure, not expressed in wistful longing but in making Haitian zombie adventures into a job. It was the book’s book’s utter, nonscientific, nonclinical readability. It was the book’s mixture of anthropology, botany and plain curiosity and the desire to know, experience, listen and learn. It was the way Davis embraced other cultures so deeply and easily, with sort of social comfort that not only allowed him greater entry into a culture, but brought the reader more deeply in, too.

And Davis isn’t even a writer or storyteller, but a real scientist with undergraduate degrees in degrees in Biology and Anthropology, and a Ph.D. in Ethnobotany, all from Harvard, the prestigious American university. He was mentored there by Richard Schultes, whose botanic explorations in Colombia are the primary inspiration for In Search of One River. Schultes was a mild-mannered, middle-class American scientist who had a flipside life of hunting the Colombian Amazon solo for botanic treasure. He was known to spend over a year at a time in the rainforest finding plant species new to science, traveling alone with minimal supplies, and joining South American people in religious ceremonies involving psychoreactive drugs.

I’m pretty sure it was Schultes that sent Davis to Haiti on his own ethnobotanic adventure.

Nearly 20 years later I am still affected by my first Davis book. I nearly always have a datura plant of my own in my yard. My love of The Serpent and the Rainbow led me to other explorations of Haiti and voudun from a similarly nonclinical, curiosity-driven perspective, like Zora Neale Hurston’s Tell My Horse.

And even now I think it’s strange that the news never got about about zombies, that I have to tell friends that zombies are real and alive, that a Canadian ethnobotanist tracked down their wholly natural origin in the 80s while all of us Americans were listening to Kool & the Gang.

No one seems to know.

But I know. I know about the zombies. I know some of their secrets. Though I am soft and running to fat, rooted in place like my datura in my common American life, I know secrets. And I am still young enough still to hear the world whisper to me that I too can sate my curiosity beyond wistful imaginings. That I too have adventures to aspire to because Schultes and Davis gave the world adventures to aspire to, in the great work of knowing one another richly and well, in exploring the amazing biodiversity of the human.

(Image: Datura inoxia, Missouri State Univeristy)

No battle victory — no commando missile attack on a FARC camp, like the one that killed the FARC’s No. 2 leader, Raul Reyes, last March — could have dealt Colombia’s once powerful guerrillas a more devastating blow than the liberation operation that took place along the Apaporis River in southern Guaviare province, long a FARC stronghold.

Earlier photos of Ingrid Betancourt bathing in the Apaporis had appeard in 2007.

There are memories related by payès (medicine men) who, when confronting illnesses, prayers and spells, reveal their conception of the world.Guided by Professor Schultes’ research, we traced and recorded with a high contrast video, unique and events little known to Western vision, such as the preparation of the curare for hunting and the preparation of coca powder for the mambeo*. We also recorded the preparation of dupa, extracted from Virola, one of the strongest secret psychotropics in the world, prohibited for many decades by the missionaries since its effects confuse reasoning more radically than yagé.

In an account by Richard Schultes of his experiences among the Indians of southern Mexico he described a mushroom, previously unknown outside the region, used to create hallucinations. The account was mainly academic in style; nevertheless it excited a writer who went to the region and sampled the mushroom. His report was published in Life magazine in 1957 under the title “Seeking the Magic Mushrooms”. Thus the “magic mushroom” came to the United States, to be promoted among others by Timothy Leary, one of the high priests of American drug culture of the 1960s, and still remembered for his recipe for supine living, “Turn on, tune in, drop out”.

Although Mr Schultes never expected his botanical discoveries to affect, however indirectly, American social behaviour, he did not criticise Leary and his weird followers for their use of drugs. He merely expressed his disappointment that Leary had not spelt correctly the Latin names of plants from which their drugs were derived.

But Mr Schultes was sad that the public attention given to their hallucinogenic effects distracted from the value of plants as a source of medicines. After his adventure in Mexico he spent many years among tribespeople along the Amazon river. He collected thousands of previously unrecorded plants and reckoned that some 2,000 had medical value. Many more, he believed, were waiting in the jungle to benefit humanity. He liked to talk about curare. For many years it had been known as a powerful, but short term, poison on darts and arrows used by Amazonian natives. Mr Schultes traced the plants that curare came from. They yielded a substance now used as a muscle relaxant in surgery.

He inevitably became concerned that the Amazonian jungle and its inhabitants were disappearing alarmingly quickly. Around 100 tribes have become extinct in Brazil alone in the past few decades. As the tribespeople disappear, so does their knowledge. Mr Schultes saw it as his job “to salvage some of the native medico-botanical lore” before it was lost. Perhaps, he said, the cure for cancer “may come from the witch-doctor’s knowledge of plants”.

His orchid

Richard Schultes’s parents were immigrants from Germany. His father was a plumber in Boston. Young Richard won a scholarship to Harvard, the first member of his family to go to university. In 1941 “as a young botanist, armed with a bright, new doctor’s degree”, as Mr Schultes described himself, he was sent by Harvard on a trip to the Amazon to study medicinal, narcotic and poisonous plants. On his first day in the jungle he found a previously unrecorded orchid. He sent it back to Harvard where it was called Pachyphllum schultesii, the first of many plants attached to his name. He was due to return after a few months but stayed in Amazonia for 14 years. During the second world war he was told to remain in the jungle to look for sources of natural rubber for the United States to replace Asian plantations lost to the Japanese.

Mr Schultes sought to travel simply. His kit is a reproach to overloaded backpackers. He carried a single change of clothing, and little food: he ate the same as his native hosts. He did have a canoe, but it was light enough to carry unaided, and anyway the natives were usually happy to lend a hand. Heavy boots, he found, were usually unnecessary because jungle snakes generally struck at the neck. A pith helmet, though, he found indispensable in the rainforest. This made Mr Schultes resemble an explorer of the Victorian era, which in some ways he was. One of his heroes was Richard Spruce, a 19th-century British naturalist who also explored the Amazon region.

Like the Victorians, Mr Schultes had an unquenchable curiosity that went beyond his speciality. He wrote about the use of hallucinogens in tribespeople’s religious ceremonies. Shamans, medical men, under the influence of hallucinogens believed that they acquired supernatural powers enabling them to cure illness, locate lost articles, affect fertility and control the weather. Mr Schultes saw a connection with stories of European witches who used potions that enabled them to fly. “Flying” was an experience claimed by some of Leary’s followers. Mr Schultes’s Christianity seems to have remained untouched, but he accepted that to Indians throughout the Americas some plants are sacred. One of his books is called “Where the Gods Reign”.

Back from the Amazon with extraordinary tales to tell, Richard Schultes remained at Harvard as a teacher until he retired in his 70s. Students remember his prowess with a blowpipe that he kept in his laboratory. Each year he returned to the Amazon to collect more plants. He received numerous honours. A chunk of Amazonia preserved by the Colombian government is called Sector Schultes. He edited a journal called Economic Botany, covering a science of which he was a pioneer. Mr Schultes remained a modest man. A reporter, awed by his reputation as the world’s top authority on ethnobotany, asked how he should be described. “Just a jungle botanist,” said Richard Schultes.

This obituary appeared in The Economist (London), 2001-05-05, p.88.