Two adventurers on very different missions to Borneo

Bruno Manser and Michael Palmieri went to Borneo, the third-largest island on the planet, seeking different things. Starting in the mid-1980s, Manser, a Swiss traveller, decided to live with the Penan, an indigenous tribe that eventually accepted him as one of its own. After several years with the Penan, Manser became an outspoken critic of deforestation on the island, and he disappeared in 2000, presumed dead. Palmieri, a Californian, eventually settled in Bali, and from there took a series of trips to Borneo seeking art and artefacts that he sold to museums and collectors.

In The Last Wild Men Of Borneo, Carl Hoffman, himself an adventurer-journalist, tells their stories. Like Manser and Palmieri, Hoffman has long harboured a fascination with Borneo. Its “forest and its people were the very definition of exotic in the Western mind”, he writes. Hoffman’s 2014 book, Savage Harvest, was an account of the disappearance of Nelson Rockefeller’s son Michael in New Guinea. Here, Hoffman discusses how that book led to this one, the way his view of his subjects changed over time and more.

When did you first get the idea to write this book?

To understand what happened to Michael Rockefeller, I had to go pretty deep in to Asmat, the place and the people, on the southwest coast of New Guinea, what is now Indonesian West Papua. At first I was going in there and I had a guide and a translator, and the translator had an assistant. And you had to have a boat guy, and the boat guy had an assistant. I had this whole entourage. I wasn’t really getting anywhere. Ultimately I had to abandon everybody and live in the village.

We see tribal people as blank slates on which to project our own needs and desires. Anthropologists want their PhDs from them. Journalists like me want their secrets. It’s an uneven relationship. We tend to fetishise and exoticise them, and the reality is that they’re complex, three-dimensional, nuanced people. In thinking about that, I was obsessed with the long Western fascination — in lots of places, including literature — with people who wanted to go in and become part of the tribe. I had that fantasy too, when I was there.

I had known about Bruno Manser for years, and I admired him. And then by chance, I met Michael Palmieri in Bali in the fall of 2014, and he told me this incredible story about how he had gone in and out of Borneo. And I realised these two men were avatars through which I could get at these questions that had been dogging me.

What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?

Both Bruno and Michael are the absolute opposite of 9-to-5 kind of people. When you think about growing older and getting stuck in these troughs of life from which you can’t escape, you don’t think of someone like Bruno or Michael. But both, in their extraordinary lives, got a little stuck on tracks from which they couldn’t escape.

Bruno’s story is tragic. What’s a guy to do who just wants to live with hunter-gatherers in the jungle when there are no more hunter-gatherers to live with? He couldn’t go back home and live in Switzerland. Michael is very American in so many ways. He lives in Bali and has satellite TV and loves football. But he can’t go home either, and he lives in this weird netherworld.

Michael isn’t super-reflective about his own life, and in some ways he’s the more successful of the two; I don’t mean monetarily, but just in navigating life. But he’s in his 70s, and I think he’s looking at life and wondering what he did and what he achieved, like we all do.

In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?

My sympathies changed as I wrote the book. Bruno is this Jesus-like figure. He moved people because he was so authentic, dedicated, single-minded and pure. But that purity was also a selfish purity. He alienated the people closest to him. When you’re pure and there’s no compromise, there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to turn if things don’t work. Despite all his incredible work — and it was selfless, the miles travelled and the hunger strikes — he failed in saving any of the forest and he ended up dead. As sad as the Penan situation is now, there are Penan who are becoming educated, who want more modern lives and yet retain an essence of their Penan-ness. But that was unacceptable to Bruno.

Michael was the buccaneer going out into the world for pure adventure, but he ended up mostly content. Who is the better person? In the end, I feel an incredible admiration for Bruno, but I also think he was kind of nuts. A main theme of the book is that the saint-like figure is maybe not that saintly; and the person who on the surface is more of a sinner isn’t really at all, and that life is complicated.

Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work?

My parents. My mother loved fiction and my father loved old-school journalism. They wanted to be writers, but they couldn’t. I mean, they could write a nice letter, but my dad tried a couple of times to write a book and he couldn’t finish anything. There was a seed planted for me: I got all that love of writing and literature from them, but I also wanted to leap beyond them and show them that it could be done.

Persuade someone to read

in 50 words or less.

It’s a wild ride. On the one hand, it’s this rip-roaring tale of arrests and smuggling, but it also explores stereotypes of how we view indigenous people. It leaves you with some heavy thoughts and questions that will shake up your world.

By Carl Hoffman William Morrow/HarperCollins 347pp