Ode to Jim Duke: America's Chief Herbalist

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Duke applies the extract of an Amazonian tree leaf to a friend’s insect bite. photographs by Steven Foster

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We were on a flight from Miami to the hot, humid, ancient rain forest city of Iquitos, Peru. You may remember the main character in The Celestine Prophecy (Warner, 1997) driving to Iquitos, the “capital of the Amazon.” The fact is, there are only two ways to get there—by air or via the Amazon River. There are no roads to Iquitos.

I was traveling to the Amazon for the first time with the American Botanical Council’s “Pharmacy from the Rainforest” program for pharmacists in the fall of 1995. Because our group on the flight numbered more than 100 people, the instructors got upgraded to first class. I sat next to Jim Duke, who had made the trip too many times to count (up to ten times a year). It was my first trip to the real tropics, besides a short stint to Guatemala during the dry season. The flight was rough. The flight attendants plied us with drinks, and our conversation lasted the length of the flight. Duke treated me like he was taking a kid to a candy store.

“You’re going to get the tropical bug,” he leaned over and said.

I pulled out my immunization card. “What do you mean?” I asked. “I’ve got all of my shots. And here are my malaria pills.”

“No,” Duke replied, “I mean, after you come here once, you will want to come back as much as you can. If it wasn’t for the fact that I can’t get my wife to live down here, I would move here myself.”

On the four-hour flight, he told me story after story and prepared me for what lay ahead.

“Every ten feet you walk, you will see something different,” Duke explained. “The diversity is incredible. Near my home in Maryland there are about thirty species of woody plants per hectare. In the Peruvian rain forest there are over 300 woody species per hectare. This unbelievable diversity must be experienced to be believed. Words can’t describe it.”

At home in the Amazon

After a night in Iquitos, the trip’s 120-plus participants loaded into boats and went down the Amazon River to Explorama Lodge, a rustic but comfortable facility featuring all the creature comforts a rain forest camp can offer (with emphasis on the word “creature,” as a tarantula-sized spider crawled across my room).

“You get it out,” I told my roommate, Larry Wilson, the herpetologist on the trip. “You’re the animal guy—I’m just a plant guy.” He grudgingly obliged.

Explorama Lodge served as the main camp for the trip. Two other locales were featured, Napo Camp and the Amazon Center for Environmental Education and Research (ACEER), up a branch of an Amazon tributary, the Napo River.

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