Savage Harvest

by Carl Hoffman

  There is no evidence any heads were ever turned over to Lapré, and his action did not stop headhunting in Otsjanep or anywhere else in Asmat. Lapré admitted that he was probably just driving villages deeper into the jungle and farther up rivers, away from the government. When he visited Otsjanep three months later, many of the inhabitants fled, and men hid under their houses, “waiting to see which way the cat would jump,” he wrote in his patrol report. “The course of affairs is certainly regrettable, but on the other hand it has become clear to them that headhunting and cannibalism is not much appreciated by a government institution all but unknown to them, with which they had only incidental contact. It is highly likely that the people now understand that they would do better not to resist authorities. Their attitude of intentional resistance, which found expression in the rejection of contact items and the Dutch flag . . . was all the more reproachable. . . . However regrettable it may be that there had to be casualties, this is to be preferred over the fact that the village is slowly but surely walking into the forest and nothing can be done about it. In the latter case, every grain of respect would have gone up in the air and eventually there would have been more casualties because of the headhunting raids.”

  The words, given the people he was writing about, are absurd. To us, to a Westerner, they make sense—a straightforward analysis of a people resisting government, who required the teaching of a lesson. But a Dutch flag? A government institution? The rule of law? To the Asmat, Lapré’s raid was altogether something else, a profoundly unsettling experience, something far more than a simple imposition of rational law: the confusing appearance of superbeings, the spirits their whole lives were built around appeasing and deceiving and driving away, had come to kill them with nearly supernatural weapons. For a Catholic it would be like devils or angels appearing in the flesh to attack them for . . . for what?

  And what of the spirits of the five killed by Lapré? They were out there, wandering around, causing mischief, haunting the village, making people sick, as real in death as they were in life. The Chinese crocodile hunters had killed eight. Omadesep had killed four more. Lapré now added five. Seventeen men, women, and children were dead. The world was out of balance, an open wound festering in the village each and every day, even more so because Lapré was a white man. It’s hard to imagine the consternation this caused. How to explain it? How to deal with it?

  10

  March 1958

  INDONESIAN PRESIDENT SUKARNO.

  (Library of Congress)

  MAX LAPRÉ WASN’T operating in a vacuum. If the world of the Asmat and Otsjanep was in turmoil, so was the larger world around New Guinea. Within days of Lapré’s raid on Otsjanep, the new US ambassador to Indonesia, William Palfrey Jones, presented his credentials to Indonesian president Sukarno at a ceremony in Jakarta. Cameras flashed as Sukarno and Jones raised champagne glasses filled with orange juice (a Muslim, Sukarno did not drink alcohol) and toasted the health of Sukarno and President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Jones reiterated his nation’s position—that it had no interest in meddling in Indonesia’s internal affairs and every interest in helping the country maintain its hard-won independence.

  Jones’s comments were more specific than they sounded. The islands of the Indonesian archipelago had a deep and complex culture that had been subjugated by the Dutch for as long as anyone alive, or their grandparents or great-grandparents, could remember. In 1928 Sukarno had proclaimed that a united and independent Indonesia was everything. “Prince and pauper, patrician and coolie, Moslem and Christian—all could be united in a passionate drive for a single goal, Sukarno saw,” wrote Jones. “This goal was liberty, or merdeka, a word that became the rallying cry of the cause.” On August 17, 1945, in the waning days of the Japanese occupation, the Indonesian nationalist movement proclaimed the Republic of Indonesia.

  The Netherlands wanted its colony back, however, and moved in with tanks and aircraft. Only after four years of war and negotiations through the United Nations Commission on Indonesia did the Dutch surrender their claim. During the negotiations, however, the Netherlands insisted on keeping West New Guinea—the western, Dutch half of the island. Indonesia was Muslim; New Guinea was Melanesian and animist—a separate place, so the Dutch argument ran. Sukarno set aside the New Guinea issue, and the agreement was signed, creating the Republic of Indonesia in 1950, with the stipulation that further negotiations on New Guinea would take place within a year. But with the formal birth of the Republic—a country with 150 million inhabitants spread across thousands of miles—the Netherlands balked, ignoring its agreement to further discuss Indonesian claims to New Guinea, and was supported by Britain, Australia, and the United States. Jones’s words were a careful balancing act regarding Indonesian sovereignty, Papua, and Sukarno’s own balancing act with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI).

  When it became Sukarno’s turn to speak during the ceremony, his word choice was equally specific. Sukarno emphasized Indonesia’s independent foreign policy—it had no wish to take sides with either major world bloc—and stressed the importance of “completing Indonesia’s revolution by effecting the return of West Irian” (the Dutch colony of New Guinea). For Sukarno and Indonesia, the “return” of Papua was the fundamental issue; without it, in his mind, Indonesia remained divided and unfree.

  Between 1954 and 1957, Indonesia submitted four draft resolutions on the issue to the UN General Assembly, but none were passed. In retribution, in 1956 the country nationalized Dutch businesses and expelled tens of thousands of Dutch still living there, deepening the antagonism between the two countries.

  For the Dutch, keeping its Papuan colony was purely emotional—no valuable natural resources had yet been discovered there, and the colony cost the Netherlands far more than it earned. But the Indonesian army and Communist Party were locked in a struggle for dominance, and President Sukarno maintained power by dancing between the two—and distracting both by whipping up nationalist fervor over the occupation of West New Guinea and British Malaysia. Percy Spender, Australia’s minister for external affairs, feared that Indonesia would make “hostile and aggressive neighbors.” Indonesia appeared unstable, on the verge of economic collapse. Communism was spreading throughout Southeast Asia, and the PKI was growing in strength, winning 27 percent of the votes cast in local elections in 1957. Economic collapse would be the opening the PKI was hoping for, the theory went, part of the feared “falling dominoes”: Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia. A Communist Indonesia would be bad enough, but even worse would be a Communist foothold in New Guinea, just across the Arafura from Australia.

  Rebuffed by the West when he sought Western military assistance, Sukarno made official state visits in 1956 to both Moscow and Beijing, returning with $100 million in credit from the Soviet Union and a more modest amount of aid guarantees from China. Meanwhile, the British, who still held territory on the island of Borneo, feared that the transfer of West New Guinea to Sukarno would set a precedent for the takeover of its Borneo territory. The official US position on the issue was neutral, a balancing act to avoid strengthening the PKI and to placate Australia and Britain.

  The Netherlands knew it couldn’t hold on to its colony forever, but it hoped to do so for another ten years. “New Guinea had been the abandoned child of the Dutch government,” said Wim van de Waal, the Dutch patrol officer who was stationed in Asmat in 1961, who now lives in the Canary Islands. “But then it was all they had, and because of rising internal political pressure, they had to do something with it. The Dutch didn’t want to talk about it, but the government knew it had to step up development in order to show that they were capable of leading the Papuans toward independence.” Which is why the missionary and government presence in what had been a forgotten corner of the empire accelerated throughout the 1950s. Jones’s words to Sukarno notwithstanding, in 1957 the US policy had became one of opposing, “by appropriate measures, any attempt by a Communist-oriented Indonesia to seize West New Guinea.”

 
; The Dutch set up elected regional councils throughout the island, hoping to create an elite who could govern the country by 1970, when it proposed granting West New Guinea independence. “It is essential for the Netherlands to see to it that, once the time for independence has come, a sufficient number of qualified indigenous inhabitants are available to take over the greatest part of the administration,” a 1960 Dutch policy paper stated. It was a difficult task, though, given that all but a handful of the elites, found almost exclusively in Hollandia and on Biak, were still living in the Stone Age. How were headhunting cannibals supposed to govern themselves? It was why Max Lapré was never censored for the killings in Otsjanep and why Dutch officials would repeatedly tell visitors that headhunting had been vanquished even when it was still flourishing. And given the Netherlands’ three-hundred-year occupation of Indonesia and its reluctance to give up its colony, it’s easy to grasp Lapré’s need, as he sailed up the Ewta River toward Otsjanep, to teach them a lesson.

  BY THE TIME Michael Rockefeller prepared to go to New Guinea in 1961, Sukarno, after feeling increasingly snubbed by the West, was buying hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Soviet weapons and threatening to take West New Guinea by force. With John F. Kennedy’s election, Washington’s policy changed; Kennedy’s advisers began advocating that New Guinea be given to Indonesia to appease the Communists and keep Sukarno away from the Eastern Bloc—in direct opposition to the policy of the Netherlands, Britain, and Australia.

  The Dutch foreign minister, Joseph Luns, created what would become known as the Luns Plan. The Dutch would withdraw from New Guinea and terminate sovereignty in exchange for a UN administration and a “member state study commission” that would supervise the administration and organize an election to decide its final status, creating an independent country that would be politically aligned with the West and friendly to Dutch business interests. Walt Rostow, a national security adviser to Kennedy, opposed the plan. Returning West New Guinea to Sukarno, he wrote to Kennedy, was the only option to keep Indonesia from being “driven into the arms” of the Soviet Union. And he wrote that the United States should be honest with the Dutch and tell them that self-determination for a bunch of “Stone Age” Papuans would be meaningless.

  Into this tangle stepped Michael Rockefeller. He wasn’t just another Western college kid with a backpack; he was the son of one of the richest and most powerful and influential men in America, a man who had just a few months before run for president, whose family had once donated the land for the UN itself. The Luns Plan was scheduled to be formally presented to the UN in September 1961. The Dutch would do whatever it took to make Michael—and his father—happy; they needed American allies wherever and however they could find them. They would provide logistical support and an anthropologist from the Netherlands New Guinea Office of Native Affairs to Michael when he finally arrived in Asmat, and that assistance would have profound effects on the story of his disappearance.

  PART II

  11

  March 1961

  DANI MEN REMEMBERING MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER AND THE HARVARD PEABODY EXPEDITION, BALIEM VALLEY, 2012.

  “IF YOU CAN believe it, I’m finally in New Guinea,” Michael Rockefeller wrote on March 29, 1961, to his best friend, Sam Putnam. He’d flown from Boston to Tokyo, via New York, the takeoff delayed an hour because the New York radar had gone down, giving him “heart failure as I had visions of missing the flight out.” En route to Tokyo the plane was nearly empty, and he slept sprawled across four seats. There are different kinds of travelers; people ease into new cultures in different ways. When I hit the ground in a foreign world, I revel in the place with a big meal. It’s a ritual, bodily taking in the new place, and Michael did the same, eagerly consuming Japanese culture with a “wonderful” meal of tempura.

  From Tokyo he’d flown on to Biak, an island off the north coast of New Guinea, home to a former US Army Air Corps airfield on which the Dutch maintained a squadron of aircraft to protect its colony. There he linked up with Karl Heider, a Harvard graduate student in anthropology. When Heider had arrived the day before, he disappointed the throng of Dutch officials who’d gathered, thinking they were welcoming the son of the governor of New York. The two spent a day walking around in the heat and humidity of Biak and then departed for Hollandia on a DC-3. Michael perched in the cockpit, marveling at the winding brown rivers emptying into New Guinea’s north coast, when the pilot poked him in the ribs and pointed out the window—the right engine had died. Michael scrambled into his seat, Heider clutched his most valuable papers and possessions, the plane landed safely again in Biak, and they flew on to Hollandia the next day.

  Michael was heading not to Asmat but to the Great Baliem Valley in the island’s highlands. He was tall and slender, clean-shaven, and square-jawed like his father, with thick black-rimmed glasses. He’d grown up in the family townhouse in midtown Manhattan and on weekends at the Rockefeller estate in Westchester County, New York. As Abby had done with Nelson, so Nelson did with Michael, taking him to art dealers on Saturday afternoons, a father-and-son bonding ritual that schooled his taste. His twin sister, Mary, remembered how the two of them loved to watch their father rearrange his art. And when he was eleven, his mother finally discovered why he’d been coming home from school late: he’d spotted a painting he liked through the second-floor window of the Old Masters art gallery on Madison Avenue, rang the bell, and its owner, Harry Yotnakparian, started letting Michael hang around as long as he didn’t get in the way.

  By the time he was nearing the end of his four years at Harvard, Michael was, in the words of Sam Putnam’s girlfriend, “a quiet, artistic spirit.” And he was torn. Though his appreciation of art had been nurtured since the day he was born, his father expected his son to be like him—to pursue a career in one of the family enterprises, banking or finance, and indulge his artistic passions on the side. Michael graduated cum laude from Harvard with a BA degree in history and economics, but he yearned for something else, a different way of being. He’d traveled widely, working on his father’s ranch in Venezuela for a summer, traveling to Japan in 1957, and he’d been surrounded not just by art but by primitive art. Who’s to say where wanderlust comes from, whether it’s innate or whether experiences or books or even objects inspire it—but without a doubt, Michael had it.

  Imagine growing up surrounded by objects that had been coveted by your father and that spoke of far-flung places. Imagine not just appreciating those same kinds of objects yourself, but wanting to go to their source to find them and bring them home. As graduation neared, Michael and Putnam schemed. They’d been best friends since prep school at Phillips Exeter, where Michael had been art director of the yearbook and Sam editor. Now they wanted to get away, to have a big adventure before Putnam attended medical school and Michael pursued what seemed an inevitable life of business—one last hurrah, as Putnam’s then girlfriend put it. Putnam had dabbled in film and knew Robert Gardner. Gardner ran the Harvard Film Study Center and was fascinated by film as ethnographic record. He wanted to make a movie about an uncontacted Neolithic people, “to employ the art of film to a humane observation of a remote and seemingly alien group of people,” a film, he said, “about the world outside myself that also revealed me and my inner world.”

  In 1959 he’d begun casting about for the right project when a distant cousin told him about an obscure tribe in New Guinea whose culture was based on ritual war. Gardner contacted Victor de Bruyn, the head of native affairs in Dutch New Guinea, who said his government might not only be interested in a film but able to help with the funding. Gardner talked to the anthropologist Margaret Mead; Robert Goldwater, director of Nelson Rockefeller’s Museum of Primitive Art; and Adrian Gerbrands, deputy director of the Dutch National Museum of Ethnology, who’d recently begun doing fieldwork in Asmat. De Bruyn suggested a film about the Dani tribes living in the Grand Baliem Valley, and the Dutch government eventually contributed $5,000 toward the expedition.

  In some w
ays, the Dani had long been more isolated than the Asmat. Although encounters with the West along the southwest coast of Asmat had been few and far between, at least the jungles and swamps were known to be inhabited. But anyone who gazed into the interior of New Guinea saw one thing: the high and jagged mountains that ran along its central spine. And if you traveled upriver from the coast, those rivers eventually narrowed and turned into whitewater at the walls of steep mountains. Up there was simply uninhabited wilderness. In the 1930s, Australian explorers and gold-hunters began discovering the highlands on the Australian side of the island. Then, in 1938, an American named Richard Archbold, on an expedition sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, flew over the Grand Baliem Valley. He was astounded. Instead of jagged, uninhabited mountains, he found a green valley. Instead of the sparsely populated and isolated communities of the coastal people, he found a heavily populated pastoral, a world of rising tendrils of smoke and intricate, carefully terraced gardens and irrigation canals, stone walls, vine suspension bridges, and grass huts—and fifty thousand people, naked save for grass skirts and penis gourds, who thought they were the only people on earth. The Dani living in the Grand Baliem Valley were the last great uncontacted civilization.