Books: Precious Poison

WHITE WATER AND BLACK MAGIC — Richard C. Gill — Holt ($3).

Some 20 years ago a young U. S. English instructor named Richard C. Gill decided to visit Ecuador. He liked the country so well that he bought 750 acres of jungle near the headwaters of the Amazon River. There Gill and his wife pioneered the first dude ranch in South America.

One day Ranchman Gill’s horse threw him. Three months later, in Washington, D. C., Richard Gill was flat on his back and rigid with spastic (muscle-contracting) paralysis. He remained on his back for four years. Doctors had no drug to combat his condition. One “eminent specialist” said that curare (pronounced koo-rah-reh), which contains a muscle-relaxing principle, might help. But U. S. doctors had never been able to get enough pure curare to experiment with its properties.

Detectifiction addicts know strange curare as the exotic drug which causes undiagnosable death. Richard Gill knew it as the dark brown, pitchlike poison brewed by the Amazon Indians, who use it to tip the darts of their blowguns. Some two or three minutes after a victim is hit by a curare dart, he dies.

As soon as Rancher Gill had been massaged, yanked and kneaded into some semblance of muscular control, had learned all over again how to wash his face, tie his tie, handle a knife & fork, he headed for his ranch in the Amazon jungle. He was in charge of an expedition, financed by Philanthropist Sayre Merrill, 1) to worm from the Indians the black magic of curare cooking, 2) to bring back to the U. S. enough curare for laboratory use, 3) to bring back any other useful drugs from the Indian pharmacopoeia. Rancher Gill succeeded in all three tasks. The best parts of his somewhat flamboyantly written book (Sample: “The days streaked by like frightened parrots”) report how the searcher succeeded, how he won the confidence of the suspicious brujos (witch men), how he learned the secret ingredients, the magic ritual and recipe for mixing and brewing curare.

Curare’s ingredients are still the secret of Medicine Man Gill, a handful of scientists and a jungleful of witch doctors. Others will have to be satisfied with the poetry of the translated Indian names of the plants that yield the poison — the thick-gold-stick; the toucan-tongue; the vine-which-is-like-a-frog; the magic-stick- that-grows-beside-big-waters; roots from the plant-which-talks-in-the-wind.