The Last Wild Men of Borneo

by Carl Hoffman

  “Anything else important? Yes! The creek is howling, the frogs are cracking and my lamp is slowly running out and so I go to sleep. Ciao.”

  Then, in a postscript, he showed a flash of ego, calling anthropologists “empty windbags,” “with nothing meaningful to say” about Penan culture. “When I have all my notes and studies in one place, then they’ll be the deepest ones about the Penan culture in the whole world.”

  By May 1986, Graf wrote that he’d collected fifty-one hundred signatures from throughout Europe and Australia on his petition, and would soon send it on to Harrison Ngau and the Malaysian government. An attempt to draw in the World Wildlife Fund in Malaysia had failed, though; the Malaysians were frightened of the government. Small, disorganized blockades were popping up throughout Penan and Kelabit lands, with little effect. “The WTK company broke through the Penan’s Magoh River blockade,” Bruno wrote to Graf. “The bulldozers are digging now under police protection. . . . They’re always sneaking around and trying to find where I’m staying. As fast as they can, they want to give me a kick in the ass. The right side of the Seridan River is already widely sullied—the Penans from Long Banan accepted a little ‘compensation.’ On the left side of the Magoh River the company soon will reach the Tarum River, but there the nomads from Magoh still want to defend their ground. A journalist from the New Straits Times applied for a meeting—so I’m on the road with some Penans. But I doubt his reliability. We’ll see. That’s all for the moment. Today’s prey is a wild baby boar, an old male stump-tailed macaque, and a langur. So—after an extensive meal—our group is cheerfully sitting together. Just the sand flies are secretly making trouble—apart from that the peace is absolute and even the bulldozers are silent.”

  The journalist from the Straits Times was James Ritchie. For months he’d been trying to find Bruno. He had, finally, gone to see James Wong, who was not only Sarawak’s minister of environment and forests, but also one of its largest timber barons, second in power in Sarawak only to Taib, and Wong offered his support, including the use of his helicopter if necessary.

  After their meeting, Ritchie hitched a ride in one of Wong’s trucks along lumber roads as far as he could, made contact with a group of Penan, and walked with them to their camp. Though a native of Sarawak, Ritchie had never met any nomadic Penan, whom he disdained and feared. After hours of trepidation, he finally brought up Bruno. Though it seems hard to believe, Ritchie insists in his book that he was trying to “rescue” Bruno from the jungle and his visa problems in Malaysia. “‘If he is here, please tell me, I want to help him,’ I told Busak. She pretended she didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “. . . I told them that I was a friend whose real intention was to help a man in distress. ‘Saya tahu dia ada sini,’ I said. [I know he’s here.] Now they looked surprised. How could I know that he is around? I told them it was wrong for them to ask this Orang Putih to remain in the jungle with them. Their consciences had been pricked.” Ritchie told them he was their friend, that they were like his father and mother, his brothers and sisters. As Ritchie described it, he said, “‘This man . . . hiding in the jungle is your brother and mine too. We are all like one family. I came here with good intentions, I want to help him. If I had bad intentions, I wouldn’t have come alone. I am not afraid . . . because I believe and trust you all. If I wasn’t sorry for this man I wouldn’t have come here. I came here with a lot of difficulty—alone—I came a long way, into your jungle, finishing all my money—all to help him. If I was a bad man, I would come in a different manner, with many men. But I have come alone. I am not afraid because I come with honesty.’

  “Then Agan spoke, Busak paused then translated: ‘We are hiding Bruno in the jungle.’”

  They still wouldn’t tell Ritchie where he was, so Ritchie wrote a note “telling [Agan] I’d be willing to help [Bruno] get back to his country if he wanted. I then told Agan that I would come back with a helicopter to take Bruno home.” He would, Ritchie said, fly into a spot in the upper reaches of the Magoh River in eleven days between noon and 3 p.m. and they should make a big X marking so that the helicopter pilot would know where to land. As Ritchie left the camp, he felt repulsed. “The deplorable conditions of [the Penan] are disturbing. How could this Swiss—if that was what he really was—from a country with European standards of living live in these conditions?”

  On September 15, 1986, the appointed date, clearly working with the government, Ritchie flew by helicopter to the rendezvous bearing a special two-week visa from the Immigration Department for Bruno, allowing him—on the face of it—free passage out of the country.

  On the second pass they found the X, landed, and were greeted by two Penan bearing a note from Bruno. He had never asked for help from anyone and he had no plans to leave. The only reason to meet, he said, was if Ritchie would “write a report about the Penan struggle and the problems they . . . face through logging.” The helicopter must leave; only Ritchie and one other person could come; no pictures would be allowed, and he should plan on staying two days. Penan would guide him to Bruno’s camp, and if he didn’t follow the instructions, he would never see Bruno.

  Ritchie refused to go. He was afraid of getting lost, afraid the Penan might lead him astray, afraid the walk would be too difficult, afraid of Bruno himself. Two weeks later, however, Ritchie’s first story hit the front pages of the New Straits Times: SWISS ON THE RUN GOES NATIVE IN SARAWAK. “The illiterate Penan have expressed admiration for Bruno’s concern and his style of ‘fighting for them.’ Fearing that their ‘White Rajah’ would be arrested, they have provided him with bodyguards and have hidden him in deep virgin jungle.” Ritchie pumped up the White Rajah angle for all it was worth, writing that the Penan carried Bruno through the forest in a sedan chair.

  Word of the piece, which was quickly followed by two more, reached Bruno, who responded in a letter to Ritchie that his stories were wrong on all accounts. As the two continued to correspond, Roger Graf presented his petition to the embassy of Malaysia on October 22, calling for the “immediate discontinuance of deforestation” and the protection of thirteen hundred square kilometers in the upper Limbang watershed, with 6,878 signatures. “The petition,” wrote Ritchie, “was tantamount to a threat . . . to the Sarawak Government.”

  Five days later Ritchie went to see Abdul Taib Mahmud, seeking help for another helicopter flight in search of Bruno. “By then Taib had read all my reports; he then wrote a note to his deputy” to give Ritchie “‘a lift . . . to go back and cover the story on the . . . “Tarzan” from Long Seridan.’” Ritchie wrote that he never used the note, but what happened next calls that into question.

  “A reporter of the largest Malaysian daily newspaper heard about me living in the jungle,” journaled Bruno. “With the blessing of the current government, he wants to find me and send me home, nicely packaged, bow and all. Because I did not concur with his ideas, and probably based on misinformation and lies, he wrote a serial and mixed it with headlines about me which made me look insincere and notorious. James Ritchie was careful not to say a word about the worries of the Penan, and the destruction of their home because of the logging. Now he suddenly says that he wants to help the Penan, under the condition that he can see me. I don’t have much confidence. The whole hubbub about myself is not what I want. After hesitating for a long time, I agree. In these spare times, you have to grab every helping hand.”

  In mid-November, Ritchie and a crew from Radio Television Malaysia helicoptered into Long Seridan. At 7 p.m., the summons came. “We dressed for an overnight expedition and moved ahead. . . . It seemed like ages, but within fifteen minutes we passed the village school, walked along a muddy path through secondary jungle and were at a small farm hut. Climbing up the notched log ladder we pushed open the door and there he was sitting on the floor.

  “After all the stories I had heard about the great man called Manser, he now looked quite small and insignificant. I had imagined him to be a big, broad and over-bearing
‘Tarzan.’ In fact before meeting him, [his friends] had warned me to be careful as he had been labeled by the authorities as ‘dangerous.’ But . . . I was prepared to face the consequences.

  “He had a scrawny beard and his light-brown hair was tied up in a bun. Bare-chested and wearing jungle-green pants, he was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the hut, wearing ‘John Lennon’ glasses. The contemplative Manser stared at the dancing flame of a candle perched on an empty glucose tin. His quiet manner made him appear a Gandhi-like figure in deep thought—or a man who was drugged. His eyes were glazed and he rarely looked up. . . .

  “On his occasional smile I noticed his teeth were stained yellow. Standing about five feet five inches and weighing about 135 lbs he was small for a European. He could have passed for a Penan with his skin colour and general appearance. The yellowing of his skin indicated that he could still have been suffering from a serious attack of Malaria. He didn’t appear like the normal European tourist, there was something about his eyes and mannerisms that struck me as quite strange.

  “I sat about three feet from him. . . . I didn’t want to get too near for fear that he could act irrationally. He was armed with a parang, which was placed on his left, while all I had was my ball-point pen. Would there be any action? I mean, if he was on some hallucinogen—then I could have a problem on my hands. There was no saying how many Penan . . . bodyguards were hiding outside. I stayed cool.

  “I was also . . . concerned that if Manser still had Malaria, we could be infected by him.”

  They talked for several hours, Ritchie’s notes from the meeting rambling and barely coherent. “As usual, the reporter arrived by helicopter,” wrote Bruno, “and he conveniently brought along two television cameramen. We meet at night at a rice storage place on the edge of the Kelabit village Long Seridan. The . . . interview appears more like providing fodder for gossip stories and I ask him to get to the issue.” Nevertheless, Bruno invited Ritchie to a meeting of Penan scheduled for the following day; it was their voices that mattered, not Bruno’s, he told Ritchie, and it was imperative that Ritchie and the television crew hear their complaints directly.

  At the meeting the next day in the forest, a short boat trip up the Magoh River from Long Seridan, thirteen Penan “chieftains,” in the words of Ritchie, gathered; some had walked for two weeks to attend. “The Penan leaders spoke with emotion about their forests,” Ritchie wrote. “From their composure and manner of expression I realized that they were eloquent speakers. It was new to me to hear them speak out like this, because during earlier encounters with the [Western] Baram Penan they had always seemed so shy and reluctant. . . . They were now apparently speaking their minds and were totally absorbed in their rhetoric. And they had a sad story to tell. At least, I thought, if there was one thing that Manser had done, it was to teach them how to speak their minds. Bruno watched from a nearby hut interjecting when necessary, sometimes to guide the Penan at other times to act as our interpreter.”

  Bruno saw it differently. “On the next day I even dare to allow myself to be photographed with Penan, which I had consciously avoided up to now. This way, two natives finally have the opportunity to talk about their concerns. But even before the speakers realize it, the cameraman packed up his stuff and the reporters rushed away. They appear to have found the fodder for their story. As he says goodbye, Ritchie imitates cutting scissors and says: ‘As a human being, I agree with you. But as a citizen of this country, I have to disagree with you. Don’t be upset if the story is not going to be to your liking, my editor is going to cut some of it.’ Have I once again been too trusting?”

  Ritchie denied any role in what happened next, but after the meeting in the forest, Bruno returned to Long Seridan just as police in military fatigues armed with automatic weapons converged nearby. “Before they arrive, they shoot their rifles into the air a few times to demonstrate power,” Bruno wrote. “They are looking for ‘Bruno.’ Disappointed that I’m not there, the second officer says: ‘At home, he gets a bunch of money for his book and it will make him rich, but you are the ones who are losing. He’s also going to infect you with malaria. The [police] who come after us will kill Bruno. You can forget about your forest reservation.’”

  The police were closing in. Leaving the outskirts of Long Seridan the morning after he’d met with Ritchie, Bruno wanted to bathe in the cool river, and he warily approached the banks of the Magoh. He spotted a longboat tied up to the bank, a boat that shouldn’t be there. Voices, male.

  “Oh, Lakei Ja’au! Oh, Lakei Ja’au!”

  Were these friends? He leaned out of the tangle of green. Damn! Just a few feet in front of him crept a policeman in military-style camouflage fatigues carrying an automatic weapon. Bruno looked behind him; two more were approaching from the rear. He pretended he was a rabbit, remained still, silent, his body pressed to the ground.

  They were too close. The policeman spotted him, yelled, and Bruno took off. His quiver banged open, arrows fell, Bruno stumbled to close it. Gunshots rang out and Bruno charged on, tossing aside the quiver and cumbersome blowpipe. He was fleeing on a narrow peninsula between two rivers. Trapped. Should he stop, surrender, allow them to catch him? No! The Magoh. The river was his only hope. He dumped his backpack and plunged into the silvery brown water. More shots, wild calls from the boat, which headed into the stream in pursuit. Bruno swam with everything he had. He could hear the motor, the boat coming closer, fast, but so was the opposite bank under his powerful strokes.

  He bounded out of the river, crashed along the bank’s thick tangles of half-inch-long thorns. The boat grounded for a split second on the riverbed, bounced off, and picked up speed, passing him, trying to cut him off. Bruno had no choice. He veered inland, into the thick jungle forest and straight up a mountain slope. After a few minutes he paused, listened, tried to clear his head. He heard no voices, no footfalls or crashing branches. His machete was gone, had slipped from its sheath in his flight. Bleeding scratches covered his arms and legs, a piece of flesh the size of a silver dollar torn from his foot.

  He considered his options. He could look for friends up by the Bare River, but that was a two-day hike and he had nothing—no knife to build shelter or mark his path, no blowpipe or arrows with which to hunt, no hammock. And there were still people near Long Seridan he wanted to see. He crept back down the slope. The police were gone. He swam the river again, climbed out on the other side, found a group of his Penan friends waiting, hidden in the jungle. A boy brought him drinking water in a leaf, handed him a machete, and as night fell, they left him. As he lay on a bed of leaves, the ants attacked. Exhausted, Bruno cut thin trees and built a small raised platform on which to sleep away from the voracious insects. Light. Flashlights bouncing in the night. The police? Did they see the smoke from his fire? Hear his chopping? He leapt up, slipped into the dark jungle. Finally, feeling safe and far enough away, he rolled up in a ball on the ground in thick underbrush. Sleep, he thought, just sleep. Tomorrow is another day.

  But biting flies and mosquitoes attacked; he rose again, moved, settled between the gigantic buttressed roots of a beripun tree and covered himself with leaves and pulled his head inside, he pictured, like the head of a snail in its shell. To no avail. Sleep did not come; the army of insects continued to bite him and crawl across his skin. And he thought, what if the lights bouncing through the forest were friends, not police? He got up, brushed off the leaves and ants, and slowly circled his way back toward his first camp. It was 3 a.m. Someone sat next to a dying fire. Bruno grabbed a stick, threw it. The figure moved and in the glowing embers Bruno recognized him. A Penan. “Seluang!” he called, stepping up to the fire.

  “Ahh, you scared me!”

  Bruno was bloody, filthy, hungry. But he’d escaped from the police for the second time. Was still free. He curled into a tight ball by the fire and, as he would later write, “lay down, with relief, in the arms of the mother.”

  The next morning, as a Penan delegation traveled down
the valley to Marudi, Bruno moved up into the mountains, accompanied by the “daring young hunter Seluang.” He had, once again, lost everything, including a three-thousand-word Penan dictionary he had been compiling and letters from Graf and Bokemeier, which used a contact address in Long Seridan—anything with a star on the address was meant for Bruno. “They fired all over the place, threatened everyone who helped me with prison, and myself with death,” he wrote Graf. He would now have to stay away from Long Seridan to protect not only himself, but his friends there, who could be arrested for helping him. And he would have to find a new way of communicating with the outside world. “My basic peaceful nature is put to a hard test. Should I make my hand into a fist? To go for someone’s throat can only be a last scream of hopelessness. I try to continue to follow the ideal ‘Die before killing.’ As Bruno built a hut and a fire rack and pondered it all, Seluang returned from the hunt empty-handed. “All we have to eat with us is a two-day ration of sago flour. Without any water container [necessary to make the sago edible] . . . we are going to go hungry.”

  Michael Palmieri on his riverboat shortly after acquiring one of his greatest finds, which today is on permanent display in the Dallas Museum of Art. (Michael Palmieri)

  Nine

  May 1979. Michael Palmieri walked along the docks of Samarinda, East Kalimantan, looking for a boat and crew to charter for a voyage up the Mahakam River. An old man surprised him with a question: would Michael like to buy his boat? The vessel in question wasn’t some small, open longboat, but a traditional klotok one hundred feet long, the kind that plied the river loaded with tons of supplies or dozens of passengers. The idea didn’t seem so crazy. He could roam the rivers at will, always have a comfortable and private space to sleep, and load up on treasure, big and small. Michael had the boat hauled and checked for dry rot; there was none. He hired a mechanic to look at the big diesel; the engine was sound. Michael forked over $9,000 in cash, found a trusted Indonesian friend to put his name on the title, and became the first, and perhaps last, American to own a traditional wooden Mahakam River freighter.