The Last Wild Men of Borneo Read online

  Then, just like that, it was over. “Sudah,” he said. Finished. He stood up, a smile on his face. The weight, the dread, was lifted from the house. “Sudah. Sudah pulang.” Gone home. He then purified every room and finally Michael himself.

  Michael never heard footsteps again. “That spirit was in the house!” he said, sipping the last watery dregs of his scotch. “In the house! It was a guardian figure. Powerful. So strong. So powerful. He didn’t like it here. He wanted to go back home. So we sent him back to Borneo, and what remained was the wood.” A piece of wood worth a fortune to the collectors, auctioneers, and museum curators he knew in New York and Paris and London.

  Hearing Michael’s story in New York or Los Angeles, cities where you couldn’t see the night sky and where technology and its magicians had become the gods, would have made my eyes roll. But this was Bali. Geckos slithered along the ceiling beams and frogs croaked and crickets hummed and a ceiling fan turned slowly overhead. Even in the new Bali of malls and swanky hotels stood a temple on every corner, the ground littered with the day’s offerings. On any given night the bang and clang of gamelan orchestras carried on the breeze, and it was hardly uncommon for men and women to routinely fall into trances as they communicated with the spirits. And Borneo was just north of Bali, a ninety-minute plane ride away.

  I’d always been fascinated with Borneo, with the whole idea of wild jungle and rivers inhabited by highly cultured head-hunters. It was the third-largest island in the world (after Greenland and New Guinea), a mini-continent stretching eight hundred miles north to south and six hundred miles east to west, a place of vast fecundity harboring so much life—plants and animals and deep human culture, both physical and spiritual—that it was hard to imagine it for real. It was one of those places, like the Amazon, like Conrad’s Congo, like New Guinea, that had long obsessed the Western imagination. It was where the heart of darkness lay, where orangutans the size of men swung through the trees and where Alfred Russel Wallace collected two thousand different species of insects in a single square mile. It was where the rich British gentleman James Brooke battled head-hunting Iban pirates to proclaim himself the White Rajah, where the legendarily beautiful Dayaks lived in longhouses that stretched three hundred feet end to end and covered themselves in swirling tattoos and stretched their earlobes to their shoulders with heavy brass bangles. Borneo’s forest and its people were the very definition of exotic in the Western mind.

  In 1987, at the age of twenty-seven, I’d taken a ten-day foray up the Mahakam River, where I’d spent two nights in a longhouse. It had been my first experience, albeit brief, with indigenous people, and the dislocation I’d felt in that long dark elevated wooden structure with topless women and men who hunted with blowpipes left me hungry for more understanding of what I’d seen, felt, experienced. I wanted to know them; in some unfathomable way I wanted to be one of them. The Borneo that filled my head as Michael’s story unspooled offered a wistful promise of something mysterious and mystical. Of lost worlds, lost tribes, a lost way of being: that somewhere out there in the bush was something bigger, something unknown, something that spoke to the very essence of our humanity.

  Michael and Bruno, I realized while listening to Michael’s story that night, were completely different kinds of men. At least on the surface, their lives had nothing to do with each other. Bruno was an idealist, a do-gooder, a refugee from the modern world who despised the cult of Western consumerism and devoted his life to the Penan. Michael was a buccaneer, a man who spent his life buying and selling the Dayaks’ art, the physical manifestations of their sacred universe, and in doing so had made himself more than merely comfortable.

  But hearing Michael’s story, with the haunting monuments to Dayak culture all around us, it struck me that he and Bruno were two pieces of a whole, Eros and Thanatos, Apollo and Dionysus, two men who spent their lives in pursuit of the sacred fire of “exotic” indigenous people. They had both fled their own countries at more or less the same moment, and they’d each been drawn in a powerful way to the same island. They’d both become obsessed with Borneo’s people, were fascinated with sacred cultures and our romantic notions of their power. The two were hungry to touch a perceived Eden of our past, desperate to hold it in their hands and in their hearts, both trying to fill some piece of their souls with it, from it, in very different ways. They’d both been treasure hunters, I realized, and the prize hadn’t been gold or priceless statues or even really the self-determination of a people, but a long and persistent Western fantasy: of the power, mojo, juju of native culture. Bruno had fought time and progress, while Michael had bought up sacred objects just as development and consumerism was dissolving the cultures that produced them. They both plunged heedlessly into the same world, but one ended up aging in comfort, the other dead—and their stories represented two poles of possibility: a forest and its people saved against all odds from development, or a people absorbed by the modern world, their culture relegated to the walls of museums or collectors.

  I asked Michael if he’d ever heard of Bruno.

  “Of course!” he said. “Met him. In Borneo. I think it drove him crazy, going native like that. He and I . . .” He drifted off for a second. “He and I were different, but after just a minute of talking we both recognized a similar impulse. We were both obsessed. I wanted to be a Victorian pirate, the Rajah of Borneo. And he wanted to be one of them, a Penan. And, I don’t know, but I think maybe we both tried to save it in our own ways.”

  That was it. I wanted to follow the stories of Michael and Bruno, two narratives that were really one. It was the story of the fate of Borneo: the place itself and an idea that we coveted, the last Eden of our imagination, a wild garden filled with spirits and magic and unconquered people. I would find out what happened to Bruno Manser and how well either of these wild men of Borneo had succeeded in fulfilling their dreams. Dreams of being adventurers in a strange land. Dreams of escaping Western culture and wrapping themselves in the powers of Borneo’s indigenous people. And the most difficult dream of all—of saving its inextricably linked wildness and culture.

  It was late and time to go. I put my glass in Michael’s sink, slipped on my flip-flops, and asked one last question. What about the statue?

  “Sold it to a guy in Paris,” he said. “For the price of a house. A big house.”

  I

  Rupture

  I feel the irksomeness of civilized society greater than ever, and its bonds shall not hold me long.

  —SIR JAMES BROOKE, RAJAH OF BORNEO

  Penan of Ulu Benali, Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. (James Barclay)

  One

  Bruno Manser walked into the forest alone. He carried a backpack stuffed with twenty pounds of rice, a rain tarp, a hammock, a fishing net, a few shorts and T-shirts, pens, watercolors, a sketchbook, a machete, a carbide caving headlamp, a 1-to-100,000-scale map of Sarawak, and a compass. It was June 1984, and as he left Gunung Mulu National Park, on the Malaysian side of Borneo, and hiked into the most spectacular virgin rain forest on earth, he had only the vaguest idea where he was going or for how long. He was days beyond any roads or airports, and no cell or satellite communications devices would be available for years to come. “Once more,” he wrote in his journal, “my soul is amazed.” He was thirty years old.

  To the north, a few miles in a straight line stood Gunung Mulu, Sarawak’s second-highest peak, reaching a misty, rain-shrouded seven thousand feet. To the east, the direction he headed, rose forest-covered mountains in ever-higher steps, the headwaters of the rivulets and streams that tumbled out of Borneo’s central plateau to become mighty rivers like the Rajang and the Kapuas and the Mahakam, rivers so big you could sail a ship up them for hundreds of miles before hitting surging rapids, gateways protecting inner, hidden worlds. Somewhere in those mountain headwaters lived the Penan, and he was going to find them.

  The forest was not for the most part the low, green, humid tangle that most people imagine when they think of a tropical
jungle, but an ancient primary landscape of hardwood trees soaring one hundred feet tall, some of them fifteen feet in diameter, with huge buttress roots that could dwarf a man. Beneath that high green canopy lay a cool, dim, shadowed place of smaller trees and shrubs fighting for what light reached the always moist forest floor, soft and spongy from untold millennia of rot and decay, sprouting mushrooms and wet leaves and rotting logs and moss and ferns, the whole a seething soup of life. The forest smelled of damp and old wood, the smell of death but also of life.

  The age of this place he was entering was hard to conceive. Southeast Asia’s forests are the oldest on earth, 180 million years, and when much of Africa and the Amazon became dry savannas the woods of Southeast Asia retained their hot, wet climates. Borneo, when it rose from the sea 130 million years ago, was colonized by those ancient forests. Without substantive changes in climate or seismic activity, the environment into which Bruno was walking had remained stable, intact, pristine, unchanged for years. “The tropical rain forests are one of the most complex ecosystems that ever evolved on this planet,” writes Biruté Galdikas, who spent forty years studying orangutans in Borneo. “Nourished by the unyielding heat and high rainfall that prevail at the equator, these forests have been the crucible of evolution, spawning increasingly specialized forms of life inhabiting ever more narrow niches.” She adds, “The term ‘cathedral forest’ is used as a metaphor, to suggest that great woods are like great medieval churches. But I have often felt that this is backward, that the stone cathedrals are a recreation of the forests where our distant ancestors once lived. This is why they strike a chord deep within us. The soaring ceilings of a medieval cathedral, the cool, damp air, the dark punctuated by beams of brilliant light colored by stained glass windows mimic our ancient home, our Garden of Eden. . . . A walk in the rain forest is a walk into the mind of God.”

  Bruno Manser was a newcomer to this tropical landscape. He had left Switzerland six months earlier, on January 4, flying from Zurich to Bangkok, working his way south by train and bus, just another Western backpacker, it would seem, wandering through Asia. But little was ordinary about Bruno. On the train he climbed up on its roof and jumped between the cars. He wandered off the road straight through rice paddies and slept under the stars. He explored Thai caves filled with millions of bats, closing his eyes to feel their vibrations, marveling at gigantic spiders. In one he spotted a strange-looking six-foot-long white snake. He was fascinated with serpents, couldn’t keep his hands off them, had been haunted by dreams of them since he was a child. Heedlessly, he grabbed its tail, forced its head to the ground, and picked it up. “It was nice meeting you,” he said, letting it go. He slept alone in that cave, screaming joyously when he felt the wind from the bats’ wings on his face.

  Hearing there were wild elephants living in the Malaysian state of Kelantan, he decided he wanted to look them in the eye in their natural state. He walked into the jungle alone, tracked them, and sneaked up to them in the night to pet them, a misadventure that sent him fleeing for his life.

  He spent six weeks living on the deserted beaches and hot jungles of a tiny Malaysian island, Perhentian Kecil, as a modern-day Robinson Crusoe. Arriving with just six pounds of rice, some cooking oil, and a few onions, he sought to live off the land. When he noticed a plant with large, arrow-shaped leaves that reminded him of taro, he dug it out of the ground and bit into it. His mouth exploded. “I threw the root far and spit and ran like a monkey chased through the forest,” he wrote in his journal. “I felt the need to vomit and each movement of my tongue felt like pins sticking in my mouth, and I hadn’t even swallowed any of it!” Another plant made him so sick he couldn’t rise from his hammock for twenty-four hours. He ate a rat and a snake, snails, and finally learned to catch some fish in his nets. He was bitten in the hand trying to catch another snake, but didn’t seem to learn his lesson. A few days later he wrestled a nine-foot python out of a tree with his bare hands. He was about to kill it, but decided he had enough fish in his nets to eat and set it free.

  Now he was heading up into the mountains in pursuit of the Penan, the last nomads of the Borneo rain forest, a people who had remained mysterious until the early twentieth century. “Indeed,” writes the anthropologist Bernard Sellato, “though certain relatively old sources mention the existence of nomads in the interior of the island, almost nothing in the literature prior to 1900 provides more than occasional very brief notes about them, and almost always these notes are based on secondhand information or unfounded rumors.” Only in the 1950s did the first anthropological studies about them begin to appear, which Bruno saw in a library in Basel.

  As he made his way into the forest in 1984, about seven thousand lived in two distinct populations: the Western Penan, who numbered around twenty-five hundred and tended to live in much larger communities of sixty to two hundred members and had long settled into small farming communities; and forty-five hundred Eastern Penan, who lived to the north and east of the Baram River. The majority had become semi-settled, but many remained nomadic and lived in small bands of twenty to forty. Pure hunter-gatherers. Men and women who lived, Bruno heard, like faeries of the forest. An egalitarian people unfettered by consumerism or possessions, who shared equally all of the little they had, who looked not to the stars and the moon, which they could barely see beneath the forest canopy, but to the streams and trees and animals, and could find their way by those alone and could even write in symbols crafted from leaves and saplings. Men and women who knew the forest’s rhythms and voices, who could speak to the animals and move barefoot and silent beneath its vaulted arches. A people who never stayed in one place for more than a few months and moved in pursuit of wild boar and sago trees, their favorite foods. In Bruno’s imagination they were pure and free, untouched by time or history, had been living in perfect coexistence with the forest unchanged since the dawn of time itself. And while the neighboring Dayak tribes had a long history of violent head-hunting, the Penan knew no war, it seemed, eschewing violence for shy withdrawal.

  All of which fit perfectly for Bruno, who’d been climbing and crawling in the woods since he could walk. He’d grown up working class, crowded into a two-bedroom apartment in Basel with three sisters and two brothers, so many kids that everybody shared bedrooms and their father slept on the sofa in the living room. The children attended church every Sunday, and in pictures the three boys looked like poster children for the 1950s: crew cuts, bow ties, sweaters, beaming smiles. His father, though, had a hard edge. He could be tyrannical, was often verbally abusive to Bruno’s mother, and so Bruno and his two brothers escaped. They wandered, with a freedom incomprehensible to any urban parent today, in the woods and streams that were just a twenty-minute walk from their apartment.

  From early childhood Bruno was precocious, especially in the natural world. Bugs. Dirt. The dark—every kid is afraid of the dark at some point. But never Bruno. He touched everything. Tasted everything. Put everything in his mouth. His curiosity was boundless. “He took each stone and looked under it,” said Monika Niederberger, his younger sister.

  Under his leadership, he and his brothers would steal out to the forest at four in the morning to listen to the birds and watch the forest come alive. They fished. Caught bugs, frogs, and newts, which he brought home, himself often covered in mud, sometimes even in his best clothes. One day when Monika went to take a bath, the tub was filled with swimming fish—not little goldfish, but fat trout from the river, which he then cooked and served the family for dinner.

  He often escaped out to the little balcony at night and just stared at the sky. As fall gave way to winter, his mother watched him bring home long bundles of green ferns. Piles of leaves. Sticks and odd feathers that he began piling on the apartment’s little balcony.

  What are you doing? his mother asked.

  Don’t worry, Mameli, he said. I am building a bed.

  He created a nest of sorts, remarkably similar to the bowers he would sometimes be forced to make
years later when he was on the run in Borneo. He slept there most nights, even in the harsh cold of the Swiss winter. As he lay in his nest in the dark, Bruno’s mind wandered far, to the jungles and deserts and deepest oceans. It wasn’t just nature in and of itself that he loved, but adventure, and he grew ever more engrossed in the idea of self-reliance. He disemboweled an old sleeping bag and sewed his own pillow. He started carving his own buttons out of wood. He was quiet and shy in school, did not stand out, except for a series of odd yet articulate essays. Still in primary school, he faced the age-old school assignment of what he wanted to be when he grew up. “My profession should have something adventurous about it. If only I could go to Sumatra, Borneo and Africa and live like a cave dweller amongst gorillas, orangutans and other animals in the impenetrable jungle! I would always have a magnifying glass, a pipe, tobacco and matches with me, as well as a large pair of binoculars and a lot of interesting books about nature. I shouldn’t lack courage.”

  In the seventh grade his class went to the Alps, where they slept in the open hayloft of a barn. But just before dawn odd noises woke the group. Crawling sounds. Murmuring. Something rolling around in the hay. His teacher found Bruno lingering near the edge of the loft, about to jump off, babbling incomprehensibly. The teacher pulled him back from the brink, and as the sun rose, he looked into Bruno’s eyes. His pupils were huge brown holes, wildly dilated. He was escorted down the mountain, and a few hours later as he came to his senses, all was revealed: he had eaten morning glory seeds he’d found on the hike that afternoon. He had, in a phrase, just taken his first acid trip. He was not repentant. He did not apologize. Instead he criticized his teacher: If you have never eaten the seeds, he said, you are not a real scientist!