by Carl Hoffman
“How old is he?” I asked Amates.
They talked, I waited. “He doesn’t know,” Amates said, “but maybe in his sixties.”
“Does he remember a story about a Dutch raid, men being killed?”
Amates spoke to Kokai with what would soon become familiar to me—a long-winded, winding indirectness, a simple, ten-word question taking ten minutes to ask. Amates’s interrogatory concluded, Kokai looked at me. Rolled a cigarette, a long one, using two pieces of rolling paper. The candlelight flickered. It was hot, my legs ached from the hard wooden floor, and I hadn’t sat on a piece of padding since arising from my air mattress at three that morning. Then Kokai started talking.
“He remembers,” Amates said. “He was a child, and he saw it.” On and on it went in a disjointed swirl of story, Amates pausing to translate. The Asmat, I would learn, are splendid storytellers in a world without TV or film or prerecorded media of any kind. Kokai pantomimed the pulling of a bow. He slapped his thighs, his chest, his forehead, then swept his hands over his head, illustrating the back of his head blowing off. His eyes went big to show fright; he showed running with his arms and shoulders, then slinked, crept into the jungle. He held his cigarette between his middle finger and thumb, wiping his forefinger across the glowing coal to brush off the ash. I heard the names Osom, Faratsjam, Akon, Samut, and Ipi, and a tale that was the second link in the chain of events surrounding the mystery of Michael Rockefeller and that had been nothing but typewritten pages from a dusty Dutch archive came to life.
9
February 1958
THE VILLAGE OF OTSJANEP AND THE EWTA RIVER AT LOW TIDE AROUND THE TIME OF MAX LEPRÉ’S RAID.
(MSC/OSC Brotherhood, Order of the Sacred Heart)
ON FEBRUARY 6, 1958, as he boarded the government launch Eendracht and headed for Otsjanep, the sun burned overhead with such intensity it made Max Lapré wilt. The Eendracht was thirty feet long, shallow draft, with a high bow and a curving sheer line that ended in a low waist just a foot above the water. At the bow was a small cuddy cabin with two portholes, and a white canopy covered the open deck. Lapré was wiry and tightly wound. Accompanying him were eleven Papuan policemen dressed in khaki military-style uniforms and armed with Mauser M98 bolt-action rifles and one Schmeisser submachine gun, and Lapré carried a sidearm.
Lapré felt afraid. Following behind were three canoes of warriors from Atsj, and looking at them paddling naked in the sun, he couldn’t shake a nagging feeling of smallness; he was a white dot in an utterly foreign, black-skinned world. And yet it was his country’s to rule, this jungle, this swamp, these people, his to govern and tame, and he was determined to teach the natives a lesson in the power of civilized government.
The days of colonialism may have been ending, but Lapré, the new government controller who had taken over Asmat in 1956, was a man from another era. Max Lapré’s relatives had been in the Dutch East Indies since the 1600s, and he was born in 1925 on the island of Sumatra. His father was a soldier in the Royal Netherlands Indies Army. When he was three, the family moved to Malang on the island of Celebes. There Max grew up in a community as insular as only a group of colonists can be, a place where people depended on each other against the majority and toasted the queen on her birthday. Even more so because, from the 1930s on, it was a community under threat as Indonesians agitated for independence and Japan began expanding throughout the Pacific. Years later, Max would remember his first encounter with Japanese soldiers in an interview. “There was this Japanese store in the Chinese area of Malang,” Lapré said. “These were really long buildings and all the way in the back, you always had some sort of living area with a patio. I kept on walking further and further into the back of the store. Right there at the patio there were Japanese having a meeting. They sat there in uniforms, their samurai swords leaning against their seats. They saw me and I ducked away. It frightened me.”
Still, the Dutch were shocked when Japan invaded Singapore in 1942. Lapré’s father was sent to the front, and his seventeen-year-old son never forgot the words he told his father: “You go teach them a lesson.”
Instead, William Lapré stepped on a land mine and was taken prisoner from his hospital bed. He wouldn’t see his family until 1946. As the war deepened, the Laprés lost their income and their servants, and the Dutch schools closed. Max became a hustler, selling watches, fabric, clothes, and beauty products to prostitutes. His girlfriend’s father was executed. He was beaten by Japanese soldiers in 1944 and had to report to a working prison camp. His head was shaved, he was made to chop down trees with a dull ax, he slept in a wooden shed and was fed a meager diet of tea and a cup of corn in the morning, and more corn and raw vegetables in the evening. He grew weak with dysentery and had wild dreams; his mind drifted like it was floating away from his body.
Lapré’s dysentery may have saved his life, because he was soon transferred to a hospital and released from the work camp to live with his grandparents. When the war ended, however, his troubles did not, for Indonesians were seeking independence. Houses and cars were appropriated by Indonesian republicans. Dutch were stoned and beaten with sticks. The Laprés’ servants, back on the payroll, were blocked from entering the house. Max was arrested again, this time by young Indonesians with machine guns and swords, and locked in a prison cell in Malang. One day a prisoner started singing “The Wilhelmus,” the Dutch national anthem, and all the prisoners joined in and were pelted with rocks and struck with sticks. When a half-Indonesian, half-European came to persuade them to become Indonesian citizens, they booed him.
After being released in June 1946, Lapré sailed for the Netherlands.
NOW, TEN YEARS LATER, he was back, working for the government in the last Dutch colony in the East. A death here, a death there, could be overlooked, but the recent mayhem between Omadesep and Otsjanep was too much. Holland was a civilized country trying to make something out of its half of New Guinea, and it was time to step in. Did he carry animosity toward the Asmat? He would say in later interviews that he didn’t. But his whole life had been formed as a colonist, as an overlord, and then he’d suffered years of abuse and was ripped away from the only world he knew. Did he have any knowledge about the Asmat as a culture? Did he care? There is no evidence in his writings or reports that he had any empathy for them, and he seems to have stepped into his post with an agenda. After meeting him, van Kessel lamented that Lapré was “planning to rule the Asmat with a strong hand.”
Soon after Lapré arrived in Asmat, the small village of Atembut took a head from the village of Biwar Laut, in retribution for two men and two women from Atembut who had been killed three years before on a visit to Biwar. Lapré sped to the village, which he found deserted. Still, he would teach them a lesson. He set the jeu on fire, destroyed all the canoes he found, and emptied a machine gun into the air, an action that van Kessel called “unproportionate.”
When he’d first heard the news about the fight between Omadesep and Otsjanep, Lapré had simply dispatched a policeman named Dias, himself a colonial mutt, half-Indonesian, half-Dutch. Dias and a force descended on Omadesep on January 18, 1958. They arrested eleven, confiscated as many of the weapons in the village as they could find, and burned canoes and at least one of the men’s houses. Reports reached Dias, however, that Otsjanep wouldn’t be so pliable. Fearing trouble, he sent three Papuan policemen with a Dutch flag and some steel axes to the village. The police returned quickly. Otsjanep wanted nothing to do with the government and were willing, Lapré would write in his official report, “to use violence to make themselves clear. The Dutch flag was not accepted.”
Lapré went himself ten days later. He’d first stopped at Atsj, where he asked the people for help—a curious thing to do since the villages were barely known to each other and canoes of warriors from Atsj would hardly be a calming influence on Otsjanep. “Maybe they saw it as an opportunity to smack someone’s head off,” Lapré admitted of the rowers from Atsj. “You never know with these people, an
d if there were fights, yeah, they liked that.” Again he’d sent three Papuans with a flag, and again they’d returned reporting that the flag was rejected and that Otsjanep was “fully armed and waiting for them.”
Years later, Lapré would say that he went to Otsjanep only to “investigate” and to see if he could find anyone who might “identify the perpetrators.” If that was true, however, he could have waited for things to cool off. He could have arrived unarmed in a canoe with von Peij or van Kessel bearing tobacco. In fact, in 1958 no white men had ever been attacked by the Asmat, who either feared the white strangers in their midst or regarded the few who came without weapons and bearing fishhooks, axes, and tobacco—like van Kessel—with tolerance.
THAT HAD ALMOST always been the case with tribal people in the first stages of contact. When Christopher Columbus reached the New World in 1492, he wrote in his journal on December 16: “They are the best people in the world and above all the gentlest. They became so much our friends that it was a marvel. . . . They traded and gave everything they had, with good will. I sent the ship’s boat ashore for water, and they very willingly showed my people where the water was, and they themselves carried the full barrels to the boat. They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil, nor do they murder or steal. Your highnesses may believe that in all the world there can be no better or gentler people.”
Four hundred years later, Tobias Schneebaum arrived in the last mission outpost in the Peruvian Amazon. Out there, beyond the mission, he was told, were uncontacted tribes who bashed the heads of their enemies and attacked any attempts at contact from outsiders. But Schneebaum had an insatiable curiosity and deep affinity for indigenous people—they didn’t scare him. One day he left the mission and headed alone into the jungle. After four days of walking, he spotted a group of men on the banks of the river. Had he been armed, fearful, on edge, or in a big group, who knows what would have happened. But Schneebaum surrendered totally: he shed his clothes and walked naked into their midst. The violent savages’ response? They hugged him and touched him and kissed him all over and marveled at him and led him back to their village, where he lived for months.
Inevitably, those early peaceful encounters between whites and natives soon turned to violence. The cultural collision was too great, the power imbalance too extreme, between men who knew nothing beyond their immediate world and men who thought they knew everything. They weren’t, after all, just people with different technologies, but people living in completely different worlds—and the whites invariably had no inkling of this other world. They couldn’t see the spirits, didn’t know they existed, and were blind, deaf, and dumb to the symbols and meanings of the cultures they were entering.
In the 1930s, explorers began a series of foot journeys into the highlands of what is now Papua New Guinea, almost always in large parties of several whites and with extensive retinues of porters and policemen, all of them armed with modern firearms. And always the response was the same: the Papuans were petrified, believing that the whites were ghosts, spirits of the dead. The white creatures’ boot prints, to those used to reading footprints, indicated a being that had its toes cut off, and the tread patterns implied a skeleton of some kind.
These creatures had to be either avoided, driven away from their homes, or placated with sweet potatoes and pigs, and the accounts offer a long tale of one misunderstanding after another. When Australians Jack Hides and Jim O’Malley entered the Great Papuan Plateau in 1935, they appeared to the local Etoro people as if coming from outer space. “We jumped with surprise,” recalled an Etoro who’d witnessed them. “No one had seen anything like this before or knew what it was. When they saw the clothes on the Sowelo—Europeans—and the others, they thought they were like people you see in a dream; ‘these must be spirit people coming openly, in plain sight.’ ” About fifty Etoro warriors eventually appeared, armed with bows and arrows. They pranced and whooped and to disrupt them Hides let out a loud, two-fingered whistle. In that moment two worlds—three, really, the world of the whites, the world of the Etoro, and the world of the spirits, a fourth dimension that Hides couldn’t see, didn’t know existed—collided. For the Australian it was just a sound, a loud noise to get the natives’ attention. To the Etoro it was something else altogether: the sound a witch made when it approached. By the time an escalating series of cultural miscommunications came to an end, Hides and his porters had fired three shots, killing two.
AS LAPRÉ ENTERED the Ewta River, geography didn’t help. The river is narrow: seventy-five feet wide at its mouth at high tide, it quickly diminishes to less than half that upstream. Three hundred yards upriver, they encountered a fleet of canoes full of armed warriors from Otsjanep. They screeched and “bawled,” as Lapré put it, but pulled back as Lapré came closer. He chased them for a bit, but got nervous, and then decided to retreat.
Not wanting to take any chances, Lapré increased his strength. On the sixth of February, he dispatched a mobile police force out of Merauke to the mouth of the Faretsj, where it linked up with Dias and another ten policemen, and together with four canoes full of warriors from Atsj they again arrived at the mouth of the Ewta.
It was afternoon and the tide was incoming, but the river was still too shallow to enter with the launch. They waited, the tension increasing with the afternoon heat. Finally, late in the day, there was enough water to proceed, and they entered what must have seemed like the heart of darkness. As the Ewta narrowed to thirty feet, sometimes twenty, the banks pressed in, a tangle of nipa palms and reeds and mangrove roots rising out of black mud. And then it started to rain, a driving, pelting tropical deluge. Lapré felt unsure, frightened. Where van Kessel would have arrived in shorts and sneakers, sitting in the bottom of a native canoe, Lapré was steaming upriver in a powered steel motor launch packed with gun-toting, uniformed policemen. Even worse, he was leading a party of warriors from Atsj, historic enemies of Otsjanep. Behind every tree he believed lurked a savage warrior, and he was worried about how to get out—the upper Ewta was too narrow to turn around quickly.
Lapré grabbed the tiller himself. It took an hour for them to creep toward the village. The heat. The overhanging trees and dangling vines, all dripping and moist. A twisting, narrow passageway. The sound of their engine bouncing off the wall of green. The agonizingly slow voyage toward an armed confrontation with naked men smeared with war paint and adorned with feathers and the tusks of pigs and teeth of dogs, shells and pig bone in their noses, who followed no conventions regarding prisoners, who were as different as it was possible for human beings to be.
Lapré’s concern was self-fulfilling. After an hour, they rounded a bend and the world opened. The clearing was thick with men, and Lapré noted seeing no women, children, or dogs—“always a bad sign.” The villagers were as scared as Lapré, maybe more so. Word had traveled fast in the jungle; they knew what happened in Omadesep, the canoes destroyed, the men arrested. And they knew about guns, the violence they were capable of. But they were confused. They didn’t know what Lapré and his patrol would do, what they should do, maybe not even who, or what, he really was. They were proud and independent in their world, and Lapré might even be a ghost. What to do?
On the left a group approached, Lapré believed, in capitulation. But on the right stood a group armed with bows and arrows and spears and shields. Lapré looked left, he looked right; he was equally unsure of what to do. Women and children streamed out of the houses and fled into the jungle. Behind the houses a third group of men broke into what he described as “warrior dances.” Lapré and a force of police scrambled onto the left bank, Dias and his men took the right. A few men from Otsjanep bolted for the bush, and the armed men backed toward the rim of the forest.
“Come out!” Lapré yelled, through interpreters, “and put down your weapons!”
A few men edged forward and then tried to run away, and Lapré’s policemen tried to restrain them.
Then pandemonium. A man came out of a house beari
ng something in his hand, and he ran toward Lapré. What was he holding?
Shots rang out from all directions. Bang. Bang. Bang. An Asmat named Faratsjam was hit in the head and the rear of his skull blew off. Four bullets ripped into Osom—his biceps, both armpits, and his hip. Akon took shots to the midsection, Samut to the chest. Ipi’s jaw vanished in a bloody instant. As in stories of similar encounters in the highlands, the villagers would remember every detail of the bullet damage, so shocking it was to them, the violence so fast and ferocious and magical to people used to hand-to-hand combat and wounding with spear or arrow, which almost never killed instantly.
The Asmat panicked and bolted in all directions, disappearing into the jungle. “Stop shooting!” Lapré yelled. He did a quick search, found two dead, and set fire to the biggest canoes. Shortly before dusk, Lapré and his men climbed back on their boat and headed downriver.
Lapré’s explanation to van Kessel about his actions: “It was raining cats and dogs, and the people acted so strange.”
Lapré spent the night offshore and returned up the Ewta the next day at five-thirty a.m. Now, however, the river was blocked. Throughout the night the men from Otsjanep had cut trees, felling them across the river, so many that it took Lapré six hours to make it the few miles to Otsjanep. The village was deserted, but from the jungle they heard chanting and the beat of drums. Lapré did not pursue them.
Over the next few days Lapré visited nearby villages. Basim, just a few miles away and closely related by marriage and blood to Otsjanep, was deserted. Buepis he found “quite skittish.” At the mouth of the Fajit, he made contact with a powerful chief named Betekam, who had managed the feat of marrying five wives from five different villages, thereby acquiring not just power and prestige but free passage among them. Lapré had left five dead and one injured in Otsjanep, Betekam said, and the village had been hostile because it didn’t want to let go of “old customs and headhunting.” The villagers, Betekam said, were afraid and did not want to return. Lapré offered a deal, to be conveyed through Betekam: he would leave them alone if they returned to their village and turned over the heads of the men from Omadesep they had taken.
