Savage Harvest

by Carl Hoffman

  By 1960 there were a few Protestant missionaries, a small contingent of Dutch officials, an airfield, and not much else there. The United States and the Soviet Union were sending rockets into space, but the handful of Dutch officials in the “city” of Wamena lived without running water or electricity. Little contact had been made at the north and south ends of the valley. The Dani were not headhunters or cannibals like the Asmat, but they engaged in a cyclical war of revenge with their immediate neighbors that intrigued Gardner. He, like most observers fascinated with indigenous people, felt they might offer insight into humans in an uncorrupted state, and he wanted to observe and film them over months to glean insights into man’s propensity for violence and war.

  Gardner began thinking about including writers and photographers who could depict the project in other mediums. At lunch one afternoon on Martha’s Vineyard at the home of the playwright Lillian Hellman, he met the writer Peter Matthiessen and invited him along to the Grand Baliem Valley. “He said I’d be paid,” Matthiessen told me, “and that was really important to me.” Gardner used to take smoking breaks on the steps of the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, and there he met Karl Heider. When Michael came to him, Gardner sensed a possible source of funding and offered him the opportunity to be the film’s sound engineer.

  It was the perfect postcollege adventure, and Michael invited Sam Putnam to join them a few months later, at the end of his first year of medical school at Harvard. Michael plunged in, learning everything he could about sound recording and asking Gardner if he could practice with the expedition’s new Nagra tape recorder at the 1960 Republican National Convention, where his father hoped to be nominated for the presidency. Before he could go, however, there was the issue of the draft. Michael got a six-month gig in the US Army Reserve and was recommended for training in teletype repair. “My first reaction was one of terror,” he wrote Gardner from basic training in Fort Dix, New Jersey, “ . . . and I pictured myself shipped off to Fort Leonard Wood, Oklahoma or Fort Jackson, Kentucky.” Instead, he wrote a “passionate” letter to his captain, “describing my utter incompetence in the recommended field.” Clearly it didn’t hurt to be the son of the governor of New York, for his orders were quickly changed, and he was off to Fort Devens, just down the road from Harvard, to be trained as a “code traffic analyst.” “At least my typing will get a good practicing [sic].” Still, he said, the army had taught him “the assets of a highly ordered day-to-day existence. I have received all sorts of useful pointers for field life in New Guinea from such things as bivouac and courses in first aid, land navigation, etc. Furthermore, I am in sterling condition.”

  That was in November 1960. Gardner knew about Michael’s interest in art, and a few weeks later he helped Michael out further by introducing him to Adrian Gerbrands, an ethnologist living in New Guinea. Gardner said Michael had been excited by Gerbrands’s work in Asmat, and “he became more and more interested in meeting you and visiting the Asmat area.” Would that be possible in mid-May during a break in filming in the highlands? Gardner asked. “I can assure you that he knows how to take care of himself and would be not the slightest burden.”

  BY APRIL 2, Michael was in Wamena at last, and he was excited. “The flight in was spectacular,” he wrote “Sambo.” He flew in “over Lake Sentani, jungles, mountains, the huge impenetrable swamp of the interior, more mountains, and then finally the Baliem Valley opening up like a sudden giant, fertile cavity before me. How badly we were misled in all the pictures we saw! The Baliem is a thing of magnificent vastness, decorated with the green of the valley floor and blues of the surrounding mountains. Tones are ever changing in the shifting light. The mountains rise . . . over 10,000 feet on all sides and are constantly hidden and altered by the clouds that gather about them. The valley floor is broken into fragments by the Baliem and its tributaries, hills and rocky rises, and the handmade barriers of the Ndani peoples. The climate is like Maine in the peak of summer. Only the sun is better.”

  A few days later they brought hundreds of pounds of equipment via boat and foot to the northern part of the valley, where they made camp at a small stream at the base of a wall of rock and sparse pine trees. It was a beautiful spot, slightly elevated yet protected, far enough from the Dani family compounds for the expedition to get much-needed personal space, but close enough to get involved in everything. Matthiessen and Eliot Elisofon, a photographer for Life magazine, soon joined them, and Matthiessen had a strong first impression of Michael. “He was very, very young and a little bit spoiled. He quoted Dad a lot.”

  It was a magical time. The Baliem is as beautiful as Michael described it, a place of a thousand shades of green changing as the clouds roll by, surrounded by jagged peaks in every direction. At six thousand feet, its temperatures are cool, with cold nights, no humidity, and few mosquitoes. When Michael arrived, the Dani there were untouched, the men naked except for long gourds covering their penises in stylized erections and a layer of pig grease, the women naked save for loose grass skirts and net bags slung with a child or pig from their heads and across their backs. It was, in some ways, the best of two worlds—having access to the primitive balanced with being able to retreat to a comfortable camp full of urbane colleagues. The team shared civilized meals in the cook tent—omelets and orange juice and coffee for breakfast—and drank Heineken at night as the Dani gathered around, amazed by their clothing, mirrors, and cameras. During the day the visitors fanned out into villages of family compounds to watch and record the Dani. Michael found them “emotionally expressive” and fantastic to look at. “Polik, the warrior,” he wrote, “struts around with a fifteen foot spear and the most incredible headdress. His face, often peering through hair that reaches his shoulders, is always blackened with charcoal and pig grease is kind of the epitome of Neolithic wildness.”

  When word came of a battle, they’d all gather on a grassy plateau no-man’s-land where opposing villages assembled to shout at each other and run at each other and threaten and occasionally engage each other. The film team’s whiteness granted them an immunity as the Dani grew used to their presence, allowing them in their midst even as they battled—as if a team of filmmakers were allowed to witness and record the set-piece battles of World War II with impunity. They were so close to the action that one day an arrow hit Michael in the leg, and the team was careful to keep it secret. It was a strange kind of war, however, compared to the destructive violence of the much more developed world. “They went to war with a set of rules far more civilized than ours,” said Matthiessen. “One killing was fine.”

  Michael worked hard, recording the sounds, songs, music, and warfare as well as taking photographs, which he especially loved. He “shot wildly,” he wrote, exposing eighteen rolls in a single day. Sometimes it was too much, and one night the team unloaded on Michael, criticizing him for missing important sound recordings. “Michael went away in tears,” Matthiessen said. After that night, Michael grew up and worked hard, according to Matthiessen, but he was “disorganized. Messy. He forgot things.”

  Michael shared a tent with Heider, who got to know him well. “Mike was very quiet and very modest,” Heider remembers, “though of course everyone knew who he was, who his father was. He didn’t take up much space, and it was easy to be around him. And he had patience.” The Dani opened up to him. While Elisofon, the professional, would pose them and stage photos, Michael would just watch quietly, shooting what he saw. In the evenings Heider was astonished to see the wealthiest member of the team darning his old army socks. But Michael was ambitious, and he began to think seriously about his photography. In late April, he wrote his friend Sam with an idea: they should put together a book on the Dani. “It seems to me that there is a large opportunity for me and you if it can be somehow managed with medical school. The photography ought to be good enough to form the basis for a photographic essay on the Ndani culture to come out in book form. Certainly this is a wild and conceited thought and would be very difficult to do well. Let m
e know what you think,” adding in a postscript, “Keep this confidential, for I have told no one but you and wouldn’t unless it was more definite.”

  There are people who don’t like hanging out with spiders and dirt and naked men in pig grease, but Michael Rockefeller wasn’t one of them. It was especially nice to be among people who didn’t care that he was a Rockefeller, who had no idea what the name even meant. In New Guinea, as the weeks passed, home began to dissolve into abstraction, to lessen its hold. Material possessions began to lose their importance. There was something liberating about the intense focus on a single project. What was important was right here—a world of sweating, naked bodies, of feasts and smoke-filled huts, of pigs and pig grease. Here, at last, he was free from social conventions. Free from being a Rockefeller.

  AS APRIL GAVE way to May, Michael began planning his trip to Asmat with Putnam. In the Baliem, he was the youngest member of a group under the leadership of Gardner; now, for the first time, he would be plunging in alone with his own agenda. “Michael’s father had put him on the board of his museum,” said Heider, “and Michael said he wanted to do something that hadn’t been done before and to bring a major collection to New York, and Asmat was the obvious choice.” His goal was a short trip of two to four weeks with Sam that would serve as reconnaissance for a longer journey after the filming was finished. He was hardly a lone entity, however, plunging into the unknown without resources. Michael was both part of a Harvard expedition that had the backing of the government and a Rockefeller—not to mention a trustee of the Museum of Primitive Art. He was treated like a VIP wherever he went outside the Baliem Valley.

  Michael wrote to Robert Goldwater about his forthcoming trip and suggested the possibility of also collecting along the Sepik River of Australian New Guinea. “Collecting along the Sepik . . . needs some reflection and discussion,” Goldwater wrote him back. “As you know, there have been several collecting expeditions there in the last few years, and from what we have seen brought back it does not in general seem any longer to be a very promising area.”

  However, Goldwater introduced Michael to Australian officials, provided a letter of recommendation, and said that he was “looking forward to your coming up with a fine group of objects.” And the Dutch New Guinea Department of Native Affairs provided Michael with an anthropologist to guide and accompany him. René Wassing was thirty-four, with a tidy mustache and ropy, muscled calves. He worked across the island in Hollandia and had never been to Asmat before. The two linked up in the capital and on June 20 flew to Merauke, where they had lunch with Resident F. R. J. Eibrink Jansen, the highest government official in the area, along with the Dutch controller and the head of the regional council. In the afternoon, they loaded up on food in the local Chinese-owned shop and then departed that evening at five on the government launch Tasman, heading north along the coast, where Wassing noted that they encountered turbulent seas.

  Early on the morning of the twenty-second, they arrived at the government post of Pirimapun, where they saw their first Asmat people and canoes, some with delicately carved bows, pulled up on the mud. There wasn’t much in the settlement—a dock and a few thatch houses belonging to Wim van de Waal, a slender, blond, twenty-one-year-old Dutch patrol officer who was overseeing the construction of an airstrip; Ken Dresser, a Canadian Protestant missionary and medical doctor; and a handful of Papuan policemen.

  Van de Waal was Lapré’s polar opposite. He’d finished high school late, when he was twenty, and before he could attend university he had to complete two years of military service, which he felt was a waste of time. His best friend’s brother had been a patrol officer in New Guinea, a more exciting and exotic alternative to military service.

  Out of three hundred candidates who applied as colonial patrol officers, sixteen were selected, and van de Waal was among them. He traveled from the Netherlands to New Guinea in late 1959. After nine months in Hollandia learning Malay and receiving instruction in colonial government, he was sent to Pirimapun in October 1960. “It was an ‘exploration district,’ one of the wildest areas of all of New Guinea,” he said. He had almost no instructions. “ ‘Make contact,’ I was told, ‘so that little by little they will gain the trust of the government.’ ” And he was to make an airstrip, because only in Pirimapun was there enough dry ground. He had no equipment, not even a wheelbarrow. For a month’s work, he paid his workers with an ax, a knife, and some fishing line and hooks. Once a month a supply vessel docked. He had a radio and a generator, which he turned on twice a day to report that he was still alive.

  Van de Waal loved it. There wasn’t much to do except “move a bit of sand” for the airstrip and wander short distances by canoe. As the postmaster, he’d send letters home postmarked with odd dates, like September 35, 1960. After a couple of months there, he had a carpenter in Merauke create a catamaran out of two dugout canoes connected by a platform topped by a thatch hut. With an outboard motor, van de Waal had freedom; he could go anywhere and could sleep on the boat. He wandered throughout his region, up and down rivers, making contact. Officially, headhunting was no more. That was what Michael was told, as were his father and sister when they arrived a year later. It was what everyone from outside had to be told, given Papua’s political situation and the Dutch need, as it readied the country for independence, to present it as capable of leading itself as a productive member of the international community a decade hence. “But there was still headhunting,” van de Waal said, “and sometimes even massive raids.” As there would be for years to come: in 1970 the American missionary Frank Trenkenschuh arrived in the villages of Sogopo and Ti the day after warriors had killed five men and women, and even in the early 1980s Schneebaum heard stories of headhunting raids and killings in the remoter fringes of Asmat.

  Still, van de Waal traveled undefended, with only a cook and boat boy. He had a handful of Papuan police officers in Pirimapun, but he always left them behind. He had a revolver, which he never took out of its box. Why were van de Waal, Gerbrands, and men like Zegwaard, van Kessel, and von Peij able to travel and even live among a people so fierce and warlike? For the Asmat, every exchange was greased with constant payment: of tobacco, to which the Asmat had become addicted, as well as steel axes and fishhooks and fishing line. Remembering their first encounter with Australian explorers in the New Guinea highlands in the 1930s, a Koiari man said: “We didn’t know where these creatures came from; we wondered if they had come from the sky, from under the ground, or from inside the water. We thought they might be remo [spirits], but we had never seen remo before. . . . We were very scared of them and thought that eventually many of them would come back and finish us all off. Yet at the same time we liked the good things they had brought with them, such as matches and knives.”

  The Asmat’s love of Western goods was matched by their fear of the gun. Its power hung over every encounter between armed Westerners and native people. The Asmat were fierce and ruthless warriors on the battlefield, but bamboo arrows and wooden spears were no better than toys against the firepower of modern guns. Confrontations with armed whites in New Guinea were little different from those with the conquistadors in the Americas. In a story recounted by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, when Francisco Pizarro met the Inca emperor Atahualpa at the Peruvian highland town of Cajamarca on November 16, 1532, Pizarro’s 168 men were in the middle of enemy territory surrounded by 80,000 armed Inca soldiers. The battle didn’t last long: in minutes Atahualpa was captured and thousands of natives lay dead, with not a single Spanish casualty. When Englishman Charlie Savage arrived in Fiji in 1808, “he paddled his canoe up a river to the Fijian village of Kasavu, halted less than a pistol shot’s length from the village fence, and fired away at the undefended inhabitants. His victims were so numerous that surviving villagers piled up the bodies to take shelter behind them. . . . Such examples of the power of guns against native peoples lacking guns could be multiplied indefinitely,” writes Diamond.

  Indeed, an inve
stigation of the Strickland-Purari patrol, a government-sponsored exploration into the Australian New Guinea highlands, reported in 1935 that the “patrol had opened fire on the natives on at least nine occasions.” Fifty-four men had been killed by rifle fire, “with no member of the patrol killed or seriously wounded in the skirmishes.” Natives learned quickly that they were virtually powerless in the face of gunpowder.

  The Asmat did their best to placate Westerners and to work around them. The whole Asmat cosmos was one of reciprocal violence, and that meant not just between men, or villages, but between men and the spirits. Other men weren’t just full of vengeance; so were the spirits. If they weren’t placated, they could attack a village just as forcefully as its human enemies, by making men, women, and children sick. Certainly in the early years of European contact, and probably for a long time after, the Asmat were never quite sure who these white interlopers were. Spirits or men? To attack them wasn’t just to risk a physical reprisal like Max Lapré’s, but to risk something even more frightening: a spiritual reprisal.

  While Zegwaard, as the lone white on the rivers in the mid-1950s, had simply appeared in villages in the immediate aftermath of raids, as time went on the Asmat were smart enough to hide the practices that the priests and colonial administrators disapproved of. As Lapré noted in his reports, the Asmat simply went farther into the jungle to carry out their ceremonies, which were integral to their whole place in the world. It is easy to celebrate our shared humanity—after all, we are all human beings who love and hope and fear and feel and dream and mourn—and to dismiss our differences, forgetting that those differences are powerful and fundamental to the way we see the world, each other, and our place within it. We both shake hands. We both smile. We both eat together and laugh and look at the same river and the same palm trees, and we both have to disappear into the jungle to take a piss. But what each of us perceives, what we believe, and what’s important to us can be profoundly different. All of Asmat culture was based on reciprocation; Lapré might have insisted on Dutch laws and the power of the government, but after the bloody fight at the Ewta between Omadesep and Otsjanep, Faniptas had given one of his children to Dombai in an offer of peace. It’s almost impossible to know the power of an Asmat bisj pole or the meaning of a song or the sacredness of a skull to an Asmat, or the importance of giving gifts of sago to the jeu and its elders. And so people like Wim van de Waal and Michael Rockefeller were able to collect and photograph and dig into Asmat culture, to travel with the Asmat and be deep in their midst, without ever really understanding their world and the unseen dimensions of its reality.