How an American Family Escaped From Pirates in the Amazon
PORTO DOS DIAS, Brazil—In Oct 2012, Adam and Emily Harteau, a California couple in their early on 30s, set out on an overland journeying to the southernmost tip of S America in their Volkswagen Westfalia camper van. With colorful travel photos, $16,301 raised on Kickstarter, and the hashtag #vanlife, they drew an army of social-media followers intrigued past their seemingly blissful existence.
"As nosotros abound older, time is punctuated by appointments and alarm clocks, and nosotros forget how to live at our own pace," Ms. Harteau wrote in a photograph essay published in the New York Times' travel section in August, near v years into what was initially planned as a yearlong trip. "We wanted to ho-hum down time again by raising a family on the road and use their questions nearly nature and life as our curriculum. Nosotros are world-schooling our kids."
Adam Harteau, correct, Emily Harteau, left, and their two daughters arriving at the international airdrome in Belém in Brazil'southward Para state on Nov. 2. The California family had been missing for days after pirates attacked their boat in the Amazon River delta area.
Photo: Marcelo Lelis/Associated PressThe Harteaus' adventure came to a harrowing end on November. 1, when a ferry captain plucked the couple and their 2 daughters, 6-year-one-time Colette and iii-year-old Sierra, from a river in Pará state in the Brazilian Amazon. They had spent the previous three days hiding in the jungle after pirates in a wooden canoe ambushed the barge carrying them upriver on their render journey to California.
"They were very, very scared, hungry and covered by insect bites," said Dinei dos Santos, the boat'south manager, who spotted them signaling for help.
The couple didn't respond to interview requests. The tale of their escape and subsequent rescue was pieced together from their statements to police and accounts from locals in the remote area where they were rescued.
The band of a half dozen armed pirates surrounded and took control of the vessel Andorinha, or Swallow, on Oct. 29, brought the vessel aground and confined the Harteaus and the crew in a tugboat. After several hours being held hostage and intermittently threatened at gunpoint, the family decided to brand a run for information technology.
In the center of the nighttime, equally the robbers were plain busy off-loading cargo from the hijacked barge, Mr. Harteau grabbed a survival kit and his surfboard from the Westfalia and slipped into the Jacaré Grande River with his family.
Using the surfboard as a float, the family unit of iv swam a mile and a one-half to the opposite bank of the river. From there they bushwhacked about 6 miles over the adjacent 3 days through the jungle racked by tearing thunderstorms and teeming with jaguars, anacondas, caimans and a host of venomous spiders and snakes. They hid from passersby, fearing they might accept ties to the pirates.
Exhausted and hungry on their fourth day in the wild, Mr. Harteau finally pushed his family on the surfboard toward Mr. dos Santos'south ferry. He was filling out his ship'south log in the cabin as the sun set when he heard shouts and saw easily waving aimlessly from the choppy waters of the river.
A school boat at Porto dos Dias hamlet, where the barge went after the pirates left.
Photo: Paulo Trevisani/The Wall Street JournalNews that the Americans were missing had surfaced the day before, when the U.S. Embassy notified family members in California. Ms. Harteau'south father, Warren Brandle, a family unit md in the Sacramento surface area, read vastly conflicting accounts of their fate on Brazilian websites, including reports that the family had been kidnapped and that they had jumped into the river. Calculation to the mystery was the fact that the Andorinha's crew members were aboard the clomp when the police arrived, by which time the pirates had absconded.
"I thought they were dead," said Ieda Dias, a 56-twelvemonth-old nurse in the nearby hamlet of Porto dos Dias, where she kickoff got word of the missing family. "Nobody swims in these waters."
But when Mr. dos Santos saw the two children on top of a surfboard and their parents in the water, he said he instantly knew information technology was the Americans he had heard nearly in the news.
"They climbed onboard and rushed to a corner," the 30-year-old ferryman said. "I think they only wanted to experience safe."
Coiffure members and other passengers on Mr. dos Santos'south ferry gave the family unit wearing apparel to supervene upon their tattered garments and fed them a typical Brazilian meal of rice, beans and beef.
The Harteaus were taken to the river town of Breves, where they spent nearly 24 hours in a local hospital. Mr. Harteau was treated for a mild allergic reaction; Ms. Harteau had sunstroke and a leg injury from a previous accident; and their daughters were treated for fever, dehydration, insect bites and sunstroke.
In an Instagram post on Sunday, the Harteaus posed with their olive-green surfboard and Brazilian regime in front of a single-propeller plane.
"We couldn't be more ecstatic to say that WE ARE ALIVE," the family declared to 132,000 followers. "Nosotros are so grateful for all of your well wishes in these hard times and want to relay our love for Brazil, which remains fifty-fifty after the hell nosotros survived."
Government say piracy and drug trafficking are rampant in the Amazon, a woods the size of Western Europe where roads are nearly nonexistent and rivers provide the just ways of transportation for people and cargo. In Pará land lone, constabulary registered 641 pirate attacks from 2011 through last month, with many others thought to have never been reported.
The Harteaus' travail was the second case in piddling more than a month of foreign tourists beingness ambushed by pirates in the wild reaches of the Brazilian Amazon, highlighting what many say is an intractable threat in a region where human settlements are few and far between and law enforcement scarcer notwithstanding.
Police say these footprints were left by the Harteaus as they wandered into the forest by the Cumuru River.
Photo: Para State PoliceIn September, police said 43-year-one-time Emma Kelty, a British teacher, was murdered past a gang known as Water Rats while kayaking on the Solimões River, in neighboring Amazonas state.
"The expanse is huge, and we don't have resource to monitor information technology all," said Rilmar Firmino, police master in Pará, a country twice the size of Texas, where the Harteaus were found. "You'll travel the whole day and see no police force at all."
Gunkhole operators, often mom-and-pop businesses struggling to stay afloat, are ill-equipped to stave off the marauders. "If I hire security guards, I tin't make money," said Altair Ferreira da Silva, the Andorinha's possessor.
Further complicating matters, constabulary say pirates are sometimes abetted by riverside communities, where residents live in flimsy wooden houses on stilts, have petty income and are happy to buy cut-rate trade. Nigh of the cargo that was stolen from the Andorinha comprised boxes of apparel and manioc flour, a local staple. Local police force said on Tuesday that one suspect had been arrested.
Raimundo Luiz, a 37-twelvemonth-old grocery trader in the village of Curumu, well-nigh the port where the pirates unloaded their booty, expressed a feeling of helplessness.
"If someone comes here and I know he's a pirate, what tin I exercise?" he said equally his six-twelvemonth-old granddaughter played on his kitchen floor. "There are no police here to protect the states."
Children playing in a canoe in Porto dos Dias, a river village in the Amazon wood where the Andorinha barge'south coiffure went to call the police after being pillaged by pirates, reporting the American family unit's disappearance.
Photo: Paulo Trevisani/The Wall Street JournalWrite to Paulo Trevisani at paulo.trevisani@wsj.com and Paul Kiernan at paul.kiernan@wsj.com
Corrections & Amplifications
The name of the hijacked clomp, Andorinha, translates as Swallow. An before version of this article incorrectly gave the translation as Sparrow. (November. nine, 2017)
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Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-an-american-family-escaped-from-amazon-pirates-1510223400
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