Savage Harvest Part 5

BISJ POLES COLLECTED BY MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER FROM OMADESEP AND OTSJANEP IN THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART.

"WHAT TIME IS it and where am I? It is nighttime with the crickets going berserk all around me and I'm back in Hollandia," wrote Michael in September 1961. "I arrived exhausted today and found that tomorrow at 8:40 a.m. Rene and I will fly to Merauke in order to make a 6:00 p.m. boat to the Asmat. I am now surrounded by my little reality for the next ten weeks: a chaos of cameras and recording equipment cluttering up everything including my mind."

Immediately after returning from his first Asmat voyage in July, Michael wrote Goldwater a long letter. "I think I can report with some confidence that my first trip to the Asmat has met with success." He was elated with the objects he'd collected. Though he and Goldwater had been told that Asmat was "already well acculturated," that was only partially true around Agats and "for anyone taking a very rapid, relatively short trip . . . by motor boat," he wrote. "However there remain 2 parts of the Asmat which are as yet very little known: the extreme Northwest and the entire Casuarinas Coast, which has only just begun to be patrolled and is known well only by the missionary, Father van Kessel." He wrote that while it was true that "headhunting has ceased"-a strange thing to say given the simmering tensions he'd seen between Omadesep and Otsjanep and the art he was hoping to find, which was based entirely on headhunting-"Western ideas have made remarkably little dent on the Asmat mind." The art and ceremonies a.s.sociated with it, he wrote, were healthy in nearly every village. His biggest coup, he said, was acquiring the bisj poles from Otsjanep, which he'd negotiated for but which hadn't been delivered. "These have resulted from the well known bise [sic] ceremony . . . the poles from Ochenep [sic] have carved patterns all over the figures' arms and legs. This is apparently a style typical of the Casuarinen [sic] Coast area. Dr. Gerbrands tells me that there are none like these in Europe. Here once again we were able to induce the villagers to put on part of the bise [sic] ceremony for us. 12 poles were involved, they were placed, not standing but leaning on a constructed wooden framework out over the water of the river-before all 3 men's houses of the village." Again there's that strange disa.s.sociation, almost a denial. If the culture was intact, if Western ideas had made no dent in the Asmat mind, then by definition that meant headhunting-and the eating of human flesh that was part of it-was alive and well. Which, of course, it was. In fact, that very month, Sanpai, one of the warriors from Atsj who'd accompanied Lapre in 1958, had been invited to a feast in Otsjanep. But the villagers were just up to their old tricks. "He arrived in Otsjanep and was immediately stabbed/shot with an arrow, murdered and eaten," wrote von Peij. Which meant that the deep, vibrant spirit world was alive too, and yet it always feels, reading his letters and journals, as if Michael was trying to shy away from it.

Instead, he was thinking of the things he was getting and what he could do with them and how he could acquire more good stuff. The opportunity to purchase the poles, he said, was "unique" for the United States, and he was off to a great start. He'd also decided to forget Australian New Guinea and concentrate on the Asmat.

Goldwater wrote van Kessel, as Michael had requested. "Mr. Rockefeller is, as you know, the son of the founder of the Museum of Primitive Art, and he is himself a valuable member of our Board of Trustees. You will have been able to appreciate his real enthusiasm, scientific background, and artistic understanding. We at the Museum are looking forward eagerly to the collections he will be able to bring back to the Museum, because we know they will be well chosen and doc.u.mented. But Mr. Rockefeller is young, and new in the field. Any instruction and a.s.sistance you can give him will be greatly appreciated by our Board and our Staff, and eventually by the public who will admire these works and so gain in insight and understanding. May I add my sincere personal thanks for your friendly cooperation."

Michael wrote van Kessel to say he was particularly interested in Otsjanep "for its lack of acculturation in spite of some less auspicious after effects of Mr. Gaisseau's visit." This sentence, the only one of its kind in his letters and journals, is remarkable, and eerily prescient; it is the only pa.s.sage that indicates he was aware, if even dimly, of the turbulence there, the turbulence that he himself would fall into. Gaisseau was a French filmmaker who led an expedition across New Guinea in 1959, a trip that began in Otsjanep and resulted in the film The Sky Above, the Mud Below. Upon arrival in the village, just a year after Lapre's raid, the crew found a large number of bisj poles-probably some of the same poles Michael had seen and tried to buy. Although Gaisseau was able to get the village to perform for his cameras-he filmed them in repeated takes drumming and singing and paddling their canoes-his Dutch police escort became aware of an increasing agitation in the men and began fearing for his life, so much so that he forced the crew to abandon Otsjanep after just a few days of filming there. Michael also asked van Kessel if he knew of any other villages in the area "with equally as talented sculptors less influenced by Western ideas."

Van Kessel said he'd happily a.s.sist Michael. He recommended that Michael go to northwest Asmat first, then come south and meet him in Basim, where they could take off together. He mentioned three villages, but wrote, "I will not exclude Otsjanep."

If Rockefeller's initial interest in working on Gardner's film had been a lark, a last hurrah before turning to more adult pursuits, that wasn't true any longer. His field notes from his first trip and the letters he wrote reveal a deepening seriousness regarding his collecting. His photographs show an intuitive grasp of light and shadow and form. His field notes are ill.u.s.trated with hundreds of drawings illuminating stylistic details of Asmat symbology. For his second expedition he laid out "objectives; themes of investigation; criterion for stylistic variation." He wanted to explore the "extent of communication between areas and trace the distribution of different kinds of objects." He was a Rockefeller, a family that took achievement and hard work seriously; they were philanthropists and connoisseurs, ambitious enough to run for the presidency of the United States three times. Michael wanted to produce books, mount the biggest exhibition of Asmat art ever, and wow his father and family so much that he wouldn't have to start his career as some Rockefeller Plaza leasing agent.

As the Harvard team finished its work in August and celebrated in Hollandia, Michael received disturbing news from home: his father was divorcing his mother to marry a Philadelphia socialite and campaign aide named Margareta "Happy" Murphy, news that wouldn't be announced to the public for another two months. Michael immediately flew back to New York. He'd been living in primitive conditions for five months. He hadn't seen his family and friends, hadn't eaten a meal that might not make him sick, hadn't seen a television, in almost half a year. No matter. Where others might have savored the comforts of home or gotten sucked into the domestic family drama playing out, Michael did something else. He briefly saw his family and Sam Putnam, met with Goldwater at the museum, and then turned around and returned to New Guinea.

After a few days in Hollandia, he and Wa.s.sing flew to Merauke, where they hustled to catch a boat to Agats that same day. It felt good to be back. It doesn't matter where you go in the world: when you get to a place for the second time, it feels different. You know your way around. You know the best place to find a boat and how much to pay. You know where to grab a meal. You've returned, and people regard you differently.

Darkness falls quickly near the equator, and as he sat happily on the floor of his wooden room without furniture, electricity, or running water, Michael finally got caught up with his journal, to the flickering light of a kerosene lamp. "The key to my fascination with the Asmat is the woodcarving. The sculpture which the people here produce is some of the most extraordinary work in the primitive world. And equally as remarkable as the art is the fact that the culture which produces it is still intact; some remote areas are still headhunting; and only five years ago almost the whole area was headhunting."

It's one of the only times he acknowledges the headhunting directly, in contradiction to his letter to Goldwater. He felt enthralled, excited, in his element. He felt that he was starting to put his finger on it all, to find the treasure. The world was rich and exotic and full of life, and a lot of people were scared by it, but he savored it, felt confident traveling out to its farthest corners and deepest crevices. "Nights here are really the most fun. Something like teeth grinding in the Baliem: a rhythm created by the patter of mice feet over the walls and ceiling with crickets and frogs burping in counterpoint. The roosters here are affected by a curious neurosis which causes them to begin crowing at midnight. Last night we had an earthquake rock us to sleep."

Michael wanted to find a motorboat to explore faster and farther, but all he could find was the standard Asmat canoe, which had little room to carry barter goods or the art he was hoping to collect and which also required rowers, who had to be fed and paid and would only go to certain places. There was a single government vessel in town, but the patrol officer hardly wanted to be Michael Rockefeller's chauffer for two months. The conundrum of Asmat is transportation: you can be right there in Agats and yet feel a million miles away from the rivers and villages because you can't move without a boat.

By coincidence, patrol officer Wim van de Waal, fifty miles south in Pirimapun, had been restless. Though he'd never before gone so far out of his district, he yearned for a few more white faces and conversation, and he'd taken his catamaran all the way up the coast to Agats, where, by 1961, twenty-five or so Western government officers and missionaries were living. The catamaran was great on the rivers, but not so great on the Arafura. Van de Waal was methodical and careful, and through trial and error he evolved a way to pilot the boat into the waves at the right angle so as to not get swamped. "The sideboards were only ten or fifteen centimeters above the water, and I just experimented over the months I used it," he said. "If it was rough, you couldn't be in the ocean, especially if the tide was coming out." But he'd never had any problems, so he thought, What the h.e.l.l, why not go all the way to Agats?

There he ran into Michael, and they shared a warm beer, two young men in the throes of a big adventure who couldn't have been more different. Van de Waal said, "He was stuck, flabbergasted that he, Michael Rockefeller, couldn't get a vessel."

"How'd you get here if you're from Pirimapun?" asked Michael.

"I came in my own catamaran," said van de Waal.

Van de Waal showed it to Michael the next morning. The minute Michael saw it he wanted it, the boat of his dreams, a Tom Sawyerish vessel forty feet long, carrying a perfect thatched house across its twin hulls. It was big enough and stable enough to carry plenty of goods to trade and some of what they could collect. And he and Wa.s.sing could sleep in it rather than in the smoky, loud jeus.

"Will you sell it to me?" Michael said.

Van de Waal dithered. He wasn't against selling his boat, but he needed it for a few days, and he needed to make sure he could get himself and a carpenter back to Pirimapun some other way, to make a new one. "He was a nice guy," van de Waal said, "but you could tell he was used to getting whatever he wanted, and he was pus.h.i.+ng very hard." Van de Waal talked to the patrol officer in Agats, who immediately agreed to take van de Waal back to Pirimapun on the Tasman when he was ready. "He was so happy, because Michael was bugging him for transportation. My G.o.d,' he said, I've just gotten rid of a problem.' " The deal was done: van de Waal agreed to sell Michael his boat for 400 Dutch New Guinea guilders, about $200.

"Mike was keen to do everything big and quick," van de Waal said. He wanted to have a forty-five-horsepower outboard flown in from Hollandia on a PBY Catalina airplane, but van de Waal said no. It was too powerful, too big and heavy-van de Waal himself only used a ten-horsepower motor. Michael settled on a fifteen-horsepower Johnson, bought for $1,000 in Hollandia. At the local Chinese general store, he bought forty axes and $300 worth of tobacco, fis.h.i.+ng hooks and line, and cloth-a wealth of barter goods. By the time he disappeared, he'd spent more than $7,000-equivalent to $53,000 today-in one of the remotest places on earth. One thing he didn't buy, however, was a radio. "He should have had one," van de Waal said. "I feel he really underestimated the dangers. Not of attacks from the Asmat, but of nature. The mouths of the rivers, and the volume of water, is so huge, and Wa.s.sing was just a bureaucrat."

On October 7, Michael wrote van Kessel. He now had a catamaran, he said, and he and Wa.s.sing were going to explore the Casuarina Coast for a couple of weeks with van Kessel, then settle in a village for two to three weeks to film the carvers at work. He hoped the priest could suggest a good village and help make all the arrangements. "Both Rene Wa.s.sing and I very much look forward to [our rendezvous in] November," he wrote, the last message van Kessel would receive from him.

On October 10, he and Wa.s.sing and Simon and Leo, two teenagers from the adjacent village of Sjuru, set out from Agats in the catamaran. Here Michael made his gravest mistake. As long as he was with native rowers-men who knew the weather and the water, the tides and currents, the rhythms of the villages and their alliances and antipathies-he was safe. Although Simon and Leo were Asmat, they were only teenagers in a culture that venerated headhunting prowess and age. Even if they had known the waters, they would have found it difficult to challenge Wa.s.sing and Rockefeller, their elders and the holders of the purse strings. And in the villages they were nothing-they had no standing whatsoever. In his own boat Michael was free to come and go as he pleased, but he would arrive and depart like an alien, bound to no one and nothing, save his trade goods. And that made him vulnerable in every way-to the winds, to the tides and waves, to the Asmat themselves.

They made a quick swing south first, to the village of Per, which interested Michael because it was a small village with its own style of art, dominated by one carver, named Chinasapitch. Michael arrived in the village to find that the carver had just finished a beautiful canoe prow, which he refused to sell. Finally Chinasapitch agreed to make not just a bow ornament for Michael but an entire canoe. It was a great beginning, and Michael was psyched. He was out in the world and making things happen. That evening he reveled in it all. "The evening was crystal clear, and the sun set before the open mouth of the Por River. Then the new moon appeared and the outlines of the family houses, canoe river poles were cast against a violet and rose sky and sea."

They visited Gerbrands and David Eyde in Amanamkai, where they were greeted like returning heroes. The chief was wild with excitement, and the villagers swarmed out to meet them in canoes, jumping in the mud and pulling the catamaran up the river to the village. "The Asmat has a special shout which is chanted at once by many men and used as a form of welcome. All the village lined the river bank and we heard this again and again as we made slow progress upstream."

Over the next three weeks, he and Wa.s.sing turned north and visited thirteen villages. Michael collected everywhere and in quant.i.ty, loading up on drums, sago bowls, bamboo horns, spears, paddles, s.h.i.+elds, and even decorated ancestor skulls. He made intricate drawings of designs and stylistic differences between villages and artists, and he filmed and photographed carvers at work. He felt energized, constantly excited, increasingly comfortable and confident as a collector and explorer, now one of the world's foremost authorities on Asmat art. While his father, the ambitious and famous governor, had acquired the primitive objects he coveted from dealers, Michael was here, traveling the rivers among headhunters and cannibals.

"The only difference between Mark Twain and us is that his characters used poles all the time while we use an outboard engine most of the time and poles part of the time," he wrote. "We have been known to get out and push after propelling ourselves naively onto a mud bank at half tide. The boat has been christened Chinasapitch,' the name of the most brilliant single artist we have come across thus far. Occasionally it is called Fofo,' the name of a hornbill which we obtained in the village of Amanamkai."

AT THE END of the first week of November, they returned to Agats, Michael in high spirits. He'd collected hundreds of objects. As he cataloged, organized, and began arranging the transport of it back to New York, Agats felt easy and familiar. He knew its nooks, crannies, and rhythms, where to get tobacco and fishhooks or a warm beer in the evenings. He savored lounging under his mosquito net in the morning and, as he put it, "making use of the Sisters' major contribution to modern Agats: a lunch delivery service. At 1:00 every day you get a stack of seven pots, each containing some unusual goody."

He was intellectually fired up. "The Asmat is like a huge puzzle with the variations in ceremony and art style forming the pieces. My trips are enabling me to comprehend . . . the nature of this puzzle. I think now that with my trip, with all the anthropological work that will have been done here, and after a careful study of the large collections of Asmat things now in three Dutch museums, it would be possible to organize a mammoth exhibition which would do justice to the art of these people: to show the artist functions in Asmat society[,] to explain the function of the art in the culture, and to indicate by means of the arrangement of the objects the nature of style variation throughout the entire area. Nothing approaching this has ever been granted a single primitive people. You can imagine what fun I am having dreaming these wild dreams and creating earth-shattering hypotheses about the nature of Asmat art."

And yet there is something missing in those journals, in those efforts to decipher Asmat art. He wants to know how the artists work and what the symbols depict, how they vary from one village to another, and how to explain the function of the art in the culture. Absent, though, is an emotional need to know the Asmat as people, to connect, to answer the question of why he, Michael Rockefeller, was interested in their art, and what it might mean to him, beyond the academic questions. His notes feel clinical. There's no deeply personal need, no burning pathos. It's clear he likes to be in the wild, but he also seems oblivious to parts of that experience. There's not a single account of friends.h.i.+p with any individual Asmat. He needs and wants the objects, good and beautiful and old Asmat artifacts, but less so the Asmat themselves. It's like he sees the art as the thing itself rather than as the product of something larger. He keeps denying that headhunting and cannibalism still exist.

Maybe he was just too young, not yet mature enough to understand why he was there, incapable of personalizing his experience rather than simply intellectualizing it. If we had him with us today, if he'd lived, maybe he would have been able to articulate what he was seeking, what had driven him. There had to have been a reason. To seek anonymity, to escape the safety of his family, to make the world understand a culture so different from his own-any of these would surely have been beautiful and understandable.

IT WAS A pivotal moment in Asmat history. Throughout the 1950s, even as an ever-increasing number of missionaries and government officials arrived, Asmat culture remained largely unaffected by their presence. When Omadesep and Otsjanep set off toward Wagin at the end of 1957, there were no more than thirty whites in ten thousand square miles of swamp and river, most of them in Agats, and the world still belonged to the Asmat. Now, just three and a half years later, the balance was s.h.i.+fting. There were police posts in Pirimapun, Agats, Atsj, and Ajam; missionaries in Agats, Atsj, Basim, and Pirimapun; and non-Asmat Papuan catechists in many other villages, not to mention Adrian Gerbrands and David Eyde in Amanamkai. Westerners weren't just on the periphery of Asmat lives, weren't just strange ghosts pa.s.sing through, but had become a huge cultural force that was constantly pus.h.i.+ng for change. Asmat society and culture were still there, still pure in many ways, but in turmoil-everywhere the Asmat turned were these powerful men, coveting their drums, s.h.i.+elds, spears, skulls, bisj poles, which those men paid for with things the Asmat now wanted, needed, couldn't get anywhere else. The whites were fascinated by their ceremonies, yet constantly interfered with them, and these powerful men backed up their actions, the Asmat knew, with the threat of violence, guns, against which they could not compete. Whenever conflicts heated up between villages, there was some priest or policeman or government official jumping in, thwarting the very things that had defined them as men, that gave them prestige with each other and their women.

One day in Atsj, Father von Peij got wind that two boys had been killed and eaten by Amanamkai. He ran outside and saw sixty canoes gathering, about to row to Amanamkai. He jumped in his boat and went with them, putting himself between the gathering canoes of warriors. He was petrified, afraid for his life, but he repeatedly tried to push them apart. The warriors yelled and screamed and shot arrows and hurled spears around him, but not at him-he was the white Lord, the Tuan, and they knew the power he represented and the repercussions if they killed him. "They were so angry and I was so scared, but I had to do it." Those kinds of disruptive incidents were now happening all over central Asmat near Agats and increasingly at its peripheries in the south and northwest.

Nor, of course, was the turmoil and change uniform. Some villages and some people embraced change faster than others. The closer to Agats a village was, and the bigger the river on which it lay, the more contact it had with whites and the government.

It was this place undergoing profound change and unrest through which Michael and Wa.s.sing were now traveling, and Michael was about to get swept up in all of it. His father had opened the door for him that day in 1957 when he launched the Museum of Primitive Art. The epic battle between Otsjanep and Omadesep-never again would so many men be killed in one clash-had unleashed Lapre, whose killings of Osom and his fellow villagers had never been reciprocated. And at the very moment when Michael was ranging over Asmat's rivers, alone, with no Asmat escort except the two teenagers, Joseph Luns was trying to persuade the UN General a.s.sembly to approve his plan for retaining Dutch New Guinea, a weird, exotic island that most of the world barely knew existed.

ON WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, at five p.m., Michael had tea at the parsonage with a group of missionaries, including Zegwaard and von Peij. Outside it was quiet, peaceful, Agats a tiny oasis of civilization on the edge of a fierce, roiling, and wild place. They sipped their tea and sat in chairs in a cozy wooden house and discussed their travel plans. Both von Peij and Michael were heading south on Friday. There were two routes past the mouth of the Betsj River-the shorter route over the Arafura and a longer one weaving in and out of rivers and small cuts. "I'm leaving for Atsj on Friday at five a.m.," von Peij told Michael, "via the Mbajir River between the Siretsj and the Betsj, when the tide will be high, and I'll be in Atsj by one. Don't take the sea route; come with me on the rivers. It's November, and the sea is rough."

"I can't," Michael said. "I have to go to Per first, but I'll see you in Atsj and Amanamkai." Three of the seven bisj poles from Otsjanep that he'd bought in the summer had been delivered to Amanamkai.

In remembering that conversation, von Peij was speaking about Michael at length for the first time in fifty years. He lived in a small room in an apartment for retired priests and nuns in Tilburg, Netherlands, decorated with a few Asmat carvings. He was a tidy, precise man in a green sweater vest and white s.h.i.+rt. "It was fifty years ago," he said, and he was tired of carrying the burden his whole life. "Why not speak about it now?"

The two men parted, agreeing to meet in a few days in Atsj. From there, Michael would proceed to Basim to meet van Kessel and begin exploring southern Asmat and the villages of the Casuarina Coast.

14.

February 2012

ASMAT PADDLING A DUGOUT CANOE IN THE EARLY 1960S.

(MSC/OSC Brotherhood, Order of the Sacred Heart) I'D BEEN OUT on the rivers for nine days. My legs were covered with red welts, I was shedding pounds like I'd been on some crazy crash diet, and I was frustrated with Amates's English skills. I needed to go deeper, but Wilem and Amates were fighting over money and we were running out of tobacco and fuel, so, like Michael, we headed back to Agats.

We floated down the Ewta with the tide in the early morning, and I felt a lifting. The bubbling water was the color of strong tea. The breeze swept the flies away. We were leaving not just a place but a consciousness-one in which the "I" was different for the Asmat than for me. It was group, tribe, family, tied together in ways difficult to grasp. For me, an American, "I" is the biggest, most important unit. For us, freedom is everything. The right to do as we please, unbound by clan or village or parents-to move two thousand miles at will, to make a call home or send an email or say hi via Skype. We can reinvent ourselves, change churches or religions, divorce, remarry, decide to celebrate Christmas or Kwanzaa or both. But these men in Otsjanep are bound to each other. To their village and its surrounding jungle, to the river and the sea. Most will never see anything else, know anything else. And I kept wondering if I was as guilty as Michael, also filled with a Western conceit that I could just walk into a place and not only get it but also dominate it. Could I make the Asmat spill their secrets? Would they ever? Should they?

They are also bound to a spirit world, a place where powers I couldn't see exist. The powers and spirits are like the edges of a black hole for scientists: a phenomenon they can never see directly, only measure its effects. It is a place of the imagination. It isn't on any maps; no satellites or GPS can ever pinpoint it. It is a metaphysical place, as real to the Asmat as the dock or the moon or the river. They are part of it, it is part of them, and it is as powerful as any "real" thing, maybe infinitely more so, because what can be more powerful than your imagination? Their Catholicism is an overlay that eliminated headhunting and cannibalism and turned the act of carving a bisj pole into homage to the ancestors, whose deaths no longer need to be physically avenged. But that old spirit world is sprinkled everywhere still. As the bubbling water swept by and women in canoes, their fis.h.i.+ng nets piled in the center, floated past, I wondered how to enter that world. Where was the doorway?

IF AGATS HAD felt like the end of the world when I'd stepped off the plane, now it felt like Paris. My cell phone worked. The hotel still had little power and only a bucket of cold water in which to bathe, but at least I had a bed and a chair. A friend back in the United States worked the phones and came up with Hennah Joku, a former journalist whose father was from Indonesian Papua and whose mother was from Papua New Guinea. She spoke perfect English and happened to be just over the mountains in Jayapura. She said she'd fly in to help translate as soon as possible-which meant days.

Van Kessel, von Peij, and others had lived in Basim, Atsj, and Amanamkai for decades, but stepping off the boat, I always felt like I was the first white man who'd ever come to the village. In Agats I was the only Westerner, and people stared at me, even though the Catholic bishop who lived there from 1961 to 2001, Alphonse Sowada, had been an American.

Then, one evening, I spotted a ghost in a baseball cap and slacks-Vince Cole. Pastor Vince was the last American missionary in Asmat. He'd lived in the twin villages of Sawa-Erma for thirty-seven years, and now he had come to Agats for a couple of days of meetings. He invited me for a drink, which sounded wonderful, since there was no alcohol in Asmat and I hadn't had a drink in a month. "We'll drink ma.s.s wine," he said.

At eight that night, I threaded my way carefully in the dark along the crooked boardwalks (often missing boards) to the wooden house where Vince was staying. He welcomed me inside, in bare feet and chino slacks, bearing a bottle of wine. He was sixty-seven years old but looked ten years younger. He was big, strong, with long gray eyebrows and a prominent s.p.a.ce between his two front teeth. The wine was warm and sweet. A single bare lightbulb lit the room, which was simply furnished with a basic sofa and a couple of chairs.

Vince was a dinosaur, and I liked him. The son of working-cla.s.s parents in Detroit, he'd studied Islam and Urdu at McGill University in Montreal and become a Maryknoll priest. He'd originally planned to go to Pakistan, but that fell through, and in 1967 he ended up in Jakarta, where he first met Zegwaard and Sowada. He liked their approach. "They weren't evangelical," he said, tilting his gla.s.s back, "and we saw eye to eye-that it was our role to defend people's rights, and Asmat was the place to be if you had that bent."

For Vince, the biggest issue facing the Asmat was the encroachment of Indonesians flooding Papua and Asmat itself. They controlled everything, and had brought in consumer goods, even prost.i.tution and HIV. If a village had a store, it was run by an Indonesian; Indonesian traders plied the most remote stretches of river in floating shops. Parangs and fis.h.i.+ng hooks were one thing, instant ramen another. "The people invite them to come, to open stores, to log," he said. "They have never been beyond one or two villages, and they don't understand what's waiting for them around the next corner. They cut down their own trees; they cut themselves off at their own knees." And Asmat was potentially rich in coal, oil, and gold. It was an old story, the same in Asmat as in the Amazon or so many other places in the world-native people who were innocent about the world, who had few defenses against its encroachments. "They are easily influenced by the outside, too easily. I don't even like to be here in Agats, but people from the villages jump at the chance to come here, to see the bright lights."

Between Asmat and the highlands, in the foothills before the great wall of mountains rising in central New Guinea, Indonesia was establis.h.i.+ng a new Kabupaten-an administrative district-rumored to be thick with coal and other minerals. Government officials had recently asked for Vince's help in talking to the tribes and acquiring the mineral rights under their land, and he'd said sure, if it could be done through a process of long-range planning to handle the payment in a way that would benefit the villages. "But they just wanted to get it done, so they literally arrived one day and dumped $200,000 in cash on the village. Guys flooded downriver and bought tobacco and used outboard motors for double what they were worth and the money was gone."

Toward the foothills at Momogo a road was even being built through the highlands to connect with Jayapura on the other side of the mountains. Maps showed projected road systems winding throughout West Papua, all the way to Agats, which was hard to imagine given the miles of swamp and mud and tides. But roads had been built in tougher places in the world. In villages far upstream, where some Asmat had been interacting with the road crews, Vince had recently found leprosy. His urgent appeals to the government health workers in Agats went unanswered; they were too busy, it was too far. Alcohol had been banned in Asmat, but you could buy it if you tried hard enough, and the source was reported to be the Indonesian army itself.

Despite Pastor Vince's many years here, there was much he still didn't understand. "There are so many taboos." When he arrived in Sawa, he had the thesis of an Australian professor who had spent time in the village. "I read his paper on ancestor feasts, and when I finally saw one, I was asking all of these questions, and the answers I got were totally different from what the professor had written. Finally, I said to them, This professor says it's all different from what you're telling me.' And they said, Well, he was persistent and we didn't want to make him angry, so we just made stuff up.' So now we have an agreement. If there are things they don't want me to know, they just say so, and they don't make things up.

"Everything is secret and related to the spirit world, and it can have ill effects on their life. There are certain songs and stories that only they are privy to, and if they told outsiders they'd be putting themselves at physical risk of sickness or death."

Asmat ceremonies can last for months, and they start on no set schedule. "Just the other day the men in Sawa-Erma announced they were having a feast," Vince noted. "I asked them, Why? Why now?' And they said, Because a man was in the jungle and he met some ancestors, spirits, and they told him now was the time.' They wait for some message, an ancestor or an animal, you just don't know."

Once, he said, the villagers were having a jipae mask feast. The making of the masks, which are intricate, full-body costumes, is kept secret from women and children. Vince asked the men if he could take photos of the masks being made in the jeu. He was surprised when the men said, "Sure," as long as he didn't show them to the women and children. He felt a little weird about it, but took a roll of photos and then weeks later had them developed. And they were all blank. Nothing was there.

He paused.

Then he began another story, about a crocodile that had run amok and started eating people near Sawa-Erma. "People thought the croc was an evil spirit. The victims were from every village but one, where a guy lived who they thought was the crocodile. One day a man was walking with his bow and arrow, and he saw the croc and shot an arrow up in the air, and it came down into the croc's eye, and the croc ran itself into the mud bank, where people killed it with axes and spears and feasted on it for three days. And the same day the croc died so did the guy who was presumed to be it."

We both said nothing. Stillness and the hum of crickets, the barks of lizards. And in the stillness it was hard not to wonder, to feel, to imagine the power of this coincidence-or was it? In a place where everyone believed, it was hard not to become a believer yourself. And that is how unshakable belief works: if you know something is taboo and you do it anyway and get sick, who's to say it isn't real? It took Western Europe a thousand years to go from the medieval world to the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, and still people struggle with the supernatural. Asmat, by contrast, was a preStone Age culture just fifty years ago.

"When I first came to Agats, you could walk from one end of town to the other in ten minutes and you knew everyone. The changes seem fast to me; I can't imagine how they see it. . . . I wish I could crawl into their heads and feel what they feel. And how much they're picking and choosing to share, how much they're embarra.s.sed to tell-it's hard to know. There are just whole areas that you can't go, where they can't let you in, and you have to project, and you don't know if it's your own projection based on your own background. At six months, I could have written a book, but now I wouldn't know where to start.

"They don't distinguish between what they see in a dream and what they see in real life," Vince pointed out. "A dream has the same validity as something they see with their eyes." Yet the Asmat aren't completely beholden to the spirits; they adapt and interpret according to their needs. "Upriver from Sawa-Erma they have this piece of wood they whirl around, a bullroarer, and the sound it makes is the voice of the spirits. One day I was at a feast, and they swung it around to see if everything was going to go well and they'd be able to hunt a wild boar. They swung it and all got long faces. What's wrong?' I said. Doesn't look good for wild pig?' Well, they just took the bullroarer and shaved it down-changing its shape changed the sound it made-and swung it around again and they were all happy: the day was auspicious for hunting."

I'd been thinking a lot about Eden and Genesis, since Asmat felt biblical to me sometimes, a strange sort of Eden before whites came, and I asked Vince about it. "It's a myth," he said. "It's not a fact, but something you strive for. Harmony. Peace. For everything that was expressed in Genesis before man destroyed that possibility. The whole Bible is driving you into a deeper meaning about what it means to be human, and G.o.d is the unknowable. It's not about the answers but about the questions."

We gulped the bottle down and listened to the crickets and a pack of barking dogs. I had a strange sensation. Vince was a priest whose lineage descended from Zegwaard and van Kessel and von Peij, and he had met them all, the men who had been the earliest, most important agents of change in Asmat. Zegwaard, he said, had been crazy tough. Once, when Vince went to see him in his office in Jakarta, Zegwaard was throwing a guy out the door: "I was walking up the stairs, and I heard this commotion and a door flies open, and he had this guy by the b.u.m's rush-one hand on his belt and the other on his s.h.i.+rt-and he literally heaved the guy out of his office." And Vince had known Schneebaum, called him Toby. They had traveled together, he said, to places that had never seen a white man before. "He was open. He'd talk about anything, and he wore his h.o.m.os.e.xuality well. It's just what he was, and he had so many insights and drew so well, it used to amaze me." Yet here Vince was saying that the most important thing was getting the Asmat to appreciate their own culture in the face of a world that was hurtling toward them with ever-greater speed. "For me, they have to believe that what they have is valuable and not be afraid to acknowledge it. Christianity can do a lot of damage, and the religion doesn't make any sense if they lose that."

Vince didn't know anything about Michael Rockefeller's disappearance-he'd come to Asmat in the 1970s, and Sawa-Erma was relatively far away from Otsjanep, in central Asmat. "But that village was always considered to be bada.s.ses," he said. "Same as Sawa-Erma, which was why I was attracted to it, because people said I couldn't do anything with it. They were fierce in war. Why? What made them individualistic, not listen to officials and priests? I still don't know."

15.

November 1961

MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER PADDLING AN ASMAT CANOE, SHORTLY BEFORE HE DISAPPEARED.

(Library of Congress) IT WAS JUST getting light on Friday, November 17, when Father von Peij left Agats. Michael Rockefeller and Rene Wa.s.sing followed soon after. The catamaran was fully loaded. Fuel. Boxes of axes and fis.h.i.+ng hooks and nylon line. Cloth. Bricks of loose-leaf tobacco. Rice and chocolate bars and a sixteen-millimeter film camera, Michael's Nikon cameras, notebooks and field journals, a small portable typewriter-everything they'd need for another month, this time along the Casuarina Coast of southern Asmat. They slid down the wide silvery-blue Asawets, past the canoes and huts of Sjuru, and into the swampy netherworld where the spirits dwelled.

It always felt good to get back to Agats, and it always felt good to leave. Michael couldn't wait to see Otsjanep and the coastal Asmat again, which had had little contact with the West and which he could explore with van Kessel, someone who seemed to know the villages and people well. With Michael and Wa.s.sing were the Asmat teenagers from Sjuru, Simon and Leo, and they operated the engine as Michael let his mind wander, wondering if the southern Asmat would recognize the designs of their northern cousins, wondering how big an exhibit he might be able to organize. He loved to visualize showing everything he'd collected to his father and Goldwater. Their amazement. Their curiosity. His father wanting to know everything, admiring his daring.

Von Peij made Atsj by noon on Friday, and Michael and Wa.s.sing arrived in Per around the same time, to check on Chinasapitch's progress on the canoe he was carving. It was magnificent-hollowed from a single tree trunk forty-eight feet long, painted with red and white stripes, tied with sago ta.s.sels along its sides. Today the canoe rests on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

They spent the night and left the next morning, Sat.u.r.day, November 18. Before them stretched the mouth of the Betsj, which Michael already knew was a treacherous place, especially in the months of November and December, when strong prevailing winds and currents blow out of the southwest. Not only did the outflowing tides of the three-mile-wide Betsj hit those winds and waves, but across the mouth lay a series of mud banks. When the Arafura was calm, the winds were light, and the tide was slack, it could be as still as a swimming pool. But at full bore it was a turbulent place of stacked, confused waves and crosscurrents; Michael had already seen how dangerous it could be and how careful the Asmat had been navigating the mouth of the Betsj. He'd heard von Peij say he was scared of it. Yet he disregarded von Peij's admonition to take the inland route, and neither Simon nor Leo advised him otherwise.

The trouble with seas and waves and wind is that it can take an experienced eye to read them, to see what lies ahead. The sun was s.h.i.+ning, and the sky was dotted with big white puffs; he and Wa.s.sing saw no storm clouds that would have made them nervous. They started across. Wa.s.sing took the throttle. The waves were small at first, and rolling in from abeam; the catamaran rose and fell in a gentle sway. As they motored farther out, the wind freshened. It felt good. Cool and bracing.

Things in boats happen quickly. Once you get into trouble, it's hard to get out of it unless you know what you're doing and act decisively. One minute the water was gentle and easy, the next the boat was bucking hard. Spray flew over the starboard hull every time the boat slammed into the troughs, which were becoming deeper, more irregular, as the waves grew bigger, tilting the boat hard, throwing it around. The craft was losing momentum and control and the engine was screaming as the prop flew out of the water, then surged forward as the stern dipped and the prop bit again. The catamaran made noises it wasn't supposed to. It creaked and groaned, wood rubbing and nails moving in their holes. Michael and Wa.s.sing tried to turn more into the waves, but that just slammed them harder; the boat felt like it would break apart. Sideways to the short walls of water, though, the flat boat felt like it would capsize. Still, they weren't really scared. The sh.o.r.e was right there, the two sides of the Betsj's yawning mouth.

But things grew wilder, more uncontrolled, the boat shuddering, water pouring into the canoe hulls, which made the catamaran only ride lower, become more sluggish. Their only option was to turn inland, upriver, to run with the waves, against the outgoing tide. Wa.s.sing swung the boat, a wave picked it up, and they tipped forward, bow down, like a surfboard taking off, and flew forward on the power of the wave. They were moving so fast that Wa.s.sing throttled back, but the wave pa.s.sed and the stern sank, plunging into a trough just as another wave swept over them.

Silence. The motor was dead, soaked. Wa.s.sing, Michael, Simon, and Leo all took turns pulling the cord, yanking and yanking, but nothing. They were still in the river mouth, sh.o.r.e a half-mile away, the outflowing Betsj pus.h.i.+ng them to sea. The boys wanted to jump in and swim to sh.o.r.e. Come, they said. We need to go. If we get swept out to sea, no one will find us. No, Michael said, we can't leave my cameras, my notes, all the barter goods. And I can't swim well, added Wa.s.sing. They weren't afraid; they were just dealing with a problem they had to solve.

The boys were born on the rivers; Asmat are amphibians. The solution was obvious. Simon and Leo jumped in and started swimming. Wa.s.sing and Michael watched, staring, their fates dependent on the two boys. Though they focused on the waves as long as they could, hoping, they didn't see the boys reach sh.o.r.e.

Their catamaran continued to fill with water. Michael and Wa.s.sing gathered what they could and placed it on the roof of the little cabin, and then they climbed up too. But losing power is the worst thing that can happen to a boat in rough seas. It becomes flotsam, a piece of driftwood tossed at the mercy of the currents and waves and wind. It wasn't long until a wave flipped over the waterlogged boat. They salvaged what they could, some food, some water and fuel, Michael's backpack, and scrambled on top of the overturned hulls. Everything else was gone. Every minute was wet. Under a s.h.i.+ning sun and blue sky, within sight of land, even as the seas calmed and they drifted away from the turbulent river mouth, they were in a nightmare. All they could do was hope that the boys had reached sh.o.r.e and would summon help.

Which they had. It was midafternoon when Simon and Leo waded through the mud onto sh.o.r.e. They headed north, a slow, arduous trek through the mud, but it was a mud and a landscape they knew, and they reached Agats at ten-thirty p.m. By one a.m. on the nineteenth, the radio was buzzing. Immediately, Dutch authorities in Agats scrambled the government vessel, the Eendracht, which headed downriver to look for Wa.s.sing and Michael. But the boat had been inspected the day before, and the spare barrel of fuel put on the dock. In the haste to launch in the dark, the barrel was left behind. When the Eendracht was ten miles from the catamaran's last estimated position, it ran out of gas. And it had no operating radio.

Michael and Wa.s.sing, meanwhile, spent a long, cool night on the overturned hull. The stars were huge overhead. Lightning flickered on the far horizon. Save for the slapping of water on the hulls, it was silent, the sea calm. They pried a couple of boards from the floor of the deck and tried to paddle, but got nowhere. They told stories. They tried to sleep, Michael with the motor's empty fuel tank strapped around his waist. They talked about what they'd do when they got rescued. They watched the moon rise and set. They slept some. They had no idea that just ten miles away bobbed a rescue vessel without fuel. They saw the purple shadows of first light at four a.m. and the sun rise at five. They didn't know where they were, but the tides and currents had carried them south, out to sea and back in toward the coast, and they could still see land, a dim, low shadow to the northeast. Wa.s.sing thought they were three miles off the coast, though they were probably farther away. Where were the boys? Had they made it to sh.o.r.e, but just gone back to Sjuru and abandoned them?

"Let's try to paddle again," said Michael at five-thirty. They tried, but the upside-down boat was too big, too heavy and waterlogged, to make way under the power of two men and their narrow boards.

"I think we should swim to sh.o.r.e," said Michael.

No way, said Wa.s.sing. I wouldn't dare swim. I'll never make it, I'll be exhausted. And you should never leave the boat, it's the number one nautical rule-so long as it's afloat, it'll keep us alive and can be seen by rescuers. Don't go, he said. We'll be found, I'm sure of it.

No, I can do it, Michael said. The water is warm. All I have to do is keep swimming. We could be out here forever and never be found. And it's high tide now. We're as close as we're going to be right this minute.

He'd made up his mind. Maybe it was his youth. Maybe it was because he was a Rockefeller and he thought he could do anything, had no experience with the idea that things couldn't always be done. Wa.s.sing couldn't persuade him otherwise. "If you can make it, I don't do it," he said. "I don't take responsibility for you."

Michael had the one fuel tank already strapped to his waist; he found the spare gerry can stuck under one of the hulls, emptied it, sealed it again, and then added it to his webbed belt. He slipped off his pants and shoes and lowered himself into the water. It was eight a.m. on November 19. He was swimming against the outflowing tide at first, but by four p.m., when he was the most tired, it would reverse and start carrying him in. The sea felt warm, almost hot. He hugged a fuel can and said, "I think I can make it." Wa.s.sing watched Michael swim away until he became a dim form, three dots, and then disappeared from sight.