The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes

488 Pages·2011·5.96 MB·English

by  Scott Wallace

Copyright © 2011 by Scott Wallace All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the
Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wallace Scott.
The unconquered : in search of the Amazon’s last uncontacted tribes / Scott Wallace.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Indians of South America—Amazon River Region—Social life and customs. 2. Wallace, Scott—
Travel—Amazon River Region. 3. Amazon River Region—Description and
travel. I. Title.
F2519.1.A6W35 2011
981′.1—dc22
2011006717
eISBN: 978-0-30746298-5
Photograph insert © 2011 by Scott Wallace unless otherwise noted.
Photograph on this page © 2011 by Scott Wallace
Jacket design by Jennifer O’Connor
Jacket photograph by Arctic-Images/Workbook Stock/Getty Images
v3.1
For Mackenzie, Aaron, and Ian,
and my parents,
Robert and Flora Wallace,
who would have been proud
to hold this in their hands
Poor Aruá, he had no way of knowing that the whites were not a tribe like
ours or like others that occupy a single riverbank, or two at most. He didn’t
know that they were the first of a whole world of people, an inexhaustible
anthill, occupying the entire earth, insatiably swarming over the globe. In the
following years, more and more started arriving. They continue to surround
us to this day. They have already taken possession of the side of sunrise;
someday they will take the forests of the sunset. Then we will be reduced to
an islet in a sea of whiteness.
—From Maíra by Darcy Ribeiro,
translated by E. H. Goodland and Thomas Colchie
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: Deep In, Far Back
Map
PART I: INTO THE AMAZON
1. A Rumor of Savages
2. Scramble to the Amazon
3. Through the Chokepoint
4. At a Bend in the River
5. A Topography of Strife
6. White River, Black Night
7. A Government of One
8. Between Two Worlds
9. The Point of No Return
PART II: IN THE LAND OF THE ARROW PEOPLE
10. A Forest Dark
11. The Headwaters
12. Lessons in Biology
13. A Guerrilla Army
14. In the Footsteps of Rondon
15. The Meaning of Contact
16. Our Guns, Our Germs, and Our Steel
17. The Day of the Maloca
Photo Insert
PART III: THE IMPERATIVE TO SURVIVE
18. Reprovisioned
19. Jungle Shipyards
20. The Tipping Point
21. East with the River
22. Borderlands
23. Rendezvous
24. The Old Man and the River
25. The Gold Dredge
26. Civilization and Our Discontents
27. Meet the Head-Bashers
28. The Overflight
Epilogue
Postscript
Acknowledgments
Notes
Select Glossary and Pronunciation Guide
Bibliography
Prologue
Deep In, Far Back
in the morning, footprints in the soggy mud,
W E FOUND FRESH TRACKS
adult size 8 or 9, and no more than a few hours old. They
pointed in the same direction our column was headed, deep
into the farthest reaches of the Amazon jungle.
We walked single file through dense foliage and lianas thick as
anacondas that dangled 150 feet from the treetops to the jungle floor.
Monkeys hooted and chattered somewhere above us, their calls
punctuated by the four-note cry of a screaming piha bird in the canopy. I
followed close on the heels of Sydney Possuelo, the expedition leader.
“We’re probably the only ones who have ever walked here—us and the
Indians,” he said. By Indians, he meant not the twenty men from three
different tribes who formed the core of our expeditionary force, but
rather the mysterious flecheiros, the People of the Arrow. Índios bravos.
Wild Indians.
A day earlier our scouts had glimpsed a pair of naked Indians near the
river, called out to them, then watched as they fled across a makeshift
bridge and vanished into the forest. Now, the most visible evidence of
the panic that must have been spreading through their realm lay right
here before us—not so much in the footprints themselves as in the long
spaces between them, which suggested the full stride of a runner bearing
urgent news.
There was no way to know exactly how the tribe would react to our
presence. They had little reason to view us as anything other than a
hostile, invasive army. And not unreasonably, for despite our best
intentions, any direct contact with the Arrow People could be disastrous.
The tribe had no immunity to the germs we carried. We were not doctors
and carried few medicines. We, too, were in danger; there was little
chance for escape in the walled-in jungle, if their curare-tipped arrows
began to fly.
Yet, who among us—yes, even the purist Possuelo—didn’t secretly
hope for a “first contact”: that moment on the cutting edge of history
when complete and utter strangers from separate universes stand face-to-
face, look one another in the eye, and recognize their common
humanity? That was how I liked to imagine it—smiles, handshakes, an
exchange of gifts—a rewriting of the epochal encounters at Roanoke or
Tenochtitlán. An experience for all time, a tale to recount to wide-eyed
children and grandchildren: Come on, Grandpa, tell us about the time you
met the wild Indians in the jungle! We’d bedazzle the world with images of
the Stone Age savages, appear on the Today show, become celebrity
journalists. Maybe I’d get a book contract.
Possuelo stopped dead in his tracks. A freshly hacked sapling, dangling
by a shred of bark, hung across the path before us. The makeshift gate
couldn’t have halted a toddler, much less our contingent of nearly three
dozen well-armed men. Yet, it bore a message—and a warning—that
Possuelo instantly recognized and respected. “This is universal language
in the jungle,” he whispered. “It means: ‘Stay out. Go no farther.’ ”
We were getting close to their village. Any encounter would mean an
abrupt and definitive end to a way of life thousands of years old, which
is exactly what we were there to prevent.
We had located the inner sanctum of the Arrow People. Now it was
time to back off, if it wasn’t already too late.