Savage Harvest

by Carl Hoffman

  VAN DE WAAL showed Michael and Wassing around his little kingdom at Pirimapun for a few hours and introduced them to van Kessel, who was building a house there. The priest and Michael chatted briefly, a conversation that excited Rockefeller and would determine the rest of his short life. Van Kessel, he wrote Goldwater a few days later, was the “first whiteman” to explore the southern Asmat area of the Casuarina Coast. He had deep experience in Asmat and recommended that Michael pay attention to the south. “For several reasons, I think he will prove my most valuable contact . . . and he appears to be willing to help me in my collecting for the Museum of Primitive Art. He could be particularly valuable since he has the confidence of the natives in the area and therefore probably has greater access to the good pieces than I ever would.” Michael asked Goldwater to send van Kessel a letter affirming his connection to the museum. Van Kessel was exactly what Michael needed: the missionary knew how to grease the skids, he could speak Asmat, and he knew the power of the people’s sacred world. Had they managed to travel together, Michael’s fate might have been far different. Instead, it would be on his way to meet van Kessel that Michael vanished.

  By noon Michael and Wassing were gone, arriving in Agats that evening. Michael spent the night in the comfortable house of a Dutch official. The next morning they followed the same route as I would, fifty years later, passing Warse and arriving in Atsj late that night, now traveling by native canoe and rowers. Father von Peij was away, and they slept in the post office. They paid each rower a lump of tobacco a day and one length of nylon fishing line.

  In the morning, they pushed on toward Amanamkai, where Gerbrands and David Eyde, an American anthropologist from Yale, were living. There, Asmat sucked them in. Gerbrands took them to the jeu Aman, which had just been rebuilt and was in the middle of celebrations surrounding its reconstruction. “There has been something mysterious about my arrival in first the Baliem, and now the Asmat,” Michael wrote in his journal. “Both have been coincident with important ceremonies.” The jeu was huge, more than a hundred feet long, with sixteen fireplaces lining its back wall, each fireplace belonging to a different family group, and each marked with a carved pole. The floor was cool to the touch, springy, covered in the peeled bark of the sago palm, and the light inside was magical—dark with shafts of sunlight and thick smoke. The jeu was packed with sweating men, a semicircle of drummers standing or sitting around the central hearth, which belonged to the group as a whole, surrounded by men dancing like cassowaries—bouncing up and down on the balls of their feet and waving their knees in and out. One man would start singing, a mournful melodic chant, and then all the men would join in. It was hypnotic, primitive, powerful, otherworldly, an alternative universe untouched by time or technology, a world romanticized and revered, yet only hinted at in the sleek, sterilized displays of Michael’s father’s museum. Now it was Michael’s to explore and untangle and harvest.

  The dancing and drumming went on for hours, all day and into the evening, when a canoe of men from Omadesep arrived, bearing the message, Wassing noted, that Otsjanep “made the region unsafe and that the situation was tense.” This was “troublesome” news, because Michael and Wassing had hoped to go to Omadesep and Otsjanep and needed rowers, who appeared reluctant to make the trip. But with the help of Gerbrands and Eyde, whose Yale dissertation was about headhunting and warfare, Michael reveled in the art and the ceremony, noting that the bisj poles were “a revenge figure . . . whose placement usually preceded a headhunt in former days. The figures represented people who have been headhunted and will be avenged.” It never occurred to him that he might end up sating the lust for revenge of a people he had yet to meet.

  They spent the next day waiting out a heavy rain that thundered down all afternoon, Michael snapping photos from the veranda of the men’s house of the intense downpour and men and canoes paddling through it. The day after that he paid the men to reenact an attack. Michael was in ecstasy as hundreds of warriors, some naked, draped in dogs’ teeth necklaces and their faces white with chalk, in “tens” of canoes, swept out of the Awor River. The canoes separated into two groups and rowed “as though possessed” toward each other, throwing lime and circling the canoe containing Michael and Wassing “like a whirlwind, paired with yelling and howling and accompanied by the blast of horns.” Michael shot photos, overwhelmed by “the grace of the movements in paddling, the sheer strength and speed, the sense of numbers and the rhythm in each canoe, and the pageantry of the occasion for the Asmat.”

  They left two days later at three p.m. in three canoes, short on rowers because of the tensions between Omadesep and Otsjanep. Wassing, Gerbrands, Putnam, and Michael sat in the middle of the leaky canoes, naked men fore and aft. “First there was the quiet, leisurely departure down the Awor,” Michael wrote. “The rowers placed little effort behind their strokes, allowing the outflowing tide to carry the canoes easily along. Or perhaps this was only my imagination due to the beautiful ease that always seems to follow from one’s having lived a particular movement for a life time.” Michael wanted to save film, but he couldn’t help himself, for he was “beset with one marvelous sight after the other. . . . I was able to watch the rowers for hour after hour, particularly the rear man of René’s canoe. The forms never lost interest; the thrust and pull being cast against the lush tangle of plant life and towering trees along the river’s bank, and lit by sunlight, rainstorm, brilliant sunset, a full moon and the blue-black night. Could one not take pictures even at the risk of being repetitive?

  “I only wish I could have somehow recorded the twittering mass of sparrows that we saw perched in the trees along the ocean’s shores. Hundreds and hundreds of the small birds flew madly from one tree to another, succeeding in accomplishing glory knows what. Obscure objects darted among the branches, and first one tree and then the next would bend from the weight of a myriad flying creatures lit for an instant among its branches. The air was filled with the whir of wings and the scream of a thousand birds twittering at once.” The sun set in a blaze of red-orange, and then the full moon rose, big and glowing, and they paddled on in silence, save the lap of river against canoe and the occasional voice of the lookout in the bow.

  After seven hours, they arrived at a bivouac not unlike the one Amates would take me to on the mouth of the Faretsj River. Swarms of starlings surged around the boats, filling the shadowy night with chirps and the rustling of thousands of wings. The group wolfed down a cold dinner of tea, leftover rice, and herring and spent the night. Three more hours of paddling up the Faretsj in the morning brought them to Omadesep. At first Michael was disappointed—a school was there, and in session! And when he asked to see carvings, he felt “almost disgust” with items that “showed the effect of hasty craftsmanship stimulated by the white man’s knives and curio interest.” Michael realized that they were items “made for sale, not use.” He started asking for shields and drums, and “slowly, quietly, interesting objects began to appear. First a shield, broken, but old and quite handsome. Then one drum after the other . . . with an interesting variety of carved handles. With this, disappointment vanished and I became immersed in that pent up excitement that is only contained by the realization that impetuosity would lead to disaster.” He was, of course, too young, too inexperienced, too rich, to contain his excitement and its impetuosity, and he would tragically fail to heed his own words, especially the day he crossed the mouth of the Betsj River. While he paid for his new treasure “with prices varying in their degree of inadequacy,” Putnam recorded the artists’ names and entered them in their journal.

  IN FRONT OF the school they found four bisj poles, huge twenty-foot-tall carvings from a single piece of mangrove, from which the top figure sprouted a four-foot-long lattice flag, or penis. All Asmat carvings are beautiful and complex—drums, shields, spears, bowls, paddles—but none compare to the bisj poles. Their three-dimensional detail, their dynamic lines with limbs and faces intermingled with praying mantises, hornbills, and crocodiles
(eaters of fruit and meat, like the Asmat themselves)—all carved freehand, with not even a sketch or line drawn, and no two the same—are things of power and haunting beauty. But removed from their surroundings and culture, as Michael intended, they were stripped of their meaning, of their profound significance in Asmat life, and became little more than exotic objects to be consumed by the discriminating patrons of the Museum of Primitive Art, who had no real understanding of their purpose.

  Rockefeller and Gerbrands looked at the four poles and declared them marvelous. With no sense of irony, Michael wrote: “This was one kind of object that seemed to me inviolate for the encroachment of western commercialism upon Asmat art. I quickly decided to buy one made by Faniptas”—the same man who had tricked Pip and company from Otsjanep into following him to Wagin. But Gerbrands convinced him to buy them all; to have all four as a complete ceremonial set was too good a chance to pass up. (Today those poles stand in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.) Then Michael had an idea. “I thought how marvelous it would be to have those poles standing before the yeu [sic] for which they had been carved.” Gerbrands plunged in, and soon it was agreed: the poles would be set up before the jeu and the “entire ceremony that accompanies such an occasion would be re-enacted.”

  Many parts of Asmat ceremonial life are compartmentalized. Certain songs are so powerful and so special that they remain secret even from women and children within the village itself. Asmat reveal some things and don’t reveal others. When pressed by outsiders, they will sometimes concoct stories to satisfy them.

  Exactly what ceremony the men of Omadesep performed with the bisj poles is hard to know. They stood them up in front of the jeu, per Michael’s request, and sang, drummed, and danced around the poles. Not surprisingly, however, Michael found it “quite disappointing” and hard to shoot. “There is no magic involved and no offering or religious attention paid to the poles as such. This fact probably accounts for the ease with which the Asmat were induced to re-enact the ceremony. Where there is no danger of angering a god or misapplying magic, such an occasion must be welcome by the village.”

  He was right—who knows what they’d been doing—but he also reveals here a crack in his character, a certain hubris. Routinely described as kind, gentle, hardworking, and without pretense, Rockefeller was also just twenty-three years old. He was young and rich. Used to getting what he wanted, he seemed unconscious of his own role in distorting the local economy and disrupting village ceremony, or of the contradictory nature of his entire enterprise. Here was the heir to one of the largest fortunes on earth plundering sacred objects for pennies—the most privileged person on earth dabbling in the world of the most marginalized, the lowest of the low on the totem pole, so to speak. Despairing of the objects made for sale, he had nevertheless arrived in the village to buy its objects. He was commodifying the culture and its art with every purchase. Over the next four months, Michael would spend prodigiously, which he suspected contributed to a certain reticence and resentment in Gerbrands, whom he called “an elusive personality closed to the world like a clamshell.” It took Michael three days to get Gerbrands to call him “Mike” instead of just “Rockefeller,” and Gerbrands grew annoyed at Michael’s constant questions and either gave abrupt answers or just said he didn’t know. But it took Sam, a pauper compared to Michael, to explain how Gerbrands might be feeling as the twenty-three-year-old descended out of nowhere.

  “Towards the end of the trip I began to think that maybe [this] closed, distant quality in Adri [Gerbrands’s nickname] stemmed from a kind of disillusionment that came from a frustration at his ambition,” Michael wrote. “During his stay in New Guinea I know that he had been continually exasperated by such things as defects in the lenses he had bought in Japan, inadequacy in his film supply, the failures of his tape recorder to arrive, and constant difficulty in obtaining the rowers for his various trips. . . . I think Sam may well have been right in pointing out that such a man as Adri might be a bit resentful when relative upstarts such as ourselves come along equipped with the best camera equipment, quantities of film, money enough to buy bisj poles and any number of objects to say nothing of our ability to pay for the putting up of 2 bisj poles ceremonies . . . and then speak of another collecting trip later outfitted with an outboard motor which he had been unable to afford.”

  In his description of his purchase later that afternoon can be seen the first glimpses of a burgeoning obsession. A man named Givin brought Michael a spear, which he immediately bought. “This was an old, beautiful one of a kind I had never expected to get. Somehow I had been led to believe from Bob that I would only be at the end of a long line of collectors that had already ravaged the Asmat. Yet now I wonder whether this is the case. I have seen too many beautiful things even in my short stay to feel discouraged by a conviction that the art has gone. Now . . . I am almost confident, at least excited. In any event this one purchase set off a chain reaction among the people. Spear after spear appeared from the dark corners of the houses about the village. I bought four marvelous ones.”

  In any treasure hunt there comes a moment, if your journey is a success, where imagination and reality coalesce. The journey is born from imagination, from envisioning a strange place, finding the trail, tracking it down. Michael had imagined himself deep in an exotic culture, surrounding himself in it like a thick coat, and now here he was. His dream was becoming a reality. When that moment comes, that realization that you’ve done it, the more the quest becomes the only thing that matters—and the deeper I went into Asmat myself and read Michael’s journals the more I understood that, identified with it. Hunting art and chasing a story, they are the same. Rain, heat, cold, danger—out there in the wild everything becomes subordinate to the task, and the closer you get to the treasure the more you’re willing to do to get it. There is nothing more intoxicating; it makes you feel powerful, invulnerable.

  Michael wanted Asmat art, but not just any art. He wanted the authentic, objects that were touchstones to a world that was pure, that touched a distant past and a version of ourselves that was gone. But the purer the object, the more authentic it was, and the more power it had, the more trading in those objects put him on the threshold of an alternative universe. He had no understanding that by trading in bisj poles he was trading in the souls of men, souls that could make you sick, that could kill you. Michael was working with a bottomless supply of money—the one thing that limits most people, that checks them, that forces them to use friendship and reciprocity and patience with others. And there is a profound difference between people who are friends and people who want your money. Had Michael had less money, he would have had to move more slowly, would have had to settle in villages for longer, to trade, to make connections, to become known. Instead, he averaged a day or two in every village; he arrived, bought, and moved on.

  OMADESEP AND OTSJANEP lie on parallel rivers—the Faretsj and the Ewta—that are connected, like the top of a horseshoe, by a navigable swamp. Officially, headhunting may have been over, but it was clear to Gerbrands, Wassing, and Michael that tensions between the two villages were high. In the tangled knot of Asmat allegiances, they found a man named Tatsji, who, “because he had relatives in Otsjanep, was inviolable” and so could serve as escort, wrote Wassing. And suddenly a lot of others wanted to go too; at eleven on the morning of June 30, a fleet of canoes set out up the Faretsj to Otsjanep. Faniptas went too, though it’s unclear whether Michael or Wassing knew who he was, beyond being a carver, or whether they knew that after the disastrous trip to Wagin and the ensuing violence three years before he had given a daughter to Dombai in Otsjanep in reciprocation, to make peace. “It was a marvelous paddle upstream,” Michael wrote. “A large number of dugout canoes from Omadesep loaded with warriors accompanied us, using the occasion of our trip and the protection it provided to negotiate a peace treaty with Otsjanep, the much feared, powerful enemy and traditional rival.”

  The river twisted and turned and narrowed, and t
hey paddled past overhanging or fallen trees under a burning sun. The river grew ever narrower and then turned into little more than a creek through the marsh and tough, man-high plants. Near the head of the Ewta, as it emerged from the swamp, they passed the village of Warkai, which was abandoned. That was always in Asmat a sign that a village had either been recently attacked or had been the attackers; with the increasing government presence, villages often hid deep in the bush to carry out the butchering and eating of their victims.

  As they entered Otsjanep territory, the paddlers became wary; “every tree and river bend,” noted Wassing, “was watched carefully.” They came upon a group of houses on thirty-foot-long poles, a temporary refuge of safety that had recently been built by Otsjanep—yet another indication that war and headhunting were alive and well. Tatsji let out a long, melodious yell, explaining who they were, where they came from, why they had come, and that there were no government, police, or missionaries with them. All was still. Silent. The rowers chanted in unison this time, all of them, the same announcement of their arrival. Then, from all around them in the jungle, horns echoed. Men and women streamed out of the bush, singing. The tension evaporated as men jumped into canoes and paddled out to meet them. They hugged. They shook hands. And they began frantically trading—sago and bulbs of taro for tobacco and fruit.