Thy Will Be Done by Gerard Colby

Author:Gerard Colby
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9781504048392
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

32

POISONS OF THE AMAZON

THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

While the CIA’s war against leftist guerrillas raged in the Peruvian Amazon throughout 1965, an elderly American landed at Iquitos’s sweltering airport. His arrival in the country’s largest port on the Amazon River went unnoticed. Iquitos was by then a true small city, with buses, hotels, newspapers, and even a radio station. Foreign travelers were a common sight walking down the Malecón, the wide promenade along the river, enjoying the colorful tropical vistas. Although the guerrilla war had scared off some tourists, the nearest fighting was far to the southwest in the jungle, and Iquitos’s white-shirted merchants still hoped for a tourist boom that might rival the rubber boom of a headier past. No one had any reason to offer an American stranger anything but a welcome, especially when he asked only about where he could find another American who was herself a local tourist attraction, Nicole Maxwell.

These days Maxwell never knew who might ring her doorbell. Her book, Witch Doctor’s Apprentice, had made her a celebrity. It recounted her solo expedition to the Peruvian jungle in 1958 to gather Indian medicinal plants for a New York pharmaceutical company. That eight-month trip netted a publicity bonanza for her corporate sponsor, but only $1,000 for Maxwell. But in the course of Maxwell’s television appearances, the media warmed to her and she to them. In her late fifties, Maxwell was still a handsome woman, with brown hair, bright blue eyes, and a slight, almost petite figure that seemed exotically at odds with the image of a jungle adventurer. Her book became a mild success. More important, it brought opportunity literally knocking on her door.

The gray-haired man standing at her door introduced himself in a manner she would later remember as correct, even courtly. He had read her book and been given her address by a mutual friend. He knew the jungle, he said, having served with the Rubber Production Board during World War II. He had learned then that the power of Indian medicinal plants was more than superstition. Now that he was retired from heading the South American division of Johnson & Johnson, he was free to investigate these remedies. Would she be interested in joining in the effort if he set up a firm on a solid scientific and financial basis?1

Maxwell accepted. This man, she learned from friends in New York, was an important industrialist. She could feel confident that he would know people who might invest some risk capital.2

He, on the other hand, knew that Maxwell was a person with some savvy on South America. During World War II, she had worked in Washington as director of the Latin American Institute, an organization associated with Nelson Rockefeller’s CIAA. In 1948, she launched her first expedition into the Amazon, one that coincided with Standard Oil of New Jersey’s first expedition into the Ecuadorian Amazon. Rumors that she was a spy could have proved more dangerous than the Jivaro headhunters. Despite it all, she survived her

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.