by Carl Hoffman
ON WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, at five p.m., Michael had tea at the parsonage with a group of missionaries, including Zegwaard and von Peij. Outside it was quiet, peaceful, Agats a tiny oasis of civilization on the edge of a fierce, roiling, and wild place. They sipped their tea and sat in chairs in a cozy wooden house and discussed their travel plans. Both von Peij and Michael were heading south on Friday. There were two routes past the mouth of the Betsj River—the shorter route over the Arafura and a longer one weaving in and out of rivers and small cuts. “I’m leaving for Atsj on Friday at five a.m.,” von Peij told Michael, “via the Mbajir River between the Siretsj and the Betsj, when the tide will be high, and I’ll be in Atsj by one. Don’t take the sea route; come with me on the rivers. It’s November, and the sea is rough.”
“I can’t,” Michael said. “I have to go to Per first, but I’ll see you in Atsj and Amanamkai.” Three of the seven bisj poles from Otsjanep that he’d bought in the summer had been delivered to Amanamkai.
In remembering that conversation, von Peij was speaking about Michael at length for the first time in fifty years. He lived in a small room in an apartment for retired priests and nuns in Tilburg, Netherlands, decorated with a few Asmat carvings. He was a tidy, precise man in a green sweater vest and white shirt. “It was fifty years ago,” he said, and he was tired of carrying the burden his whole life. “Why not speak about it now?”
The two men parted, agreeing to meet in a few days in Atsj. From there, Michael would proceed to Basim to meet van Kessel and begin exploring southern Asmat and the villages of the Casuarina Coast.
14
February 2012
ASMAT PADDLING A DUGOUT CANOE IN THE EARLY 1960S.
(MSC/OSC Brotherhood, Order of the Sacred Heart)
I’D BEEN OUT on the rivers for nine days. My legs were covered with red welts, I was shedding pounds like I’d been on some crazy crash diet, and I was frustrated with Amates’s English skills. I needed to go deeper, but Wilem and Amates were fighting over money and we were running out of tobacco and fuel, so, like Michael, we headed back to Agats.
We floated down the Ewta with the tide in the early morning, and I felt a lifting. The bubbling water was the color of strong tea. The breeze swept the flies away. We were leaving not just a place but a consciousness—one in which the “I” was different for the Asmat than for me. It was group, tribe, family, tied together in ways difficult to grasp. For me, an American, “I” is the biggest, most important unit. For us, freedom is everything. The right to do as we please, unbound by clan or village or parents—to move two thousand miles at will, to make a call home or send an email or say hi via Skype. We can reinvent ourselves, change churches or religions, divorce, remarry, decide to celebrate Christmas or Kwanzaa or both. But these men in Otsjanep are bound to each other. To their village and its surrounding jungle, to the river and the sea. Most will never see anything else, know anything else. And I kept wondering if I was as guilty as Michael, also filled with a Western conceit that I could just walk into a place and not only get it but also dominate it. Could I make the Asmat spill their secrets? Would they ever? Should they?
They are also bound to a spirit world, a place where powers I couldn’t see exist. The powers and spirits are like the edges of a black hole for scientists: a phenomenon they can never see directly, only measure its effects. It is a place of the imagination. It isn’t on any maps; no satellites or GPS can ever pinpoint it. It is a metaphysical place, as real to the Asmat as the dock or the moon or the river. They are part of it, it is part of them, and it is as powerful as any “real” thing, maybe infinitely more so, because what can be more powerful than your imagination? Their Catholicism is an overlay that eliminated headhunting and cannibalism and turned the act of carving a bisj pole into homage to the ancestors, whose deaths no longer need to be physically avenged. But that old spirit world is sprinkled everywhere still. As the bubbling water swept by and women in canoes, their fishing nets piled in the center, floated past, I wondered how to enter that world. Where was the doorway?
IF AGATS HAD felt like the end of the world when I’d stepped off the plane, now it felt like Paris. My cell phone worked. The hotel still had little power and only a bucket of cold water in which to bathe, but at least I had a bed and a chair. A friend back in the United States worked the phones and came up with Hennah Joku, a former journalist whose father was from Indonesian Papua and whose mother was from Papua New Guinea. She spoke perfect English and happened to be just over the mountains in Jayapura. She said she’d fly in to help translate as soon as possible—which meant days.
Van Kessel, von Peij, and others had lived in Basim, Atsj, and Amanamkai for decades, but stepping off the boat, I always felt like I was the first white man who’d ever come to the village. In Agats I was the only Westerner, and people stared at me, even though the Catholic bishop who lived there from 1961 to 2001, Alphonse Sowada, had been an American.
Then, one evening, I spotted a ghost in a baseball cap and slacks—Vince Cole. Pastor Vince was the last American missionary in Asmat. He’d lived in the twin villages of Sawa-Erma for thirty-seven years, and now he had come to Agats for a couple of days of meetings. He invited me for a drink, which sounded wonderful, since there was no alcohol in Asmat and I hadn’t had a drink in a month. “We’ll drink mass wine,” he said.
At eight that night, I threaded my way carefully in the dark along the crooked boardwalks (often missing boards) to the wooden house where Vince was staying. He welcomed me inside, in bare feet and chino slacks, bearing a bottle of wine. He was sixty-seven years old but looked ten years younger. He was big, strong, with long gray eyebrows and a prominent space between his two front teeth. The wine was warm and sweet. A single bare lightbulb lit the room, which was simply furnished with a basic sofa and a couple of chairs.
Vince was a dinosaur, and I liked him. The son of working-class parents in Detroit, he’d studied Islam and Urdu at McGill University in Montreal and become a Maryknoll priest. He’d originally planned to go to Pakistan, but that fell through, and in 1967 he ended up in Jakarta, where he first met Zegwaard and Sowada. He liked their approach. “They weren’t evangelical,” he said, tilting his glass back, “and we saw eye to eye—that it was our role to defend people’s rights, and Asmat was the place to be if you had that bent.”
For Vince, the biggest issue facing the Asmat was the encroachment of Indonesians flooding Papua and Asmat itself. They controlled everything, and had brought in consumer goods, even prostitution and HIV. If a village had a store, it was run by an Indonesian; Indonesian traders plied the most remote stretches of river in floating shops. Parangs and fishing hooks were one thing, instant ramen another. “The people invite them to come, to open stores, to log,” he said. “They have never been beyond one or two villages, and they don’t understand what’s waiting for them around the next corner. They cut down their own trees; they cut themselves off at their own knees.” And Asmat was potentially rich in coal, oil, and gold. It was an old story, the same in Asmat as in the Amazon or so many other places in the world—native people who were innocent about the world, who had few defenses against its encroachments. “They are easily influenced by the outside, too easily. I don’t even like to be here in Agats, but people from the villages jump at the chance to come here, to see the bright lights.”
Between Asmat and the highlands, in the foothills before the great wall of mountains rising in central New Guinea, Indonesia was establishing a new Kabupaten—an administrative district—rumored to be thick with coal and other minerals. Government officials had recently asked for Vince’s help in talking to the tribes and acquiring the mineral rights under their land, and he’d said sure, if it could be done through a process of long-range planning to handle the payment in a way that would benefit the villages. “But they just wanted to get it done, so they literally arrived one day and dumped $200,000 in cash on the village. Guys flooded downriver and bought tobacco and used outboard motors for double what t
hey were worth and the money was gone.”
Toward the foothills at Momogo a road was even being built through the highlands to connect with Jayapura on the other side of the mountains. Maps showed projected road systems winding throughout West Papua, all the way to Agats, which was hard to imagine given the miles of swamp and mud and tides. But roads had been built in tougher places in the world. In villages far upstream, where some Asmat had been interacting with the road crews, Vince had recently found leprosy. His urgent appeals to the government health workers in Agats went unanswered; they were too busy, it was too far. Alcohol had been banned in Asmat, but you could buy it if you tried hard enough, and the source was reported to be the Indonesian army itself.
Despite Pastor Vince’s many years here, there was much he still didn’t understand. “There are so many taboos.” When he arrived in Sawa, he had the thesis of an Australian professor who had spent time in the village. “I read his paper on ancestor feasts, and when I finally saw one, I was asking all of these questions, and the answers I got were totally different from what the professor had written. Finally, I said to them, ‘This professor says it’s all different from what you’re telling me.’ And they said, ‘Well, he was persistent and we didn’t want to make him angry, so we just made stuff up.’ So now we have an agreement. If there are things they don’t want me to know, they just say so, and they don’t make things up.
“Everything is secret and related to the spirit world, and it can have ill effects on their life. There are certain songs and stories that only they are privy to, and if they told outsiders they’d be putting themselves at physical risk of sickness or death.”
Asmat ceremonies can last for months, and they start on no set schedule. “Just the other day the men in Sawa-Erma announced they were having a feast,” Vince noted. “I asked them, ‘Why? Why now?’ And they said, ‘Because a man was in the jungle and he met some ancestors, spirits, and they told him now was the time.’ They wait for some message, an ancestor or an animal, you just don’t know.”
Once, he said, the villagers were having a jipae mask feast. The making of the masks, which are intricate, full-body costumes, is kept secret from women and children. Vince asked the men if he could take photos of the masks being made in the jeu. He was surprised when the men said, “Sure,” as long as he didn’t show them to the women and children. He felt a little weird about it, but took a roll of photos and then weeks later had them developed. And they were all blank. Nothing was there.
He paused.
Then he began another story, about a crocodile that had run amok and started eating people near Sawa-Erma. “People thought the croc was an evil spirit. The victims were from every village but one, where a guy lived who they thought was the crocodile. One day a man was walking with his bow and arrow, and he saw the croc and shot an arrow up in the air, and it came down into the croc’s eye, and the croc ran itself into the mud bank, where people killed it with axes and spears and feasted on it for three days. And the same day the croc died so did the guy who was presumed to be it.”
We both said nothing. Stillness and the hum of crickets, the barks of lizards. And in the stillness it was hard not to wonder, to feel, to imagine the power of this coincidence—or was it? In a place where everyone believed, it was hard not to become a believer yourself. And that is how unshakable belief works: if you know something is taboo and you do it anyway and get sick, who’s to say it isn’t real? It took Western Europe a thousand years to go from the medieval world to the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, and still people struggle with the supernatural. Asmat, by contrast, was a pre–Stone Age culture just fifty years ago.
“When I first came to Agats, you could walk from one end of town to the other in ten minutes and you knew everyone. The changes seem fast to me; I can’t imagine how they see it. . . . I wish I could crawl into their heads and feel what they feel. And how much they’re picking and choosing to share, how much they’re embarrassed to tell—it’s hard to know. There are just whole areas that you can’t go, where they can’t let you in, and you have to project, and you don’t know if it’s your own projection based on your own background. At six months, I could have written a book, but now I wouldn’t know where to start.
“They don’t distinguish between what they see in a dream and what they see in real life,” Vince pointed out. “A dream has the same validity as something they see with their eyes.” Yet the Asmat aren’t completely beholden to the spirits; they adapt and interpret according to their needs. “Upriver from Sawa-Erma they have this piece of wood they whirl around, a bullroarer, and the sound it makes is the voice of the spirits. One day I was at a feast, and they swung it around to see if everything was going to go well and they’d be able to hunt a wild boar. They swung it and all got long faces. ‘What’s wrong?’ I said. ‘Doesn’t look good for wild pig?’ Well, they just took the bullroarer and shaved it down—changing its shape changed the sound it made—and swung it around again and they were all happy: the day was auspicious for hunting.”
I’d been thinking a lot about Eden and Genesis, since Asmat felt biblical to me sometimes, a strange sort of Eden before whites came, and I asked Vince about it. “It’s a myth,” he said. “It’s not a fact, but something you strive for. Harmony. Peace. For everything that was expressed in Genesis before man destroyed that possibility. The whole Bible is driving you into a deeper meaning about what it means to be human, and God is the unknowable. It’s not about the answers but about the questions.”
We gulped the bottle down and listened to the crickets and a pack of barking dogs. I had a strange sensation. Vince was a priest whose lineage descended from Zegwaard and van Kessel and von Peij, and he had met them all, the men who had been the earliest, most important agents of change in Asmat. Zegwaard, he said, had been crazy tough. Once, when Vince went to see him in his office in Jakarta, Zegwaard was throwing a guy out the door: “I was walking up the stairs, and I heard this commotion and a door flies open, and he had this guy by the bum’s rush—one hand on his belt and the other on his shirt—and he literally heaved the guy out of his office.” And Vince had known Schneebaum, called him Toby. They had traveled together, he said, to places that had never seen a white man before. “He was open. He’d talk about anything, and he wore his homosexuality well. It’s just what he was, and he had so many insights and drew so well, it used to amaze me.” Yet here Vince was saying that the most important thing was getting the Asmat to appreciate their own culture in the face of a world that was hurtling toward them with ever-greater speed. “For me, they have to believe that what they have is valuable and not be afraid to acknowledge it. Christianity can do a lot of damage, and the religion doesn’t make any sense if they lose that.”
Vince didn’t know anything about Michael Rockefeller’s disappearance—he’d come to Asmat in the 1970s, and Sawa-Erma was relatively far away from Otsjanep, in central Asmat. “But that village was always considered to be badasses,” he said. “Same as Sawa-Erma, which was why I was attracted to it, because people said I couldn’t do anything with it. They were fierce in war. Why? What made them individualistic, not listen to officials and priests? I still don’t know.”
15
November 1961
MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER PADDLING AN ASMAT CANOE, SHORTLY BEFORE HE DISAPPEARED.
(Library of Congress)
IT WAS JUST getting light on Friday, November 17, when Father von Peij left Agats. Michael Rockefeller and René Wassing followed soon after. The catamaran was fully loaded. Fuel. Boxes of axes and fishing hooks and nylon line. Cloth. Bricks of loose-leaf tobacco. Rice and chocolate bars and a sixteen-millimeter film camera, Michael’s Nikon cameras, notebooks and field journals, a small portable typewriter—everything they’d need for another month, this time along the Casuarina Coast of southern Asmat. They slid down the wide silvery-blue Asawets, past the canoes and huts of Sjuru, and into the swampy netherworld where the spirits dwelled.
It always felt good to get b
ack to Agats, and it always felt good to leave. Michael couldn’t wait to see Otsjanep and the coastal Asmat again, which had had little contact with the West and which he could explore with van Kessel, someone who seemed to know the villages and people well. With Michael and Wassing were the Asmat teenagers from Sjuru, Simon and Leo, and they operated the engine as Michael let his mind wander, wondering if the southern Asmat would recognize the designs of their northern cousins, wondering how big an exhibit he might be able to organize. He loved to visualize showing everything he’d collected to his father and Goldwater. Their amazement. Their curiosity. His father wanting to know everything, admiring his daring.
Von Peij made Atsj by noon on Friday, and Michael and Wassing arrived in Per around the same time, to check on Chinasapitch’s progress on the canoe he was carving. It was magnificent—hollowed from a single tree trunk forty-eight feet long, painted with red and white stripes, tied with sago tassels along its sides. Today the canoe rests on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
They spent the night and left the next morning, Saturday, November 18. Before them stretched the mouth of the Betsj, which Michael already knew was a treacherous place, especially in the months of November and December, when strong prevailing winds and currents blow out of the southwest. Not only did the outflowing tides of the three-mile-wide Betsj hit those winds and waves, but across the mouth lay a series of mud banks. When the Arafura was calm, the winds were light, and the tide was slack, it could be as still as a swimming pool. But at full bore it was a turbulent place of stacked, confused waves and crosscurrents; Michael had already seen how dangerous it could be and how careful the Asmat had been navigating the mouth of the Betsj. He’d heard von Peij say he was scared of it. Yet he disregarded von Peij’s admonition to take the inland route, and neither Simon nor Leo advised him otherwise.
