03. Third Voyage: Australia to Malayasia

The ship left Australia, sailing to Bali and Java, Indonesia, Singapore and Penang, Malaysia, where the crew attended the Institute of Ecotechnics’ conference, ‘Man, Jungles, and Survival’, produced in cooperation with the Technical University of Malaysia and UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Program. One of the conference speakers was Prof. Richard Evans Schultes (head of the Harvard Botanical Museum), regarded as the father of modern ethnobotany, who described the rainforest as a biochemical emporium that was scarcely studied and under grave threat. Prof. Schultes proposed that the Heraclitus sail to the Upper Amazon in Peru, carrying on the ethnobotanical field work he had begun aboard the Scripps Institute’s vessel, the Alpha Helix, collecting specimens of rainforest plants threatened by extinction.