Why not regard the Indians of the Amazon Basin as a kind of phytochemical rapid- assessment team already on the ground?”
​-Richard Schultes (1994)
Father of Ethnobotany

Richard Schultes

In North America and Europe, the plants are so well known that the discovery of a single new species marks the highlight of a botanist's career. Schultes found over three hundred. Dozens of plants are named fro him, even genera. Punama hats, which are actually made in Ecuador, are woven from the fibers of Schultesiophytum palmata. Schultesianthus is a genus of nightshades. Marasmius Schultesii is a mushroom used by Taiwano Indians to treat ear infections. The Makuna use Justicia schultesii for sores, Hiraea schultesii for conjuctivitis, and Pourouma schultesii for ulcers and wounds. The Karijona relieve coughs and chest infections with a tea brewed from the stems and leaves of Piper schultesii. The list goes on. So many botanists wanted to name plants for him that they ran our of ways to use his name and had to use his initials. On this cliff in the Vaupes, Schultes found an extremely rare and beautiful plant, a new genus in the African violet family. Schultesia had already been used, so the specialist named it Resia, for Richar Evans Schultes.

The Rio Guainia, headwaters of the Rio Negro, was a land of hunger, a river of few fish and less game. By the time Schultes reached the Raudal del Sapo, the Frog's Cataract, he had exhausted his emergency rations and was considering breaking into his last supplies - four tins of Boston baked beans he carried wherever he went, less as food than as fetish. After four days on the river, he came upon what appeared to be an apparition, a small dugout canoe paddled by a solitary white woman wearing a straw bonnet. She was an American, Sophia Muller, an evangelist for the New Tribes Mission who had been living for years among the Kuripako at a small outpost known as Sejal. This poor woman was so depserately thin and sickly that Schultes made the ultimate sacrifice. Of his four tins of beans, he left two behind. It proved to be a hasty decision, for in the following days he would need the food. That evening, June 2, 2948, he first noticed the tingling in his fingertips that foreshadowed the onset of beriberi.

Richard Schultes with his Rolleiflex Camera

Cofan poling upstream, Qubrada Hormiga, April 1942.

The entry falls at Jirijirimo, Rio Apaporis, September 1943

Makuna Shaman lighting the torch that heralds the beginning of the Yage ceremony, Rio Popeyaca, June 1952.

Kamsa youth with the blossom of Culebra borrachera, Sibundoy, June 1953.

Cofan Shaman, Porvenir, Rio Putumayo, April 1942.

Makuna Shaman and young boy collecting the woody stems of Yage, The Vine of the Soul, Oo-na-me, Rio Popeyaca, June 1952.

The Dance of the Butterfly, Cano Guacaya, Rio Miritiparana, April 1952.

Transporting piassaba fiber, Rio Guainia, Vaupes. The piassaba palm thrives only on the white sands of the open savannahs of the upper Rio Negro. Though mostly used for brushes and brooms, piassaba was so highly valued that men risked their lives to transport it from the headwaters a thousand miles or more in dugout canoes through impossible rapids to the markets of Manaus.

Cano Guacaya, Rio Miritiparana. In April 1952, Schultes traveled to the homeland of the Yukuna, an Arawakan people inhabiting the Miritiparana, a remote tributary of the CAqueta born in the lightly forested uplands south of the Rio Apaporis. Three hundred miles long, the Miritiparana begins as a shallow transparent stream flowing over a bed of pure white sand, and then tumbles through seven major rapids. Doubling in size at the confluence of the Guacaya, its principle affluent, the river flows south, entering the Caqueta twenty-five miles above the Columbian military post of La Padrera. He arrived among the Yukuna on the eve of the Kai-ya-ree, a four day annual celebration that gives form through dance and ritual masks to all the forces of nature. In this photograph, Yukuna dancers at the Kai-ya-ree wear the masks of the sun.

The Catalina. Owned by the Medellin merchant Don Miquel Dumit and flown by his German pilot, Captain Lieberman, the Catalina is pictured delivering supplies to Soratama. At Dumit's behest, Schultes established the rubber station in June 1951 on the banks of the upper Rio Apaporis, three hours by paddle above the falls of Jirijirimo. The amphibious Catalina was a marvelous aircraft, capable of carrying a considerable load and able to land and take off from almost any flat stretch of river free of cataracts. For Schultes, it became a lifeline to the outside world, allowing him to travel to ever more remote reaches of the Amazon.

Rio Piraparana, 1943. Schultes sharing coca with his Makuna friends. In the Andes, coca leaves are taken orally and formed into a quid, to which is added an alkaline substance: limestone, powdered seashells, or the prepared ash of certain plants. In the Amazon, by contrast, the leaves are dried over a fire and pounded in a mortar. Ash is then added, and the mixture is sifted to yield a very fine powder with the consistency of talc. Schultes had a particular fondness for Amazonian coca. According to his good friend, Columbian anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, Schultes once pulled out a can of the powder at a Bogata cocktail party. In measured tones, he explained to anyone who would listen that the preferred ash came from the large palmate leaves of Cecropia sciadophilia, not the decidedly inferior foliage of Cecropia peltata. He, naturally, had the good stuff.

Schultes labeled this photograph "Making cofee, Macarena, Columbia, January, 1951." On the day this photograph was taken, January 23, Schultes would discover a new species of an extremely rare genus of trees found only in Columbia. Perched on the side of a high cliff, it had a dense crown of compound leaves, a long inflorescence and a striking appearance. He named it Rhytidanthera regalis. Intermediate between related species found in the northern Andes and one known from the sandstone hills of the Vaupes and Coqueta five hundred miles to the east, it was the missing link that verified his theory that there had been a major migration of Andean plants eastward toward the ancient mountains of Guiana Highlands. With uncharacteristic pride, Schultes called his find "one of the most significant phytogeographical discoveries of the last two decades."

Schultes with Makuna youth, Soratama, 1952.

Schultes and four Makuna boys taking shelter from a rainstorm in the cracks of a cliff in the falls at Yayacopi, Rio Apaporis. On the back of this photograph Schultes wrote, "Rock of ages cleft for me." February 1952.

The first time Schultes felt the dull ache of malaria was on the afternoon of May 23, 1942, as he paddled up the Rio Caraparana on his way to El Encanto. It was the height of the rainy season, and both riverbanks were flooded. Still, he had no choice but to make camp and rest until the fever passed. Stringing his hammock above the boggy ground, kindling a fire from the moss and bark, he lay in the rain for three days as the paroxysms of chills and night sweats convulsed his body. On the morning of May 27, the fever broke and Schultes awakened to a blue sky, a cool breeze coming off the river and sunlight falling through the forest. Still weak, he rose slowly from his hammock and cautiosly made his way down to the river to bathe. He stumbled and fell against the muddy bank. Looking up, he saw a solitary orchid growing on the surface of a half-drowned mossy trunk. He went closer and reached for the delicate infloresence. The petals and sepals were light blue, the lip somewhat darker with pale veins, and the back and wings of the column were streaked with red.He had never seen such a perfectly pure shade of blue. Teasing a blossom with his finger, Schultes knew that he held in his hand the legendary blue orchid. "Never", he wrote years later, "could a doctor have prescribed a more effective tonic! I had found my friend... I was happy and could almost have believed that destiny had led me in these lowest of days to that one bright jewel of the jungle." Photo by Guillermo Cabo

Kiowa Roadman Belo Kozad flanked by twnty-one-year-old Schultes and his companion, Weston La Barre, a graduate student in anthropology at Yale who would go on to write the seminal book The Peyote Cult. They have just come out of an all-night peyote ceremony. In the heat of the morning, and throughout the long night of chanting, prayer, and ritual vomiting, Schultes evidently has not so much as loosened the red Harvard tie around his neck. One would never know that coursing through his blood is the residue of a sacred plant that has just sent a dozen Kiowa on a mystical journey to their gods.

Mary Buffalo, one of Schultes's principal teachers among the Kiowa. Wife of the Keeper of the Ten Medicines, the sacred medicine bundles that date back to the beginning of the world, Mary was also the granddaughter of Onaskyaptak, owner of the Tai-Me, the Sundance Image, the most venerated object of the Kiowa. Her medicine bundle had twelve scalps tied to it, seven of them taken from the white settlers. Hers is a face formed by the open prairie, by winter blizzards and summer heat. She appears proud, yet there is a deep sadness in her eyes that suggests that the stoic indifference we have come to associate with Plains Indians is less a characteristic of a people than the result of a century of impossible grief. At eighty-eight, her life had spanned the entire modern history of the Kiowa. As a child, she was brought up to believe in the divinity of the sun. As a young girl, she witnessed the return of war parties and made offerings to the Tai-Me at the Sundance. As a woman, she discovered the affliction of defeat and endured famine and disease. She grew old listening to the brooding chants of broken warriors, the silence of a prairie without buffalo.

Schultes in Oaxaca among the Mazatec, 1938.

Ingano hunter preparing yoco, Mocoa, December 1941. The woody liana, though used every day by the Ingano as a stimulant, turned out to be a species new to science, discovered and named by Schultes: Paullinia yoco.

Schultes and his friend Nazzareno Pstarino leaving La Chorrera on June 12, 1942, heading down the Rio Igaraparana. Schultes stands in the rear, wearing a pith helmet.

Schultes in the field with his close friend and colleague, the great Coluimbian botanist Hernando Garcia Barriga. If Schultes connected with Indians through decency and good faith, Garcia Barriga did so with humor. Beyond his dashing appearance- the slicked-back hair and dark eyes, the classic Latin mustache and aquiline nose - he had the look of the consummate trickster. In old age the lines of his face would betray a lifetime of laughter.

Cano Guacaya, Rio Miritiparana, April 1952. Schultes being administered a dose of Amazonian tobacco.

Makuna shaman and young boy collecting the woody stems of yage, the vine of the soul. Oo-na-me, Rio Popeyaca, June, 1952.

Salvador Chindoy, Kamsa healer, Sibundoy, September, 1953.

Makuna shaman with yage. Oo-na-me, Rio Popeyaca, Jun, 1952.

Schultes and friend heading upstreadm, Cano Paca, Rio Piaparana, October, 1943.

Rubber tapper, Loretoyacu.

Makuna fisherboy, Rio Popeyaca, June, 1952.

Schultes sorting some of the six hundred thousand rubber seeds he collected and processed for sipment at Leticia, March, 1949.

Rubber tappers bringing daily harvest of latex, Rio Loretoyacu, October, 1944.

Cerro de la Campana, Rio ajaju. When Schultes began his Rio Apaporis explorations in April 1943, the river was the least known and most isolated of all the major waterways of Colombia. Formed by the confluence of the Ajaju and the Mcaya, rivers themselves born not on the slopes of the Andes but further to the east, in the midst of the trackless savannahs of the Caqueta and Meta, the Apaporis flows through a series of flat-topped sandstone mountains, remnants of the ancient land mass that once rose above the forests of the Guianas, Venezuela, and Colombia.

The chasm at Jiririmo where the Rio Apaporis disappears to flow through a mysterious fault long held to be sacred by the Makuna Indians.

The Rio Guainia, headwaters of the Rio Negro, was a land of hunger, a river of few fish and less game. By the time Schultes reached the Raudal del Sapo, the Frog's Cataract, he had exhausted his emergency rations and was considering breaking into his last supplies - four tins of Boston baked beans he carried wherever he went, less as food than as fetish. After four days on the river, he came upon what appeared to be anapparition, a small dugout canoe paddled by a solitary white woman wearing a straw bonnet. She was an American, Sophia Muller, an evangelist for the New Tribes Mission who had been living for years among the Kuripako at a small outpost known as Sejal. This poor woman was so desperately thin and sickly that Schultes made the ultimate sacrifice. Of his four tins of beans, he left two behind. It proved a hasty decision, for in the following days he would need the food. That evening, June 2 1948, he first noticed the tingling in his fingertips that foreshadowed the onset of beriberi.

On New Year's Eve 1942,the day this photograph was taken, Schultes was visiting San Agustin, an ancient site overlooking the ravine of the upper Magdalena. As he wandered the hillsides on either side of the river, he encountered, standing over burial sites and sarcophagi, some five hundred anthropomorphic statues. In aspect and scale, these megaliths rival those of Easter Island, but their symbolism is rooted in the forests of the Amazon. Carved sometime during the first millenium A.D., through possibly much earlier, by a people we know little about, they depic animals and demons, eagles with fangs, felines copulating with men, faces emerging from the tails of snakes. In many instances the figures have cheeks bulging with stylized quids of coca. Schultes recognized these as some of the oldest representations of the plant, and the earliest evidence of its sacred role in the lost civilizations of the northern Andes.

The altar is the moon, the mountains where Peyote Woman found the first plants. The narrow groove running along the length of the altar symbolizes the road one must follow to obtain peyote knowledge. The ashes of the fire spread in the shape of a wing in an arc parallel to the altar. In the morning, the canvas will be pulled away from the tipi, and the wind will disperse the ashes of the Thunderbird.

Schultes and young friends.

Victoria amazonica, The Giant Lily.

The Spirit Mask of Wagti, Cano Guacaya, Rio Miritiparana, April 1952.

Celebration of Shamanic Initiations among the Cubeo, Rio Kubiyu.

The Spirit Mask, Yakuna. Cano Guacaya, Rio Miritiparana, April 1952.

Among the Cofan.

Cofan men preparing Curare. Conejo, Rio Sucumbios, April 1942.

Cofan fisherman placing the stems of the timbo liana into the water, April 1942.

Cofan fisherman pounding the stems of the timbo liana, a fish poison, Lonchocarpus nicou. Rio Sucumbios, April 1942. Schultes was interested in all biodynamic plants. He often quoted the Greek scholar Paracelsus, who said that the difference between a poison, a drug, and a medicine is dosage. On his first complete day of botanizing in the Amazon, he discovered a new specis of fish poison, Serjania piscetorum. KNown to the Ingano as sacha barbasco, it was one of four fish poisons collected that first morning. The other three, all members of the Spurge family, remain unidentified to this day. Placed in slow-moving bodies of water, these poisons interfere with respiration in the gills of the fish. The fish float to the surface and are readily gathered. In time he would identify more than thirty species employed as fish poisons by the Indians of the Northwest Amazon. Many contain enormous concentrations of rotenone. Thus, in uncovering their identity, Schultes stumbled upon the source of the most commonly used biodegradable insecticide available to the modern world.

Tikuna woman, Rio Amacayacu, Columbian Amazon, 1944.

Cano Guacaya, Rio Miritiparana, April 1952

The sandstone caves of the savannah of Yapoboda, Rio Kuduyari, Vaupes.

Jirijirimo, Rio Apaporis, September 1943

The Falls of Yayacopi, Rio Apaporis.

Paramo, Northern Andes.

Vellozia phantasmagoria, a new species discovered May 14, 1943, and later named by Schultes. Chiribiquete, Rio Apaporis.

The Mountains of Chiribiquete.

A young Seringuero, Rio Loretoyacu, Columbian Amazon.

Cofan Shaman, Conejo, Rio Sucumbios, April 1942.

Makuna boys, Rio Piraparana, September 1952.

Traditional Healer Salvador Chindoy... He wears a black cushma tied at the waist, a necklace of jaguar teeth, pounds of glass beads, a magnificent corona with a halo of erect macaw feathers, and a long cape of parrot feathers that hangs down his back to the waist. His ears are pierced by the tail feathers of a scarlet macaw, and his wrists are often decorated with leaves. The entire costume is a walking vision. The beads and feathers, the sweet leaves on his arms, and the delicate motifs painted onto his face are a conscious and deliberate attempt to emulate the elegant dress of the spirit people who the shaman meets when he ingests Yage.

Heading upstream through the rapids of the Tatu, Wacaricuara, Rio Vaupes.

The Rock of Nyi, Rio Piraparana.

Cubeo mother bathing child at Soratama, Rio Apaporis.

The Falls of Yayacopi, Rio Apaporis, February 1952.

The Dance of Kai-ya-ree.

Schultes and two Tanimuka dancers at the Kai-ya-ree, Cano Guacaya, Rio Miritiparana, April 1952.

The Dance of the Kai-ya-ree.

The Dance of the Kai-ya-ree.

Cofan elder making a blowgun, Rio Sucumbios, April 1942.

The Cofan family that met Schultes at Conejo, Rio Sucumbios, April 1942. Before the arrival of the Spaniards, the Cofan were a powerful tribe, a small nation in effect, strong enough to incur the wrath of Inca Huayna Capac, who made war against them as he attempted to expand his empire to the north. By the time the Jesuits appeared in 1602, the conquistadores had stripped the gold-bearing sands of the upper Aguarico and Sucumbios, and enslavement and disease had reduced the population to twenty thousand. By the mid-nineteenth century, when Colombia and Ecuador first mapped their eastern lowlands, geographers described the Cofan as a warlike tribe of perhaps two thousand, a figure that remained more or less constant until 1899, when, after a hiatus of more than two centuries, missionaries returned. The latest blow had come in 1923, when a measles epidemic, introduced by the Capuchin missionaries, had killed half the tribe.

Makuna boya, Rio Popeyaca, June 1952.

Makuna youths fishing, Rio Popeyaca, June 1952.

Yakuna administering snuff, Cano Gucaya, Rio Miritiparana, April 1952.

The Dance of Wagti, homage to human fertility, fields, and the wild, Cano Guacaya, Rio Miritiparana, April 1952.

A wild orchid, Soratama, Rio Apaporis, 1952.

Young rubber workers, Tingo Maria, Peru.

Cliffs at Cerro Tapiaca, Rio Vaupes.

Art made by shaman using Yage.

Makuna Shaman with student apprentice dancing under the influence of Yage, Rio Piraparana, September 1952.

Inga man carrying clay pot through the rain forest, Dec 1941.

Makuna boya, Rio Piraparana, September 1952.

Cubeo mother and her son tapping rubber, Rio Tuy, Vaupes.

Yakuna men test their strength after using coca Rio Miritiparana, April 1952.

Makuna youth in a garden of Yage, Rio Piraparana, Vaupes, October 1943.

Schultes with the sons of a Puinave shaman, who taught him the ritual use of Virola calophylla, yopo.

The descent of the Rio Vaupes, April 1953.

Yanomami taking ebena snuff. Totorobi, upper Rio Negro, Brazil, August 1967.

In the summer of 1967, Schultes traveled to the upper Rio Negro in Brazil and experienced for the first time the poerful psychoactive effects of evena, the poder known to the Yanomami, or Waika, as the Smen of the Sun. The powder induced not the distortion of reality, but rather its dissolution. In that suspended state of consciousness, the healers worked their deeds of mystical and medical rescue.

Photo by Guillermo Cabo.

Petroglyphs, Rio Piraparana, October 1943.

A Tanimuka Shaman's apprentice, Cano Guacaya, Rio Miritiparana, April 1952.

Cubeo Shaman under the influence of Yage, Mitu, June 1953.

Dugout canoes along the riverbank at Solano, Rio Caqueta, near Tres Esquinas, May 1942.

Cofan Shaman, Rio Sucumbios, April 1942.

The cataracts and cliffs of Araracuara, Rio Caqueta.

Cofan Shaman, Conejo, Rio Sucumbios, April 1942.

Ciudad de Neiva, Caucaya, Rio Putumayo. On May 19, 1942, after four days of collecting at Caucaya, Schultes boarded this wood-burning, three-decked paddlewheeler to travel down the Putumayo to the mouth of the Rio Karaparana. From there he paddled a dugout canoe upriver to El Encanto, and then walked overland to La Chorrera on the Rio Igaraparana. This journey took him through a shadowy world of darkness where he encountered scores of Bora and Witoto Indians who had been crippled and savaged during the rubber boom at the turn of the twentieth century.

A Kamsa youth on the Paramo of San Antonio above the Valley of Sibundoy, November 1941.