Ring of Fire

by Lawrence Blair; Lorne Blaire

  We butted out into the Arafura Sea, towards Darwin and safety. The consolation of our richly stocked refrigerator was offset by appalling sea-sickness. After the maternal loping motion of Sinar Surya in all but the highest seas, this muscular vessel was a nightmare for the inner ear and, quickly revealing ourselves as ‘wingeing poms’ indeed, we wretchedly accepted their offer to rig the stabilizers, even though it reduced our speed and added to our fuel cost.

  When they learnt that our chief remaining concern was to contact London as soon as we reached Australia, they said: ‘Let’s give ‘em a bell now, then, mates!’ And within minutes we were talking to our mother in London on the radio telephone. She was grateful for the call, since she had reported us missing to the British consular authorities in Jakarta three months previously.

  Ringo was out, but our co-producer Hillary was there, as clearly as if he were in the next cabin. ‘Where the hell have you boys been?’ he shouted. ‘Don’t you get any newspapers out there? Big changes have been going down. Apple’s being divided up at the moment. We can’t guarantee your post-production any more, I’m afraid. So don’t hurry back. You might as well carry on swinging in your hammocks out there until the dust settles.’

  So what if it was all a professional fiasco, and we no longer had the security of a post-production job to go back to? We had sailed with the pirates and seen the golden bird, and sensed something immense and mysterious still waiting to be discovered in that harsh fairyland. We would wait, like buddhas, for the next wind. If we could raise money by phone, then we might still give ourselves that long-planned holiday we had been promising ourselves in Bali, which I had still never been to. After all, there was a good chance that all our so carefully nursed film was completely spoilt by heat and humidity. Maybe it was all just a dream, we thought, in those first languorous gluttonizing weeks in our motel room in Darwin; then we began to focus more closely on Hillary’s words to us: ‘Apple’s breaking up… film’s post-production is cancelled… swing in your hammocks.’

  We picked ourselves up, climbed on a plane and flew back back to the thick of it in London.

  Apple had not quite gone bust. Hillary threw his arms round us in greeting, and Ringo leant on his silver cane in the background and made appreciative Liverpudlian sounds about his ‘pirate’ and ‘flying-saucer’ movies, which he had apparently forgotten all about. Not much of our footage had spoilt after all and, in time, everything gradually came together and the films saw the light.

  But that bird, dancing on film, is still to me but the palest reflection of those bursts of gold which I actually saw, for a moment, that dawn in the jungles of Aru.

  12. Lyall Watson, Supernature (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973).

  13. Wallace, Malay Archipelago, p. 341.

  Life Amongst the Men of Wood

  Paper wraps stone,

  Stone breaks scissors,

  Scissors cut paper... sometimes.

  The Bugis, too, have their ‘Boogie man’. The Aru Islands represent the easternmost limit of the Bugis’ traditional monsoon trading cycle, for beyond them lies the Belakang Tanah – the dark and dangerous ‘Ends of the Earth’.

  The Bugis venture into the muddy shallows of the Arafura Sea only in legend and nightmare, or if driven there by storm, for the sprawling mangrove swamps of west New Guinea are the domain of a people they fear as a tribe of skull-toting man-eating monsters. ‘Monsters’ is a rather harsh description of the Asmat tribe of cannibal headhunters, for they seldom reach five foot eight inches, but they’re nevertheless an impressive lot, as we were to discover…

  The Asmat are a wood-age culture, living amongst the estuaries of the world’s largest and least-accessible alluvial swamp. The rivers which snake through their mangrove forest daily rise with the tides to submerge the entire area for up to 100 miles inland; and daily withdraw again to expose nothing but mud, roots and crawling things – without a stone to be found. For the pre-Stone Age Asmat, rocks are a vital magical ingredient for certain rites, and are obtainable only at great risk through trade with the highland tribes. The value of stone is exceeded only by that of steel, an almost mystical substance which occasionally reaches them in the form of hooks, knives or axes.

  The word ‘Asmat’ means ‘Tree’ or ‘Wood’ people, for they are the same word and, like their totemic creature the praying mantis, they are the forest itself come alive. Legend tells how their creator, Fumeripits, carved their first ancestors from trees which he then drummed into life, standing back to watch them dance.

  The Asmat also carve trees into which they drum the spirits of relatives killed in battle with neighbouring villages. These spirits can only be released through a vengeance killing. The carving of these spectacular 20-foot bis poles is part of an elaborate ritual which ultimately requires the killing, beheading and eating of at least one retaliatory victim from the offending village or clan. ‘Inhabited’ bis poles may stand in a village for weeks or even years until anointed with the victim’s blood which then releases their residents to eternal rest in the land of ancestors, so the poles can be discarded to rot. More than mere carvings, inhabited bis poles are ‘living beings’ about whom the entire Asmat religious ecology of revenge and regeneration revolves, but to museums and collectors around the world they rank amongst the most valuable and coveted examples of contemporary primitive art.

  Nowadays it is rare enough either to be a bona-fide headhunter or a cannibal, but to be both simultaneously is – at least to a snooping anthropologist – a singular accomplishment. The Asmat were to achieve world fame in 1961 when Michael Rockefeller, son of the late American Vice-President, disappeared off their coast. He was last seen swimming strongly for shore from his drifting open boat towards the nearby village of Otjanep.

  Michael Rockefeller was a child of the Steel Age: heir to the most powerful clan of his nation, which had risen on the tide of oil and US Steel. He studied ethnology at Yale and in 1961, aged 22, made his first trip to Indonesian New Guinea (now called Irian Jaya) on a collecting expedition sponsored by the New York Museum of Primitive Art. A few months later he made his second – and last – trip to expand what was already the world’s finest single collection of Asmat art (now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York). 14

  From his base at the mission and government post at Agats, on the New Guinea coast east-south-east of Aru, Rockefeller made bis-spotting sorties to outlying villages, where he would bargain for the poles in the ‘encouraged’ currency of tobacco and steel fishing hooks, paying half of it down and the balance on delivery of the poles to his base at Agats. The method worked perfectly for all the villages except Otjanep – an isolated community of warrior master-carvers where Rockefeller found no less than 17 superb upright bis poles. The Otjaneps wryly accepted both the bargaining process and the healthy down-payment, but they never delivered the poles. Rockefeller was only to see them again by chance, on the last day of his life.

  Since he had vanished without a trace, the international press had a field day. Some theories insisted he was drowned in the strong currents before reaching shore; others that he was eaten by a shark or a crocodile. The one that caught the public imagination, however, was the suggestion that he was eaten by the Asmat themselves.

  None of these theories was more plausible than another, since no further evidence came to light until 13 years later, when Lorne arrived with two colleagues to film the Asmat.

  They were to be the first outsiders actually to live in Otjanep, and were to spend many weeks naked amongst the villagers, becoming the adopted sons of their war leaders, and finally being exposed to what most probably happened between Michael and the Men of Wood. The resulting film, in which individual accounts by the war chiefs of Otjanep are juxtaposed with their neighbouring villages’ versions of the events, is an interesting exercise in determining who is telling the truth. The trail of clues which led Lorne and his colleagues to the bizarre circumstances of Rockefeller’s last hours are recounted below.

&
nbsp; From Lorne’s Notes

  I first arrived in New Guinea with two old friends, the American and Belgian cinematographers Bill Leimbach and Jean-Pierre Dutilleux, to make a film on the relationship between Asmat art and their headhunting and cannibalism. I had longed to film the Asmat ever since I first saw New Guinea’s distant mountains from the pearling reefs of Aru. I was in Los Angeles when Bill called me from London saying he had just paid a flying visit to the missionaries at Agats, and had won their general approval to shoot a film there. We had decided on the village of Otjanep because it was by far the most notoriously resistant to outside interference with its traditional way of life.

  The best precaution against being beheaded and eaten by one’s all-star cast is to do some fairly thorough research before attempting to live with them. The trouble here was that no government or mission post existed in the region until the 1940s, and no white men had visited Otjanep itself until 1956. Subsequent contacts were few: some brief visits by armed Dutch colonial officers (the area was still a part of Dutch New Guinea until the 1960s), a few unsuccessful missionary attempts at soul-salvaging and, in 1959, a brief visit by the French film-maker Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau, who made the memorable documentary The Sky Above, the Mud Below. After 48 hours in Otjanep, the rising agitation of the villagers caused the nervous supervising Dutch official to order Gaisseau and his team back to the safety of the mission post at Agats. Two years later Michael Rockefeller was to make his brief bis-pole bargaining visit to Otjanep. But, a few months later, Otjanep was the only village in the region which the massive party of foreign and national intruders vainly searching for the vanished Rockefeller failed to reach, for its sinuous river (its sole means of access) proved to be massively and expertly barricaded with newly felled trees. Neighbouring villages suggested there was very good reason for the Otjaneps to lie low, for they knew exactly what had happened to the young white man.

  The accusations made little sense to us for a variety of reasons. First, there are many instances of innocent but frightened people barricading themselves against outsiders; second, Rockefeller was already known in the region as a bearer of tobacco and gift items; third, the Asmat were known to include outsiders in their vengeance cycle only if previously attacked by them, and nowhere in Otjanep’s slender history was there evidence of the white tribe having earned such inclusion. Only later did we discover that our assumptions were ill founded.

  Cannibal jungles are supposed to be pretty inaccessible, and the great southern swamp of the Asmat is no disappointment. It could only be reached by single-engined missionary Cessnas, flying the full breadth of the world’s second-largest island, over Indonesia’s highest mountain range. We took off from Jayapura, the northern capital of the Indonesian half of New Guinea, and had only been airborne for 10 minutes when the crackling voice of another pilot came over the radio warning that the weather in the highlands was turning nasty.

  ‘Shit!’ exclaimed our young American mission pilot. He was less concerned with religion than with accumulating flying hours as a New Guinea bushwacker to earn himself a chance at flying for a major international airline.

  ‘Sorry, folks,’ he howled above the engine. ‘Looks like we’ll have to try again tomorrow. There are three different weather zones between here and Agats, and they’ve all got to come up like lemons on a fruit machine to make it through. We can’t get these little crates high enough to clear the mountain-tops, so we gotta work our way down through the deep valleys. Not the nicest neighbourhoods to come down in.’

  He expertly spat the end of his cigar out of the open roaring sidewindow, and shouted back to us.

  ‘One of the Protestant planes flew into the wrong valley the other week. By the time they realized they’d blown it, the valley was too narrow to turn round in… Wham! The rescue ’copter found out they’d survived the crash but not the reception party. They ended up on the dinner menu! We could push ahead anyway, if you like.’

  The three of us chorused that trying again the following day would suit us just fine. It was only after another four days of abortive attempts that we finally found ourselves soaring over the high Baliem Valley and the huts of the Dani tribe, whose thriving community had remained unknown to the outside world until the 1930s. I thought of Rockefeller, who had been there with the Harvard-Peabody Expedition filming the last great tribal war of the Dani peoples, shortly before he went on to his death in the Asmat swamps.

  Far to the east and west of us we could see snow-capped peaks, and by the third hour of flying the terrain was becoming progressively wilder. We entered deep gorges with furious white rivers rushing through them far below, and perpendicular walls of jungle rising to disappear into the mist above us either side of our wing-tips. We were savaged by updraughts, our aileron cables creaked and popped, and our pilot chomped his thirtieth cigar almost in half as he wrestled with the stick. Only J.P. was enjoying himself. Bill looked rigid and green, and I was feeling very uneasy about facing danger without the security buffer of a camera lens to look at it through. At one point we passed within three hundred feet of a high ridge, at the same altitude as ourselves. It was topped by a community of circular huts. Outside, so close that I could almost distinguish the expressions on their faces, a group of some 40 naked men, women and children stood poised to perform some solemn ritual, as if frozen in time, as we careered onwards through the angry air.

  ‘Uncontacted!’ our pilot yelled. ‘Crazy, eh? We pass ’em every few weeks. They can see we’re people of sorts inside this bird. But they don’t smile much, do they? Never seen ’em wave, either. We drop them stuff, sometimes, the old-fashioned knives and mirrors mainly – just in case we have a flat tire round here…’

  We turned a corner in this chasm, and abruptly the mountain wall was behind us, and we dropped from eight to one thousand feet over the sprawling southern swamp. Flat and horizonless, because of the heat haze, its only features were occasional wide rivers, which snaked lazily back upon themselves, each loop taking several miles to return to a point a few hundred yards from where it had begun.

  ‘Done it again, boys!’ our pilot screamed above the engine, with alarming enthusiasm. ‘Agats is only about another hundred miles on the nose. But best not to count your turkeys, eh?’ And he foraged in his multiple pockets for another cigar – I hoped not his last.

  The squelching landing-field, raised just a few feet above the high tide mark was a two-hour boat-ride downstream from Agats. We had been in radio contact with the missionaries since leaving the mountains, so a rusty old riverboat was waiting by the landing-patch for us.

  In Agats, the tiny administrative and missionary nerve-centre of the region, sun and rain beat furiously on the rusting iron roofs of crumbling stilt shacks connected by rickety boardwalks. These boardwalks were exceedingly dangerous. A friend of ours had recently walked and canoed half the length of New Guinea without mishap, and had finally reached the safety of Agats only to fall through the boardwalk and break his leg. So it was with caution that we hauled our daunting mountain of equipment from the jetty towards the nearest house in town – the mission headquarters. This was my first look at the Asmat, and it was a depressing sight. They seemed like aliens in their own swamp, and their faces reflected their anguish at being gradually brow-beaten into the Christian work-ethic. In Agats they were forbidden to appear naked, and so had to work for two weeks to earn a pair of shorts which might last them four.

  We were met by a lay brother who led us to our airy cells, telling us that the bishop and several of the fathers who were in town from their outlying posts would be joining us later for dinner. I was prepared for a social ordeal, but they turned out to be an articulate and hospitable bunch from Holland and the American mid-west, who came here to save souls but discovered that their first priority was to save bodies. One of them, an elderly fine-faced man, boasted of having made only two conversions in all the 17 years he had been here. Their Crosier Order was clearly at the liberal end of the Catholic spectrum, and
their bishop was a tough compact man in his mid-forties, with an unexpectedly earthy sense of humour.

  ‘This might seem kind of a one-horse town to have a bishop,’ he told us on meeting him, ‘but it’s considered a high-risk post. Murdered bishops attract more attention than murdered padres, which means more donations to our Order’s collection box if anything goes wrong again. So they’ve given me the world’s smallest bishopric in terms of population, but probably the largest in land area.’

  ‘When I first arrived,’ he recalled as we sat on his veranda overlooking the swamp, there were a lot of strange things to get used to. For instance, it’s customary for important men to greet each other by firmly grabbing the arm with one hand, and the testicles with the other! It can be a painful experience if you’re not expecting it.’

  ‘And hardly less so’, one of the others added, ‘if you are!’

  Now that the after-dinner wine was flowing freely, they admitted to having enslaved the Asmat with tobacco – to which they are completely addicted – and excused it on the grounds that it was the only available leverage they had over them for suppressing headhunting and cannibalism.

  ‘Piet, here, once manoeuvred his canoe between two war-parties,’ one of them said, pointing at the older man who had made only two conversions. ‘He shouted, “If you fight, there’ll be no more tobacco”, and everyone went home.’ The old priest blushed at our laughter.