Savage Harvest Part 2

It felt like the end of the known world. A mile of rickety docks and shacks on stilts hanging over floating plastic water bottles and empty ramen wrappers and packs of clove cigarettes. Dozens of s.h.i.+ny, naked children jumping into the brown, frothy river. A broken boardwalk slanted into the water. A barefoot man grabbed my bag, I followed blindly, and a few minutes later we were at the Pada Elo Hotel. Four windowless rooms of plywood over the river around a courtyard of oil barrels filled with water, laundry on a clothesline. A young woman in blue jeans showed me my room-two single beds, a hole over the river for a bathroom. No running water. No electricity. A c.o.c.katoo paced around the rim of a barrel, gazing at me with a black, liquid eye.

"I'm looking for Mr. Alex," I said.

She shook her head, shrugged her shoulders. She didn't speak English.

Then the skies opened up, and I collapsed. Rain thundered down, more than I ever thought possible, and my fever raged. The room was dark and suffocatingly hot. A parade of ants crawled up and down my bedposts, and water dripped through the roof, gathering into a small river flowing across the floor. For two days the rain drummed on the corrugated roof and I tossed and turned. What was I doing here? What was I chasing? How was I to pierce this place when I couldn't even speak the language?

Then I woke to a cacophony of roosters and intense brightness coming through the cracks in my door, my walls, my roof. I doused myself with cold water from a bucket and stepped out. Steam rose from mossy, broken boardwalks over an omnipresent muddy carpet of those empty plastic water bottles, thousands and thousands of them. There were boats everywhere-dugout canoes and sixty-foot longboats and colorful little speedboats-crowding the creeks and streams. Agats was a city of seven thousand, but there wasn't a single street, not a single car. Along the waterfront, open shops lined the boardwalk, crowded with Javans and Bugis and Torajans and Indonesian traders and opportunists from throughout the archipelago. The town square and soccer field was made of wooden planks raised over the muck. This was the frontier of the growing republic, the Indian country of Indonesia, Manifest Destiny as powerful here as it had been in America a hundred years ago. When Michael Rockefeller had arrived in Agats, it was a Dutch administrative center with a handful of Dutch priests and nuns and colonial officers next to the Asmat village of Sjuru, and he had been hosted by the Dutch government. Now there wasn't another Westerner to be seen, and Agats was growing by the day as Jakarta pumped money into the region and paid civil servants six times what they'd make back on Java.

The market teemed with Asmat, though. Dark black, broad-chested men and bony, short-haired women sold clams and crabs wrapped in palm leaves, strings of two-foot-long shark, skates, and catfish gasping for air, strange-looking lumps of white-the pith of the sago palm, which was Asmat's most important food. I was getting closer; the pure world of Asmat was out there.

After an hour of rambling, I discovered another hotel. It had rooms with toilets and sheets and windows opening onto a courtyard of black mud and, best of all, a desk clerk who spoke a bit of English. When I asked about a guide, he whipped out his cell phone, made a call, and a few minutes later in walked Harun.

He was Asmat, inscrutable, quiet. He spoke in a whisper, his eyes downcast, his left arm in a dirty, unraveling plaster cast. "I am a guide," he said. "Many tourists come to Asmat."

"How many?" I said.

"Maybe four this year," he said.

I wanted to get a boat and explore the rivers and villages, I said, not mentioning Rockefeller, though I had a plan: to make a general reconnaissance journey and work my way south through the villages that Michael had visited and that had figured prominently in the story, and then end up in Omadesep and Otsjanep.

I brought out a map of Michael's route during his two trips and showed it to Harun. "A week, two weeks, I'm not sure," I said. "I just want to explore."

Harun nodded. "I can take you anywhere."

We threw around some prices. His arm hurt, he said-he had fallen off one of the boardwalks in the darkness one night. He was going to the hospital, and he said he'd come back in a few hours.

Which he did, this time with two other men, Amates and Wilem. "The doctor said I cannot go with my arm, but my friends will take you."

Amates looked tense, tightly wound. He was dripping with sweat, his body lost in baggy pleated slacks, his mouth an ugly dark cave. He had a suppurating carbuncle on his neck that he couldn't stop touching. And there was that half a finger, the stub still swollen. Wilem was his opposite. Round for an Asmat, in flip-flops and gym shorts and a red-and-white-striped soccer jersey, and there was something haughty about him. Amates's English was slow, labored. "I am from Biwar Laut," he said. "I have been to university. I teach English. This is Wilem, he is the boat driver."

We haggled over prices some more, settled on a number, and it was done. They would provide food, fuel, everything.

WE PULLED AWAY from the dock just after six the next morning in a narrow, thirty-foot longboat powered by a fifteen-horsepower Johnson outboard. The air was still, the Asawets River a half-mile wide. There were five of us in the boat: Amates and Wilem and me, plus Manu, Wilem's a.s.sistant, and Filo, Amates's brother. We carried two hundred liters of fuel and a pile of rice and ramen and water and enough loose-leaf tobacco and clove cigarettes to give the whole of Asmat cancer-hundreds of dollars' worth. We hugged the left bank, pa.s.sed Sjuru, the original Asmat village next to which Agats had been built (now all trash and shacks and billowing smoke), and turned left, into the Famborep River.

One second there were boats and big coastal traders and the smell and clamor of Agats and Sjuru, the next silence and water and green. The Famborep was barely twenty feet wide, a drowned world of hanging vines and epiphytes and moss-covered mangroves. The dark water mirrored the trees and sky above it as shafts of sunlight streamed through the overgrowth, the river flooding the land as far inland as I could see. Birds called. It was beautiful and ethereal, removed. There was no trash, nothing man-made-it looked the same as it had at the dawn of time.

Amates pointed to a Seussian fan of leaves. "A tree of sago!" he said. "One day I slept here. I was coming back to school in Agats from Biwar." He was thirty-two, had six kids, had been smart enough to be s.h.i.+pped off to Catholic boarding school in Agats and then university in Bali. He had no job, though, no money, and even with Biwar Laut just a few hours downriver by powered longboat, he hadn't been home in five years. It was just too far and expensive.

We pa.s.sed into the Banduw River. "This is a crocodile place." We zigged and zagged, hit the Jet River, and turned north. The waterway widened, and it began to make sense-why there were people here, and why the few Westerners who'd made it this far had been so infatuated with it. Asmat was otherworldly. Compelling. A strange and fecund universe utterly removed from the grip of the world. The jungle was thick, but the rivers were highways, and they kept it from feeling cloying, oppressive. It was a drowned Eden, full of birds and fish and freshwater and a giant sky that was always in motion. We pa.s.sed villages you could smell before you got to them, smoke and laughing children's voices and canoes drawn up on muddy banks. Dugouts lined with standing men paddled by, smoke rising from the coals in the stern.

After four hours, we came to Atsj, one of the largest and most developed villages outside of Agats. Under way, there was always a breeze, but as soon as we stopped the sun bore down on us as we tied up at some rickety poles and climbed to an unpainted wooden house belonging to Amates's sister. The front porch was crowded with men and women in T-s.h.i.+rts and gym shorts. Its boards were s.h.i.+ny and polished smooth from years of bare feet. A thin woman with short hair rushed out. "Oh, oh, oh!" she cried. "Oooh," she moaned, clasping Amates by the elbow, the arm, hugging and clutching him, rocking back and forth, sobbing, rubbing her tear-covered face over his arms and cheeks, a dramatic outpouring of emotion that ended as quickly as it began, when she simply turned and walked away. This was my first glimpse into the Asmat way-a place of intense emotional extremes and the very consciousness and sense of self that had been inextricably bound with cannibalism-though it would take me a long time to understand it.

The house had four rooms, bare plank walls, and two red velour sofas. A pig's jaw hung over the door. A seven-foot-long bow and a thick bunch of bamboo arrows dangled from a nail in the corner. Plastic tubs of rainwater lined the back porch. A handwoven fis.h.i.+ng net hung on the wall. And beyond, more rooms, dark, windowless, and smoky, one with a mud hearth full of glowing coals and blackened pots. Uncles, cousins, nephews-Amates identified each as "my brother," one of them albino-were everywhere, lying, sitting, squatting on the bare floor. By the fire, a woman took handfuls of pinkish-white sago, pressed it into a mold, covered it with a banana leaf, then lay the mold on the fire. After a few minutes, she lifted it out and shook the rectangular cakes onto a tin plate. The sago tasted warm, nutty, but dry, like eating sand; it was hard to imagine surviving off it. Even though they lived here in Atsj, Amates's family was from Biwar Laut, and so, Amates said, "this sago comes from the jungle of Biwar Laut. Not Atsj. If we go to the Atsj jungle for sago, there will be boxing, fighting. It will be very bad."

As the hours ticked by and hardly anyone moved, I felt an unsettling dislocation of time and place. Atsj had a hotel, stores, and little restaurants run by Indonesian traders, a big concrete dock, mosques, and we were sitting in a house with a corrugated metal roof and those incongruous velour sofas. A TV rested in a corner, reverently covered by clear plastic. But the princ.i.p.al food was still sago cooked on an open fire, and it still came from a source that couldn't be deviated from. I had traveled all over the world, and I'd always felt more than welcome-I'm usually an object of attention, people are curious and fascinated by where I'm from and why I'm in their midst, me a little doorway to the mythical America. But here no one asked any questions. I felt like a ghost, a feeling that would only grow the deeper I went. No one spoke English except for Amates, and there was nothing to do but sit and listen and watch other people sitting and sweating and smoking and talking. I felt a wall that had another side I couldn't get to, couldn't see, except for a few tantalizing clues, and I wasn't even sure what that wall was or what lay behind it. This wasn't the Asmat that Michael Rockefeller had seen. Layers had been added, layers of Christianity and Indonesia, but how much had changed and who they really were, what they were thinking, I couldn't tell. At least not yet.

To go to the bathroom I had to exit a plank door, negotiate a ten-foot-long board over mud, tightrope across a three-inch-wide log at a steep angle down into another house filled with people cooking and lying on the floor, then go out on another plank to a wooden outhouse with a hole over a stream.

As it got dark, Filo rustled up some white rice and instant ramen by candlelight and the skies burst open, unleas.h.i.+ng dramatic sheets of rain that thundered on the roof and sent a fine mist curling through the eaves. I retreated to the master bedroom, which had been turned over to me, a furniture-less room full of fis.h.i.+ng nets and an ax and bow and arrow and hyperbolic, colorful pictures of Jesus. I blew up my thin, inflatable air mattress in the flickering candlelight and lay down, exhausted.

7.

December 1957

FATHER CORNELIUS VAN KESSEL WEARING BOAR TUSKS ON HIS LEFT ARM, A CUSCUS FUR HEADBAND, AND TRADITIONAL ASMAT MARKINGS.

(Mieke van Kessel) AS THE 124 MEN from Otsjanep and Omadesep paddled south along the coast toward Wagin, Pip and Faniptas knew that strange people had lately been appearing from across the sea, as if by magic. But in 1957 those beings were still dim apparitions to them, with little impact on their lives, and they weren't thinking about the white men at all. The warriors stayed well offsh.o.r.e, but as they neared the Digul the weather turned. Big, low green-black clouds covered the sky, and the wind whipped the sea into whitecaps. A fierce winter storm blew in, piling the Arafura against the shallows in short, steep waves that threatened to swamp the canoes. Water poured in over the gunwales. The men couldn't balance any longer, couldn't make headway, couldn't keep the waves from filling their canoes. Torrents of cold rain fell from low gray clouds. In the roiling surf and breaking waves, they were forced to sh.o.r.e at the coastal village of Emene.

In New York, art critics were celebrating humanity's oneness, our commonality of love and games and dancing and sunsets. In Asmat, men who would soon be heralded as some of the greatest artists of the world attacked each other with spears, bows and arrows, and axes. In the driving, chill rain, Emene attacked the men from Omadesep and Otsjanep. They fought hand to hand, howling and screaming and covered in mud. It was awful, but glorious too, for they were warriors. One man from Omadesep died and four from Emene, and the men from Omadesep and Otsjanep scattered into the jungle swamp.

In the morning they found their canoes destroyed. Faniptas led them north. They trudged through the mud, fighting their way home through one hostile territory after another. In Baiyun six died, three from Omadesep and three from Baiyun. Near Basim, the men from Omadesep turned on their own traveling companions, the men from Otsjanep, planning to kill them all. Pip took a steel ax blow to his abdomen and fell to the mud. Everisus Birojipts was a small child, maybe six, maybe seven, and he saw Pip fall. "Father," he said, staring at the dead man, "I saw Pip's eyes open; maybe he's not dead."

"No, he's dead," said Birojipts's father. "Don't worry."

He wasn't dead. After three hours, he stood, nursing his wound, and made his way toward the Ewta River and Otsjanep, his home. Alone, he moved fast, outpacing the others.

The mouth of every river belongs to the village that lies upstream. At the Ewta, Pip encountered his kinsmen, and they paddled immediately back to the village, where he spoke of Omadesep's treachery. The warriors drew Xs across their chests and rings around their legs and arms with ochre and black ash, adorned themselves with cuscus fur headbands and c.o.c.katoo feathers, and put curving sh.e.l.ls in their noses that resembled the tusks of the wild boar, giving themselves strength, power. They wanted to look fierce, to strike fear in the hearts of their enemies. They became the animals that lived in the jungle, eaters of fruit, eaters of men. In the jeu they drummed and sang and chanted through the night, sweat pouring off their chests and arms and legs, filling the jeu with their smell, a smell that gave them added strength, bravery. They danced and howled and screamed, pus.h.i.+ng themselves to the limits of fearlessness. They danced with their bows and arrows, their spears. There were straight spears with inch-high barbs, spears that branched off to six points, spears with points that broke off in their prey. Just before dawn, they gathered their s.h.i.+elds-six feet long and intricately carved with the symbols of the forest and headhunting, fruit bats and boar tusks and praying mantises-and each bore a protruding p.e.n.i.s in the shape of a man from its top. They carried powdered lime (a female element that made men hot) to throw into the air and frighten their opponents, and they looked like what they were-wild creatures from the jungle. Two hundred men in twenty canoes paddled silently down the Ewta in the dawn light and waited at the narrow, tangled mouth of the river.

THAT THE ASMAT remained so untouched by the rest of the world for so long was remarkable. It was one thing to live deep in the jungle a thousand miles up tributaries of a river like the Amazon, but Asmat was on the coast, the rivers were roads, and Europeans had been cruising by for centuries. The Portuguese touched the island in 1526, the Spanish a few years later. In 1595 the Netherlands sent an expedition to the Moluccas-nine hundred miles to the northeast of Asmat-to secure its supply of spices and soon established the United East Indies Company, which began ruling over the Indonesian archipelago. But New Guinea was an enormous mystery, its sh.o.r.es hot and moist and its interior an impenetrable land of steep mountains and valleys, the southwest coast even more so; indeed, it remained outside the control of governments for longer than any other non-Arctic coast in the world. Crops didn't grow there. Asmat nourished no large mammals to domesticate or hunt, possessed no known mineral resources, and was so shallow and tidal it was hard to navigate. The place seemed untamable. When Jan Carstenz landed in 1623, "the natives attacked without warning," wrote Gavin Souter in his history of New Guinea, and "tore one man to pieces, killed eight others with arrows and spears, and wounded the remaining seven."

Captain James Cook paused at the entrance to the Cook River-now the Kuti-in 1770 and sent two boatloads of men upriver, where they encountered canoes full of Asmat armed with spears and bows and arrows, enveloped in clouds of white smoke-the lime the Asmat threw-which Cook's men took for gunfire. "Their Arms were ordinary darts about four feet long made of a kind of reed and point at one end with hard wood, but what appear'd most extraordinary to us was something they had which caused a flash of fire or smook, very much like the going off of a Pistol or Gun without any report, the deception was so great that the People in the s.h.i.+p actually thought they had fire arms." When that first contact was over, twenty of Cook's men and an unknown number of Asmat were dead, and Cook felt no need to remain or encourage others to return.

In 1800 the Dutch government took over the archipelago from the United East Indies Company, and a century later it began a series of forays up the rivers of Papua's southwest coast, but made little contact with the Asmat. In 1902, under pressure from British authorities, whose territories were being invaded by headhunting Marind warriors from the Dutch side of the island, the Netherlands established a police post in Merauke, 150 miles southwest of Asmat. The Dutch colonial capital of Hollandia, three hundred miles to the north, across the high mountains, was so far away it might as well have been on a different planet.

The Asmat existed in their own world, as if these outsiders were nothing but occasional spirits pa.s.sing by. When World War II hit the Pacific, huge battles raged across the northern coast, culminating in large American bases in Hollandia and on the island of Biak. The j.a.panese briefly established a post in what would become Agats and killed twenty-two men there on a single day, but their influence on the rest of Asmat was small.

After the war, in 1947, the Dutch Catholic priest Gerard Zegwaard arrived in Mimika, a culturally and linguistically different region of much firmer land northwest of Asmat. Zegwaard belonged to the Order of the Sacred Heart, a missionary brotherhood that had been working in the Pacific since the late 1800s. OSC priests were highly educated and devout tough guys. They practiced self-flagellation, flaying their own backs with a knotted whip. Besides their native Dutch, they spoke Latin, English, French, and German. They were steeped in the philosophy of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Nietzsche. Zegwaard was twenty-eight when he arrived, with an anthropologist's sense of wonder and curiosity, and it wasn't long before he acquired a scruffy beard and deep tan. He smoked a pipe and plunged deeply into Asmat culture, stumbling into ceremonies and headhunting raids, which no white man had ever seen-and recording them in his journals.

Raids could happen at any time, anywhere. Villages were constantly on the move, the larger, more powerful ones extending their range by destroying their smaller neighbors and appropriating their hunting, fis.h.i.+ng, and sago-gathering grounds. Face-to-face battles between warriors were few. When canoes of men from two warring villages met on the rivers, the men howled and hurled insults across the water, calling their opponents wives or women. They drew their bows, they fired arrows overhead or into the water, and they threw fistfuls of lime at each other. But being evenly matched, there was little reason to fight.

Far preferable were sudden ambushes on villages or the taking of a stray man, woman, or child with the bad fortune to be caught unprotected in the open. Whole villages or men's house groups fished or gathered sago in the jungle as protection. Warriors formed a cordon upstream and down from where a group was working, and others accompanied women into the forest to harvest sago. This, of course, often left old people or children alone, and they, too, were fair game.

Even among warring villages, some people related by blood or bond, like Faniptas from Omadesep, had safe pa.s.sage and could be received as guests. By the exchange of children or marriage or the taking of names of those they had killed, there was always some connection that left villages able to travel and communicate with each other. But the Asmat were opportunists and tricksters, and sometimes those visitors were killed anyway in their sleep, or given presents and killed as they were leaving, or lured as suckers on voyages like the one to Wagin.

Village ambushes were a.s.sociated with ceremonies meant to restore order in a world of opposites, including the creation of elaborate wooden poles carved from a single piece of mangrove that could be as tall as twenty feet, known as bisj. Each pole depicted a column of stacked ancestors; the pole carried the name of its topmost person. Canoes, snakes, and crocodiles were carved into the base of the pole, and symbols of headhunting extended out in a three-foot-long protrusion from its top. The poles were haunting, alive, often s.e.xually suggestive.

For the Asmat, ancestors are involved in every aspect of their existence. The carvings are memorial signs to those ancestors, and to the living, that their deaths have not been forgotten, that the living's responsibility to avenge them is still alive and strong, and that the living should not be punished if those deaths haven't yet been avenged. Bisj itself comes from the word "mbiu"-the spirit or soul of the dead-and the bisj pole, more than any other object, is an embodiment of the dead person, whose spirit lives inside it. The pole is a symbol of his presence, a reminder of the obligation to revenge, and, possessing both a p.e.n.i.s and a v.a.g.i.n.a, a symbol of fertility. Death into life and life into death, inextricable opposites of a unified whole.

To the west lies Safan, the home of the spirits of the ancestors. Man is born in Asmat, lives and dies there, and then enters a secondary level of earthly existence, a sort of limbo. In order to pa.s.s through it to Safan, he depends on the help of the living. They must celebrate with bisj festivals that can last seven months, beginning with the warriors attacking a mangrove tree in the jungle just as they would a man. They yell and scream and shoot it with arrows, before cutting it down and bringing it to the village just as they would a man killed in battle. Only a great man can afford to sponsor such a process-the carvers must be fed, for instance, and much food is necessary for all of the feasting.

The completion of a pole usually unleashed a new round of raids; revenge was taken and balance restored, new heads obtained-new seeds to nourish the growth of young men-and the blood of the victims rubbed into the pole. At the end of the feast and the bisj celebration, the spirit in the pole was made complete and could return to help the living. The villagers then engaged in s.e.x, and the poles were left to rot in the sago fields, fertilizing the sago itself and completing the cycle. If no remembrance was made, no bisj celebration held, no new heads taken, life and happiness could not flow into human existence from the ancestral world.

Raids usually took place just before dawn. After a night of planning, the raiding party was divided into three groups: the leaders, who gave advice; the archers, who opened the attack; and the spearmen and s.h.i.+eld-bearers, who did the killing. The warriors approached as close as they could by canoe, then surrounded the village. The leaders, all older, distinguished warriors, took the rear. The archers crept to the front, between the village and the river, and the spearmen to the rear, between the village and the jungle, for all Asmat houses have hidden rear doorways.

One of the attackers would make a noise.

"Who is that?" someone in the houses would call.

"Your husband, Sjuru!" he would reply, using the name of the attacking village.

Then panic. Women and children would try to escape into the jungle or by canoe. Sometimes they were spared, the women taken as wives if there was a shortage of women in the attacking village, the children adopted. As soon as a victim was overpowered, he was pushed and beaten, especially his head, as the killer yelled, "My head, my head won in the raid!" The victim's name was discovered, if it wasn't already known. Preferably, if there was time, the victim wasn't killed immediately, but taken to the canoe and made to sit with his hands and chest hanging over a pole.

At the confluence of rivers or river bends, the victims were decapitated (sometimes even by women-the wife of a great headhunter could become great too), and the horns were sounded upon their return to the village for the ensuing ceremonies and feasts.

WHEN ZEGWAARD ARRIVED in Mimika in 1947, this had been going on for as long as the Asmat could remember. In 1928, ten canoes of a hundred Asmat came ash.o.r.e at the Mimikan village of Atuka, near a Dutch outpost. The Atukans fled, and the Asmat stripped the village, particularly anything made of steel. They tore apart the desks and benches in the Atuka school and pulled out the nails, which they flattened and used as carving tools. By 1947, the raiding and warfare in Asmat had become so fierce that as many as six thousand Asmat fled their villages to escape the violence. They ended up next door, in Mimika, where Zegwaard encountered them for the first time. This was a refugee crisis; the Dutch government forced them to return to their villages, and Zegwaard and the Dutch Resident, the local official in charge, began making regular voyages into the swamps and rivers.

Zegwaard remains the best authority on the Asmat in their purest state, at the time of first sustained contact with Europeans, and his writing draws a b.l.o.o.d.y portrait. "There is a tendency to minimize what we have heard about the violence in Asmat's culture," he wrote. "I frequently sense that government officials are very skeptical about the wild stories' they have heard about Asmat. I do not blame them as I, too, had this initial impression when I knew the Asmat only in superficial contact situations. As I mentioned above, the Asmatters are such good actors that they can give favorable impressions and suggest that things are not really too bad.'

"The Asmat language," he continued, "has an abundance of words for such concepts as fight,' argue,' quarrel,' murder,' and headhunting.' Any conflict between two persons will usually escalate into involvement of all members of their immediate families, then their clans and finally can involve the entire village. A conflict with a related or friendly village usually ultimately involves a major battle. Asmatters fight with all weapons they possess: clubs, bow and arrow, spears, paddles, etc. They try to maintain a balance in conflicts with friendly' or related villages but anything is fair in battle or warfare with non-related or enemy villages. Some examples from this postWorld War II period will serve to clarify this state of affairs. Two men from Sjuru were killed by Jasakor's arrows in a fight over tobacco and women. Another six men from Ewer were killed, as well as five men and a woman from the village of Sjuru. In 1950 two children were beaten to death in a conflict over a woman. This was countered by the other party. . . . I know of three men killed in Jamasj during 1952 and another three in March 1953. These were revenge for [the] 1952 killings. The fights may continue for hours and even spill over into days without pause. If a man feels that he has been wronged in any way he will quietly bide his time looking for revenge. Sometimes this means waiting for the opportunity and the killing place. This pattern of revenge through the children was used as an explanation for the scarcity of children in Asmat when I was taking a census there. I know of similar child-revenge-killing in Erma in 1952. This child was killed because his parents had gathered sago in someone else's sago area. The child's parents in turn took revenge on a man from Joni who was a relative of the man who killed their child. These conflicts (frequently culminating in killings) are the usual reason for the division of clans (i.e. JEW units) [sic] or the disintegration of village units. The history of almost every Jew [sic] begins in conflict."

In the village of Sjuru in 1947 and 1948, Zegwaard recorded "sixty-one known deaths resulting from this ever-present violence. Fifty-six of this total were headhunting victims who were eaten by their enemy and who gave their name, in death, to their murderer.' Thus Sjuru's total population was reduced from 675 to 610 during this two-year period-an absolute decrease of 10 percent and annual decrease of 4 percent."

Figuring the average for the villages of Sjuru, Ewer, Ayam, Amborep, and Wa.r.s.e for the same two-year period, Zegwaard extrapolated that "we can presume a population decrease approximately 2% to 3% per year due to death by violence." This was one of the highest murder rates ever recorded anywhere. In the years in which Was.h.i.+ngton, DC, was known as the murder capital of the United States, its rate was less than 1 percent.

In 1952 Zegwaard opened a rectory in Sjuru, and the government soon followed by opening a police post adjacent, which it named Agats. The pacification of the Asmat began, though it was a long and slow process that would take more than twenty years. A handful of government officials and priests would voyage by canoe or motorized launch up the rivers making contact, using fishhooks, axes, and tobacco, to which the Asmat soon became addicted. For a people with nothing but wood, sh.e.l.l, and a few pieces of stone that came from the highlands, these objects were revolutionary pieces of technology. Felling sago trees, their primary source of food; hollowing out canoes; carving their s.h.i.+elds, drums, bowls, and bisj poles-the most essential tasks of their lives-were done with stone. A piece of steel was as transformational as a tractor.

Though small in numbers, the whites had an impact hard to understate. They arrived in a place and among a people to whom the visible and invisible worlds were connected into one vast unity, a consciousness formed purely by the physical world around them-the jungle, the rivers, the sky, the mud, themselves. And for most Asmat, that meant their village, their hunting and gathering grounds, any neighboring villages, and their war territory. What they could see was the whole universe. Anything outside of that tangible immediacy had to come from the spirit world-it was the only comprehensible explanation. Those spirits were omnipresent, always jealous of the living, always wanting to return and make trouble. Upon a death in the village, women rolled in the mud, covering their bodies with it, so the spirit of the deceased couldn't smell them, couldn't find them. An airplane was opndettaji-a pa.s.sing-over-canoe-of-the-spirits-and white men were superbeings who came, mysteriously, from the land beyond the sea, the same place the spirits lived. Arriving strangers meant an invasion of reincarnated souls, their ancestors who were never content with their fate and always wanted to return and were thus aggressive with the living. The Asmat greeted them with fear and often aggression, armed with spears and bows and arrows and skulls, to impress and scare these invading spirits, for the sight of their own hollowed-out skulls ought to make them fly away.

These new superbeings were also rich. Nails and steel ax heads were marvels of eye-popping value, made from the scarcest and most valuable resource the Asmat had ever seen. To see a whole s.h.i.+p of metal-it was unimaginable. The wealth! The creatures bearing these marvels possessed an immediate and awe-inspiring power.

For Asmat men, their wives were sacrosanct; violence would erupt, and whole villages be split, over adultery. Yet they also carried out papisj-the sharing of wives between male bond mates-a practice meant to be so disruptive, so bad, that it frightened the spirits, driving them back to Safan. Papisj happened under times of stress in a village, and almost without fail, the arrival of priests or government officials in those years precipitated the ma.s.s exchange of s.e.xual partners.

In 1955 Zegwaard moved back to Merauke and was replaced by the Dutch priest Cornelius "Kees" van Kessel. He was tall and lanky, with a narrow face and a long, unruly beard. He had a deep wanderl.u.s.t, and he'd dreamed about being a missionary since he was seven years old. At twelve, he entered the seminary, and in 1947 he was sent to New Guinea. Eight years later, he was posted to the southern Asmat village of Atsj, one of the most powerful and violent in the territory.

"The mission had no motorized vessel," he wrote in an unpublished memoir, "so all the luggage was loaded in ten canoes. The jungle telephone worked very fast: on the Siretsj we got an extensive escort of all the leaders from Atsj. Close to the village the big armada made a special formation according to the Asmat protocol-apart from the calm splas.h.i.+ng of the paddles no sound was made. But close to the village a cantor started a solemn song interrupted by a ma.s.sive yell out of this whole group and echoed by the village. When we came in front of the houses the women threw lime into the air."

Van Kessel built a house, traveled the rivers by canoe, and made sure he kept the cargo coming. And of course, he learned the language. "In each village I left one or two [axes], but in Atsj I gave out hundreds . . . to distract them from going headhunting. Daily I had to exchange food and art objects to still their hunger for knives and choppers, razorblades and fis.h.i.+ng hooks and tobacco!"

Van Kessel was an unusual man. He had a huge heart. He was deeply pious, but that faith was built on the idea that men are good, that the world and life are beautiful and full of wonder, that G.o.d is a warm, loving presence who tolerates our human eccentricities and imperfections. He believed unequivocally in heaven. He loved cigars-his family in Holland kept him supplied with his favorite Dutch brand, La Paz. He didn't think religion could be enforced, and he proselytized slowly. He believed in getting to know the Asmat, so he talked with them, ate with them, slept with them, and was slow to bring up his G.o.d. He was a striking figure, this gangly white man in shorts and sneakers, with a wild beard and the stub of a cigar between his lips. He was often streaked with white and ochre bands on his chest, arms, and legs, white feathers sticking from his beard, sometimes even a cuscus fur headband enveloping his bald head. He was a free, joyous spirit, and for this the Asmat loved him and his superiors mistrusted him. They were forever at odds. He chafed at authority, could only speak his mind. The files of the Order of the Sacred Heart are filled with letters from his superiors, wringing their hands over this ebullient child who would not be bridled. He was reprimanded for not baptizing enough people fast enough, reprimanded for speaking his mind and not following orders from officials in Holland who, he felt, knew nothing about the realities of the place and its culture.

Van Kessel was a priest for the best reasons, the right reasons, an optimistic romantic who, years later, would fall in love, leave the priesthood, and marry-and yet remain ever close to the Church, his faith never wavering. This divide between van Kessel and his superiors would have serious repercussions when Michael disappeared.

Slowly, the priests began inserting Papuan laypeople into villages as catechists, who could begin teaching the Asmat about Christianity and report back to the Church and the government about headhunting forays. Still, some villages were more receptive than others, and Otsjanep was particularly skittish. Its first contact with outsiders hadn't gone well. In October 1953, a group of Chinese Indonesian crocodile hunters, employing villagers from Omadesep as guides, attacked a group of Otsjanep women fis.h.i.+ng near the mouth of the Ewta River. The Chinese hunters killed six women and two children, four of them shot to death-Otsjanep's first experience not just with Others but with Others carrying firearms. When Dutch official F. R. J. Eibrink Jansen visited Otsjanep in 1955 to investigate the Chinese murders, a cla.s.sic story of cultural misunderstanding unfolded. Although Eibrink Jansen was arriving on the village's behalf, he sailed up the river for the first official contact with Otsjanep with a heavily armed police patrol accompanied by a group of warriors from Omadesep. The men of Otsjanep saw the white Dutchman, the weapons, they saw their enemies from Omadesep, and they freaked; the police were surrounded in the narrow river by hundreds of screaming, lime-throwing, and well-armed warriors. Eibrink Jansen had the sense to back down, turn around, and retreat. "I could have mown them down," he told van Kessel the next day, "but I would have hit dozens of innocent people. So I decided to go back without even having been in contact."

Two months later, van Kessel himself visited Otsjanep for the first time. "We were welcomed most heartily. But then we were unarmed and (of course) not accompanied by police." He returned again on April 15, 1956, "was heartily welcomed," and left two catechists, but they fled after twenty-four hours. "The village became wildly enthusiastic about the tobacco of the catechists, who misinterpreted the intrusive enthusiasm and made a run for it!"

THE KILLING THROUGHOUT Asmat went on. In September 1956, Omadesep killed another four from Otsjanep, bringing the number whose deaths had not yet been avenged to ten.

Van Kessel traveled to Amborep and found the village had just "beaten off an attack from Jasokor and Kaimo, and that Jasokor had something in mind." He raced to Jasokor and found the village empty, save for his two catechists, "who told me in a laconic way the people had just gone on a raid to Damen.' So in a hurry I rushed to Damen, but too late: the houses were still burning and the villagers still lamenting their dead-eight men, eight women and eight children were killed and loaded into the canoes of Jasokor for the cannibalistic ritual."

In the village of Ajam, in May, twenty-eight men and boys visiting from j.a.paer were slaughtered, and van Kessel himself was almost caught in the violence. "Rowing on the Asawetsj [sic] toward Ajam I came in a rain of arrows from a Jepaer [sic] armada. I traveled with three canoes of Atsj people and Jipaer [sic] ran after us. By throwing tobacco into the river I obstructed the speed of my pursuers (free tobacco works miracles!) and finally they stopped the persecution because we came close to Ajam where a strong police force was settled, so I escaped an uncertain fate, for j.a.paer was still loaded with feelings of revenge to anybody."

Van Kessel kept a list of the violence. In 1955, 300 dead. In 1956, 120, including the four from Otsjanep killed by Omadesep and two from Otsjanep killed by Basim. In 1957, 200. This was in southern Asmat alone, and it's impossible to know how many deaths he wasn't even aware of.

In October 1956, van Kessel was joined by a colleague, Father Hubertus von Peij. He was twenty-six years old, a recently ordained OSC minister, like van Kessel. Von Peij, too, had heard the calling early, wanting to be a priest since the age of twelve, and he could have gone to Brazil, the Philippines, or elsewhere in Indonesia, but he chose New Guinea. He wanted adventure. "We heard the stories," he said. "It was attractive to me." After four months of learning Malay in Merauke, Zegwaard, his superior, escorted von Peij to Ajam, where he was to be posted. "Ajam was very bad," he said when I found him alive and well and eighty-four years old in Tilburg, Netherlands, "and there was a lot of killing in revenge for the raids in the 1940s." More than ten years might have pa.s.sed, but as von Peij said, "They never forget. Ever."

Zegwaard installed von Peij in Ajam and said, "So, I leave," and he was gone. "I had no radio. No phone. I couldn't communicate with anyone." Von Peij stayed in Ajam for three years, and then spent another two in Atsj. He was much more conservative than van Kessel. While van Kessel looked like some wild man in the jungle, with his war stripes and the feathers in his beard, von Peij never went native and looked like what he was-a white missionary, always cleanly shaven and scrubbed, dressed in white shorts and a white T-s.h.i.+rt. He tried to visit every village in his parish once a month, placed non-Asmat Papuan catechists in them to "testify about what's happening and if necessary tell the government." He learned Asmat fluently. And like van Kessel, he was in no hurry to baptize anyone. "We had a lot of time, and they weren't able to understand."

AND SO, on that day toward the end of 1957, the men from Otsjanep hid in the scrubby green tangle at the mouth of the Ewta to avenge the murder of Dombai, Su, Kokai, Wawar, and Pakai, the men killed by Omadesep a day earlier. They were aware of the superbeings entering their world. They knew van Kessel and von Peij, accepting their occasional presence in their villages because, over time, they got to know them and wanted their tobacco and modern tools, and they knew the government men and the police who backed them up, but it's fair to say that at that moment all of these people remained cloudy presences on the periphery of their lives. The Asmat of Otsjanep hadn't changed yet. Their sense of purpose and the very balance of their world were built around war and headhunting and rituals. Now, here, waiting for the men from Omadesep, they were fulfilling their purpose as men. To attack. To fight. To restore balance in a dualistic world. If we could be inside their minds, if we could film what they saw, feel what they felt and be them, we might understand their need. The violence was the very fabric of their lives-it made them whole, const.i.tuted them, gave them ident.i.ty and literally nourished them, helping the s.e.m.e.n flow and the sago grow. And from it they created the s.h.i.+elds and spears, the drums and masks and bisj poles, that was their language, their art, their symbolic and creative expression-ironically the very "art" beginning to attract the notice of Western collectors like Nelson Rockefeller.

As the last stragglers from Omadesep pa.s.sed the river on their way home from the coastal fighting of the trip to Wagin, the men from Otsjanep attacked in force, hurtling down on them in swiftly paddled canoes. The exhausted men from Omadesep, with no canoes of their own, were vulnerable. Otsjanep shouted and screamed and clouds of lime burst over the water and bamboo horns sounded, and Otsjanep beat their canoes with the sides of their paddles. The warriors slaughtered their counterparts from Omadesep with arrows and spears, without remorse. The river ran red with blood. They beat the heads of their captives, dragged them back to their canoes, tied them onto crosspieces so they could be decapitated. Of the 124 men from the two villages who set out together to Wagin a few days earlier, only 11 made it home alive.

Van Kessel called it the Sylvester Ma.s.sacre, because it happened at the end of December.

8.

February 2012

KOKAI, THE FORMER HEADMAN OF PIRIEN VILLAGE, WEARING A TRADITIONAL ASMAT CUSCUS FUR HEADBAND, NOSE ORNAMENT, BAG, AND BOW AND ARROWS.

WILEM SHOOK ME awake at three a.m. I tiptoed around bodies sprawled asleep on the living room floor in the darkness, climbed into the boat, and soon we were under way with the outflowing tide. It was still deep night, a few lanterns flickering yellow on the opposite bank, but the sky was alive with a trillion stars, the full moon so bright that long shadows of trees spread over the river, easily a mile wide. And that Southern Cross, an arrow pointing south. We were all sleepy, silent, lost in our own reveries as the bats flew and dipped overhead, Amates pa.s.sing around cigarettes for all of us.

After an hour the sky began to lighten, and we crossed to the opposite bank as waves grew and the longboat started bucking. The morning was gray, still without sun, as we entered the Arafura. The wind picked up, pus.h.i.+ng against us from the south, and we followed a quarter-mile off the coast, crossing the mouth of the Betsj on the same route Michael Rockefeller had taken that fateful day. The sun rose, the wind and waves grew stronger, the boat rolled and water crashed over the gunwales, I went for my satellite phone, and we ran for shelter up the Aping River.

AT THE MOUTHS of rivers and small creeks are often one or two huts-bivouacs built as temporary fis.h.i.+ng camps. Which is what I thought this group of huts was too. But drying out inside, as Filo boiled water for rice and I stretched across a floor of split bamboo covered in sweet-smelling palm fronds, Amates said this was a new, permanent village, broken off from Omadesep, which itself had broken from Biwar Laut long ago. "Why?" I asked.

"Woman trouble," he said.

We ate, we smoked, we snoozed and swatted flies, and when Wilem decided the wind had died enough, we moved on, arriving at the Fajit River and the village of Basim in the early afternoon. Basim was spread out, had a handful of stores along the waterfront boardwalk. The day was burning hot, windless, and still. As always, we climbed onto a dock surrounded by silent, staring men and women and children in rags. Amates would mumble a few words and stride off, and the next thing I knew we'd taken over the schoolmaster's house, four bare wooden rooms across from the elementary school.

At first, these villages felt as if they'd been stripped of something, as if they were waiting, empty, as if some reason for being was gone. Basim's jeu was empty and crumbling, though magnificent in the way they all were-long and huge and tied together with rattan, nail-less. But there were no carvings anywhere, and if people weren't out gathering sago or fis.h.i.+ng, they sat around. Listless. Waiting. All except for the children, who played wildly, rambunctiously, loudly, climbing palm trees and covering themselves with mud and jumping off docks into the brown river. The sound of an Asmat village is the sound of a crowded playground, of children laughing and shouting and playing.

That night we were sitting on the floor when an older man walked in. He was thin, small, five-foot-seven and 140 pounds or so, with a prominent jaw, a big nose, and deep-set eyes. Veins popped from his neck and his temples. He had a hole in his septum. His polyester T-s.h.i.+rt was stained, spotted with small holes, and emblazoned with the image of a Papuan with sh.e.l.ls through his nose and the word NOSESLIDE! A woven bag adorned with Job's tears seeds and c.o.c.katoo feathers hung from his neck across his chest-a sign of his importance. He had quick, darting eyes and spoke fast in a voice that sounded like gravel rolling across gla.s.s, exuding a wildness I hadn't seen yet in Asmat. "This is Kokai," Amates said. "He is my elder brother, my papa, the headman from Pirien," meaning that he was a chief in Pirien, a village named after one of the jeus in Otsjanep that had violently split to form a new village sometime after Rockefeller's disappearance. "He has a new wife in Basim, so he's here a lot." Kokai sat down on the floor with us, Amates brought out a pouch of tobacco and rolling papers. It was too good an opportunity: I confessed to Amates that I was interested in some old stories from Otsjanep and Omadesep, especially about a Dutch raid on the village in 1958, in retaliation for the killings during the trip to Wagin. In fact, from Dutch government archives, I had the original colonial reports filed at the time, describing the events.