Savage Harvest Part 3

"How old is he?" I asked Amates.

They talked, I waited. "He doesn't know," Amates said, "but maybe in his sixties."

"Does he remember a story about a Dutch raid, men being killed?"

Amates spoke to Kokai with what would soon become familiar to me-a long-winded, winding indirectness, a simple, ten-word question taking ten minutes to ask. Amates's interrogatory concluded, Kokai looked at me. Rolled a cigarette, a long one, using two pieces of rolling paper. The candlelight flickered. It was hot, my legs ached from the hard wooden floor, and I hadn't sat on a piece of padding since arising from my air mattress at three that morning. Then Kokai started talking.

"He remembers," Amates said. "He was a child, and he saw it." On and on it went in a disjointed swirl of story, Amates pausing to translate. The Asmat, I would learn, are splendid storytellers in a world without TV or film or prerecorded media of any kind. Kokai pantomimed the pulling of a bow. He slapped his thighs, his chest, his forehead, then swept his hands over his head, ill.u.s.trating the back of his head blowing off. His eyes went big to show fright; he showed running with his arms and shoulders, then slinked, crept into the jungle. He held his cigarette between his middle finger and thumb, wiping his forefinger across the glowing coal to brush off the ash. I heard the names Osom, Faratsjam, Akon, Samut, and Ipi, and a tale that was the second link in the chain of events surrounding the mystery of Michael Rockefeller and that had been nothing but typewritten pages from a dusty Dutch archive came to life.

9.

February 1958

THE VILLAGE OF OTSJANEP AND THE EWTA RIVER AT LOW TIDE AROUND THE TIME OF MAX LEPRe'S RAID.

(MSC/OSC Brotherhood, Order of the Sacred Heart) ON FEBRUARY 6, 1958, as he boarded the government launch Eendracht and headed for Otsjanep, the sun burned overhead with such intensity it made Max Lapre wilt. The Eendracht was thirty feet long, shallow draft, with a high bow and a curving sheer line that ended in a low waist just a foot above the water. At the bow was a small cuddy cabin with two portholes, and a white canopy covered the open deck. Lapre was wiry and tightly wound. Accompanying him were eleven Papuan policemen dressed in khaki military-style uniforms and armed with Mauser M98 bolt-action rifles and one Schmeisser submachine gun, and Lapre carried a sidearm.

Lapre felt afraid. Following behind were three canoes of warriors from Atsj, and looking at them paddling naked in the sun, he couldn't shake a nagging feeling of smallness; he was a white dot in an utterly foreign, black-skinned world. And yet it was his country's to rule, this jungle, this swamp, these people, his to govern and tame, and he was determined to teach the natives a lesson in the power of civilized government.

The days of colonialism may have been ending, but Lapre, the new government controller who had taken over Asmat in 1956, was a man from another era. Max Lapre's relatives had been in the Dutch East Indies since the 1600s, and he was born in 1925 on the island of Sumatra. His father was a soldier in the Royal Netherlands Indies Army. When he was three, the family moved to Malang on the island of Celebes. There Max grew up in a community as insular as only a group of colonists can be, a place where people depended on each other against the majority and toasted the queen on her birthday. Even more so because, from the 1930s on, it was a community under threat as Indonesians agitated for independence and j.a.pan began expanding throughout the Pacific. Years later, Max would remember his first encounter with j.a.panese soldiers in an interview. "There was this j.a.panese store in the Chinese area of Malang," Lapre said. "These were really long buildings and all the way in the back, you always had some sort of living area with a patio. I kept on walking further and further into the back of the store. Right there at the patio there were j.a.panese having a meeting. They sat there in uniforms, their samurai swords leaning against their seats. They saw me and I ducked away. It frightened me."

Still, the Dutch were shocked when j.a.pan invaded Singapore in 1942. Lapre's father was sent to the front, and his seventeen-year-old son never forgot the words he told his father: "You go teach them a lesson."

Instead, William Lapre stepped on a land mine and was taken prisoner from his hospital bed. He wouldn't see his family until 1946. As the war deepened, the Lapres lost their income and their servants, and the Dutch schools closed. Max became a hustler, selling watches, fabric, clothes, and beauty products to prost.i.tutes. His girlfriend's father was executed. He was beaten by j.a.panese soldiers in 1944 and had to report to a working prison camp. His head was shaved, he was made to chop down trees with a dull ax, he slept in a wooden shed and was fed a meager diet of tea and a cup of corn in the morning, and more corn and raw vegetables in the evening. He grew weak with dysentery and had wild dreams; his mind drifted like it was floating away from his body.

Lapre's dysentery may have saved his life, because he was soon transferred to a hospital and released from the work camp to live with his grandparents. When the war ended, however, his troubles did not, for Indonesians were seeking independence. Houses and cars were appropriated by Indonesian republicans. Dutch were stoned and beaten with sticks. The Lapres' servants, back on the payroll, were blocked from entering the house. Max was arrested again, this time by young Indonesians with machine guns and swords, and locked in a prison cell in Malang. One day a prisoner started singing "The Wilhelmus," the Dutch national anthem, and all the prisoners joined in and were pelted with rocks and struck with sticks. When a half-Indonesian, half-European came to persuade them to become Indonesian citizens, they booed him.

After being released in June 1946, Lapre sailed for the Netherlands.

NOW, TEN YEARS LATER, he was back, working for the government in the last Dutch colony in the East. A death here, a death there, could be overlooked, but the recent mayhem between Omadesep and Otsjanep was too much. Holland was a civilized country trying to make something out of its half of New Guinea, and it was time to step in. Did he carry animosity toward the Asmat? He would say in later interviews that he didn't. But his whole life had been formed as a colonist, as an overlord, and then he'd suffered years of abuse and was ripped away from the only world he knew. Did he have any knowledge about the Asmat as a culture? Did he care? There is no evidence in his writings or reports that he had any empathy for them, and he seems to have stepped into his post with an agenda. After meeting him, van Kessel lamented that Lapre was "planning to rule the Asmat with a strong hand."

Soon after Lapre arrived in Asmat, the small village of Atembut took a head from the village of Biwar Laut, in retribution for two men and two women from Atembut who had been killed three years before on a visit to Biwar. Lapre sped to the village, which he found deserted. Still, he would teach them a lesson. He set the jeu on fire, destroyed all the canoes he found, and emptied a machine gun into the air, an action that van Kessel called "unproportionate."

When he'd first heard the news about the fight between Omadesep and Otsjanep, Lapre had simply dispatched a policeman named Dias, himself a colonial mutt, half-Indonesian, half-Dutch. Dias and a force descended on Omadesep on January 18, 1958. They arrested eleven, confiscated as many of the weapons in the village as they could find, and burned canoes and at least one of the men's houses. Reports reached Dias, however, that Otsjanep wouldn't be so pliable. Fearing trouble, he sent three Papuan policemen with a Dutch flag and some steel axes to the village. The police returned quickly. Otsjanep wanted nothing to do with the government and were willing, Lapre would write in his official report, "to use violence to make themselves clear. The Dutch flag was not accepted."

Lapre went himself ten days later. He'd first stopped at Atsj, where he asked the people for help-a curious thing to do since the villages were barely known to each other and canoes of warriors from Atsj would hardly be a calming influence on Otsjanep. "Maybe they saw it as an opportunity to smack someone's head off," Lapre admitted of the rowers from Atsj. "You never know with these people, and if there were fights, yeah, they liked that." Again he'd sent three Papuans with a flag, and again they'd returned reporting that the flag was rejected and that Otsjanep was "fully armed and waiting for them."

Years later, Lapre would say that he went to Otsjanep only to "investigate" and to see if he could find anyone who might "identify the perpetrators." If that was true, however, he could have waited for things to cool off. He could have arrived unarmed in a canoe with von Peij or van Kessel bearing tobacco. In fact, in 1958 no white men had ever been attacked by the Asmat, who either feared the white strangers in their midst or regarded the few who came without weapons and bearing fishhooks, axes, and tobacco-like van Kessel-with tolerance.

THAT HAD ALMOST always been the case with tribal people in the first stages of contact. When Christopher Columbus reached the New World in 1492, he wrote in his journal on December 16: "They are the best people in the world and above all the gentlest. They became so much our friends that it was a marvel. . . . They traded and gave everything they had, with good will. I sent the s.h.i.+p's boat ash.o.r.e for water, and they very willingly showed my people where the water was, and they themselves carried the full barrels to the boat. They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil, nor do they murder or steal. Your highnesses may believe that in all the world there can be no better or gentler people."

Four hundred years later, Tobias Schneebaum arrived in the last mission outpost in the Peruvian Amazon. Out there, beyond the mission, he was told, were uncontacted tribes who bashed the heads of their enemies and attacked any attempts at contact from outsiders. But Schneebaum had an insatiable curiosity and deep affinity for indigenous people-they didn't scare him. One day he left the mission and headed alone into the jungle. After four days of walking, he spotted a group of men on the banks of the river. Had he been armed, fearful, on edge, or in a big group, who knows what would have happened. But Schneebaum surrendered totally: he shed his clothes and walked naked into their midst. The violent savages' response? They hugged him and touched him and kissed him all over and marveled at him and led him back to their village, where he lived for months.

Inevitably, those early peaceful encounters between whites and natives soon turned to violence. The cultural collision was too great, the power imbalance too extreme, between men who knew nothing beyond their immediate world and men who thought they knew everything. They weren't, after all, just people with different technologies, but people living in completely different worlds-and the whites invariably had no inkling of this other world. They couldn't see the spirits, didn't know they existed, and were blind, deaf, and dumb to the symbols and meanings of the cultures they were entering.

In the 1930s, explorers began a series of foot journeys into the highlands of what is now Papua New Guinea, almost always in large parties of several whites and with extensive retinues of porters and policemen, all of them armed with modern firearms. And always the response was the same: the Papuans were petrified, believing that the whites were ghosts, spirits of the dead. The white creatures' boot prints, to those used to reading footprints, indicated a being that had its toes cut off, and the tread patterns implied a skeleton of some kind.

These creatures had to be either avoided, driven away from their homes, or placated with sweet potatoes and pigs, and the accounts offer a long tale of one misunderstanding after another. When Australians Jack Hides and Jim O'Malley entered the Great Papuan Plateau in 1935, they appeared to the local Etoro people as if coming from outer s.p.a.ce. "We jumped with surprise," recalled an Etoro who'd witnessed them. "No one had seen anything like this before or knew what it was. When they saw the clothes on the Sowelo-Europeans-and the others, they thought they were like people you see in a dream; these must be spirit people coming openly, in plain sight.' " About fifty Etoro warriors eventually appeared, armed with bows and arrows. They pranced and whooped and to disrupt them Hides let out a loud, two-fingered whistle. In that moment two worlds-three, really, the world of the whites, the world of the Etoro, and the world of the spirits, a fourth dimension that Hides couldn't see, didn't know existed-collided. For the Australian it was just a sound, a loud noise to get the natives' attention. To the Etoro it was something else altogether: the sound a witch made when it approached. By the time an escalating series of cultural miscommunications came to an end, Hides and his porters had fired three shots, killing two.

AS LAPRe ENTERED the Ewta River, geography didn't help. The river is narrow: seventy-five feet wide at its mouth at high tide, it quickly diminishes to less than half that upstream. Three hundred yards upriver, they encountered a fleet of canoes full of armed warriors from Otsjanep. They screeched and "bawled," as Lapre put it, but pulled back as Lapre came closer. He chased them for a bit, but got nervous, and then decided to retreat.

Not wanting to take any chances, Lapre increased his strength. On the sixth of February, he dispatched a mobile police force out of Merauke to the mouth of the Faretsj, where it linked up with Dias and another ten policemen, and together with four canoes full of warriors from Atsj they again arrived at the mouth of the Ewta.

It was afternoon and the tide was incoming, but the river was still too shallow to enter with the launch. They waited, the tension increasing with the afternoon heat. Finally, late in the day, there was enough water to proceed, and they entered what must have seemed like the heart of darkness. As the Ewta narrowed to thirty feet, sometimes twenty, the banks pressed in, a tangle of nipa palms and reeds and mangrove roots rising out of black mud. And then it started to rain, a driving, pelting tropical deluge. Lapre felt unsure, frightened. Where van Kessel would have arrived in shorts and sneakers, sitting in the bottom of a native canoe, Lapre was steaming upriver in a powered steel motor launch packed with gun-toting, uniformed policemen. Even worse, he was leading a party of warriors from Atsj, historic enemies of Otsjanep. Behind every tree he believed lurked a savage warrior, and he was worried about how to get out-the upper Ewta was too narrow to turn around quickly.

Lapre grabbed the tiller himself. It took an hour for them to creep toward the village. The heat. The overhanging trees and dangling vines, all dripping and moist. A twisting, narrow pa.s.sageway. The sound of their engine bouncing off the wall of green. The agonizingly slow voyage toward an armed confrontation with naked men smeared with war paint and adorned with feathers and the tusks of pigs and teeth of dogs, sh.e.l.ls and pig bone in their noses, who followed no conventions regarding prisoners, who were as different as it was possible for human beings to be.

Lapre's concern was self-fulfilling. After an hour, they rounded a bend and the world opened. The clearing was thick with men, and Lapre noted seeing no women, children, or dogs-"always a bad sign." The villagers were as scared as Lapre, maybe more so. Word had traveled fast in the jungle; they knew what happened in Omadesep, the canoes destroyed, the men arrested. And they knew about guns, the violence they were capable of. But they were confused. They didn't know what Lapre and his patrol would do, what they should do, maybe not even who, or what, he really was. They were proud and independent in their world, and Lapre might even be a ghost. What to do?

On the left a group approached, Lapre believed, in capitulation. But on the right stood a group armed with bows and arrows and spears and s.h.i.+elds. Lapre looked left, he looked right; he was equally unsure of what to do. Women and children streamed out of the houses and fled into the jungle. Behind the houses a third group of men broke into what he described as "warrior dances." Lapre and a force of police scrambled onto the left bank, Dias and his men took the right. A few men from Otsjanep bolted for the bush, and the armed men backed toward the rim of the forest.

"Come out!" Lapre yelled, through interpreters, "and put down your weapons!"

A few men edged forward and then tried to run away, and Lapre's policemen tried to restrain them.

Then pandemonium. A man came out of a house bearing something in his hand, and he ran toward Lapre. What was he holding?

Shots rang out from all directions. Bang. Bang. Bang. An Asmat named Faratsjam was. .h.i.t in the head and the rear of his skull blew off. Four bullets ripped into Osom-his biceps, both armpits, and his hip. Akon took shots to the midsection, Samut to the chest. Ipi's jaw vanished in a b.l.o.o.d.y instant. As in stories of similar encounters in the highlands, the villagers would remember every detail of the bullet damage, so shocking it was to them, the violence so fast and ferocious and magical to people used to hand-to-hand combat and wounding with spear or arrow, which almost never killed instantly.

The Asmat panicked and bolted in all directions, disappearing into the jungle. "Stop shooting!" Lapre yelled. He did a quick search, found two dead, and set fire to the biggest canoes. Shortly before dusk, Lapre and his men climbed back on their boat and headed downriver.

Lapre's explanation to van Kessel about his actions: "It was raining cats and dogs, and the people acted so strange."

Lapre spent the night offsh.o.r.e and returned up the Ewta the next day at five-thirty a.m. Now, however, the river was blocked. Throughout the night the men from Otsjanep had cut trees, felling them across the river, so many that it took Lapre six hours to make it the few miles to Otsjanep. The village was deserted, but from the jungle they heard chanting and the beat of drums. Lapre did not pursue them.

Over the next few days Lapre visited nearby villages. Basim, just a few miles away and closely related by marriage and blood to Otsjanep, was deserted. Buepis he found "quite skittish." At the mouth of the Fajit, he made contact with a powerful chief named Betekam, who had managed the feat of marrying five wives from five different villages, thereby acquiring not just power and prestige but free pa.s.sage among them. Lapre had left five dead and one injured in Otsjanep, Betekam said, and the village had been hostile because it didn't want to let go of "old customs and headhunting." The villagers, Betekam said, were afraid and did not want to return. Lapre offered a deal, to be conveyed through Betekam: he would leave them alone if they returned to their village and turned over the heads of the men from Omadesep they had taken.

There is no evidence any heads were ever turned over to Lapre, and his action did not stop headhunting in Otsjanep or anywhere else in Asmat. Lapre admitted that he was probably just driving villages deeper into the jungle and farther up rivers, away from the government. When he visited Otsjanep three months later, many of the inhabitants fled, and men hid under their houses, "waiting to see which way the cat would jump," he wrote in his patrol report. "The course of affairs is certainly regrettable, but on the other hand it has become clear to them that headhunting and cannibalism is not much appreciated by a government inst.i.tution all but unknown to them, with which they had only incidental contact. It is highly likely that the people now understand that they would do better not to resist authorities. Their att.i.tude of intentional resistance, which found expression in the rejection of contact items and the Dutch flag . . . was all the more reproachable. . . . However regrettable it may be that there had to be casualties, this is to be preferred over the fact that the village is slowly but surely walking into the forest and nothing can be done about it. In the latter case, every grain of respect would have gone up in the air and eventually there would have been more casualties because of the headhunting raids."

The words, given the people he was writing about, are absurd. To us, to a Westerner, they make sense-a straightforward a.n.a.lysis of a people resisting government, who required the teaching of a lesson. But a Dutch flag? A government inst.i.tution? The rule of law? To the Asmat, Lapre's raid was altogether something else, a profoundly unsettling experience, something far more than a simple imposition of rational law: the confusing appearance of superbeings, the spirits their whole lives were built around appeasing and deceiving and driving away, had come to kill them with nearly supernatural weapons. For a Catholic it would be like devils or angels appearing in the flesh to attack them for . . . for what?

And what of the spirits of the five killed by Lapre? They were out there, wandering around, causing mischief, haunting the village, making people sick, as real in death as they were in life. The Chinese crocodile hunters had killed eight. Omadesep had killed four more. Lapre now added five. Seventeen men, women, and children were dead. The world was out of balance, an open wound festering in the village each and every day, even more so because Lapre was a white man. It's hard to imagine the consternation this caused. How to explain it? How to deal with it?

10.

March 1958

INDONESIAN PRESIDENT SUKARNO.

(Library of Congress) MAX LAPRe WASN'T operating in a vacuum. If the world of the Asmat and Otsjanep was in turmoil, so was the larger world around New Guinea. Within days of Lapre's raid on Otsjanep, the new US amba.s.sador to Indonesia, William Palfrey Jones, presented his credentials to Indonesian president Sukarno at a ceremony in Jakarta. Cameras flashed as Sukarno and Jones raised champagne gla.s.ses filled with orange juice (a Muslim, Sukarno did not drink alcohol) and toasted the health of Sukarno and President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Jones reiterated his nation's position-that it had no interest in meddling in Indonesia's internal affairs and every interest in helping the country maintain its hard-won independence.

Jones's comments were more specific than they sounded. The islands of the Indonesian archipelago had a deep and complex culture that had been subjugated by the Dutch for as long as anyone alive, or their grandparents or great-grandparents, could remember. In 1928 Sukarno had proclaimed that a united and independent Indonesia was everything. "Prince and pauper, patrician and coolie, Moslem and Christian-all could be united in a pa.s.sionate drive for a single goal, Sukarno saw," wrote Jones. "This goal was liberty, or merdeka, a word that became the rallying cry of the cause." On August 17, 1945, in the waning days of the j.a.panese occupation, the Indonesian nationalist movement proclaimed the Republic of Indonesia.

The Netherlands wanted its colony back, however, and moved in with tanks and aircraft. Only after four years of war and negotiations through the United Nations Commission on Indonesia did the Dutch surrender their claim. During the negotiations, however, the Netherlands insisted on keeping West New Guinea-the western, Dutch half of the island. Indonesia was Muslim; New Guinea was Melanesian and animist-a separate place, so the Dutch argument ran. Sukarno set aside the New Guinea issue, and the agreement was signed, creating the Republic of Indonesia in 1950, with the stipulation that further negotiations on New Guinea would take place within a year. But with the formal birth of the Republic-a country with 150 million inhabitants spread across thousands of miles-the Netherlands balked, ignoring its agreement to further discuss Indonesian claims to New Guinea, and was supported by Britain, Australia, and the United States. Jones's words were a careful balancing act regarding Indonesian sovereignty, Papua, and Sukarno's own balancing act with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).

When it became Sukarno's turn to speak during the ceremony, his word choice was equally specific. Sukarno emphasized Indonesia's independent foreign policy-it had no wish to take sides with either major world bloc-and stressed the importance of "completing Indonesia's revolution by effecting the return of West Irian" (the Dutch colony of New Guinea). For Sukarno and Indonesia, the "return" of Papua was the fundamental issue; without it, in his mind, Indonesia remained divided and unfree.

Between 1954 and 1957, Indonesia submitted four draft resolutions on the issue to the UN General a.s.sembly, but none were pa.s.sed. In retribution, in 1956 the country nationalized Dutch businesses and expelled tens of thousands of Dutch still living there, deepening the antagonism between the two countries.

For the Dutch, keeping its Papuan colony was purely emotional-no valuable natural resources had yet been discovered there, and the colony cost the Netherlands far more than it earned. But the Indonesian army and Communist Party were locked in a struggle for dominance, and President Sukarno maintained power by dancing between the two-and distracting both by whipping up nationalist fervor over the occupation of West New Guinea and British Malaysia. Percy Spender, Australia's minister for external affairs, feared that Indonesia would make "hostile and aggressive neighbors." Indonesia appeared unstable, on the verge of economic collapse. Communism was spreading throughout Southeast Asia, and the PKI was growing in strength, winning 27 percent of the votes cast in local elections in 1957. Economic collapse would be the opening the PKI was hoping for, the theory went, part of the feared "falling dominoes": Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia. A Communist Indonesia would be bad enough, but even worse would be a Communist foothold in New Guinea, just across the Arafura from Australia.

Rebuffed by the West when he sought Western military a.s.sistance, Sukarno made official state visits in 1956 to both Moscow and Beijing, returning with $100 million in credit from the Soviet Union and a more modest amount of aid guarantees from China. Meanwhile, the British, who still held territory on the island of Borneo, feared that the transfer of West New Guinea to Sukarno would set a precedent for the takeover of its Borneo territory. The official US position on the issue was neutral, a balancing act to avoid strengthening the PKI and to placate Australia and Britain.

The Netherlands knew it couldn't hold on to its colony forever, but it hoped to do so for another ten years. "New Guinea had been the abandoned child of the Dutch government," said Wim van de Waal, the Dutch patrol officer who was stationed in Asmat in 1961, who now lives in the Canary Islands. "But then it was all they had, and because of rising internal political pressure, they had to do something with it. The Dutch didn't want to talk about it, but the government knew it had to step up development in order to show that they were capable of leading the Papuans toward independence." Which is why the missionary and government presence in what had been a forgotten corner of the empire accelerated throughout the 1950s. Jones's words to Sukarno notwithstanding, in 1957 the US policy had became one of opposing, "by appropriate measures, any attempt by a Communist-oriented Indonesia to seize West New Guinea."

The Dutch set up elected regional councils throughout the island, hoping to create an elite who could govern the country by 1970, when it proposed granting West New Guinea independence. "It is essential for the Netherlands to see to it that, once the time for independence has come, a sufficient number of qualified indigenous inhabitants are available to take over the greatest part of the administration," a 1960 Dutch policy paper stated. It was a difficult task, though, given that all but a handful of the elites, found almost exclusively in Hollandia and on Biak, were still living in the Stone Age. How were headhunting cannibals supposed to govern themselves? It was why Max Lapre was never censored for the killings in Otsjanep and why Dutch officials would repeatedly tell visitors that headhunting had been vanquished even when it was still flouris.h.i.+ng. And given the Netherlands' three-hundred-year occupation of Indonesia and its reluctance to give up its colony, it's easy to grasp Lapre's need, as he sailed up the Ewta River toward Otsjanep, to teach them a lesson.

BY THE TIME Michael Rockefeller prepared to go to New Guinea in 1961, Sukarno, after feeling increasingly snubbed by the West, was buying hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of Soviet weapons and threatening to take West New Guinea by force. With John F. Kennedy's election, Was.h.i.+ngton's policy changed; Kennedy's advisers began advocating that New Guinea be given to Indonesia to appease the Communists and keep Sukarno away from the Eastern Bloc-in direct opposition to the policy of the Netherlands, Britain, and Australia.

The Dutch foreign minister, Joseph Luns, created what would become known as the Luns Plan. The Dutch would withdraw from New Guinea and terminate sovereignty in exchange for a UN administration and a "member state study commission" that would supervise the administration and organize an election to decide its final status, creating an independent country that would be politically aligned with the West and friendly to Dutch business interests. Walt Rostow, a national security adviser to Kennedy, opposed the plan. Returning West New Guinea to Sukarno, he wrote to Kennedy, was the only option to keep Indonesia from being "driven into the arms" of the Soviet Union. And he wrote that the United States should be honest with the Dutch and tell them that self-determination for a bunch of "Stone Age" Papuans would be meaningless.

Into this tangle stepped Michael Rockefeller. He wasn't just another Western college kid with a backpack; he was the son of one of the richest and most powerful and influential men in America, a man who had just a few months before run for president, whose family had once donated the land for the UN itself. The Luns Plan was scheduled to be formally presented to the UN in September 1961. The Dutch would do whatever it took to make Michael-and his father-happy; they needed American allies wherever and however they could find them. They would provide logistical support and an anthropologist from the Netherlands New Guinea Office of Native Affairs to Michael when he finally arrived in Asmat, and that a.s.sistance would have profound effects on the story of his disappearance.

PART II.

11.

March 1961

DANI MEN REMEMBERING MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER AND THE HARVARD PEABODY EXPEDITION, BALIEM VALLEY, 2012.

"IF YOU CAN believe it, I'm finally in New Guinea," Michael Rockefeller wrote on March 29, 1961, to his best friend, Sam Putnam. He'd flown from Boston to Tokyo, via New York, the takeoff delayed an hour because the New York radar had gone down, giving him "heart failure as I had visions of missing the flight out." En route to Tokyo the plane was nearly empty, and he slept sprawled across four seats. There are different kinds of travelers; people ease into new cultures in different ways. When I hit the ground in a foreign world, I revel in the place with a big meal. It's a ritual, bodily taking in the new place, and Michael did the same, eagerly consuming j.a.panese culture with a "wonderful" meal of tempura.

From Tokyo he'd flown on to Biak, an island off the north coast of New Guinea, home to a former US Army Air Corps airfield on which the Dutch maintained a squadron of aircraft to protect its colony. There he linked up with Karl Heider, a Harvard graduate student in anthropology. When Heider had arrived the day before, he disappointed the throng of Dutch officials who'd gathered, thinking they were welcoming the son of the governor of New York. The two spent a day walking around in the heat and humidity of Biak and then departed for Hollandia on a DC-3. Michael perched in the c.o.c.kpit, marveling at the winding brown rivers emptying into New Guinea's north coast, when the pilot poked him in the ribs and pointed out the window-the right engine had died. Michael scrambled into his seat, Heider clutched his most valuable papers and possessions, the plane landed safely again in Biak, and they flew on to Hollandia the next day.

Michael was heading not to Asmat but to the Great Baliem Valley in the island's highlands. He was tall and slender, clean-shaven, and square-jawed like his father, with thick black-rimmed gla.s.ses. He'd grown up in the family townhouse in midtown Manhattan and on weekends at the Rockefeller estate in Westchester County, New York. As Abby had done with Nelson, so Nelson did with Michael, taking him to art dealers on Sat.u.r.day afternoons, a father-and-son bonding ritual that schooled his taste. His twin sister, Mary, remembered how the two of them loved to watch their father rearrange his art. And when he was eleven, his mother finally discovered why he'd been coming home from school late: he'd spotted a painting he liked through the second-floor window of the Old Masters art gallery on Madison Avenue, rang the bell, and its owner, Harry Yotnakparian, started letting Michael hang around as long as he didn't get in the way.

By the time he was nearing the end of his four years at Harvard, Michael was, in the words of Sam Putnam's girlfriend, "a quiet, artistic spirit." And he was torn. Though his appreciation of art had been nurtured since the day he was born, his father expected his son to be like him-to pursue a career in one of the family enterprises, banking or finance, and indulge his artistic pa.s.sions on the side. Michael graduated c.u.m laude from Harvard with a BA degree in history and economics, but he yearned for something else, a different way of being. He'd traveled widely, working on his father's ranch in Venezuela for a summer, traveling to j.a.pan in 1957, and he'd been surrounded not just by art but by primitive art. Who's to say where wanderl.u.s.t comes from, whether it's innate or whether experiences or books or even objects inspire it-but without a doubt, Michael had it.

Imagine growing up surrounded by objects that had been coveted by your father and that spoke of far-flung places. Imagine not just appreciating those same kinds of objects yourself, but wanting to go to their source to find them and bring them home. As graduation neared, Michael and Putnam schemed. They'd been best friends since prep school at Phillips Exeter, where Michael had been art director of the yearbook and Sam editor. Now they wanted to get away, to have a big adventure before Putnam attended medical school and Michael pursued what seemed an inevitable life of business-one last hurrah, as Putnam's then girlfriend put it. Putnam had dabbled in film and knew Robert Gardner. Gardner ran the Harvard Film Study Center and was fascinated by film as ethnographic record. He wanted to make a movie about an uncontacted Neolithic people, "to employ the art of film to a humane observation of a remote and seemingly alien group of people," a film, he said, "about the world outside myself that also revealed me and my inner world."

In 1959 he'd begun casting about for the right project when a distant cousin told him about an obscure tribe in New Guinea whose culture was based on ritual war. Gardner contacted Victor de Bruyn, the head of native affairs in Dutch New Guinea, who said his government might not only be interested in a film but able to help with the funding. Gardner talked to the anthropologist Margaret Mead; Robert Goldwater, director of Nelson Rockefeller's Museum of Primitive Art; and Adrian Gerbrands, deputy director of the Dutch National Museum of Ethnology, who'd recently begun doing fieldwork in Asmat. De Bruyn suggested a film about the Dani tribes living in the Grand Baliem Valley, and the Dutch government eventually contributed $5,000 toward the expedition.

In some ways, the Dani had long been more isolated than the Asmat. Although encounters with the West along the southwest coast of Asmat had been few and far between, at least the jungles and swamps were known to be inhabited. But anyone who gazed into the interior of New Guinea saw one thing: the high and jagged mountains that ran along its central spine. And if you traveled upriver from the coast, those rivers eventually narrowed and turned into whitewater at the walls of steep mountains. Up there was simply uninhabited wilderness. In the 1930s, Australian explorers and gold-hunters began discovering the highlands on the Australian side of the island. Then, in 1938, an American named Richard Archbold, on an expedition sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, flew over the Grand Baliem Valley. He was astounded. Instead of jagged, uninhabited mountains, he found a green valley. Instead of the spa.r.s.ely populated and isolated communities of the coastal people, he found a heavily populated pastoral, a world of rising tendrils of smoke and intricate, carefully terraced gardens and irrigation ca.n.a.ls, stone walls, vine suspension bridges, and gra.s.s huts-and fifty thousand people, naked save for gra.s.s skirts and p.e.n.i.s gourds, who thought they were the only people on earth. The Dani living in the Grand Baliem Valley were the last great uncontacted civilization.

By 1960 there were a few Protestant missionaries, a small contingent of Dutch officials, an airfield, and not much else there. The United States and the Soviet Union were sending rockets into s.p.a.ce, but the handful of Dutch officials in the "city" of Wamena lived without running water or electricity. Little contact had been made at the north and south ends of the valley. The Dani were not headhunters or cannibals like the Asmat, but they engaged in a cyclical war of revenge with their immediate neighbors that intrigued Gardner. He, like most observers fascinated with indigenous people, felt they might offer insight into humans in an uncorrupted state, and he wanted to observe and film them over months to glean insights into man's propensity for violence and war.

Gardner began thinking about including writers and photographers who could depict the project in other mediums. At lunch one afternoon on Martha's Vineyard at the home of the playwright Lillian h.e.l.lman, he met the writer Peter Matthiessen and invited him along to the Grand Baliem Valley. "He said I'd be paid," Matthiessen told me, "and that was really important to me." Gardner used to take smoking breaks on the steps of the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, and there he met Karl Heider. When Michael came to him, Gardner sensed a possible source of funding and offered him the opportunity to be the film's sound engineer.

It was the perfect postcollege adventure, and Michael invited Sam Putnam to join them a few months later, at the end of his first year of medical school at Harvard. Michael plunged in, learning everything he could about sound recording and asking Gardner if he could practice with the expedition's new Nagra tape recorder at the 1960 Republican National Convention, where his father hoped to be nominated for the presidency. Before he could go, however, there was the issue of the draft. Michael got a six-month gig in the US Army Reserve and was recommended for training in teletype repair. "My first reaction was one of terror," he wrote Gardner from basic training in Fort Dix, New Jersey, " . . . and I pictured myself s.h.i.+pped off to Fort Leonard Wood, Oklahoma or Fort Jackson, Kentucky." Instead, he wrote a "pa.s.sionate" letter to his captain, "describing my utter incompetence in the recommended field." Clearly it didn't hurt to be the son of the governor of New York, for his orders were quickly changed, and he was off to Fort Devens, just down the road from Harvard, to be trained as a "code traffic a.n.a.lyst." "At least my typing will get a good practicing [sic]." Still, he said, the army had taught him "the a.s.sets of a highly ordered day-to-day existence. I have received all sorts of useful pointers for field life in New Guinea from such things as bivouac and courses in first aid, land navigation, etc. Furthermore, I am in sterling condition."

That was in November 1960. Gardner knew about Michael's interest in art, and a few weeks later he helped Michael out further by introducing him to Adrian Gerbrands, an ethnologist living in New Guinea. Gardner said Michael had been excited by Gerbrands's work in Asmat, and "he became more and more interested in meeting you and visiting the Asmat area." Would that be possible in mid-May during a break in filming in the highlands? Gardner asked. "I can a.s.sure you that he knows how to take care of himself and would be not the slightest burden."

BY APRIL 2, Michael was in Wamena at last, and he was excited. "The flight in was spectacular," he wrote "Sambo." He flew in "over Lake Sentani, jungles, mountains, the huge impenetrable swamp of the interior, more mountains, and then finally the Baliem Valley opening up like a sudden giant, fertile cavity before me. How badly we were misled in all the pictures we saw! The Baliem is a thing of magnificent vastness, decorated with the green of the valley floor and blues of the surrounding mountains. Tones are ever changing in the s.h.i.+fting light. The mountains rise . . . over 10,000 feet on all sides and are constantly hidden and altered by the clouds that gather about them. The valley floor is broken into fragments by the Baliem and its tributaries, hills and rocky rises, and the handmade barriers of the Ndani peoples. The climate is like Maine in the peak of summer. Only the sun is better."

A few days later they brought hundreds of pounds of equipment via boat and foot to the northern part of the valley, where they made camp at a small stream at the base of a wall of rock and spa.r.s.e pine trees. It was a beautiful spot, slightly elevated yet protected, far enough from the Dani family compounds for the expedition to get much-needed personal s.p.a.ce, but close enough to get involved in everything. Matthiessen and Eliot Elisofon, a photographer for Life magazine, soon joined them, and Matthiessen had a strong first impression of Michael. "He was very, very young and a little bit spoiled. He quoted Dad a lot."

It was a magical time. The Baliem is as beautiful as Michael described it, a place of a thousand shades of green changing as the clouds roll by, surrounded by jagged peaks in every direction. At six thousand feet, its temperatures are cool, with cold nights, no humidity, and few mosquitoes. When Michael arrived, the Dani there were untouched, the men naked except for long gourds covering their p.e.n.i.ses in stylized erections and a layer of pig grease, the women naked save for loose gra.s.s skirts and net bags slung with a child or pig from their heads and across their backs. It was, in some ways, the best of two worlds-having access to the primitive balanced with being able to retreat to a comfortable camp full of urbane colleagues. The team shared civilized meals in the cook tent-omelets and orange juice and coffee for breakfast-and drank Heineken at night as the Dani gathered around, amazed by their clothing, mirrors, and cameras. During the day the visitors fanned out into villages of family compounds to watch and record the Dani. Michael found them "emotionally expressive" and fantastic to look at. "Polik, the warrior," he wrote, "struts around with a fifteen foot spear and the most incredible headdress. His face, often peering through hair that reaches his shoulders, is always blackened with charcoal and pig grease is kind of the epitome of Neolithic wildness."

When word came of a battle, they'd all gather on a gra.s.sy plateau no-man's-land where opposing villages a.s.sembled to shout at each other and run at each other and threaten and occasionally engage each other. The film team's whiteness granted them an immunity as the Dani grew used to their presence, allowing them in their midst even as they battled-as if a team of filmmakers were allowed to witness and record the set-piece battles of World War II with impunity. They were so close to the action that one day an arrow hit Michael in the leg, and the team was careful to keep it secret. It was a strange kind of war, however, compared to the destructive violence of the much more developed world. "They went to war with a set of rules far more civilized than ours," said Matthiessen. "One killing was fine."

Michael worked hard, recording the sounds, songs, music, and warfare as well as taking photographs, which he especially loved. He "shot wildly," he wrote, exposing eighteen rolls in a single day. Sometimes it was too much, and one night the team unloaded on Michael, criticizing him for missing important sound recordings. "Michael went away in tears," Matthiessen said. After that night, Michael grew up and worked hard, according to Matthiessen, but he was "disorganized. Messy. He forgot things."

Michael shared a tent with Heider, who got to know him well. "Mike was very quiet and very modest," Heider remembers, "though of course everyone knew who he was, who his father was. He didn't take up much s.p.a.ce, and it was easy to be around him. And he had patience." The Dani opened up to him. While Elisofon, the professional, would pose them and stage photos, Michael would just watch quietly, shooting what he saw. In the evenings Heider was astonished to see the wealthiest member of the team darning his old army socks. But Michael was ambitious, and he began to think seriously about his photography. In late April, he wrote his friend Sam with an idea: they should put together a book on the Dani. "It seems to me that there is a large opportunity for me and you if it can be somehow managed with medical school. The photography ought to be good enough to form the basis for a photographic essay on the Ndani culture to come out in book form. Certainly this is a wild and conceited thought and would be very difficult to do well. Let me know what you think," adding in a postscript, "Keep this confidential, for I have told no one but you and wouldn't unless it was more definite."

There are people who don't like hanging out with spiders and dirt and naked men in pig grease, but Michael Rockefeller wasn't one of them. It was especially nice to be among people who didn't care that he was a Rockefeller, who had no idea what the name even meant. In New Guinea, as the weeks pa.s.sed, home began to dissolve into abstraction, to lessen its hold. Material possessions began to lose their importance. There was something liberating about the intense focus on a single project. What was important was right here-a world of sweating, naked bodies, of feasts and smoke-filled huts, of pigs and pig grease. Here, at last, he was free from social conventions. Free from being a Rockefeller.

AS APRIL GAVE way to May, Michael began planning his trip to Asmat with Putnam. In the Baliem, he was the youngest member of a group under the leaders.h.i.+p of Gardner; now, for the first time, he would be plunging in alone with his own agenda. "Michael's father had put him on the board of his museum," said Heider, "and Michael said he wanted to do something that hadn't been done before and to bring a major collection to New York, and Asmat was the obvious choice." His goal was a short trip of two to four weeks with Sam that would serve as reconnaissance for a longer journey after the filming was finished. He was hardly a lone ent.i.ty, however, plunging into the unknown without resources. Michael was both part of a Harvard expedition that had the backing of the government and a Rockefeller-not to mention a trustee of the Museum of Primitive Art. He was treated like a VIP wherever he went outside the Baliem Valley.