The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  By 1869, it was believed that only two Aboriginal Tasmanians, a man named William Lanne, known as King Billy, and a woman named Truganini, survived. Scientists suddenly became obsessed with these “last” individuals. After Lanne died, a Hobart physician named William Crowther stole his skull and replaced it with one that he took from a white body. Lanne’s feet and hands were also removed; the historian Lyndall Ryan contends that other parts of his body, as well as a tobacco pouch made from his skin, ended up in the possession of other Hobart residents. There was a public outcry at the “unseemly” acts, but Crowther was soon elected to the legislature and later served as Tasmania’s premier.

  In 1871, two years after Lanne’s death, the curator of the Australian Museum, in Sydney, wrote to his counterparts in Tasmania with a warning: “Let us therefore advise our friends to gather their specimens in time, or it may come to pass when the last Thylacine dies the scientific men across Bass’s Straits will contest as fiercely for its body as they did for that last aboriginal man not long ago.” Truganini, who died in 1876, professed her fear of a similar fate. Thanks to a guard who kept watch over her body, she was successfully buried. Eventually, however, her bones were exhumed and displayed at the Tasmanian Museum, along with taxidermied thylacines.

  In fact, Lanne and Truganini were not the last Aboriginal Tasmanians. Descendants of the island’s first people lived on, mostly on the islands of the northern coast, where Aboriginal women had had children with white sealers; today, though the numbers are contested, some 23,000 people in Tasmania identify as Aboriginal. For decades, they had to fight against the widespread belief that they no longer existed. “It is still much easier for white Tasmanians to regard Tasmanian Aborigines as a dead people rather than confront the problems of an existing community of Aborigines who are victims of a conscious policy of genocide,” Ryan has written. In 2016, the Tasmanian government, by constitutional amendment, recognized Aboriginal Tasmanians as the original owners of the island and its waters. As of this writing, the Encyclopaedia Britannica defines them as extinct.

  The politics and the emotions may have changed, but the thylacine still serves as a proxy for other debates. In March, in the tiny town of Pipers Brook, a group of Tasmanian landowners gathered over tea and quartered sandwiches to learn about how to support native animals on their properties. During the past 200 years, more mammals have gone extinct in Australia than anywhere else in the world; Tasmania, once connected to the continent by a land bridge, has served as a last refuge for animals that are already extinct or endangered on the mainland. In Pipers Brook, the group was shown a picture of a thylacine, accompanied by an acknowledgment of grim responsibility. “A lot of what we do has the soul of the thylacine behind it,” David Pemberton, the program manager of the state’s Save the Tasmanian Devil Program, said. The devil, Tasmania’s other iconic species, is suffering from a contagious and fatal facial cancer that essentially clones itself when the devils bite one another’s faces. Pemberton has calculated that the combined weight of the tumors, most of which are genetically a single organism, now exceeds that of a blue whale.

  As the group toured an enclosure for a devil-breeding program, a man named John W. Harders told me that the possibility of the thylacine’s survival had become a matter of pure belief, like whether there is life after death. Other participants said that they couldn’t help but feel some optimism, despite their rational doubt. “There’s so much despair in terms of conservation these days,” a botanist named Nicky Meeson said. “It would provide that little bit of hope that nature is resilient, that it could come back.”

  But some people erupted in frustration at the mention of the tiger. “We killed them off a hundred years ago and now, belatedly, we’re proud of the thylacine!” Anna Povey, who works in land conservation, nearly shouted. She wanted to know why the government fetishizes the tiger’s image when other animals, such as the eastern quoll—cute, fluffy, definitely alive, and definitely endangered—could still make use of the attention. I couldn’t help thinking of all the purported thylacine videos that are dismissed as “just” a quoll. “It does piss us off!” Povey said. “It’s about time to appreciate the things we have, Australia, my God! We still treat this place as if it was the time of the thylacines—as if it was a frontier and we can carry on taking over.”

  In the 1970s, Bob Brown, later a leader of the Australian Greens, a political party, spent two years as a member of a thylacine search team. He told me that although he’d like to think the fascination with thylacines is motivated by remorse and a desire for restitution, people’s guilt doesn’t seem to be reflected in the policies that they actually support. Logging and mining are major industries in Tasmania, and land clearing is rampant; even the forest where Naarding saw his tiger is gone. Throughout Australia, the dire extinction rate is expected to worsen. It is a problem of the human psyche, Brown said, that we seem to get interested in animals only as they slide toward oblivion.

  While living Aboriginal Tasmanians were conveniently forgotten, the thylacine underwent an opposite, if equally opportune, transformation. To people convinced of its survival, the animal once derided as clumsy and primitive became almost supernaturally elusive, with heightened senses that allow it to avoid detection. “This is one hell of an animal,” Col Bailey, who is writing his fourth book about the thylacine, and claims to have seen one in 1995, told me. He has a simple explanation for why the tiger hasn’t been found: “Because it doesn’t want to be.”

  Last year, the thylacine’s genome was successfully sequenced from a tiny, wrinkled joey, preserved in alcohol for decades. It was a breakthrough in a long-standing project to revive the species through cloning, an ecological do-over that has been suggested for species from the white rhino to the woolly mammoth. Some critics consider cloning another act of denial in a long line of them—denying even the finality of extinction.

  Of all the disagreements among tiger seekers, the most contentious is this: Do they, could they possibly, still live on the Australian mainland? Although thylacines are now synonymous with Tasmania, they lived as far north as New Guinea, and were once found all across Australia. Carbon dating suggests that they have been extinct on the mainland for around 3,000 years. That would be a very long time for a large animal to live without leaving definitive traces of its existence. And yet some Aboriginal stories place the tiger closer to the present, and mainland believers contend that there have been many more sightings—by one count, around 5,000—reported on the mainland than in Tasmania.

  Thylacine lore in western Australia is so extensive that the animal has its own local name, the Nannup tiger. A point of particular debate is the age of a thylacine carcass found in a cave on the Nullarbor Plain in 1966, so fresh that it still had an intact tongue, eyeball, and striped fur. Carbon dating indicated that it was in the cave for perhaps 4,000 years, essentially mummified by the dry air, but believers argue that the dating was faulty and the animal was only recently dead.

  To many Tasmanian enthusiasts, mainland sightings are a frustrating embarrassment that threatens to undermine their credibility; they can be as scathing about mainland theorists as total nonbelievers are about them. “Every time a witness on the mainland says, ‘I found a tiger!’ it looks like they filmed it with a potato and it’s a fox or a dog,” Mike Williams, the panther researcher, told me. He pointed out that sarcoptic mange, a skin disease caused by infected mite bites, is widespread in Australian animals, and can make tails look stiff and fur look stripy.

  Last year, researchers at James Cook University, in Queensland, announced that they would begin looking for the thylacine in a remote tropical region on Cape York Peninsula and elsewhere in Far North Queensland, at the northeastern tip of Australia, about as far from Tasmania as you can get and still be in the country. The search, using 580 cameras capable of taking 20,000 photos each, was prompted by sightings from two reputable observers, an experienced outdoorsman and a former park ranger, both of whom believed that they had spotted t
he animal in the 1980s but had, in the intervening years, been too embarrassed to tell anyone. “It’s important for scientists to have an open mind,” Sandra Abell, the lead researcher at JCU, told me as the hunt was beginning. “Anything’s possible.”

  In Adelaide, I met up with Neil Waters, a professional horticulturist, who, on Facebook, started the Thylacine Awareness Group, for believers in mainland tigers. Waters, who was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the phrase MAY THE STRIPES BE WITH YOU, told me that he has “a bit more faith in the human condition” than to think that so many people are all deluded or lying. “Narrow-minded approach to life, I call it,” he said. He told me that he also felt a certain ecological responsibility, because his ancestors “were the first white trash to get off a ship, so we’ve been destroying this place for a long time.” His family had been woodcutters, and, for him, becoming a horticulturist was a kind of karmic reparation.

  In the dry hills outside the city, we stopped in an area called, appropriately or not, Humbug Scrub, and then picked up Mark Taylor, a musician and a thylacine enthusiast who lived nearby. A few months earlier, Taylor said, his son-in-law and grandson had seen what they described as a dog that hopped like a kangaroo, and Taylor was yearning for a sighting of his own. “It’s becoming one of the bigger things in my life,” he said. Any time we were near dense brush, he would get animated, saying, “There could be a thylacine in there right now and we’d never know!” Once, just as he said this, there was movement on a distant hillside and he jumped, only to realize that it was a group of kangaroos. The world felt overripe with possibility.

  Four weeks earlier, Waters had left a road-killed kangaroo next to a camera in a place where he had found a lot of mysterious scat containing bones. “Shitloads of shit!” he exulted. Now he and Taylor were going to find out what glimpses of the forest’s private history the camera had recorded. As they walked, Taylor stopped to gather scat samples for a collection that he keeps in his bait freezer for DNA analysis. “My missus hates it,” he said.

  The kangaroo was gone, except for some rank fur and a bit of backbone. Waters retrieved the camera from the tree to which he’d strapped it. Taylor was bouncing again. “This is when we hope,” he said. Back at the car, we crouched by the open trunk as Waters removed the memory card and inserted it into a laptop. We watched in beautiful clarity as a fox, and then a goshawk, and then a kookaburra fed on the slowly deflating body of the kangaroo. Waters laughed and cursed, but it was clear that no amount of disappointment would dampen his belief. “It’s a fucking big country,” he said. “There’s a lot of needles in that haystack.”

  I thought of something Bill Flowers, of TRU, told me about the first time he set up camera traps in a Tasmanian reserve called Savage River. In terms of the island, where about half the land is protected, the reserve is relatively small. But the forested hills stretched as far as he could see. He began to consider the island not as it appears on maps—small, contained, all explored and charted—but as it would appear to an animal the size of a Labrador, looking for a place to hide. Suddenly, Tasmania seemed big indeed. “You go out and have a look and you start going from skeptic to agnostic very quickly,” he said. I heard something similar from many searchers. “It’s all very well and good to look at Google Earth and say, la la la, it’s not possible for something to be not seen,” Chris Tangey, who interviewed 200 witnesses as part of his own search, in the late 1970s, said. “But then you go to those places . . .” He trailed off, sounding wistful.

  For some people, contemplating the possibility of the thylacine’s survival seems to make the world feel bigger and wilder and more unpredictable, and humans smaller and less significant. On a planet reeling from the alarming consequences of human activity, it’s comforting to think that our mistakes may not be final, that nature is not wholly stripped of its capacity for surprise. “It puts us in our place a little bit,” a mainland searcher named David Dickinson told me. “We’re not all-knowing.”

  After dodos disappeared from Mauritius, in the seventeenth century, naturalists came to believe that the bird had only been a legend. There were drawings and records, sure, but where had it suddenly gone? Extinction was a new and much-derided idea. Even Thomas Jefferson refused to believe in it for many years—how could the perfection of nature, of creation, allow such a thing? The evidence of departed species mounted until it was undeniable—dinosaur and mastodon bones were pretty difficult to account for—but it took longer to understand that humans, through their own actions, might be able to overwhelm the abundance of nature and wipe out whole species. That’s part of why the Tasmanian tiger became famous in the first place. By the time it disappeared—right on the heels of passenger pigeons, which not long before had blocked out the sun with the immensity of their flocks—we were just beginning to confront the terrible magnitude of our destructive power.

  We’re still just beginning.

  SAKI KNAFO

  Keepers of the Jungle

  from Travel + Leisure

  Long ago, there lived an ape. The ape had babies, and those babies grew up and had babies of their own, and over time their descendants drifted apart to the point that they could no longer be considered one type of ape, but five. All were highly intelligent, but one was smarter than the rest. With its gift of speech, this supersmart ape gave the others names: “gorilla,” “chimpanzee,” “bonobo,” and “orangutan.”

  This intelligence, however, came at a cost. Though this talking ape was capable of creating wonders, it was also capable of destroying them. Among the wonders it destroyed were many of the forests in which the other apes lived. One such forest is on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, where members of a unique species of orangutan are clinging to what little remains of their native habitat. Last summer, feeling less confident than usual in the merits of my own species, I went to Sumatra myself, hoping to meet one of these survivors. My destination was the Leuser Ecosystem, a sprawl of jungle in the north of Sumatra, the westernmost of Indonesia’s more than 16,000 islands. Orangutans once lived throughout Southeast Asia, but today the only two surviving species are confined to the scattered remnants of rain forest on Sumatra and nearby Borneo. The Sumatran orangutans, almost all of the remaining 7,000 of them, live in the Leuser—a nominally protected stronghold of biological diversity that is growing smaller and less biologically diverse each year. Logging, hunting, and the illegal pet trade have all played a part in the orangutan’s demise, but the main culprit is the global demand for palm oil, a commodity often produced on deforested land.

  Conservationists warn that the Sumatran orangutan could become the first great ape to reach extinction, with the Borneo species following close behind. Meanwhile, the slash-and-burn conversion of their habitat into palm plantations is helping fill the earth’s atmosphere with excess carbon, threatening the existence of us all. Travelers who don’t want to spend their vacations contemplating such truths may want to give Sumatra a miss. Bali is nice, I hear. But Bali doesn’t have wild orangutans. Or tigers. Or flowers the size of truck tires. Or the vanishingly rare Sumatran rhino. Although Sumatra’s tourism infrastructure is improving, this vast, wild, jungle-clad island remains much less developed than a place like Bali. For a certain kind of traveler, that’s precisely why it’s such an exciting place to go.

  On my way to the Leuser I spent a night in Medan, the capital of North Sumatra province, before heading to the jungle the next day. Riding out of town, I found it hard to imagine that in less time than it takes to drive from New York City to Boston, I would arrive at the edge of one of the richest forests in Asia. Medan was a crush of people and motorbikes and trucks and endless rows of street stalls filling economic niches I didn’t know existed. We passed a stall selling only kitchen clocks, another selling only birdcages, and a purse vendor who, lacking a stall, had hung her wares from the sprawling limbs of a tree, prompting my travel companion, Stefan Ruiz, who took the photographs for this story, to make one of his trademark observations: “It’s literall
y a money tree.”

  Finally the traffic thinned and the city faded, and we were rumbling through the palm plantations, acres and acres of them, the tall, spare trees stretching as far as we could see in every direction, in rows as straight as supermarket aisles. Palm oil is the most commonly used vegetable oil in the world, found in snacks, soaps, cosmetics, and a good number of the other products on our shelves, and Indonesia produces more of it than any other country, accounting for about a third of the world’s supply. If there is a money tree in Indonesia, it is the oil palm.

  As we neared the forest, I asked our driver, Adi, who didn’t speak much English, if he had seen a lot of wildlife over the years. He started talking excitedly about something called a “mina,” which I assumed was a kind of monkey, or maybe a local word for orangutan. In fact, Mina was the name given by researchers to one particularly notorious orangutan. As a local would later put it, “She had mental problems.” There were rumors that Mina had bitten tourists. It turned out she had a troubled past: captured as a baby, she’d spent years in a cage. Eventually, she was rescued and brought to a rehabilitation center for orangutans in Bukit Lawang, a village on the outskirts of the Leuser rain forest. But by then, her time with humans had taken its toll.

  The Bohorok Rehabilitation Center closed in the ’90s, but several of the orangutans that passed through it still live in the part of the jungle closest to the village, and so do their progeny, who tend to take after them. Considered “semi-wild,” they generally aren’t afraid of people, and some of the guides capitalize on this fearlessness, luring them closer to tourists with fried rice.