The Lost Amazon: The Pioneering Expeditions of Richard Evans Schultes

In 1941, Richard Evan Schultes, often referred to as the “father of ethnobotany,” took a leave of absence from Harvard University and disappeared into the Columbian Amazon. Twelve years later, he resurfaced having traveled to places no outsider had ever visited, mapped uncharted rivers, and lived among two-dozen Amazonian Indian tribes.

Simultaneously, he conducted secret research missions for the U.S. government and collected some thirty thousand botanical specimens, including two thousand novel medicinal plants and three hundred species new to science.

The greatest Amazonian botanical explorer of the twentieth century, Schultes was a living link to the naturalists of the Victorian era and a world authority on toxic, medicinal, and hallucinogenic plants. Over the course of his time in the Amazonian basin, Schultes photographed over ten thousand images of plants, landscapes, and the indigenous peoples with whom he lived.

Originally published in 2004, The Lost Amazon was the first major publication to examine the work of Dr. Schultes as seen through his photographs and field notes. With text by Schultes’s protégé and fellow explorer Wade Davis, this impressive document takes armchair travelers where they’ve never gone before. View Less