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

by Scott Wallace

Overview

The extraordinary true story of a journey into the deepest recesses of the Amazon to track one of the planet's last uncontacted indigenous tribes.
 
Even today there remain tribes in the far reaches of the Amazon rainforest that have avoided contact with modern civilization. Deliberately hiding from the outside world, they are the last survivors of an ancient culture that predates the arrival of Columbus in the New World. In this gripping first-person account of adventure and survival, author Scott Wallace chronicles an expedition into the Amazon’s uncharted depths, discovering the rainforest’s secrets while moving ever closer to a possible encounter with one such tribe—the mysterious flecheiros, or “People of the Arrow,” seldom-glimpsed warriors known to repulse all intruders with showers of deadly arrows. On assignment for National Geographic, Wallace joins Brazilian explorer Sydney Possuelo at the head of a thirty-four-man team that ventures deep into the unknown in search of the tribe. Possuelo’s mission is to protect the Arrow People. But the information he needs to do so can only be gleaned by entering a world of permanent twilight beneath the forest canopy.

Danger lurks at every step as the expedition seeks out the Arrow People even while trying to avoid them. Along the way, Wallace uncovers clues as to who the Arrow People might be, how they have managed to endure as one of the last unconquered tribes, and why so much about them must remain shrouded in mystery if they are to survive. Laced with lessons from anthropology and the Amazon’s own convulsed history, and boasting a Conradian cast of unforgettable characters—all driven by a passion to preserve the wild, but also wracked by fear, suspicion, and the desperate need to make it home alive—The Unconquered reveals this critical battleground in the fight to save the planet as it has rarely been seen, wrapped in a page-turning tale of adventure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307462978
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/24/2012
Pages:	528
Sales rank:	275,459
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

SCOTT WALLACE is a journalist whose assignments have taken him from the Himalayas and the streets of Baghdad to the Alaskan Arctic and the Amazon. A former correspondent for the Guardian and Newsweek, he has written for National Geographic, National Geographic Adventure, and Harper’s. His photography has appeared in Smithsonian, Outside, and Sports Afield. His television credits include CBS, CNN, and National Geographic Channel.

Interviews

In an age when there is little left in the world that can be said to be still "virgin," contemporary travel literature has come to seem increasingly derivative, even farcical. The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes is a rare exception, an original that works on several levels. Scott Wallace has sensitively documented the immensity, history, the terror, and the beauty of one of the world's last true wildernesses and the people who live within it. This is a wonderful book: deeply moving, riveting by turns, laced with finely wrought passages.

On the one hand, The Unconquered is the account of a nightmarish three-month expedition into the Amazon jungle in 2002 led by the irascible Brazilian wilderness explorer Sydney Possuelo, a legendary defender of the region's last uncontacted Indians. Rife through with moments of danger, loneliness, and hunger, as well as the testosterone-fuelled dramas that seem peculiar to groups of men undergoing hard times together, The Unconquered makes a spellbinding tale of real-life high-adventure.

This is also the account of an equally fascinating inward journey taken by its author, the American journalist Scott Wallace, who originally joined Possuelo on his trek in order to write about his journey for National Geographic. In this book, Wallace, who renders memorable portraits of his fellow expeditionaries (the cook, Mauro, haunted by nightmares about monkeys who castrate him; Soldado the backwoods scout, who refuses to return home and see his aging mother) is also brutally honest about himself. Recently divorced, Wallace sets off into the jungle just shy of his forty-eighth birthday; he is out-of-shape, guilt-ridden for not having said goodbye to his three young sons, and fretful about the implications of a prolonged separation with his new girlfriend.

The main character of The Unconquered, however, is Sydney Possuelo, a larger-than-life figure who emerges as a kind of Indian Jones- meets latter-day Bartolome de las Casas. Some years before Wallace met him, Possuelo, Brazil's best-known sertanista, or "agent of contact" with the Amazon's isolated indigenous people, had undergone a crisis of conscience about the destruction wrought by his life's work. He had become instead the main proponent of a no-contact policy for the Amazon's remaining "uncontacted" tribes. He had lobbied for and secured the designation of a vast Maine-sized tract of Amazonian wilderness called the Javari Valley Indigenous Land, to be closed off to all outsiders in perpetuity. It was the refuge of several uncontacted tribes hostile to outsiders, including the implacable flecheiros, the Arrow People, whose territory Possuelo planned to explore.

The motives behind Possuelo's 2002 expedition seemed nonetheless obscure, even contradictory. As Possuelo explained it to Wallace, he wished to gather vital information about the flecheiros and to ascertain their wellbeing, but could only do so by penetrating their sanctuary on foot and by dugout canoe with a band of armed men, while at the same time seeking to avoid contact with them. During the journey itself, the inescapable Catch-22 of Possuelo's logic became more and more apparent until the moment, retold dramatically by Wallace, when the expeditionaries blundered inevitably through a flecheiro settlement, spreading panic as they went.

In the end, The Unconquered is the unforgettable story of a troubled journey through a doomed landscape, its characters—the outsiders and the Indians—locked together in an ever-tightening fatal embrace by their respective needs and compulsions.

At one point in the book, Possuelo points to a path they have slashed out of the jungle with their machetes and tells Wallace: "Five years from now, you will never know we were here." But Wallace is unconvinced, and notes ruefully: "It was doubtful the Arrow People would forget us so easily."

—Jon Lee Anderson Guest Review: The Unconquered

Jon Lee Anderson is a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine. His books include: "Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life," "The Fall of Baghdad," and "The Lion's Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan." Anderson began his reporting career in 1979, in Peru. In 2009, he won an Overseas Press Club Award for his reporting on Rio de Janeiro's gangland.

Editorial Reviews

"Wallace's foreboding is matched by his sense of wonder." – New York Times Book Review

"Astonishing." – The London Sunday Times

"A rousing adventure tale." – Wall Street Journal

"Wallace's gripping account takes us upriver to a place very few outsiders have ever seen." – The Boston Globe

"What a great book! An adventure story worthy of Joseph Conrad or Peter Matthiessen." – The Oregonian

“Rousing.” – TIME
 
"Startlingly novelistic." – Salon.com

“It’s easy to picture The Unconquered being made into a movie.” – Washington Post Express
 
"Masterful...positively cinematic." – Yale Alumni Magazine

 “An eye-opening read…one of the most gripping pieces of non-fiction around…. You’ll swear you are reading a thriller novel.” – Guernica
 
“Dream assignment or nightmare? An editor from National Geographic asked journalist Scott Wallace to join an expedition into the deepest wilds of the Amazon jungle to find the mysterious ‘People of the Arrow.' While the experience was pretty much a nightmare, it’s a blessing for readers of Wallace's fascinating book.” — Associated Press
 
“Echoing Amazonia’s earliest European explorers, Wallace crafts a tale that is part gripping adventure story, part window into the unexpected complexities of a developing country where uncontacted tribes stand between a resource-hungry economy and an area abounding in natural wealth.” – Indian Country Today
 
“Rife with poachers, drug smugglers, illegal gold miners and violent tribes already acquainted with the dangers of modern life…Wallace describes the trek in vivid, if unsettling, terms.” – Maclean’s
 
“Wallace joins the tribe of jungle-besotted literary types led by Redmond O'Hanlon and David Grann and presents a credibly incredible tale about his voyage past the edge of modernity.” – Huffington Post
 
"A gripping tale of adventure." – Washingtonian

“While it’s hard to imagine that ‘stone-age’ tribes still persist in a world of cell phones, satellites and social media, it’s even harder to understand how difficult it is to police these isolated regions, to keep them free of outsiders who could endanger a way of life that has nearly disappeared…Wallace’s narrative is apt and penetrating.” – SEJournal

From the Publisher

National Geographic writer Wallace recounts his grueling odyssey into the remotest stretches of the Amazon Basin as he tracks down the ”Arrow People,” one of the last “uncontacted” tribes left in the world. Wallace’s 34-member expedition was led by Sydney Possuelo, a legendary sertanista (a Brazilian hybrid of woodsman, explorer, and anthropologist). On the three-month trek by riverboat, canoe, and foot, the expedition was threatened by pumas, starvation, disease, hostile natives, and tensions that develop between men in close quarters. The mercurial Possuelo’s mission seems paradoxical—he wants to clearly identify the “Arrow People,” but only so that in the future they will be left completely alone. The book is overlong, and in the early chapters, Wallace tends to repeat grand pronouncements about culture, history, and the environment. His best writing focuses on the details and daily grind of the expedition and, as the book progresses, on the simple struggle for survival. Wallace nicely captures the hostility and paranoia that threaten to tear the group apart. He’s equally unsparing of his own insecurity and weakness, and the contrast between the threatened Amazon and the exhausted men brings the region’s harsh beauties to life. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Writer and photographer Wallace had a dilemma: Should he spend the summer reconnecting with his three sons from an earlier marriage and foster a budding romance or head off to the Amazon for weeks of deprivation and hardship, tracking índios bravos (wild Indians)? He chose the latter and here relates his expedition. Traveling under the auspices of National Geographic, he and one other non-Brazilian in the group want to see tribes that have never been contacted, but the leader of the expedition, the head of Brazil's National Indian Foundation's Department of Isolated Indians, does not want this. He only wants to document the extent of their settlements and movement, to prove that the country's new policy of leaving the uncontacted Indians alone is working. Therein lies the tension. Will they see the people they seek? Will the trekkers mutiny? And who's hoarding the packets of Kool-Aid? VERDICT The book is slow at first (and perhaps could have been whittled down) but picks up. One gets a real sense of the raw jungle, Indian/white dynamics, and Wallace's own personal struggles. This compelling narrative is recommended for adventure travelers and those interested in Native American ethnography and rights.—Lee Arnold, Historical Soc. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Library Journal

A photographer, journalist and first-time author joins a celebrated Brazilian Indian rights activist on an expedition in search of an isolated Amazon tribe.

Brazil's dense forests are known to shelter some 400,000 Indians from 270 tribes. But there are reportedly many more indigenous people who have not made contact with modern civilization. As head of Brazil's Department of Isolated Indians, wilderness scout Sydney Possuelo, 62, had already confirmed the existence of 17 uncontacted tribes by 2002, when the author was assigned byNational Geographicto cover Possuelo's attempt to find yet another group said to be living deep in the Amazon: theflecheiros, or "People of the Arrow." Wallace's book is a detailed, overlong account of the three-month land-and-water journey, in which Possuelo and his 34 men sought facts about the Arrow People's existence—but deliberately made no contact with the tribe. The "no-contact" policy, set by Possuelo, was intended to protect wild Indians from the diseases of white men. Unfortunately, it robs readers of the traditional payoff of a journey of discovery. Even the author yearned for the knowledge that contact would bring. But Possuelo's goal was to quietly observe that the Arrow People are thriving, then leave, preserving the tribe's isolation. "The best thing we can do is to stay out of their lives," he says. Only later, on a flight retracing the expedition's route, did Wallace glimpse members of the tribe, scurrying about like ants, then "staring up at us in a trance." Wallace provides a good sense of deep-jungle travel and dining (piranha stew, boiled monkey, etc.), and portrays Possuelo as a great explorer dedicated to saving Brazil's Indians. He notes that Possuelo was later fired after criticizing his boss's remark that Indians were claiming too much land. By then, Possuelo had protected 365,000 square miles of indigenous lands from logging, mining and other development.

A well-reported but somewhat disappointing adventure story.

Kirkus Reviews