His expeditionary life is the stuff of legend. Fresh out of Oxford in 1961, he and two college friends, Richard Mason and Kit Lambert, set off to explore Brazil’s Iriri River. Four months into the expedition, their party was ambushed by the Panará, at the time an unknown and uncontacted tribe; Richard Mason was killed with arrows and clubs. The tragedy only fired John’s heart, furthering his concern for the fate of the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon.

Over subsequent decades of fieldwork, he would come to know 45 tribes throughout Brazil, four of them uncontacted at the time of his encounters. As an activist, John, along with his close friend Robin Hanbury-Tenison, co-founded Survival International, an organization that has fought for the rights of Indigenous Peoples worldwide for nearly 60 years.

As a scholar, John devoted 26 years to his masterpiece, a three-volume history of the Brazilian Amazon, distilled in three books: Red Gold (1978); Amazon Frontier (1985) and Die If You Must (2004). His other books include History of the Inca (1970), Monuments of the Incas (2010), Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon (2008) and Naturalists in Paradise: Wallace, Bates and Spruce in the Amazon (2015).

As a literary mentor, John came into my life when I was a young botanist travelling the Andes in 1974. His widely acclaimed first book, History of the Inca, transported a young scholar through time and space, allowing the reader to sense and feel both the immensity of what the Inca achieved, as well as the tragedy and enormity of the loss that the collapse and final destruction of the Empire implied. As much as any book, History of the Inca taught me what words can do.

That John was able to write all of these extraordinary books, even while running a family business and serving as director and secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, a post he held from 1975 until 1996, was deeply inspiring. He is the model of an independent scholar, fully capable and empowered to bring rigour and intellectual insight to whatever subject aroused his passion and inspired his sense of justice, fairness and truth.