by Carl Hoffman
Michael wrote van Kessel to say he was particularly interested in Otsjanep “for its lack of acculturation in spite of some less auspicious after effects of Mr. Gaisseau’s visit.” This sentence, the only one of its kind in his letters and journals, is remarkable, and eerily prescient; it is the only passage that indicates he was aware, if even dimly, of the turbulence there, the turbulence that he himself would fall into. Gaisseau was a French filmmaker who led an expedition across New Guinea in 1959, a trip that began in Otsjanep and resulted in the film The Sky Above, the Mud Below. Upon arrival in the village, just a year after Lapré’s raid, the crew found a large number of bisj poles—probably some of the same poles Michael had seen and tried to buy. Although Gaisseau was able to get the village to perform for his cameras—he filmed them in repeated takes drumming and singing and paddling their canoes—his Dutch police escort became aware of an increasing agitation in the men and began fearing for his life, so much so that he forced the crew to abandon Otsjanep after just a few days of filming there. Michael also asked van Kessel if he knew of any other villages in the area “with equally as talented sculptors less influenced by Western ideas.”
Van Kessel said he’d happily assist Michael. He recommended that Michael go to northwest Asmat first, then come south and meet him in Basim, where they could take off together. He mentioned three villages, but wrote, “I will not exclude Otsjanep.”
If Rockefeller’s initial interest in working on Gardner’s film had been a lark, a last hurrah before turning to more adult pursuits, that wasn’t true any longer. His field notes from his first trip and the letters he wrote reveal a deepening seriousness regarding his collecting. His photographs show an intuitive grasp of light and shadow and form. His field notes are illustrated with hundreds of drawings illuminating stylistic details of Asmat symbology. For his second expedition he laid out “objectives; themes of investigation; criterion for stylistic variation.” He wanted to explore the “extent of communication between areas and trace the distribution of different kinds of objects.” He was a Rockefeller, a family that took achievement and hard work seriously; they were philanthropists and connoisseurs, ambitious enough to run for the presidency of the United States three times. Michael wanted to produce books, mount the biggest exhibition of Asmat art ever, and wow his father and family so much that he wouldn’t have to start his career as some Rockefeller Plaza leasing agent.
As the Harvard team finished its work in August and celebrated in Hollandia, Michael received disturbing news from home: his father was divorcing his mother to marry a Philadelphia socialite and campaign aide named Margareta “Happy” Murphy, news that wouldn’t be announced to the public for another two months. Michael immediately flew back to New York. He’d been living in primitive conditions for five months. He hadn’t seen his family and friends, hadn’t eaten a meal that might not make him sick, hadn’t seen a television, in almost half a year. No matter. Where others might have savored the comforts of home or gotten sucked into the domestic family drama playing out, Michael did something else. He briefly saw his family and Sam Putnam, met with Goldwater at the museum, and then turned around and returned to New Guinea.
After a few days in Hollandia, he and Wassing flew to Merauke, where they hustled to catch a boat to Agats that same day. It felt good to be back. It doesn’t matter where you go in the world: when you get to a place for the second time, it feels different. You know your way around. You know the best place to find a boat and how much to pay. You know where to grab a meal. You’ve returned, and people regard you differently.
Darkness falls quickly near the equator, and as he sat happily on the floor of his wooden room without furniture, electricity, or running water, Michael finally got caught up with his journal, to the flickering light of a kerosene lamp. “The key to my fascination with the Asmat is the woodcarving. The sculpture which the people here produce is some of the most extraordinary work in the primitive world. And equally as remarkable as the art is the fact that the culture which produces it is still intact; some remote areas are still headhunting; and only five years ago almost the whole area was headhunting.”
It’s one of the only times he acknowledges the headhunting directly, in contradiction to his letter to Goldwater. He felt enthralled, excited, in his element. He felt that he was starting to put his finger on it all, to find the treasure. The world was rich and exotic and full of life, and a lot of people were scared by it, but he savored it, felt confident traveling out to its farthest corners and deepest crevices. “Nights here are really the most fun. Something like teeth grinding in the Baliem: a rhythm created by the patter of mice feet over the walls and ceiling with crickets and frogs burping in counterpoint. The roosters here are affected by a curious neurosis which causes them to begin crowing at midnight. Last night we had an earthquake rock us to sleep.”
Michael wanted to find a motorboat to explore faster and farther, but all he could find was the standard Asmat canoe, which had little room to carry barter goods or the art he was hoping to collect and which also required rowers, who had to be fed and paid and would only go to certain places. There was a single government vessel in town, but the patrol officer hardly wanted to be Michael Rockefeller’s chauffer for two months. The conundrum of Asmat is transportation: you can be right there in Agats and yet feel a million miles away from the rivers and villages because you can’t move without a boat.
By coincidence, patrol officer Wim van de Waal, fifty miles south in Pirimapun, had been restless. Though he’d never before gone so far out of his district, he yearned for a few more white faces and conversation, and he’d taken his catamaran all the way up the coast to Agats, where, by 1961, twenty-five or so Western government officers and missionaries were living. The catamaran was great on the rivers, but not so great on the Arafura. Van de Waal was methodical and careful, and through trial and error he evolved a way to pilot the boat into the waves at the right angle so as to not get swamped. “The sideboards were only ten or fifteen centimeters above the water, and I just experimented over the months I used it,” he said. “If it was rough, you couldn’t be in the ocean, especially if the tide was coming out.” But he’d never had any problems, so he thought, What the hell, why not go all the way to Agats?
There he ran into Michael, and they shared a warm beer, two young men in the throes of a big adventure who couldn’t have been more different. Van de Waal said, “He was stuck, flabbergasted that he, Michael Rockefeller, couldn’t get a vessel.”
“How’d you get here if you’re from Pirimapun?” asked Michael.
“I came in my own catamaran,” said van de Waal.
Van de Waal showed it to Michael the next morning. The minute Michael saw it he wanted it, the boat of his dreams, a Tom Sawyer–ish vessel forty feet long, carrying a perfect thatched house across its twin hulls. It was big enough and stable enough to carry plenty of goods to trade and some of what they could collect. And he and Wassing could sleep in it rather than in the smoky, loud jeus.
“Will you sell it to me?” Michael said.
Van de Waal dithered. He wasn’t against selling his boat, but he needed it for a few days, and he needed to make sure he could get himself and a carpenter back to Pirimapun some other way, to make a new one. “He was a nice guy,” van de Waal said, “but you could tell he was used to getting whatever he wanted, and he was pushing very hard.” Van de Waal talked to the patrol officer in Agats, who immediately agreed to take van de Waal back to Pirimapun on the Tasman when he was ready. “He was so happy, because Michael was bugging him for transportation. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘I’ve just gotten rid of a problem.’ ” The deal was done: van de Waal agreed to sell Michael his boat for 400 Dutch New Guinea guilders, about $200.
“Mike was keen to do everything big and quick,” van de Waal said. He wanted to have a forty-five-horsepower outboard flown in from Hollandia on a PBY Catalina airplane, but van de Waal said no. It was too powerful, too big and heavy—van de Waal himself only used a
ten-horsepower motor. Michael settled on a fifteen-horsepower Johnson, bought for $1,000 in Hollandia. At the local Chinese general store, he bought forty axes and $300 worth of tobacco, fishing hooks and line, and cloth—a wealth of barter goods. By the time he disappeared, he’d spent more than $7,000—equivalent to $53,000 today—in one of the remotest places on earth. One thing he didn’t buy, however, was a radio. “He should have had one,” van de Waal said. “I feel he really underestimated the dangers. Not of attacks from the Asmat, but of nature. The mouths of the rivers, and the volume of water, is so huge, and Wassing was just a bureaucrat.”
On October 7, Michael wrote van Kessel. He now had a catamaran, he said, and he and Wassing were going to explore the Casuarina Coast for a couple of weeks with van Kessel, then settle in a village for two to three weeks to film the carvers at work. He hoped the priest could suggest a good village and help make all the arrangements. “Both Rene Wassing and I very much look forward to [our rendezvous in] November,” he wrote, the last message van Kessel would receive from him.
On October 10, he and Wassing and Simon and Leo, two teenagers from the adjacent village of Sjuru, set out from Agats in the catamaran. Here Michael made his gravest mistake. As long as he was with native rowers—men who knew the weather and the water, the tides and currents, the rhythms of the villages and their alliances and antipathies—he was safe. Although Simon and Leo were Asmat, they were only teenagers in a culture that venerated headhunting prowess and age. Even if they had known the waters, they would have found it difficult to challenge Wassing and Rockefeller, their elders and the holders of the purse strings. And in the villages they were nothing—they had no standing whatsoever. In his own boat Michael was free to come and go as he pleased, but he would arrive and depart like an alien, bound to no one and nothing, save his trade goods. And that made him vulnerable in every way—to the winds, to the tides and waves, to the Asmat themselves.
They made a quick swing south first, to the village of Per, which interested Michael because it was a small village with its own style of art, dominated by one carver, named Chinasapitch. Michael arrived in the village to find that the carver had just finished a beautiful canoe prow, which he refused to sell. Finally Chinasapitch agreed to make not just a bow ornament for Michael but an entire canoe. It was a great beginning, and Michael was psyched. He was out in the world and making things happen. That evening he reveled in it all. “The evening was crystal clear, and the sun set before the open mouth of the Por River. Then the new moon appeared and the outlines of the family houses, canoe river poles were cast against a violet and rose sky and sea.”
They visited Gerbrands and David Eyde in Amanamkai, where they were greeted like returning heroes. The chief was wild with excitement, and the villagers swarmed out to meet them in canoes, jumping in the mud and pulling the catamaran up the river to the village. “The Asmat has a special shout which is chanted at once by many men and used as a form of welcome. All the village lined the river bank and we heard this again and again as we made slow progress upstream.”
Over the next three weeks, he and Wassing turned north and visited thirteen villages. Michael collected everywhere and in quantity, loading up on drums, sago bowls, bamboo horns, spears, paddles, shields, and even decorated ancestor skulls. He made intricate drawings of designs and stylistic differences between villages and artists, and he filmed and photographed carvers at work. He felt energized, constantly excited, increasingly comfortable and confident as a collector and explorer, now one of the world’s foremost authorities on Asmat art. While his father, the ambitious and famous governor, had acquired the primitive objects he coveted from dealers, Michael was here, traveling the rivers among headhunters and cannibals.
“The only difference between Mark Twain and us is that his characters used poles all the time while we use an outboard engine most of the time and poles part of the time,” he wrote. “We have been known to get out and push after propelling ourselves naively onto a mud bank at half tide. The boat has been christened ‘Chinasapitch,’ the name of the most brilliant single artist we have come across thus far. Occasionally it is called ‘Fofo,’ the name of a hornbill which we obtained in the village of Amanamkai.”
AT THE END of the first week of November, they returned to Agats, Michael in high spirits. He’d collected hundreds of objects. As he cataloged, organized, and began arranging the transport of it back to New York, Agats felt easy and familiar. He knew its nooks, crannies, and rhythms, where to get tobacco and fishhooks or a warm beer in the evenings. He savored lounging under his mosquito net in the morning and, as he put it, “making use of the Sisters’ major contribution to modern Agats: a lunch delivery service. At 1:00 every day you get a stack of seven pots, each containing some unusual goody.”
He was intellectually fired up. “The Asmat is like a huge puzzle with the variations in ceremony and art style forming the pieces. My trips are enabling me to comprehend . . . the nature of this puzzle. I think now that with my trip, with all the anthropological work that will have been done here, and after a careful study of the large collections of Asmat things now in three Dutch museums, it would be possible to organize a mammoth exhibition which would do justice to the art of these people: to show the artist functions in Asmat society[,] to explain the function of the art in the culture, and to indicate by means of the arrangement of the objects the nature of style variation throughout the entire area. Nothing approaching this has ever been granted a single primitive people. You can imagine what fun I am having dreaming these wild dreams and creating earth-shattering hypotheses about the nature of Asmat art.”
And yet there is something missing in those journals, in those efforts to decipher Asmat art. He wants to know how the artists work and what the symbols depict, how they vary from one village to another, and how to explain the function of the art in the culture. Absent, though, is an emotional need to know the Asmat as people, to connect, to answer the question of why he, Michael Rockefeller, was interested in their art, and what it might mean to him, beyond the academic questions. His notes feel clinical. There’s no deeply personal need, no burning pathos. It’s clear he likes to be in the wild, but he also seems oblivious to parts of that experience. There’s not a single account of friendship with any individual Asmat. He needs and wants the objects, good and beautiful and old Asmat artifacts, but less so the Asmat themselves. It’s like he sees the art as the thing itself rather than as the product of something larger. He keeps denying that headhunting and cannibalism still exist.
Maybe he was just too young, not yet mature enough to understand why he was there, incapable of personalizing his experience rather than simply intellectualizing it. If we had him with us today, if he’d lived, maybe he would have been able to articulate what he was seeking, what had driven him. There had to have been a reason. To seek anonymity, to escape the safety of his family, to make the world understand a culture so different from his own—any of these would surely have been beautiful and understandable.
IT WAS A pivotal moment in Asmat history. Throughout the 1950s, even as an ever-increasing number of missionaries and government officials arrived, Asmat culture remained largely unaffected by their presence. When Omadesep and Otsjanep set off toward Wagin at the end of 1957, there were no more than thirty whites in ten thousand square miles of swamp and river, most of them in Agats, and the world still belonged to the Asmat. Now, just three and a half years later, the balance was shifting. There were police posts in Pirimapun, Agats, Atsj, and Ajam; missionaries in Agats, Atsj, Basim, and Pirimapun; and non-Asmat Papuan catechists in many other villages, not to mention Adrian Gerbrands and David Eyde in Amanamkai. Westerners weren’t just on the periphery of Asmat lives, weren’t just strange ghosts passing through, but had become a huge cultural force that was constantly pushing for change. Asmat society and culture were still there, still pure in many ways, but in turmoil—everywhere the Asmat turned were these powerful men, coveting their drums, shields, spears, skulls,
bisj poles, which those men paid for with things the Asmat now wanted, needed, couldn’t get anywhere else. The whites were fascinated by their ceremonies, yet constantly interfered with them, and these powerful men backed up their actions, the Asmat knew, with the threat of violence, guns, against which they could not compete. Whenever conflicts heated up between villages, there was some priest or policeman or government official jumping in, thwarting the very things that had defined them as men, that gave them prestige with each other and their women.
One day in Atsj, Father von Peij got wind that two boys had been killed and eaten by Amanamkai. He ran outside and saw sixty canoes gathering, about to row to Amanamkai. He jumped in his boat and went with them, putting himself between the gathering canoes of warriors. He was petrified, afraid for his life, but he repeatedly tried to push them apart. The warriors yelled and screamed and shot arrows and hurled spears around him, but not at him—he was the white Lord, the Tuan, and they knew the power he represented and the repercussions if they killed him. “They were so angry and I was so scared, but I had to do it.” Those kinds of disruptive incidents were now happening all over central Asmat near Agats and increasingly at its peripheries in the south and northwest.
Nor, of course, was the turmoil and change uniform. Some villages and some people embraced change faster than others. The closer to Agats a village was, and the bigger the river on which it lay, the more contact it had with whites and the government.
It was this place undergoing profound change and unrest through which Michael and Wassing were now traveling, and Michael was about to get swept up in all of it. His father had opened the door for him that day in 1957 when he launched the Museum of Primitive Art. The epic battle between Otsjanep and Omadesep—never again would so many men be killed in one clash—had unleashed Lapré, whose killings of Osom and his fellow villagers had never been reciprocated. And at the very moment when Michael was ranging over Asmat’s rivers, alone, with no Asmat escort except the two teenagers, Joseph Luns was trying to persuade the UN General Assembly to approve his plan for retaining Dutch New Guinea, a weird, exotic island that most of the world barely knew existed.
