[00:00:00 - 00:00:03]	 [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:00:03 - 00:00:06]	 [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:00:06 - 00:00:10]	 [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:00:10 - 00:00:13]	 [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:00:37 - 00:00:42]	 Chapter one, The Call of the Secret.
[00:00:42 - 00:00:46]	 At the present moment, the UFO is a true mystery.
[00:00:46 - 00:00:49]	 It is easier to say what it is not.
[00:00:49 - 00:00:52]	 Much of my thought of the dozen years past
[00:00:52 - 00:00:55]	 has been name-making and contemplation,
[00:00:55 - 00:00:59]	 closely guarded by the chaotically jeweled angels.
[00:00:59 - 00:01:03]	 Every angel is terrible, wrote Rilke.
[00:01:03 - 00:01:06]	 And at once sacred and profane, the UFO
[00:01:06 - 00:01:09]	 rises in my life as it may at some future
[00:01:09 - 00:01:12]	 point in human history.
[00:01:12 - 00:01:15]	 I have chosen a literary approach.
[00:01:15 - 00:01:20]	 The UFO is master of place and space, time and spirit.
[00:01:20 - 00:01:23]	 Yet search for a simple form to convey this
[00:01:23 - 00:01:26]	 brought me to follow tradition, to write
[00:01:26 - 00:01:30]	 a chronological narrative.
[00:01:30 - 00:01:34]	 In early February of 1971, I was passing
[00:01:34 - 00:01:36]	 through southern Colombia on my way with my brother
[00:01:36 - 00:01:41]	 and friends to an expedition into Colombian Amazonas.
[00:01:41 - 00:01:43]	 Our route led us through Florencia,
[00:01:43 - 00:01:47]	 the provincial capital of the departmental of Caquetá.
[00:01:47 - 00:01:51]	 There we paused a few days, awaiting an airplane
[00:01:51 - 00:01:55]	 to carry us to our embarkation point on the Rio Putumayo,
[00:01:55 - 00:02:00]	 a river whose vast expanse is the border between Colombia
[00:02:00 - 00:02:05]	 and her two southern neighbors, Ecuador and Peru.
[00:02:05 - 00:02:07]	 The day was especially hot, and we
[00:02:07 - 00:02:10]	 had left the oppressive confines of our hotel
[00:02:10 - 00:02:14]	 near the noisy central market and bus station.
[00:02:14 - 00:02:19]	 We walked southwest, out of town perhaps a mile,
[00:02:19 - 00:02:22]	 here with the warm waters of the Rio Acha,
[00:02:22 - 00:02:26]	 across rolling pastures of tall grass.
[00:02:26 - 00:02:29]	 After swimming in the river, playing in deep pools,
[00:02:29 - 00:02:34]	 the warm torrent had carved in the black basaltic streambed,
[00:02:34 - 00:02:36]	 we returned through the same meadows.
[00:02:36 - 00:02:41]	 One more familiar than I with the appearance
[00:02:41 - 00:02:45]	 of Stropharia cubensis pointed out a single large specimen
[00:02:45 - 00:02:50]	 standing tall and alone in an old bit of cow manure.
[00:02:50 - 00:02:53]	 Impulsively and at my companion's suggestion,
[00:02:53 - 00:02:55]	 I ate the whole mushroom.
[00:02:55 - 00:02:58]	 It all occupied but a moment, and then on we
[00:02:58 - 00:03:03]	 trudged, tired from our swim, a tropical thunderstorm moving
[00:03:03 - 00:03:07]	 toward us along the eastern edge of the Andean Cordillera,
[00:03:07 - 00:03:10]	 where Florencia is located.
[00:03:10 - 00:03:15]	 For perhaps a quarter hour, we walked on, mostly in silence.
[00:03:15 - 00:03:19]	 Wearily, I hung my head, almost hypnotized
[00:03:19 - 00:03:22]	 by the sight of the regular motion of my boots cutting
[00:03:22 - 00:03:24]	 through the grass.
[00:03:24 - 00:03:27]	 To align my back, to throw off my lethargy,
[00:03:27 - 00:03:31]	 I paused and stretched, scanning the horizon.
[00:03:31 - 00:03:33]	 The feeling of the bigness of the sky
[00:03:33 - 00:03:36]	 that I have come to associate with psilocybin
[00:03:36 - 00:03:40]	 rushed down on me there for the first time.
[00:03:40 - 00:03:44]	 I asked my friends to pause and sat down heavily on the ground.
[00:03:44 - 00:03:48]	 A silent thunder seemed to shake the air before me.
[00:03:48 - 00:03:52]	 Things stood out with a new presence and significance.
[00:03:52 - 00:03:55]	 It came like a wave and passed like a wave
[00:03:55 - 00:03:58]	 as the first fury of the tropical storm
[00:03:58 - 00:04:01]	 burst over us, leaving us soaked.
[00:04:01 - 00:04:03]	 In a sudden retreat-retreat moment,
[00:04:03 - 00:04:05]	 preceding our frantic withdrawal,
[00:04:05 - 00:04:08]	 went unmentioned by me.
[00:04:08 - 00:04:12]	 I recognized my experience as being induced by the mushroom.
[00:04:12 - 00:04:16]	 But I was involved, I thought, in a deep jungle search
[00:04:16 - 00:04:19]	 for hallucinogens of a different sort,
[00:04:19 - 00:04:22]	 orally active DMT-containing drugs and ya'he
[00:04:22 - 00:04:25]	 and its admixture plants.
[00:04:25 - 00:04:28]	 I filed the mushroom experience as something
[00:04:28 - 00:04:30]	 to look into another time.
[00:04:30 - 00:04:33]	 Longtime residents of Colombia assured me
[00:04:33 - 00:04:36]	 that the mushroom occurred exclusively
[00:04:36 - 00:04:38]	 on the dung of Cebu cattle.
[00:04:38 - 00:04:41]	 And I assumed that in the jungle of the interior,
[00:04:41 - 00:04:43]	 where I was shortly to be, I could
[00:04:43 - 00:04:47]	 expect no cattle or pasture.
[00:04:47 - 00:04:49]	 I put the thought of mushrooms from my mind
[00:04:49 - 00:04:53]	 as I anticipated the rigors of the Rio Putumayo descent
[00:04:53 - 00:04:57]	 toward our target destination, a remote mission called
[00:04:57 - 00:05:00]	 La Chorrera.
[00:05:00 - 00:05:02]	 Why had people like ourselves come
[00:05:02 - 00:05:06]	 to the steaming jungles of Amazonian Colombia?
[00:05:06 - 00:05:10]	 We were a party of five, bound by friendship,
[00:05:10 - 00:05:14]	 extravagant imagination, naivete, and a dedication
[00:05:14 - 00:05:17]	 to travel and exotic experience.
[00:05:17 - 00:05:20]	 Ev, our translator, was the only member
[00:05:20 - 00:05:23]	 of the group not long an acquaintance of us all.
[00:05:23 - 00:05:25]	 She was an American like ourselves,
[00:05:25 - 00:05:28]	 who had lived several years in South America
[00:05:28 - 00:05:32]	 and had traveled in the East, where I had passed her once
[00:05:32 - 00:05:36]	 in the Kathmandu airport, another story.
[00:05:36 - 00:05:40]	 In Colombia, she was recently free of a long relationship
[00:05:40 - 00:05:44]	 and fell in with our group, having nothing better to do.
[00:05:44 - 00:05:47]	 She and I were lovers of some two weeks
[00:05:47 - 00:05:49]	 when we arrived at La Chorrera.
[00:05:49 - 00:05:53]	 The other three members of our party beside myself
[00:05:53 - 00:05:56]	 were my brother, the youngest and least traveled of us,
[00:05:56 - 00:06:00]	 a student of botany and a colleague of long standing.
[00:06:00 - 00:06:03]	 Vanessa, an old school friend of mine
[00:06:03 - 00:06:06]	 from the experimental college in Berkeley,
[00:06:06 - 00:06:08]	 trained in anthropology and photography
[00:06:08 - 00:06:10]	 and traveling on her own.
[00:06:10 - 00:06:15]	 And Dave, another old friend of mine, a gay meditator,
[00:06:15 - 00:06:18]	 a maker of pottery, an embroiderer of blue jeans,
[00:06:18 - 00:06:22]	 and like Vanessa, a New Yorker.
[00:06:22 - 00:06:26]	 As for myself, just four months before this trip,
[00:06:26 - 00:06:28]	 my brother and I had endured the grief
[00:06:28 - 00:06:30]	 of the death of our mother.
[00:06:30 - 00:06:33]	 Previous to that, I had been traveling three years
[00:06:33 - 00:06:36]	 in India and Indonesia, had worked in Japan
[00:06:36 - 00:06:39]	 and then in Canada, where we had all held a reunion
[00:06:39 - 00:06:43]	 and planned this Amazon expedition to investigate
[00:06:43 - 00:06:46]	 the depths of the psychedelic experience.
[00:06:46 - 00:06:50]	 I deliberately do not wish to say much about any of us.
[00:06:50 - 00:06:54]	 Let me say though, that we were miseducated perhaps,
[00:06:54 - 00:06:57]	 but well educated certainly.
[00:06:57 - 00:06:59]	 Our differences arose out of the faith
[00:06:59 - 00:07:01]	 that each had in his own ability
[00:07:01 - 00:07:05]	 to understand the situation correctly.
[00:07:05 - 00:07:08]	 Often these descriptions did not agree,
[00:07:08 - 00:07:12]	 as is a common enough situation among strong personalities
[00:07:12 - 00:07:15]	 or witnesses to an unusual event.
[00:07:15 - 00:07:18]	 We were complex people or we would not have been doing
[00:07:18 - 00:07:20]	 what we were doing.
[00:07:20 - 00:07:23]	 None of us were yet 24 years old.
[00:07:23 - 00:07:26]	 We had been drawn together through the political turmoil
[00:07:26 - 00:07:30]	 that had characterized years shared in Berkeley.
[00:07:30 - 00:07:33]	 We had sorted the ideological options
[00:07:33 - 00:07:35]	 and had decided to put all of our chips
[00:07:35 - 00:07:37]	 on the exploration of the potential
[00:07:37 - 00:07:41]	 of the psychedelic experience as the shortest path
[00:07:41 - 00:07:44]	 to the sort of millennium that our radical politics
[00:07:44 - 00:07:47]	 had taught us to hope for.
[00:07:47 - 00:07:51]	 We had no very good idea at all about what to expect
[00:07:51 - 00:07:52]	 from the Amazon.
[00:07:52 - 00:07:56]	 We had collected as much ethnobotanical information
[00:07:56 - 00:07:58]	 as was available.
[00:07:58 - 00:08:01]	 This data told us where the various hallucinogens
[00:08:01 - 00:08:04]	 were to be sought, but not what to expect
[00:08:04 - 00:08:05]	 when we found them.
[00:08:05 - 00:08:09]	 I have given some thought to trying to reconstruct
[00:08:09 - 00:08:12]	 how predisposed we might have been
[00:08:12 - 00:08:14]	 to our eventual experiences.
[00:08:14 - 00:08:18]	 I find in a letter written 11 months before our expedition
[00:08:18 - 00:08:21]	 that Dennis was even then the person
[00:08:21 - 00:08:24]	 with the clearest conception.
[00:08:24 - 00:08:28]	 He wrote to me in China in May of 1970 to say,
[00:08:28 - 00:08:32]	 as to the central shamanic quest
[00:08:32 - 00:08:36]	 and the idea that its resolution may entail physical death,
[00:08:36 - 00:08:38]	 indeed a sobering thought,
[00:08:38 - 00:08:41]	 I would be interested in hearing just how likely
[00:08:41 - 00:08:44]	 you consider this possibility and why.
[00:08:44 - 00:08:48]	 I had not thought of it in terms of death,
[00:08:48 - 00:08:50]	 though I have considered that it may well give us
[00:08:50 - 00:08:54]	 as living men willful access to the doorway
[00:08:54 - 00:08:56]	 of the dead pass daily.
[00:08:56 - 00:09:00]	 This I consider to be a kind of hyperspatial
[00:09:00 - 00:09:03]	 astral projection that allows the hyperorgan
[00:09:03 - 00:09:07]	 consciousness to instantly manifest itself
[00:09:07 - 00:09:10]	 at any point in the space-time matrix
[00:09:10 - 00:09:13]	 or at all points simultaneously.
[00:09:13 - 00:09:17]	 A UFO is essentially this hyperspatially mobile
[00:09:17 - 00:09:21]	 psychic vortex and the trip may well involve
[00:09:21 - 00:09:25]	 contact with some race of hyperspatial dwellers.
[00:09:25 - 00:09:29]	 Probably it will be an encounter similar to a flying lesson,
[00:09:29 - 00:09:33]	 instruction in the use of the transdimensional stone,
[00:09:33 - 00:09:36]	 how to navigate in hyperspace,
[00:09:36 - 00:09:38]	 and perhaps an introductory course
[00:09:38 - 00:09:40]	 in cosmic ecology.
[00:09:40 - 00:09:44]	 Retention of the physical form under such circumstances
[00:09:44 - 00:09:47]	 would be, it seems, a matter of choice
[00:09:47 - 00:09:49]	 rather than a necessity,
[00:09:49 - 00:09:52]	 though it could be a matter of indifference,
[00:09:52 - 00:09:54]	 since in the hyperspatial web,
[00:09:54 - 00:09:59]	 all existing physical manifestations would be open.
[00:09:59 - 00:10:03]	 I would say that time is not of the essence for the venture,
[00:10:03 - 00:10:07]	 except insofar as the culture deaths of the tribes
[00:10:07 - 00:10:11]	 we are seeking are proceeding at an appalling rate.
[00:10:11 - 00:10:18]	 (child screaming)
[00:10:18 - 00:10:21]	 (child screaming)
[00:10:21 - 00:10:30]	 (child snorting)
[00:10:30 - 00:10:36]	 (child screaming)
[00:10:36 - 00:10:41]	 (child screaming)
[00:10:41 - 00:10:44]	 (child screaming)
[00:10:44 - 00:11:03]	 However colorful our fantasies,
[00:11:03 - 00:11:08]	 our operational interests specifically centered on DMT,
[00:11:08 - 00:11:11]	 dimethyltryptamine-type drugs.
[00:11:11 - 00:11:15]	 Quite simply because their action, though very brief,
[00:11:15 - 00:11:19]	 seemed to us the most intense of the hallucinogens we knew.
[00:11:19 - 00:11:24]	 DMT is not an object of common experience,
[00:11:24 - 00:11:26]	 even among drug enthusiasts,
[00:11:26 - 00:11:29]	 and so a word must be said about it.
[00:11:29 - 00:11:32]	 It is a crystalline paste or powder
[00:11:32 - 00:11:34]	 in its pure synthetic form,
[00:11:34 - 00:11:39]	 and as such it is smoked in a glass pipe with no admixture.
[00:11:39 - 00:11:43]	 After a few lungfuls, the onset of the experience is rapid,
[00:11:43 - 00:11:46]	 15 seconds to a minute.
[00:11:46 - 00:11:49]	 The hallucinogenic experience which it triggers
[00:11:49 - 00:11:54]	 lasts three to seven minutes and is unambiguously intense.
[00:11:54 - 00:11:56]	 It is so bizarre and intense
[00:11:56 - 00:12:00]	 that even the most devoted aficionados of hallucinogens
[00:12:00 - 00:12:02]	 will usually pass it by.
[00:12:02 - 00:12:06]	 Yet it is the commonest and the most widely distributed
[00:12:06 - 00:12:09]	 of the naturally occurring hallucinogens
[00:12:09 - 00:12:13]	 and is the basis, when not the entire component,
[00:12:13 - 00:12:16]	 of most aboriginally used hallucinogens
[00:12:16 - 00:12:18]	 in tropical South America.
[00:12:18 - 00:12:21]	 Naturally, as a product of plant metabolism,
[00:12:21 - 00:12:25]	 it never occurs in anything like the concentrations
[00:12:25 - 00:12:28]	 at which it comes from the laboratory.
[00:12:28 - 00:12:31]	 Yet South American shamans,
[00:12:31 - 00:12:36]	 by predisposing themselves to its effects in various ways,
[00:12:36 - 00:12:40]	 do seek the same levels of reality obliterating intensity
[00:12:40 - 00:12:43]	 achievable with pure DMT.
[00:12:43 - 00:12:46]	 Its strangeness and power so exceeds
[00:12:46 - 00:12:48]	 that of other hallucinogens
[00:12:48 - 00:12:52]	 that DMT seemed finally to define,
[00:12:52 - 00:12:54]	 for myself and my friends at any rate,
[00:12:54 - 00:12:59]	 the maximum exfoliation of the hallucinogenic dimension
[00:12:59 - 00:13:03]	 that can occur without serious risk to the organism.
[00:13:03 - 00:13:07]	 We thought, therefore, that our phenomenological description
[00:13:07 - 00:13:09]	 of the hallucinogenic dimension
[00:13:09 - 00:13:13]	 should begin by locating a strong DMT
[00:13:13 - 00:13:16]	 containing aboriginal hallucinogen
[00:13:16 - 00:13:19]	 and then exploring with an open mind
[00:13:19 - 00:13:22]	 the shamanic states that it made accessible.
[00:13:22 - 00:13:25]	 To this end, we had sifted the literature
[00:13:25 - 00:13:29]	 on tryptamine drugs in the upper Amazon basin
[00:13:29 - 00:13:32]	 and learned that while Yahweh, or ayahuasca,
[00:13:32 - 00:13:37]	 the brew of Banisteriopsis caapi with the DMT admixture
[00:13:37 - 00:13:39]	 is known over a wide area,
[00:13:39 - 00:13:44]	 just as our several kinds of DMT-containing snuffs,
[00:13:44 - 00:13:48]	 there was one DMT-containing hallucinogen
[00:13:48 - 00:13:51]	 that was severely restricted in its usage.
[00:13:51 - 00:13:56]	 Ukuhi is made from the resin of certain trees
[00:13:56 - 00:13:59]	 of the Myristicaceous genus Varrola,
[00:13:59 - 00:14:01]	 mixed with the ashes of other plants
[00:14:01 - 00:14:04]	 and rolled into pellets.
[00:14:04 - 00:14:07]	 What caught our eye about the description of this drug
[00:14:07 - 00:14:12]	 was that the Wetoto tribe, who alone knew the secret,
[00:14:12 - 00:14:16]	 used it to talk to little men
[00:14:16 - 00:14:19]	 and to gain knowledge from them.
[00:14:19 - 00:14:23]	 These little people are one bridge
[00:14:23 - 00:14:26]	 between the motifs of UFO contact
[00:14:26 - 00:14:30]	 and more traditional strange doings in the woods
[00:14:30 - 00:14:32]	 involving elves and fairies.
[00:14:32 - 00:14:35]	 The worldwide tradition of little people
[00:14:35 - 00:14:39]	 is well studied in "The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries"
[00:14:39 - 00:14:41]	 by W.E. Evans Vance,
[00:14:41 - 00:14:45]	 a book which was influential on Jacques Vallée's UFO quest
[00:14:45 - 00:14:47]	 as well as our own.
[00:14:47 - 00:14:51]	 The mention of little men rang a bell
[00:14:51 - 00:14:53]	 since in Berkeley, in my own experience
[00:14:53 - 00:14:56]	 smoking synthesized DMT,
[00:14:56 - 00:15:00]	 there had been the impression of bursting into a space
[00:15:00 - 00:15:02]	 inhabited by merry elf-like
[00:15:02 - 00:15:05]	 self-transforming machine creatures.
[00:15:05 - 00:15:09]	 The sense of being literally in some other dimension
[00:15:09 - 00:15:11]	 which this experience provoked
[00:15:11 - 00:15:13]	 had been the focus of our decision
[00:15:13 - 00:15:16]	 to concentrate on tryptamine drugs.
[00:15:16 - 00:15:21]	 After sifting the literature of the tryptamine hallucinogens,
[00:15:21 - 00:15:24]	 we came eventually to Richard Schulte's paper,
[00:15:24 - 00:15:28]	 Varrola as an Orally Administered Hallucinogen.
[00:15:28 - 00:15:32]	 His description of the use of the resin of Varrola Theodora
[00:15:32 - 00:15:36]	 as an orally active DMT drug was fascinating.
[00:15:36 - 00:15:39]	 So too was the fact that the hallucinogens
[00:15:39 - 00:15:43]	 seemed to be limited in its use to a very small area.
[00:15:43 - 00:15:46]	 Schulte's was an inspiring voice
[00:15:46 - 00:15:49]	 when he wrote of Ukuhi,
[00:15:49 - 00:15:52]	 further field work in the original home region
[00:15:52 - 00:15:54]	 of these Indians will be necessary
[00:15:54 - 00:15:56]	 for a full understanding
[00:15:56 - 00:15:59]	 of this interesting hallucinogen.
[00:15:59 - 00:16:02]	 Interest in this newly discovered hallucinogen
[00:16:02 - 00:16:05]	 does not lie wholly within the bounds
[00:16:05 - 00:16:07]	 of anthropology or ethnobotany.
[00:16:07 - 00:16:12]	 It bears very directly on certain pharmacological matters
[00:16:12 - 00:16:15]	 and when considered with the other plants
[00:16:15 - 00:16:18]	 with psychotomimetic properties due to tryptamines,
[00:16:18 - 00:16:22]	 this new oral drug poses problems
[00:16:22 - 00:16:23]	 which must now be faced
[00:16:23 - 00:16:27]	 and if possible toxicologically explained.
[00:16:27 - 00:16:30]	 Based on Schulte's report,
[00:16:30 - 00:16:32]	 we determined to go ourselves
[00:16:32 - 00:16:36]	 to the vicinity of La Churrera to seek Ukuhi,
[00:16:36 - 00:16:39]	 to abandon our studies,
[00:16:39 - 00:16:41]	 whatever careers might be ahead
[00:16:41 - 00:16:44]	 of such opinionated psychoactivists,
[00:16:44 - 00:16:47]	 to pay our own way to the Amazon,
[00:16:47 - 00:16:51]	 to see if the titanically strange dimensions
[00:16:51 - 00:16:54]	 that we had encountered in DMT trance
[00:16:54 - 00:16:58]	 were even more accessible via the DMT drugs
[00:16:58 - 00:17:01]	 which the shamans of the Amazon had developed.
[00:17:01 - 00:17:05]	 It was of these drugs that I had been thinking
[00:17:05 - 00:17:08]	 when I had no time for the stropharia mushroom
[00:17:08 - 00:17:11]	 encountered in the pasture near Florencia.
[00:17:11 - 00:17:13]	 I was eager to press on with the quest
[00:17:13 - 00:17:18]	 for the exotic barely reported Mitoto Ukuhi.
[00:17:18 - 00:17:21]	 Could I imagine that the search for Ukuhi
[00:17:21 - 00:17:24]	 would soon after arrival at La Churrera
[00:17:24 - 00:17:28]	 be all but forgotten in the discovery of the mushrooms
[00:17:28 - 00:17:31]	 so abundant there and the strange power
[00:17:31 - 00:17:36]	 that seemed to swirl around those foggy emerald pastures.
[00:17:36 - 00:17:40]	 (light music)
[00:17:41 - 00:17:43]	 (light music)
[00:17:43 - 00:18:08]	 My first intimation of La Churrera
[00:18:08 - 00:18:11]	 as a place different from other places
[00:18:11 - 00:18:14]	 came when we arrived at Puerto Leguizamo,
[00:18:14 - 00:18:19]	 our proposed point of embarkation down the Rio Couto Mayo.
[00:18:19 - 00:18:22]	 It is a place to be reached from Florencia
[00:18:22 - 00:18:25]	 and the rest of Colombia by airplane
[00:18:25 - 00:18:29]	 as no roads make their way through the jungle to it.
[00:18:29 - 00:18:34]	 It is as tired and oppressive a South American river town
[00:18:34 - 00:18:36]	 as one could ever hope to see.
[00:18:37 - 00:18:39]	 William Burroughs passed this way
[00:18:39 - 00:18:43]	 in his search for Yahe in the '50s.
[00:18:43 - 00:18:47]	 He described it then as looking like some place
[00:18:47 - 00:18:49]	 after a flood.
[00:18:49 - 00:18:53]	 It has changed little.
[00:18:53 - 00:18:57]	 We were rarely installed in our hotel
[00:18:57 - 00:19:01]	 and returned from the ritual registration of foreigners
[00:19:01 - 00:19:04]	 that goes on in the frontier areas of Colombia
[00:19:04 - 00:19:06]	 when the matron of the hotel informed us
[00:19:06 - 00:19:10]	 that a countryman of ours was living nearby.
[00:19:10 - 00:19:13]	 It seemed incredible that an American could be living
[00:19:13 - 00:19:16]	 in such an out of the way and thoroughly rural river town
[00:19:16 - 00:19:18]	 in Colombia.
[00:19:18 - 00:19:22]	 When La Señora remarked that this man, El Señor Brown,
[00:19:22 - 00:19:25]	 was very old and also a black man,
[00:19:25 - 00:19:28]	 it all became even more puzzling.
[00:19:28 - 00:19:32]	 My curiosity aroused, I left immediately in the company
[00:19:32 - 00:19:36]	 of one of the loutish sons of the hotel woman.
[00:19:36 - 00:19:39]	 New dimensions were added as we walked along.
[00:19:39 - 00:19:43]	 My guide could hardly wait for us to get out of the door
[00:19:43 - 00:19:47]	 of the hotel before informing me that the man we were to see
[00:19:47 - 00:19:50]	 was mal y bizarro.
[00:19:50 - 00:19:56]	 El Señor Brown es un sanguinero.
[00:19:56 - 00:19:58]	 Un sanguinero, dice.
[00:19:58 - 00:20:00]	 I did not believe it for a moment.
[00:20:00 - 00:20:02]	 The horror that the rubber broom brought
[00:20:02 - 00:20:06]	 to the Amazon Indians in the early years of this century
[00:20:06 - 00:20:09]	 has lived on, a memory for the oldest people
[00:20:09 - 00:20:13]	 and a terrifying legend for the younger Indians.
[00:20:13 - 00:20:16]	 In the area surrounding La Chorrera,
[00:20:16 - 00:20:19]	 the Huitoto population had been systematically reduced
[00:20:19 - 00:20:26]	 from 40,000 in 1905 to about 5,000 today.
[00:20:26 - 00:20:29]	 I could not imagine that the man I was to meet
[00:20:29 - 00:20:32]	 had any real connection with those distant events.
[00:20:32 - 00:20:35]	 I suppose that this story I was hearing
[00:20:35 - 00:20:38]	 meant that I was to meet a local boogeyman around whom
[00:20:38 - 00:20:41]	 extravagant stories had grown up.
[00:20:41 - 00:20:48]	 We shortly reached a ramshackle and indistinguished house
[00:20:48 - 00:20:52]	 with a small yard hidden behind a tall board fence.
[00:20:52 - 00:20:56]	 My companion knocked and yelled, and soon a young man,
[00:20:56 - 00:21:00]	 similar to my guide, came and opened the gate.
[00:21:00 - 00:21:04]	 My escort melted away, and the gate closed behind me.
[00:21:04 - 00:21:08]	 A large pig lay in the lowest, wettest part of the yard.
[00:21:08 - 00:21:11]	 Three steps up was a veranda.
[00:21:11 - 00:21:15]	 Up on the veranda, smiling and motioning forward,
[00:21:15 - 00:21:23]	 sat a very thin, very old, much wrinkled black man, John Brown.
[00:21:23 - 00:21:26]	 It is not often that one meets a living legend,
[00:21:26 - 00:21:30]	 and had I known more about the person I confronted,
[00:21:30 - 00:21:34]	 I would have been even more amazed than I was.
[00:21:34 - 00:21:38]	 Yes, he said, I am an American.
[00:21:38 - 00:21:44]	 Yes, hell yes, I'm old, 93 years old.
[00:21:44 - 00:21:49]	 Me history, baby, is so long.
[00:21:49 - 00:21:53]	 He laughed dryly at the rustle of roof thatch
[00:21:53 - 00:21:55]	 when tarantulas stir.
[00:21:55 - 00:22:00]	 The son of a slave, John Brown had left America in 1885,
[00:22:00 - 00:22:02]	 never to return.
[00:22:02 - 00:22:05]	 He had gone to Barbados and then to France.
[00:22:05 - 00:22:10]	 He had been a merchant seaman and had seen Adan and Bombay.
[00:22:10 - 00:22:14]	 Around 1910, he had come to Peru to Iquitos.
[00:22:14 - 00:22:17]	 There, he had been made a work crew foreman
[00:22:17 - 00:22:19]	 in the notorious House of Arana, which
[00:22:19 - 00:22:23]	 was the main force behind the ruthless exploitation
[00:22:23 - 00:22:26]	 of the Indians of Amazonas during the rubber boom.
[00:22:29 - 00:22:33]	 I spent several hours with El Senior Brown.
[00:22:33 - 00:22:37]	 He was an extraordinary person, at once near and yet ghostly
[00:22:37 - 00:22:41]	 and far away, a living bit of history.
[00:22:41 - 00:22:44]	 He had been the personal servant of Colonel Whiffen,
[00:22:44 - 00:22:48]	 who explored the Lacherera area around 1912.
[00:22:48 - 00:22:51]	 John Brown is described in Whiffen's now rare book,
[00:22:51 - 00:22:54]	 Explorations of the Upper Amazon.
[00:22:54 - 00:22:58]	 John Brown was the last person to see the French explorer Jean
[00:22:58 - 00:23:05]	 Robochon, who disappeared on the Rio Cacatá in 1913.
[00:23:05 - 00:23:13]	 Yes, he had a big black dog that never left him, mused Brown.
[00:23:13 - 00:23:17]	 John Brown spoke Wetoto, had lived with a Wetoto woman
[00:23:17 - 00:23:19]	 for many years at one point.
[00:23:19 - 00:23:23]	 He knew the area into which we were going intimately.
[00:23:23 - 00:23:26]	 He had never heard of Ukuhe, but in 1915,
[00:23:26 - 00:23:31]	 he had taken Yahé for the first time and at Lacherera.
[00:23:31 - 00:23:33]	 His descriptions of his experience
[00:23:33 - 00:23:35]	 was an added inspiration to continue
[00:23:35 - 00:23:37]	 toward our chosen goal.
[00:23:37 - 00:23:40]	 It was only after I returned from the Amazon
[00:23:40 - 00:23:43]	 that I learned that it had been the same John Brown who
[00:23:43 - 00:23:46]	 had exposed the atrocities of the rubber
[00:23:46 - 00:23:50]	 barons in the Putumayo when Roger Casement, then
[00:23:50 - 00:23:52]	 the British consul in Rio de Janeiro,
[00:23:52 - 00:23:56]	 came to Peru to investigate the atrocity stories.
[00:23:56 - 00:24:00]	 It was John Brown who returned to London with Casement
[00:24:00 - 00:24:06]	 to give evidence to the Royal High Commission investigation.
[00:24:06 - 00:24:10]	 Jose Estacion Rivera, a Colombian historian,
[00:24:10 - 00:24:13]	 has told the story differently and implicates
[00:24:13 - 00:24:16]	 Brown in the murders, thus providing the basis
[00:24:16 - 00:24:19]	 for the Sanguinaro story.
[00:24:19 - 00:24:21]	 I was impressed by Brown's sincerity,
[00:24:21 - 00:24:24]	 by the depth of his understanding of me,
[00:24:24 - 00:24:28]	 by the way that Roger Casement and a world nearly history,
[00:24:28 - 00:24:31]	 a world known to me only from its brief mention
[00:24:31 - 00:24:35]	 in the pages of Joyce's Ulysses, lived and moved
[00:24:35 - 00:24:38]	 before me in those long, rambling conversations
[00:24:38 - 00:24:41]	 on his veranda.
[00:24:41 - 00:24:44]	 He spoke long and eloquently of Lacherera.
[00:24:44 - 00:24:47]	 He had not been there since 1935,
[00:24:47 - 00:24:50]	 but I was to find it much as he described it,
[00:24:50 - 00:24:54]	 the fever-haunted old town on the lowland across the lake
[00:24:54 - 00:24:56]	 no longer stands.
[00:24:56 - 00:25:00]	 But the dungeons for the Indian slaves can still be seen,
[00:25:00 - 00:25:05]	 crumbling iron rings set deep in sweating basaltic stone.
[00:25:05 - 00:25:09]	 The house of Arana is no more, and Peru long ago
[00:25:09 - 00:25:12]	 abandoned her rights to the area of Colombia.
[00:25:12 - 00:25:16]	 But the old town of Lacherera is ghostly indeed,
[00:25:16 - 00:25:19]	 and so is the broad trail or trocha
[00:25:19 - 00:25:23]	 that we would shortly use to walk the 110 kilometers that
[00:25:23 - 00:25:27]	 separate Lacherera from the real Putumayo.
[00:25:27 - 00:25:29]	 Up to 20,000 Indians gave their lives
[00:25:29 - 00:25:32]	 to push that trail through the jungle.
[00:25:32 - 00:25:35]	 Indians who refused to work had the bottoms
[00:25:35 - 00:25:38]	 of their feet and their buttocks removed by machete.
[00:25:38 - 00:25:41]	 Walking those gloomy, empty trails,
[00:25:41 - 00:25:45]	 one seems often to hear the grumble of voices
[00:25:45 - 00:25:47]	 or the rustle of chained feet.
[00:25:47 - 00:25:50]	 John Brown's rambling monologue prepared me
[00:25:50 - 00:25:52]	 for the strangeness.
[00:25:52 - 00:25:54]	 And on the morning that our boat was leaving
[00:25:54 - 00:25:57]	 to carry us down river, we stopped at his house
[00:25:57 - 00:26:01]	 on our way to the landing, his eyes and skin shone.
[00:26:01 - 00:26:05]	 He was the gatekeeper of the platonic world down river
[00:26:05 - 00:26:08]	 from Puerto Leguizamo, and he knew it.
[00:26:08 - 00:26:13]	 I felt like a child before him, and he knew that too.
[00:26:13 - 00:26:19]	 Bye bye, babies, bye bye was his dry farewell.
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