The Last Wild Men of Borneo Read online

  The hippie utopia of drugs and communal beach life was cracking, though, real life catching up. It was 1973. Heroin was everywhere, a serpent in the grass of paradise, and one after another too many of the tribe succumbed. That’s when he and Fatima met Perry Kesner. Perry was the son of a New York used clothing dealer who’d dropped out of college, had lived in caves in Crete, and found his way to Goa. He had tales of a new place, a place that wasn’t really on the hippie trail just yet, a place he said was better than all others: the island of Bali. One look at Perry’s photos and there was no question. In early 1974, Michael and Fatima headed east, and his rupture, too, was complete. He would never again live in the West.

  II

  Immersion

  The voyage will not teach you anything if you do not accord it the right to destroy you—a rule as old as the world itself. A voyage is like a shipwreck, and those whose boat has never sunk will never know anything about the sea. The rest is skating or tourism.

  —NICOLAS BOUVIER, LE VIDE ET LE PLEIN

  Bruno Manser in a Penan hut, Sarawak, May 1989. (James Barclay)

  Five

  The day after Bruno made contact with the Penan, they moved camps. Beneath heavy rattan backpacks stuffed with sago and meat, a few blackened pots, bamboo containers holding water and boar fat, with the littlest children perched on the very top of the loads, the nomads set off. Poison arrow quivers and machetes dangled from thin strands of rattan around their waists, and in their hands the men and boys carried blowpipes. It was everything they owned, the sum total of their worldly possessions. Even under heavy loads they hiked with power, descending narrow, muddy paths, climbing up and along ridgetops, a pack of mangy dogs yelping and barking among them. They didn’t move far; after three hours they stopped near a barely trickling stream and reconstituted their material world.

  Bruno watched in wonder. The Penan were as much a part of the forest as the trees or the birds or the ants or the rain. Their home wasn’t a house. It wasn’t a village or town. It was the forest as a whole. All of it. Everything they needed was there. With little discussion and incredible efficiency, like birds building a nest, men and women worked equally and swiftly, felling a multitude of the thin, straight-trunked young trees that everywhere fought for space under the high canopy, and gathering long strands of hanging, pliable vines the thickness of a human finger. They had been doing this all of their lives, as had their parents and grandparents, and they didn’t waste a single motion. Two hard swings of the machete on each side of the thin trees to cut them; the bottom cut created a sharp point, the top a V. They drove six uprights into the soft ground, one pair of limbs in the center four feet taller. Bound cross-pieces four feet above the ground, upon which they laid a floor of wrist-sized, bouncy limbs. Tied a second set of beams in the Vs to create the main roof joists. A quick sharp cut in the centers of long branches the thickness of two fingers left the branches hinged but not severed; those they laid twelve inches apart across the joists as slanted roof beams, the bent elbows resting on the high center joist. They laid fans of leaves over the beams to make a waterproof roof, hung leaves to create walls on three sides, the roof extending over the open face of the structure to form wide eaves. A notched trunk gave them a ladder, a small platform to one side created a hearth with a smoking rack above. In thirty minutes three brand-new houses with nary a nail or store-bought product stood in the forest.

  Nearby Bruno tied his hammock between two trees, with a tarp over the top.

  The Penan were shy and wary. It took him ten days to begin learning some of the men’s names; the women, he wrote, “guard their names like a secret and one small boy screams like he’s being tortured when I come closer.”

  A week later, though, the men let Bruno accompany them on a hunt. They tracked wild boar for six hours, Bruno slipping and falling, his body covered with mud and scratches, having to cut his way through the underbrush, while the Penan seemed to slide through it like wraiths. They walked effortlessly, with bare feet and those splayed toes that gripped the mud or fallen tree branches, following boar droppings, sighted a monkey in a tree and in a flash a hunter raised the pipe to his lips and fired with a giant breath. Their aim was uncanny. The monkey was hit, but climbed higher; the Penan whispered, worked together, and fired off arrow after arrow. After a few minutes the poison took effect and the monkey fell like a sack to the ground. They cornered a boar, hit it with numerous arrows, chased it through the brush for thirty minutes, until it too collapsed dead. The boar weighed over one hundred pounds, and the Penan tied its hind legs to its forelegs and carried it like a backpack, the legs looped around their shoulders. Bruno carried the monkey, hoping its fleas wouldn’t migrate to him.

  “Medok! Medok!”—Monkey! Monkey!—kids yelled when they returned to camp. “Everybody wanted to touch it and lift the heavy prey at least once.” The women fanned the always smoldering coals, burned and scraped off the fur, cut it up and gave half to the other hut—all food, no matter who obtained it, they shared equally. “When the father removed the eyes from the skull all the kids put out their hands begging for the delicacy,” Bruno wrote. “The brain is also reserved for the women and children. With wooden forks they get pieces from the cracked skull.”

  Days turned to weeks. Bruno spent his time recording everything, sketching the pattern of a cicada’s wing, how a dead gibbon’s hands were tied so the animal could be carried, how the Penan drilled six-foot-long, perfectly straight holes to make a blowpipe. He hunted with them, watched them carve arrows, and studied their language. He learned to make cups for drinking water out of leaves and tongs out of split wood and leaf fans for bellowing coals. He learned how to read the signs they made as they walked: five notches in a tree meant five Penan were on the march; a cut branch indicated their direction; the longer the branch the longer the distance they were traveling. Leaves placed on the track back-to-back pointing in one direction meant “I’m walking forward, hurry and follow in this direction—we desperately need help, someone is sick.” A small piece of wood wrapped in a leaf and clamped in a branch represented a blowpipe and the leaf the skin of a boar.

  Except for a few pots and pans, the occasional ragged pair of slacks, and the steel of their parangs, all of which they obtained on occasional trading forays to the closest Dayak villages, they lived in a world without commerce or manufactured things. They lived without schedules or clocks. If they weren’t hunting or cooking or whittling new arrows, they sang and played simple flutes with their noses and mouth harps that they created in minutes. The Penan “live completely in the moment; they have no calendar and don’t know their age or place of birth,” Bruno noted. “They don’t hoard any food. If their belly is full today, they’re happy, with little reason to think about tomorrow. When all work is done, dreamy sounds come from one or the other hut. Soft melodies find their way to my ears.” Bruno felt suspended in time in a vast forest alive with constant sounds, the always wet ground crawling with ants and termites, the air busy with moths and butterflies and buzzing cicadas. Hornbills flew over the canopy, the beat of their big wings sounding like a train rushing by. Torrential rains poured down, soaking everything; damp, cold mists rolled through in the evening and the morning. At night the forest blinked with fireflies, and sometimes the fungus on the trees glowed a haunting green. Bruno seldom saw beyond the trees. “Usually the leaves . . . obscure the sky, so they have no relation to the night firmament. They don’t even count the moon and the Penan don’t think of years; time is an insignificant factor. . . . Only one thing is for certain. If the trees are full of fruit then the wild boars will also collect in hordes and they can expect a fat prey for their hunts.” Indeed, the Penan lived to hunt and to eat; everything else was secondary. They gorged on meat and sago and fruit, seldom ate vegetables, which didn’t grow in the heights at which they preferred to live, barely ever drank water.

  In the evening, they sat against each other, gathered around flickering lights from flaming amberlike pieces of d
amar tree resin that smelled sweet and piney, “speaking with humor about all of my questions and imitating what I’m doing while all laughing vigorously.

  “The Penan are quite shy and never look you in the eye. Even when one greets you he looks away. Only the little girl Seleng, who may be about two years old, is exactly the opposite. She always looks for me and she likes to rub against me and she looks me in the eye so closely the tips of our noses almost touch. What secrets her eyes hold. The secret of life itself! But the small naked girl is covered in soot from head to toe like a child of the devil. There’s probably tons of lice in her hair. . . . [But] the heart of the soul appears to be closed by doors, the key to which a little child can hold in her hands, or an indigenous person somewhere far away from civilization. Moonlight shimmers through the leafy forest; ‘bad moon we don’t want you!’—it indicates rain as the white moon indicates a clear sky. Soon drops drip down from the dahoon leaves. The sounds of pagang, a bamboo string instrument that only women play, have fallen silent. The people are tired. Kijang is weaving a bag from rattan in the glimmer of the resin light, whereas two men talk at the fire that has almost extinguished.

  “There is no wild chaos in the jungle. Life develops according to a law that is inherent in nature. Even the smallest creature has its very specific living space. The many relationships form a harmonic whole that we as modern people only interfere with all too often.”

  As the weeks unfolded and he became increasingly proficient in the forest, Bruno said goodbye to his hosts, spent a few months across the border in Kalimantan to explore the Penan there, but found them already settled. He returned to Sarawak and began using the Kelabit Dayak village of Long Seridan, which had an airstrip and regular mail service, as a base for long forays into the forest to live with different bands of Penan in the remoter upper Baram and Limbang watersheds, and it was there that he would forge his deepest bonds. He recorded their stories and fables, about the ghosts and spirits who were everywhere, how the barking of dogs kept away malevolent spirits, and how to imitate the sound of the argus pheasant and other birds who would answer back. If he didn’t look behind him when the bird answered, they said he’d be turned into stone. He learned about the god Bali, who sends thunder and lightning when angered, and how to burn his hair and throw it into the wind to quiet Bali’s thunder. He was with them and yet independent of them too; he would live with one band, wander alone through the forest, able to hunt and find his way, until he hooked up with another band. He slowly shed his need for most Western comforts. On December 31, 1984, his Malaysian visa expired; from that day forward he was illegally in the country.

  Bruno’s copious letters and journals notwithstanding, he left little record of what he was looking for, or expecting to find among the Penan. He had never encountered indigenous people before, but years later he would tell an interviewer, “In my search to understand the deep essence of our humanity there grew in me the desire to learn from a people who still lived close to their source. I wanted to live with a people of nature, to share their traditions, to discover their origins, to become aware of their religion and life, to know these things.” Bruno was unusual, though his dream was anything but. He nurtured a fantasy that had gripped the imaginations of Western travelers and romantics for millennia, from Herodotus’s tales of one-eyed monsters inhabiting Hyperborea to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The farthest reaches, Ultima Thule, that was where treasure lay. “The most outlying lands . . . are likely to have those things which we think the finest and the rarest,” wrote Herodotus. Richard Burton had gone to Mecca, Gauguin to Tahiti, James Brooke to Sarawak, T. E. Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger into the desert of the Bedouins. What were they after? It was never just nature, adventure, that the Western mind thirsted for. Uninhabited terra incognita might be alluring, but not half as magnetic as places filled with indigenous, the wilder, the more “savage,” the more exotic the better, half-human creatures that could be saved or enslaved, or that could be escaped to and lived among in repudiation of all the myriad Western constraints shackling civilized man. “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” wrote Rousseau; the noble savage was a potent idea to European consciousness. “I want to go to Tahiti and finish my existence there,” wrote Gauguin. “I believe that the art which you like so much today is only the germ of what will be created down there, as I cultivate in myself a state of primitiveness and savagery.”

  “For my temperaments and mode of thinking,” James Brooke wrote in a letter to a friend shortly after inheriting £30,000 from his father, purchasing a 140-ton schooner, and setting out for Borneo in 1835, “there is nothing which makes prolonged life desirable, and, I would fain be doing something to add to the amount of happiness, especially in the way of life suited to my wild habits, wild education and ardent love for an undue degree of personal freedom. . . . Could I carry my vessel to places where the keel of a European ship never before ploughed the waters—could I plant my foot where white man’s foot never before had been—could I gaze upon scenes which educated eyes never have looked on—see man in the rudest state of nature—I should be content without looking for further reward.” It wasn’t enough just to go to a remote, difficult place and to return, but to go there and encounter the devil, ghosts, savages—to cross the River Acheron and journey into the underworld and meet “man in the rudest state of nature,” and to cavort with them, often to make love to them, people without Victorian inhibitions. That’s what Europeans and Americans hungered for, romanticized.

  Even better if you could go so deep you’d become one of them yourself, a desire that Victor Segalen ridiculed in his famous Essay on Exoticism: An Aesthetics of Diversity: “The Lotis [a term Segalen coined after a French travel writer named Pierre Loti] are . . . mystically drunk with and unconscious of their object. They confuse it with themselves and passionately intermingle with it, ‘drunk with their god!’”

  What happened after they returned—and they almost always returned, at some point—was an equally important part of the myth. You had to cross that river and go to the ends of the earth, but you couldn’t go too far or else coming back was no longer possible. The British government, for instance, never explicitly endorsed James Brooke’s exploits in Sarawak, but upon his return Brooke “became a freeman of the City of London, courted by the ancient Goldsmiths’ and Fishmongers’ Companies, a member of the foremost clubs. The government upgraded his appointment to that of Consul General for Borneo at 2,000 pounds a year (the last thing he needed, for he was already fantastically wealthy), Oxford gave him an honorary doctorate. He met lords and ministers and military and merchants and churchmen and everywhere he did what he loved to do—talked about Sarawak. And finally he met the queen.” He was a hero. Bruno did not go to the Penan seeking fame or fortune, but he too would be feted, mythologized, sought after, even paid, upon his return. He too became a hero. It was one thing, after all, to take home natives like captive zoo animals, as happened to the Polar Inuits who were brought back to New York City and housed in the Museum of Natural History like animals in a zoo; another to have a white person become a native himself—“one of us” becoming “one of them”— who could swing from jungle vines one minute and dine in a tuxedo with you the next.

  At its root, colonialism and the European travelers who came from it carried with them a long-standing ambivalence—to conquer on the one hand or to submerge oneself on the other. The Native Americans Christopher Columbus first encountered were Rousseauian wonders, the most graceful and most noble people he had ever encountered. Michel de Montaigne, in On Cannibals, published in 1580, glorified “the Brazilian cannibals, a people untouched by artifice.” Their lives, Montaigne said, surpass “all the pictures with which the poets have adorned the golden age, and all their inventions in feigning a happy state of man.” It was a place where “the very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy are unknown.” Writes Jamie James in The Glamour of Strangeness, “Shakespeare lifted passages of the
essay intact for Gonzalo’s speech describing his ideal state, in act 2 of The Tempest.”