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.
