Savage Harvest

by Carl Hoffman

  I hadn’t wanted to bring the phone, but at the last minute I’d thought how stupid it would be to die for want of a call. Had Michael Rockefeller had even a radio when his boat overturned in 1961, he never would have disappeared. It was as simple as that.

  We were crossing the mouth of the Betsj River, off the southwest coast of New Guinea. Here, north of Australia, the Arafura rolls across a thousand miles and then hits the swamps of Indonesian Papua. Where the water ends and the land begins is hard to know. The Arafura is the color of pale opal, heavy with silt carried by a thousand brown rivers that course from central New Guinea’s great mountains, jagged, steep sawteeth reaching sixteen thousand feet. The peaks trap the heavy, moisture-laden tropical clouds, and every rivulet feeds another and another, and they grow larger and intertwine and curve as the land flattens, and it flattens quickly, suddenly, and for a hundred miles to the sea this land is without a hill, a rock, or even a pebble.

  The Arafura is an ocean of fifteen-foot tides, epic shifts of water, an invisible swelling that daily slides into this flat swamp. It inundates the land, which becomes a netherworld of water and trees through which you can navigate a canoe, as if you’re floating within a hydroponic garden. Mangroves with tangled, mossy roots hang with vines and epiphytes. Stands of bamboo rise high and tight in green clusters. The fronds of prehistoric-looking nipa palms are thirty feet long and rustle in the breeze, their roots twisted and black and bulging. Towering ironwood trees grow out of water as brown as a strong cup of tea. When the tide runs out, it leaves behind great swaths of glistening mud so fine you sink up to your knees if you step in it. The mud feels as soft as liquid satin. And cool to your skin. It’s alive with wiggling mudskippers and tiny yellow crabs the size of your fingernails.

  From above, in an airplane, it is nothing but a flat, impenetrable green carpet cut with the interconnected veins of brown water snaking in every direction. From a boat or the banks of a river, the land is so flat the sky is always huge overhead, changing, full of layers and shapes, patches of blue mixed with angry pewter-colored clouds. Torrential curtains of rain fall from the sky, so much water in drops so big, hammering with such force, you can’t believe the air could hold it all. Often the sun is shining and it’s raining at the same time. It’s hot. Humid. Sometimes glimmeringly bright. Quiet, the sound of leaves rustling and water trickling, the plop of a fish jumping or a cockatoo’s screech or the dip of a paddle. At night the stars are bold and bright, the Milky Way overhead as swirly white and thick as tapioca pudding. And even on those wonderfully clear nights heat lightning flashes along the horizon, as if somewhere out there big things are happening, just not here. The Arafura is a whole, big sea; sometimes it’s flat and still and almost blue, and sometimes it’s wild and angry, a steady hot wind pushing it against the opposing current of river mouths three miles wide, creating a boiling turbulence. It feels primal. Biblical. Distant from everything.

  Asmat is, in its way, a perfect place. Everything you could possibly need is here. It’s a petri dish, teaming with shrimp and crabs and fish, clams and mussels and snails. Crocodiles fifteen feet long prowl its riverbanks, and jet-black iguanas sun on uprooted trees. In the jungle there are wild pig, the furry, possumlike cuscus, and the ostrichlike cassowary. And sago palm, whose pith can be pounded into a white, edible starch and which hosts the larvae of the Capricorn beetle, both key sources of nutrition. The rivers are navigable highways. There are flocks of brilliant red-and-green parrots. Hornbills with five-inch beaks and blue necks. White sulfur-crested cockatoo and coal-black king cockatoo sporting elaborate crests.

  And secrets, spirits, laws, and customs born of men and women who have been walled off by ocean, mountains, mud, and jungle for longer than anyone knows.

  Until fifty years ago, there were no wheels here. No steel or iron, not even any paper. Today there’s still not a single road or automobile. In its ten thousand square miles, there’s but one airstrip, and outside of the main “city” of Agats, there isn’t a single cell tower.

  The waves slammed and the boat rolled, and I tried to form a plan. The craft was fiberglass; presumably it would float. Would I be able to climb anywhere out of the water enough to use the phone? Who would I call, and what would they be able to do if I reached them back in the United States in what was the middle of their night? For that matter, habituated to my cell phone, I didn’t even know most people’s numbers by heart anymore. We were nearing the southern mouth of the river, close to shore, but there wasn’t really any shore—just flooded coastline and swamp. Could I climb one of the flimsy mangroves? And craziest of all, this was the exact spot that Rockefeller had been trying to navigate fifty years earlier.

  He was twenty-three years old, just out of Harvard, the privileged son of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, seven months into the adventure of a lifetime that had transformed him from clean-cut student to scruffy photographer and art collector. One moment his boat was being tossed by the waves, just as ours was, and the next it was upside down. And then Rockefeller had swum for shore and was gone. Vanished, no trace of him or his body ever found, despite a two-week search involving ships, airplanes, helicopters, and thousands of locals prowling the coasts and jungle swamps. The fact that such a simple, banal thing had happened to him made what was happening to us feel all the more real. There’d be no foreboding music. One bad wave and I’d be clinging to a boat in the middle of nowhere.

  The official cause of Rockefeller’s death was drowning, but there had long been a multitude of rumors. He had been kidnapped and kept prisoner. He had gone native and was hiding out in the jungle by choice. He’d been consumed by sharks or crocodiles. He’d made it to shore, only to be killed and eaten by the local Asmat headhunters. The story had grown, had become mythical. There had been an off-Broadway play about him, a novel, and a popular rock song, even a three-part television series in the 1980s hosted by Leonard Nimoy. I’d been fascinated with the story ever since I first saw a photo of Michael. In it he is bearded, kneeling, holding his thirty-five-millimeter camera under the close eyes of natives in what was then Dutch New Guinea, while working on a film in the highlands of the Great Baliem Valley. That film, Dead Birds, had been a groundbreaking and controversial ethnographic examination of a barely contacted, Stone Age culture that engaged in constant ritual warfare. The mountains, the mist, the naked men yelling and screaming and attacking each other with spears and bows and arrows, had fascinated and entranced me, as had the whole idea of contact between people from dramatically different worlds. In my twenties, I’d tried to get to what was then called Irian Jaya, but it was too expensive for my young budget, and I’d ended up, briefly, in Borneo instead. I had a photograph that mirrors the one of Rockefeller—we are about the same age, and I am holding my camera up to the eyes of a Dayak child in Indonesian Borneo.

  I was a half-Jewish middle-class mutt with a public education, not a blue-blooded scion, but Rockefeller’s journey resonated with me. I knew what he was doing and why he was there, at least in part. It wasn’t just to collect what was then called “primitive art,” but to taste, smell, see, touch that world for himself. An older, less “civilized” world, one as different from his own as it was possible to find. An encounter with the Other. And I wondered if he, like me, wanted to know what the Other could say about him, about us. Whether he wanted not just to interact with it, but to see if these naked men whose pursuit of sacred heads that resulted in spectacular carvings might be a mirror of a younger, more elemental self, a self before all the complications of technology and civilization. To see if there might even be something Eden-like about it—a world before Eve tasted the apple. To see himself, Michael Rockefeller, before privilege and social convention. Were they the same, or different?

  And how could he make his “primitive art”–collecting father prouder than by going to its source and plunging in deeper than the forceful governor and presidential candidate had ever dreamed? Michael wouldn’t just acquire primitive art from galleries or
flea markets, but collect it from the creators themselves, understand it, introduce a whole new group of artists to the world.

  I spent hours looking at that photo, wondering what Michael had seen and felt in Asmat, wondering what really happened to him, wondering if I might be able to solve the mystery. That he had been kidnapped or had run away didn’t make sense. If he had drowned, well, that was that, except he’d been attached to flotation aids and no trace of his body had ever been found. As for sharks, despite their fearsome reputation, they rarely attacked men in these waters. Which meant that if he hadn’t perished during his swim, there had to be more. Someone had to know something. And that “more” was the nightmare of every traveler—to be drawn to a place from which you never returned. There had to be some collision, some colossal misunderstanding. The Asmat were warriors drenched in blood, but Dutch colonial authorities and missionaries had been in the area for almost a decade by the time Michael disappeared, and the Asmat had never killed a white. If he had been murdered, it struck to the heart of a clash between Westerners and Others that had been ongoing ever since Columbus first sailed to the New World. I found it compelling that in this remote corner of the world the Rockefellers and their power and money had been impotent, had come up with nothing. How was that even possible?

  Michael’s disappearance was a mystery, and mysteries by their nature are open wounds, events without closure. We long to have answers, and the idea of vanishing is particularly unsettling. The great existential questions, after all, are about who we are, where we come from, where we end up. Ceremonies, from birthdays to weddings to graduations to funerals, are rituals that address those questions in a public and symbolic way, a way that lets us process them, deal with them, accept the passing changes of life and time. But Michael Rockefeller had vanished. Though his family had declared him dead, had held a memorial service for him, and maintained a gravesite on the family compound, there had been no body; no one could say with certainty what had happened to him, and no newspaper had ever run an obituary. A ghost was the spirit of a man or woman who’d died but couldn’t move on, a death that had been unsettled. As a fellow traveler, a journalist who’d traveled frequently to the fringes of the world, who’d taken the bus across Afghanistan and encountered angry, jacked-up soldiers in the Congo and been in a hundred other crazy situations, I knew something had gone wrong, and I was unsettled, bothered, by the fact that we’d never known what. Michael Rockefeller was a sort of ghost. His twin sister, Mary, had spent her lifetime struggling with the grief and loss and lack of closure, a journey that had taken her from psychotherapy to healing ceremonies. Solving the mystery, I decided, wouldn’t be just solving one of the world’s most famous cold cases; it would be performing a ritual, telling the end of the story, bringing closure to a life.

  I started poking around in Dutch colonial archives and the records of Dutch missionaries, and one document led to another. I found more than I’d ever imagined. After the ships and planes and helicopters had gone home, new information surfaced in the weeks immediately after Michael disappeared, and a series of new investigations had taken place. There were pages and pages of reports, cables, and letters discussing the case and the events leading up to it, sent by the Dutch government, Asmat-speaking missionaries on the ground, and Catholic Church authorities, and none of it had ever been made public. Men who had been key participants in those investigations had remained silent for fifty years, but they were still alive, and I found that they were finally willing to talk.

  CRASH. ROLL. The wind was picking up, and even though we were nearing shore, Wilem couldn’t find a rhythm. The waves were too choppy and steep and fast and close together. Wilem and Amates Owun, my translator and guide, conferred, then Amates said in his painstakingly slow English: “Many boats have problems here in the winter. But there is a bus here, under the water.”

  “A bus?” Half the time I couldn’t figure out what Amates was talking about. It wasn’t just his limited English, but his Asmat mind, which was privy to a world I could never enter or even know about. In the main Asmat town of Agats was a small but wondrous museum packed with ancestor poles, shields, drums, spears, paddles, skulls, and masks. At night, to me, it was dark and locked tight, but to the Asmat the museum was filled with the cacophony of the drumming and chanting spirits who were embodied in the carvings there. So, a bus? There wasn’t even a car or road within hundreds of miles, much less a bus.

  “A bus, like with wheels that carries people?” I said.

  Amates pointed toward the water with the stub of his right forefinger—the first two inches had been bitten off in a fight the month before. His face was narrow, his eyes close-set, with huge lips and the high cheekbones that characterize many Asmat. He was missing a few teeth, and those visible were brown from chewing betel nut. He was six feet tall, as thin as wire. I looked where he pointed and saw waves and sky and heavy black clouds and patches of blue, but no bus.

  “Yes,” he said. “The Bimpu Bis. It is a big bus that lives under the water right here, and when people have trouble it comes up and they ride it to shore. Many people have been saved by it. Michael Rockefeller did not know about this bus.”

  I lit a clove cigarette—we were all smoking incessantly—and gripped the satellite phone in my pocket like it was a talisman. I had no idea what Amates was talking about. I was shivering in the spray, and hungry—a diet of rice and stray bits of fish was never enough calories. I would do anything for a steak. My feet and legs were covered with red bites. We turned toward shore, surfing fast with the waves, and a narrow opening in the wall of swampy green appeared. The moment we entered the cut, the wind fell away. The water smoothed. I smelled smoke and piss, the smell of men. We rounded a slight bend and another hundred yards ahead stood eight houses—palm-thatched roofs and walls, ten feet over the water on slender poles, each with a three-foot-wide veranda. Women, some naked from the waist, and children perched on one, men gathered on the one next to it. No one said anything; there was no greeting. It was always like this when I came to a village on my first trip to Asmat, no words exchanged as we slid up to the hut with the men. We tied up, I grabbed a pouch of loose-leaf tobacco and some rolling papers and clambered onto a porch made of split pieces of bamboo fastened with rattan. There wasn’t a nail in the place. No running water. No power, no connection to anywhere else in the universe except by human touch and the distance over which a voice could shout. It was silent, only the sound of birds and those voices. The men on the veranda were shirtless and wearing battered gym shorts. I shook their hands, leathery and tough and dry, and they touched their hearts, a gesture picked up from Indonesia’s Muslims. Wet and dirty and tired, I plunked down and passed out the tobacco. We sat and smoked and stared into the new morning green. I had a thousand questions to ask, but no way to ask them.

  4

  February 20, 1957

  MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER AND HIS FATHER, NELSON, AT MICHAEL’S GRADUATION FROM HARVARD, JUNE 1960.

  (Library of Congress)

  ON FEBRUARY 20, 1957, in a city of concrete and steel six thousand times bigger than the largest hamlet in Asmat, a village big man named Nelson Rockefeller introduced the world to a new kind of seeing. Temperatures in New York City peaked that day at thirty-seven degrees, and Rockefeller was dressed in the height of New York tribal finery: black tie. He was forty-nine years old, square-jawed, and ambitious, the grandson of Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller. At Nelson’s birth, which was announced on the front page of the New York Times, John D. was the richest man on earth, with a fortune estimated at $900 million. Nelson’s wealth and political and social influence would be hard to comprehend for most Americans, let alone a tribe of hunter-gatherers. In one year he would become the governor of New York. In two he would run for the presidency. In 1974 he would become vice president of the United States under Gerald Ford.

  He had a Down East patrician drawl and was known for clasping the hands of voters and saying “Hiya, fella.” He “exuded an exu
berant self-assurance so unshakable that it must have been instilled from birth,” wrote his former press secretary Joseph Persico. “Not a social arrogance, but rather an almost child-like openness which he assumed before anyone or anything.” It seemed like he and his family owned half of Manhattan. On that day in February, inside a newly renovated, Rockefeller-owned, four-story townhouse with elegantly curving bay windows at 15 West Fifty-Fourth Street—just off Fifth Avenue in the heart of midtown and directly behind the Museum of Modern Art—guests began arriving at 8:30 p.m. to a private reception heralding the first exhibit of the Museum of Primitive Art, which would open to the public the following day.

  The sleek, modern, and minimalist space, which one critic said was “so tasteful and restrained” that it “hardly seems like a museum at all,” couldn’t have contrasted more with the objects it displayed or the people celebrating its opening. Some of the most powerful men and women in the arts and society were on the guest list. There was Rene d’Harnoncourt, the director of the Museum of Modern Art. Robert Woods Bliss, whose fifty-four-acre estate in Washington, DC, Dumbarton Oaks, is now a museum and library belonging to Harvard University. New York socialite Gertrud Mellon. Henry Luce, who founded Time and Life magazines. Henry Ochs Sulzberger, the owner of the New York Times. And of course, Nelson’s nineteen-year-old son Michael. The things they were celebrating came from a world away. A carved paddle from Easter Island. The elongated, exaggerated face of a wooden mask from Nigeria. Aztec and Mayan pre-Columbian stone figures from Mexico and Hopi Kachina dolls and an engraved reindeer bone from the Pyrenees, all created by nameless craftsmen in the nooks and crannies of the world. Around these objects were no ethnographic dioramas, no depictions of African huts or canoes and fishing nets, and no maps. They rested atop stark white cylinders and cubes, illuminated by track lighting against white walls, a “severely simple setting,” wrote the New York Times. As everything about their presentation said, they were to be viewed as works of art in and of themselves.