Vol. 8, No. 1 MEMOIRS OF THE NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN March 26, 1952 



PLANT HUNTING IN ECUADOR 

 W. H. Camp 



INTRODUCTION 



Ecuador, a land characterized by sharp contrasts:- From this segment of the 

 Roof of South America one can sometimes stand on the continental divide and see 

 salt water; in one place— the Paramo des Soldados in Azuay — it is scarcely more 

 than 30 miles to the Pacific, whereas rain falling on the eastern slope of this 

 same paramo must travel over 3,000 tortuous miles until it mingles with the waters 

 of the Atlantic. The great snow-covered mass of Chimborazo, aloof and refriger- 

 atedly antiseptic, brooding almost atop the stinking, malarial-ridden tidal swamps 

 of Los RIos. Parched desert areas which penetrate the western escarpment of the 

 Andes along the arid valley of the Rio Catamayo to within a day's march of the 

 dripping slopes of the eastern escarpment, where nobody knows how much rain 

 falls (it is estimated to exceed 200 inches per year). A score of permanent snow 

 fields athwart the equator. Typical alpine vegetation between the seasonal and 

 permanent snowlines of Tungurahua, only a few hours walk from the dense trop- 

 ical jungles of the valley of the Rio Pastaza at its feet. Modern civilization su- 

 perposed on a medieval feudal system and this, in turn, on an indigenous culture 

 which archaeologists only now are beginning to admit goes back thousands of 

 years beyond the recorded history of man; and the nearby eastern lowlands oc- 

 cupied by tribes yet scarcely emerged from a stone-age culture, where the wooden 

 spear, its point fire-hardened, and poisoned dart still rule and where men still 

 hunt each other, saving the heads of the vanquished— deboned and shrunken— as 

 grisly trophies of the anthropean chase. Perhaps nowhere in the world has nature 

 brought together so many sharp geographical contrasts in so small a space; per- 

 haps nowhere has man permitted any greater cultural differences. The contrasts 

 of climate and terrain are reflected in the varied richness of the vegetation; a full 

 discussion of the archaeologic, ethnic and social situations of Ecuador are nec- 

 essarily outside the province of this brief report. 



It was my good fortune to spend nearly a year and a half in Ecuador. During 

 the early years of World War II, I had been occupied with various problems re- 

 lated to the war emergency in other parts of Latin America — in the Caribbean 

 area, in Central America, and Mexico. During this time I had been invited to join 

 the group of workers searching for the quinine-yielding bark of the Cinchona 

 tree, but was unable to do so until April, 1944. This phase of the work was then 

 being carried out under the United States Foreign Economic Administration, suc- 

 cessor to both the Board of Economic Warfare and Office of Economic Warfare; it 

 was concluded under the U. S. Commercial Company. At the cessation of the of- 

 ficial exploratory work of the Mision de Cinchona del Ecuador in April, 1945, I 

 rejoined the staff of the New York Botanical Garden (having been on leave for 

 three years) but continued in Ecuador, carrying out general plant explorations for 

 essentially an additional six months. 



It will be obvious that, during the year of official employment with the Mision 

 de Cinchona, there was no opportunity to carry out either extensive or systematic 

 general collections; our work was primarily concerned with searching for high- 

 yielding stands of Cinchona, during which herbarium specimens were made of this 

 and related genera on a fairly large scale. However, during the course of the work 



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