One River by Wade Davis is one of the most compelling ethnographic, historical, biographical accounts I’ve ever read.
The book goes back in forth in time and place – though staying within the orbit of the Amazonian jungle – and covers a wide range of ethno-botanical history. From the great 18thcentury German naturalist Alexander Von Humbolt whose writing would light a fire in hundreds of explorers to Richard Gill, who was the person responsible in 1938 for bringing to the University of Nebraska voucher specimens or moonseed tube curare that had the properties of increasing muscular relaxation and reducing nausea and vomiting in patients undergoing surgery – which would save countless lives – Davis shows just how much in debt modern medical and industrial science is to the curadernos of the various tribes of South and Central America. This is not just an account of how plants along with various innovations and technologies managed to revolutionize the automobile, health, and other industries but also contain brief accounts of important ethnobotanists that always manage to be fascinating narratives. While the main story is that of Wade Davis’ mentor and professor, Richard Evan Schultes, it is his placement in a tradition of a long line of previous explorers with fascinating stories and historical context that helps make the book so compelling.
After it’s translation into Spanish, it became an overnight sensation in Colombia. Since reading it I’ve had discussions with several people here about it, learned that there is a Colombian company that has ordered research and writing along these lines to be completed in detail about Colombia’s major rivers, and watch an excellent film loosely based on the travels of Schultes and Theodore Koch Grunber called Embrace of the Serpent, which is the source of the screenshots below. I’ve included them as they are excellent points to begin thematic discussions of the book.
Four years before Albert Hofmann accidentally ingested LSD and went on his famous bike ride – Richard Evans Schulte’s found its natural analog in the seeds of the morning glory plant – which was worshipped as a god incarnate of the peoples now living in Mexico.
The American Midwest and Mexico are the places where Schultes first cuts his teeth in research. It’s here that he has his first experiences with psychedelics and despite his Bostonian pride and semi-monarchical learnings comes to perceive the indigenous tribes of the Amazon as more worthy of his attention than the “modern” world.
Davis describes a large number of groups that Schultes, and later he, would encounter and the varieties of their bio-centric worldviews.
“They [the Shuar tribe] believe that ordinary life is an illusion: Everything you see – that mountain, this truck, your own body. The true determinants of life and death are invisible forces that can be perceived only with the aid of hallucinogenic plants” (Davis 147).
Davis drops from the near present to the Colonial past were almost all tribal customs and beliefs were seen as an antithetical to the Catholic worldview. The monks took great care to acts as enforcement agents and Davis covers the various attempts by priests and later politicians to place the responsibility for poor industry on the part of the indigenous.
To motivate their adoption to Western values requires targeted violence. The killing of shamans that know of the rituals to accompany psychedelic mushrooms; the prohibition of rituals considered sacred for eons; the attempted takeover and regulation of the coca leaf industry; the vicious butchery enacted at rubber plantations under the justification that this agricultural lifestyle would help them abandon their semi-nomadic ways and “demon”-worship.
While such colonial and evangelical endeavors was widely described as a means of “bringing Jesus to the poor savages,” the more God was attempted to be brought at the end of a whip the greater the resistance was. Yet such resistance was never fully successful, and hundreds of years later Davis recounts Schultes dismay at learning that a number of peoples had lost their ancestral connections to the plants and animals that they once formed their worldview around.
As time progressed and science advanced, scientific interests in the forest widened. While the focus is on the adventures and misadventures that Shultes takes – filled with tropical illnesses, fortuitous encounters, and major setbacks on government-sponsored expeditions – Davis always makes a point to highlight the various interests interested in exploiting the environment of the Amazon.
Britain’s conflict in India lead to a heightened need for more quinine, and a greater willingness to discipline those that lived in regions rich in it that did not want to work to send it to them. The mining of precious stones and metals, something which had gone on unabated since the Spanish first landed, completely changed the worldviews of the indigenous. People’s that once looked upon gold as sunlight made solid came to see it as something planted in their ground by devils to bring suffering to their people as so many died and were injured extracting it. Natives killed their children at birth rather than have them grow up in servitude.
And then there was the rubber boom, which made the prior inhumanities pale in comparison.
How big was the boom? Well in 1911 “at a time when New York and Boston still had horse drawn trolleys, Manaus had sixteen mile of streetcar tracks and an electric grid built for a city of a million, though the population had yet to reach forty thousand” (Davis 234). People flipped a coin to go seek gold in California, or to go to Brazil to enslave indigenes and have them supply rubber for the ever-growing automobile industry.
Davis shares a similar story about Fordlandia, written about in more detail by Greg Grandin, and other areas which have a quick boom which radically disrupts the local environment and peoples and the bust that leaves the area depressed.
The seizure of Singapore by Japan during World War II lead to the need for new sources of rubber and re-vamped extraction enterprises in South American – something which Schultes is tasked with.
Clearly, a recurring theme of One River is the contrast between Civilization and the Savage. In the way that Davis describes the effects to the land and people touched by industrial civilization, he is clearly no booster of unrestricted capitalism. Not only does capital’s deterritorializing logic lead to people being dispossessed of their traditional lands and ways of life, their profound knowledge as to the effects of plants is as well. His concern is not merely that “science” will lose from their loss, but in his descriptions of the horrors inflicted upon South American natives for quinine, rubber, coca and other plants that industrial civilization itself is a sort of cancer.
Quoting from Schultes’ own writing about his interactions with the Kofan people in 1942, Davis includes the following passage: “The naturalist, interested in plants and animals, both close to the Indian’s preoccupation, usually is immediately accepted with excessive collaborative attention… Until the unsavory veneer of western culture surreptitiously introduces the greed, deception and exploitation that so often accompanies the good of ways foreign to these men of the forests, the preserve characteristics that must only be looked upon with envy by modern civilized societies” (Davis 224).
In close, I just want to share that One River by Wade Davis is a great read and I highly encourage all with an interest in anything that I’ve written about thus far to pick up this incredibly great work.