by Carl Hoffman
Dedication
For Lily
Epigraph
Every encounter with the Other is an enigma, an unknown quantity—I would even say a mystery.
—RYSZARD KAPUSCINSKI
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Part I
1. November 19, 1961
2. November 20, 1961
3. February 2012
4. February 20, 1957
5. December 1957
6. February 2012
7. December 1957
8. February 2012
9. February 1958
10. March 1958
Part II
11. March 1961
12. March 2012
13. September 1961
14. February 2012
15. November 1961
16. November 1961
17. November 1961
18. November 1961
19. November 1961
20. December 1961
21. March 2012
22. January, February, and March 1962
Part III
23. November 2012
24. November 2012
25. December 2012
Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Also by Carl Hoffman
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map
PART I
1
November 19, 1961
MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER IN NEW GUINEA.
(Library of Congress)
THE SEA FELT warm as Michael Rockefeller lowered himself in from the overturned wooden hull. René Wassing peered down at him, and Michael noticed René was sunburned and needed a shave. Their exchange was brief. They’d been drifting on the ocean off the coast of southwest New Guinea for twenty-four hours now, and there wasn’t much that hadn’t been said.
I really don’t think you should go.
No, it’ll be okay. I think I can make it.
Michael cupped his hands and swung his arms, swiveling around. It was eight a.m. The tide was high. He was wearing white cotton underpants and thick, black-rimmed glasses. He had two empty gasoline cans tied to his webbed, military-style belt. He hugged one tightly and started swimming, kicking toward the coast, a hazy line of gray, barely a smudge. He estimated they were five to ten miles off the coast. He kicked slowly and ran the numbers. A mile an hour and he’d be there in ten hours. A half-mile an hour and he’d reach shore in twenty. No problem. The sea was almost as hot as a bath, and it was just a matter of setting his mind to the task. Plus, he and René had the tide charts for the coast and he knew something else in his favor: the tides weren’t evenly spaced right now. Between four p.m. and the next morning, there would be a high tide at midnight, a brief low tide at two a.m., and then another high tide at eight a.m. Which meant that for twelve of the fourteen hours between four p.m. and the next morning, the water would be pushing him toward the coast when he was the most tired.
It wasn’t long until there was no more René on the overturned catamaran behind him. He knew that feeling from swimming off the coast of Maine every summer, how the shore behind you receded quickly even when the destination didn’t seem any closer. And the Arafura Sea here was shallow. He ought to be able to stand, to touch the muddy bottom, when he was still a mile from shore. He rolled onto his back and kicked, long, slow, steady kicks, dragging the cans. He could hear his heart thumping and the sound of his own breathing.
He never would have said it out loud, but he carried a sense of destiny. A bigness. A self-confidence he was barely aware of. Twenty-three-year-olds don’t think about death; life seems eternal, the same as when he would speed along the Maine Turnpike in his Studebaker doing eighty. Now was everything to a twenty-three-year-old. Plus, he was a Rockefeller. Sometimes it was a burden, sometimes a gift, but it defined him, even when he didn’t want it to. “Can’t” wasn’t part of the family lexicon. Everything was possible. He had grown up being able to go anywhere, do anything, meet anyone. His great-grandfather had been the richest man in the world. His father was governor of the state of New York, had just run for president of the United States. In epic survival situations, will is everything, and Michael’s was as big as a will could be. He carried a responsibility, every Rockefeller did, to do good things, big things, to make something of himself. “Stewardship” was the word the family used. He wasn’t just swimming for his life. He was swimming for René, who needed to be rescued. He was swimming for his father, Nelson. For his twin sister, Mary. For the Asmat themselves, in a way, because he had collected so much of their beautiful art that he wanted to share with his father, with Robert Goldwater at the Museum of Primitive Art, with his best friend, Sam Putnam, with the world. He didn’t exactly articulate this, he just knew it, felt it. So he swam and stroked and kicked with confidence. It was a big world, but he was in a bubble. Him and the sea, the big Arafura.
He wasn’t in a hurry. Fear, panic, those were what killed people, made their minds crazy, frantic, exhausted precious energy. He remembered that from army basic training. And he even smiled a little, recalling how he and his Harvard classmates had rolled their eyes at the Widener swim—the requirement that every Harvard graduate complete a fifty-meter swim before graduation, stipulated by the mother of former alum Harry Elkins Widener, who’d died on the Titanic, when she gave $2.5 million for the school’s new library. This was a matter of steadiness. When he felt his calves starting to cramp, his shoulders tiring, he rested, floating, clinging to the gasoline cans, staring at the big sky full of shifting, changing clouds overhead. Luckily the wind and the sea were calm, and they grew calmer as the afternoon passed. At sunset, the ocean was as still as a swimming pool on a summer’s eve. He swam on. He thought about the exhibition he wanted to mount in New York. The feast poles twenty feet tall he’d collected—no one had ever seen anything like that in the United States before; they would dwarf anything else in his father’s new museum. The stars came out, billions of them. Heat lightning flashed along the horizon. The moon rose, three days from full, and he wasn’t in total darkness.
He swam on.
He wasn’t sure where he was, but probably somewhere between the Faretsj and the Fajit Rivers, between the villages of Omadesep and Basim. By dawn there’d be people along the shore, for sure—they were always there fishing. He was happy with how well he already knew these people; Asmat, this remotest corner of the world, had become his. His universe, an alternative world that he’d discovered, was untangling, and this swim to shore was like a baptism, deep in Asmat, and it would be a good story to tell. It was dark and had been for a long time when he saw strange reflections on the water. Behind him the sky lit, white, the light of phosphorescent flares dropping toward the sea. He saw them, but he didn’t know what they were.
Around four a.m. the sky started to turn faintly purple, first light. Out here Michael could feel those subtle shifts. He had been swimming for eighteen hours, but it was almost done, he knew, if he could keep going. His waist was raw where the belt holding the floats was chafing. He was exhausted, but the dawn gave him some added strength. He could see the trees more clearly now. They were a dark line, but they were there. He rested again. Floated again. His whole body hurt. He was thirsty and hungry, and the salt water stung. He’d do anything for a long drink of cold, fresh water. He shivered. Best keep going. As the day got lighter, brighter, he got closer. He tried to touch bottom and he could. Barely. It was mud, though, slippery and sticky, and it was easier to swim. But he could stand and rest, and just knowing that was everything. He knew he would make
it. He untied one of the empty gasoline cans and let it go; it was easier without it. He swam, he stood, he swam some more—on his back now, really the only way to make progress, even though it hurt. He was almost safe. Nipa palms and mangrove rose seemingly right from the water, and among them canoes, a flotilla of them nestled in the trees.
And men.
2
November 20, 1961
AN ASMAT ANCESTOR SKULL. THE LOWER JAW IS ATTACHED, INDICATING THAT THE DECEASED WAS NOT THE VICTIM OF A HEADHUNTING RAID.
THEY SAW HIM, fifty of them, resting in eight long canoes along the mouth of the Ewta River. It was six a.m. The sun was already rising above the trees, the saturated glow of the early morning tropics soon to be washed out by the stark tropical light. The tide was almost high, and there was no definitive shoreline to speak of—just flooded, scattered shrubby trees where water and land came together and the swamp and dense jungle began. Here they could float in the shade, have a smoke with long cigarettes rolled in the yellow husk of nipa palm, and munch balls of sago flour after a night of paddling toward home, just three miles up the Ewta.
“Look, an ew!” said Pep, in the Asmat language. A crocodile!
The men reached for their spears, ten feet long, carved with vicious, inch-long barbs, some of them tipped with the claw of a cassowary.
They watched the crocodile, which didn’t move like any crocodile they’d ever seen before. Michael was swimming on his back, but he rolled over and saw the men and the canoes and smelled the smoke from their cigarettes and the smoldering coals nestled in mud at their sterns, and he waved, shouted. Unbelievable. He’d made it!
“No,” said Fin, “it is a man!”
“Wo!” they grunted. Pep and Fin and Ajim and the others stood and bent forward at the waist and dug their long paddles into the water with powerful strokes, their canoe surging toward the swimming man. The other men in their canoes did the same. The canoes were forty feet long, narrow and low to the water, and some bore faded ochre and white vertical stripes. They surrounded him. Michael was smiling and panting, his beard wet, his lips chapped, blistered. Pep reached down and tried to pull him in, but Michael was too exhausted to help them. Fin and Pep held his arms and began towing him toward shore. They recognized him. In a world without photographs or writing, they had sharp memories, and they had seen him before; he had been in the village. His name was Mike.
The men in the canoes were black-skinned, strong-featured, with high cheekbones and holes in their septums the size of dimes. Beyond the occasional wild pig or human being, they ate no fat, no oil, and they didn’t know sugar. Absent was the subcutaneous layer padding even thin Americans. They were hard muscle, vein, and skin, their chests and shoulders broad from a lifetime of paddling. Their waists were narrow, their abs ripped. They were naked but for tight, finely woven bands of rattan just above their knees and elbows and fiber bags decorated with the seeds of Job’s tears and cassowary and cockatoo feathers. The bags of the older, more important men hung over their chests; those of the younger hung over their backs. Ajim’s, Pep’s, and Fin’s bags hung over their chests, and their left wrists were bound in thick, six-inch-wide bracelets, protection against the powerful snap of the coarse rattan strings of their seven-foot-long bow. Some had a carved pig bone through their septum.
Ajim looked at Pep. “Now is your chance,” he said. It wasn’t just a statement—it was a taunt. Ajim was the head of one of the five jeu, or men’s houses, that made up the Asmat village of Otsjanep. He had killed more people than any of them, had taken more heads. He was quick of mind, fierce, bold, belligerent, full of passionate extremes, and he’d earned his status through fearlessness and risk-taking. He exuded what the Asmat called tes, charisma.
Pep didn’t hesitate. He was surrounded by relatives and fellow villagers, and his status was built on how bold he was, how many people he killed, how many heads he took. He howled and arched his back and drove his spear into the white man’s floating ribs. Michael screamed, groaned a deep, inhuman sound. They hauled him up into the canoe, blood spurting from the wound. They knew what they were doing, had done it dozens of times before, were following sacred rules that prescribed every step of what they were about to do, rules that defined them. Made them men. Made them whole. For they were about to take his power, become him, and restore balance to the world.
The fifty men rowed south on the Arafura Sea, standing up in a line in each canoe, the most important men at the stern and bow, the places of hardest work. Their shoulders and triceps rippled; sweat poured off their chests and foreheads; their backs glistened in the sun. They sang, shouted “Wo! Wo! Wo!” as they clacked their paddles on the sides of the canoe and blew bamboo horns that sounded like eerie foghorns. They laughed. They chanted “Wo! Wo! Wo!” over and over again. They were filled with adrenaline and purpose, the white man’s hot blood mixing with the water in the canoe, sloshing around their bare feet.
A few miles south of the Ewta River, they turned left, into a barely perceptible cut in the shoreline. Here the ocean was silvery over the black mud, long banks of which ran along the shore. The jungle was thick green on all sides, nipa palm and mangrove roots like claws in the water. Flocks of sulfur-crested cockatoo flew overhead, screaming. The cockatoos ate fruit, and Pep and Fin and Ajim were like them, for they, too, ate fruit—human heads. Human heads were the fruit of men and powerful symbols of fertility, precious seeds that blossomed, grew, died, and from which new men sprouted.
As they turned into the inlet—a deserted, beautiful place with small white waves rolling in, the mud shining in the sun and the river water brown, a place that had never seen an engine or a radio, a place where the spirits dwelled—they were about to acquire a powerful new seed: Michael Rockefeller’s head.
There was no beach, just a brief shoreline of thick, soft mud the color of ash. They dragged the white man out of the canoe and slapped him on his skull. “This is my head!” screamed Fin, as the others gathered around, shouting and taunting. Michael was limp, gravely injured, blood oozing from his mouth, matting his wet beard. Fin and Pep and Ajim held his chest off the ground and pushed his head forward and with one blow of an ax in the back of his neck, Michael Rockefeller was dead. Ajim turned him over and thrust into his throat with a bamboo knife, then pressed the head back until the vertebrae cracked. Man, pig, it was all the same now—Michael was sacred meat. As others gathered dead branches from the forest and lit them with coals from the canoe, Fin made a deep cut from Michael’s anus to his neck, through one side of his trunk to his armpit, across the collarbone to his throat, and down the other side, exactly as the ancestors had instructed them how to butcher a man. Blood ran everywhere, soaking their hands, clotting on their arms, spattering their legs. Flies too, buzzing and swarming by the thousands.
Fin broke Michael’s ribs with an ax, put his hand underneath his sternum, ripped it loose, and put it aside. Ajim twisted his legs and arms and cut them off and then pulled out Michael’s entrails with a vigorous jerk. Fifty voices chanted and sang in unison, a powerful, earthy rhythm that might have been the pulse of the mud and the trees themselves. It was sacred violence. The fire was crackling and smoking and hot, and the pieces of meat were placed in it to roast. When it was done, they pulled the charred legs and arms out of the fire, tore the meat off the bones, and mixed it with crumbly whitish-gray sago into long sticks for everyone to eat. Their hands were slippery with precious grease and fat, some of which they saved in small woven bags.
If this had been a normal killing of a fellow villager just a few years earlier, they would have taken the body back to the village for the elaborate, shameless ritual that should ensue. But times were changing. This was a white man, and this had to be done now, here, in secret. They held the head over the fire just long enough to scorch the hair. Fin took the burned hair and mixed it with the blood they’d saved, which they all smeared over each other’s heads, shoulders, and bodies, even their anuses. They were coated in Michael Rockefeller.
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br /> When the head was cooked, they scalped it, cut across its face from the root of the nose to the nape of the neck, and as they did this they talked about what Michael had been doing when he was alive.
“He was eating fish yesterday,” said Pep.
“He was swimming,” said Fin, “and now he is dead.”
Ajim cut a hole about two inches in diameter into Michael’s right temple with a stone ax. The ax had a name, a new one. Its name was Mike. They shook the brains out onto the leaf of a palm, scraped inside the skull with a knife to get every last bit, then mixed the mass with sago, wrapped the leaf up, and roasted it on the fire. This food was special. Only Pep, Fin, Ajim, and Dombai, the most senior men there, ate it. It tasted rich. It was hard to be full in Asmat, and they were all now full. Finally they could rest, sleep without fear. They wrapped the skull in banana leaves, tucked it into Fin’s canoe, and paddled home.
3
February 2012
AMATES, MANU, AND WILEM (FRONT TO BACK) IN THE LONGBOAT ON THE ARAFURA SEA.
WE CRESTED a wave, the thirty-foot, fiberglass longboat slamming into a narrow trough. As the waters of the Arafura Sea crashed over me, I wondered if that was how Michael Rockefeller had died. The swells were short and steep, and my mind had been racing, picturing Michael as a victim of the sacred Asmat ritual of killing and butchering described in detail in the American Anthropologist in 1959. If they’d killed Michael, that was how it had been done.
If they’d killed him—that’s what I was here to find out. Thankfully, the waves brought me back. We were taking them beam on, Wilem throttling up their faces before they could break, then decelerating to minimize the downward slam on the other side. He’d been bottle-fed on these waters, and he knew what he was doing, but the boat was becoming uncontrollable. It was just growing light; in Asmat you travel with the tides, and we’d left the village of Atsj at 3:30 a.m. The moon had been huge and full and so bright it was a dull sun in the darkness, making shadows off the trees and the bow waves silver. The Southern Cross had been directly overhead, as sharp as a string of Christmas lights. Small bats had jerked back and forth over the boat. Now, though, we were getting hammered on the open sea, with water pouring over the gunwales, and the beauty of the night had given way to terror. I crawled forward, reached under a plastic tarp, fumbled blindly for my duffel, found it, found the Ziploc bag holding the satellite phone, slipped it into my pocket, and was soaked by another wave.
