INTO THE AMAZON: The Life of Cândido Rondon, Trailblazing Explorer, Scientist, Statesman, and Conservationist, by Larry Rohter

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True progress requires reckoning with the past. A plethora of recent books has revealed a much more complex story than that which many of us were taught — one of hidden figures and once-marginalized peoples whose contributions shaped our world. In “Into the Amazon,” the journalist Larry Rohter delivers an exhaustively researched account of yet another vital, challenging character generally unknown to the English-speaking world.

The twists and turns of the life of this explorer, scientist and champion of Indigenous peoples runderscores a delicious truth: There have always been thinkers who challenged the prejudicial attitudes of their times. In Cândido Rondon’s case, he played a brilliant insider game, wielding power on behalf of those who could not.

Rondon remains a Brazilian hero. Orphaned as a toddler in 1865 in a remote region of his vast country, he embodied the aspirations of the developing nation. His father was descended from Europeans, Africans and Indigenous people. His mother’s ancestry was from the Bororo and Terena, two of the most prominent Indigenous groups of the interior.

Raised by his maternal grandfather, Rondon grew up speaking Portuguese but spent much of his youth among Indigenous peoples, hunting, fishing and tracking, surrounded by wildlife. The boy soaked up the knowledge of his elders — the names and uses of native plants and fungi — and was deemed a prodigy.

Rondon’s intelligence, curiosity and ambition drove him to apply to the Brazilian Army’s military academy in Rio de Janeiro; it offered the best education a poor Brazilian could attain. There, he excelled while befriending the most progressive thinkers in the capital. The Brazil of Rondon’s youth was a country in tumult. In 1888, slavery was abolished. A year later, the monarchy was overthrown in a bloodless military coup underpinned by Positivist doctrine.

Like many of his peers, Rondon fell under the spell of the writings of the French mathematician and philosopher Auguste Comte, the founder of the movement. Bucking the contemporary trend toward eugenics, Positivism argued, among other things, that all people were equal, regardless of race, an idea particularly appealing in multiethnic Brazil, where miscegenation wasn’t condemned as it was elsewhere. Comte’s followers maintained a deep faith in the ability of science to solve the suffering of humanity.

Fortunately for pacifist-minded Rondon, Brazil’s military operated rather like the United States Army Corps of Engineers, and just before graduating in 1889, he was promoted to help lead an enormous and dangerous effort to lay thousands of miles of telegraph line. At the time, telegraphs were the only means of quick communication across long distances, and the expansion would serve to connect the farthest reaches of the country — a key part of nation-building.

But stringing heavy wire across the Amazon, all the while painstakingly mapping the jungle, entailed negotiating countless hazards. There were poisonous snakes, deadly mosquito-borne illnesses and bloodthirsty reptiles and fish. (One of the most memorable anecdotes involves an unfortunate explorer on a Rondon expedition who was entirely consumed by piranhas, his bones gnawed clean — with the exception of his feet, left untouched in thick leather boots.)

Perhaps most frightening to urban soldiers, however, were the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon. These groups, since the arrival of Europeans some 200 years earlier, had been waging a war with fortune-seekers, especially mining and rubber barons, who had a history of enslaving all the Indigenous people they could and killing the rest. By the time Rondon entered the Amazon with his troops, many inhabitants were prepared to fight back — with poisonous arrows.

Because Rondon’s sympathies lay with his Indigenous roots, he was desperate to forge a peaceful way forward. Very quickly, he developed the leadership style and credo that would define his long and varied career: “Die if you must, but kill never.”

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It is impossible to overstate the significance of Rondon’s method. During a period when genocide was considered the cost of progress, Rondon brokered peace. He developed a system for communicating friendliness to Indigenous peoples, even when he couldn’t speak their language and was unfamiliar with their culture and customs. He also convinced his own troops to hold their fire. While settlers in the United States had systemically exterminated bison, a crucial food source for Native Americans, Rondon built crucial relationships between remote tribes and the distant government that would determine their fate.

Rondon’s unusual approach spared countless lives. Over several decades, through several dictatorships, he carefully mapped Brazil’s dense interior, cataloged flora and fauna, forged sincere friendships among various tribes and inspired the next generation of Brazil’s thinkers and explorers. By 1913, Rondon was so respected that he was tasked with hosting Theodore Roosevelt and his son Kermit during one of his river-mapping expeditions, an arduous five-month journey that nearly took the former president’s life. (In contemporaneous accounts, Rondon was referred to as a Native guide.)

Rondon consistently focused attention on the Amazon’s Indigenous inhabitants, whom he had grown to respect as peers. Throughout his career — he would go on to lead Brazil’s nascent Indian Protection Service (later FUNAI) — he deftly and patiently maneuvered the levers of power to make change.

Reading Rohter’s account today, one realizes anew the importance of working with repressive governments to protect vulnerable people. Brazil has had its fair share of such governments; the incorruptible Rondon, who refused to run for office, was ever a liability. And, thanks in part to his efforts, Brazil remains home to a large range of Indigenous ethnic groups.

In his later years, Rondon grappled with his legacy. He worried that his original efforts to integrate Indigenous Brazilians into modern society had been woefully misguided. Over nine decades, he saw how modernization caused their cultures and languages to slip away, and he recognized them as the truest stewards of the vast, wondrous Amazon, now under threat on all sides. In the end, while he remained an optimistic Positivist, Rondon wished that Indigenous tribes be left alone and worked for the creation of a large conservation area.

When Rondon was 91, a coalition was formed to nominate him for the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize. An argument could easily be made: Rondon’s tireless advocacy would earn him the moniker “the Gandhi of Brazil.” Decades earlier, none other than Albert Einstein had recommended him to the Nobel committee. But the nominating committee stressed Rondon’s exploratory work in the application over his humanitarian efforts, and the prize went to the Canadian statesman Lester Bowles Pearson.

“Into the Amazon” is important reading. We tend to excuse historical figures’ rotten behavior by contextualizing their beliefs within the era in which they lived. But, in fact, every age has a full complement of attitudes, from narrow-minded prejudice to utopian idealism. For that reason alone, Rohter’s crisp biography is a welcome addition to the new, more inclusive canon.

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Rachel Slade is a journalist in Boston. Her second book, “Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A. (and How It Got That Way)” will come out this year.

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INTO THE AMAZON: The Life of Cândido Rondon, Trailblazing Explorer, Scientist, Statesman, and Conservationist | By Larry Rohter | Illustrated | 465 pp. | W.W. Norton & Company| $38