by Carl Hoffman
He concentrated on the Pirien jeu, which he considered to be the most moderate, telling them that they were free to speak, that there’d be no recrimination if they did so. Finally he asked who killed Michael Rockefeller. “The answer,” van de Wouw wrote Tillemans in early May 1962, “fell right out of their mouths.”
“So far the information does not exactly match with what is in the report of Father van Kessel. Because Ajim would have been the one who stabbed M.R. to death on the shore (report K.V.K. [Kees van Kessel]: Pep stabbed him to death, from out of the proa, with a fishing spear). Also, the distribution of the head and bones is not the same as in the report. The shorts would have been buried in the mud at Kali Jawor. M.R. was then eaten and Ajim would have sucked out the brains.
“At the first arrival of the A.A. (van de Waal) and the H.P.B. in Otanep [sic] . . . Ajim would have collected all the corpora delicti, chopped them up in pieces and threw them away behind his house.
“Supposedly the information above was already sent to the Resident via the H.P.B. in Agats. However, I may repeat that the investigation has not yet come to an end.
“But A.A. is of the opinion that the Resident will not intervene before any real evidence can be handed over (possibly: shorts, skull or teeth). Without a doubt this case will have serious consequences for Lapré, because when asked, the involved men from Otanep [sic] will say it is a murder out of revenge for the folks that were shot dead by Lapré at the time.
“At last, I have to add to all this that I have tremendous respect for the peaceful way of acting of our young A.A. The case can surely be entrusted to him.
“Priest van Kessel was truly convinced of Ajim being the main instigator of this and lots of prior murders and that the inhabitants of Otanep [sic] would not accept the arrest of this unsavory character (also in appearance, comparable to Pep and a few different leaders). This also became clear in the investigation by A.A.”
Van de Wouw also reported that Otsjanep was brazenly carrying on its headhunting traditions, and that in the beginning of May a woman and a young girl from Warkai, a small village between Otsjanep and Omadesep, had been killed by men from Otsjanep, with two additional people injured.
At the end of three months in Otsjanep, van de Waal asked the men to hand over Michael’s remains. “I needed proof, not just names,” he said. They took him into the jungle, dug in the muck, and produced a skull and bones, the skull bearing no lower jaw and a hole in the right temple, the hallmarks of remains that had been headhunted and opened to consume the brains. “There are so many bones in Asmat, and I wanted to ask about the glasses,” he told me, “but that was too dangerous.” Van de Waal radioed Eibrink Jansen in Merauke. “I had a new radio, and it was scrambled so no one could listen in. I told him what I had, and he said he’d send someone to pick it up.”
Soon after, Rudy de Iongh, the newly appointed Dutch patrol officer in Agats, arrived. Van de Waal handed the remains over in a cloth sack. “He was very afraid; he came with a patrol vessel and a heap of policemen armed with machine guns.
“That was the end of the story,” he said. “I stayed two more weeks, and then Eibrink Jansen said I could leave and go back to Pirimapun, and that’s what I did.”
He never heard another word about the bones or anything else connected to Michael Rockefeller, except from a Dutch ironwood dealer who had accompanied de Iongh to collect the bones. The dealer told him that the remains had been given to Eibrink Jansen, who’d given them to a dentist in Merauke before sending them to Utrecht, in Holland. It was now June 1962.
“The political situation was becoming awkward,” van de Waal said. Indonesian paratroopers landed in Merauke at the end of the month to pressure the UN to make the Dutch government withdraw, and all women and children were sent home to Holland.
The struggle for control of West Papua was ending. The Dutch were capitulating, and van de Waal was soon sent to Merauke. “I was never asked to make a report of my time in Otsjanep,” van de Waal said, and in meetings with Eibrink Jansen, “we never, ever, touched upon my investigation.”
Today no records in the Dutch government archives mention van de Waal’s assignment to Otsjanep, his time there, or the bones he turned over—the only written mention of it appears to be in van de Wouw’s letters and in a highly aggrandized account by de Iongh in a colonial history of the Netherlands published in the 1990s.
“Why are there no government records?” van de Waal asked. “If there was no proof, it would have cost the government nothing to just tell the truth—that we’d spent three months in Otsjanep and had tried. But they did nothing, because [the truth] would have been very bad for the Dutch case, and that’s why they wanted to keep it secret.”
In September 1962, the UN ratified the New York Agreement, which transferred Dutch New Guinea to a United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (and then Indonesia eight months later). The Netherlands had lost its colony, and van de Waal sailed for home. “I never talked about it publicly,” he said in Tenerife, shrugging his shoulders, holding a cassowary bone dagger. “I guess no one’s going to be hurt by it now.”
PART III
23
November 2012
VILLAGERS OF PIRIEN/JISAR COMPLETING THE ROOF OF JISAR’S NEW JEU.
THE CROWD WAS surging, hot bodies pressed against the railing in the hotter sun, as the Tatamailau eased up the Asawets River toward the dock in Agats. It was five p.m., and the river and the sky and the jungle and even the stilted shacks of Agats glowed softly in the light of the setting sun. Longboats and canoes and speedboats buzzed out to meet the twice-a-month ship that plied the coast of Indonesian Papua—the ship that was the only connection with the outside world for most people who lived there. The crowd shrieked, shouted, pointed, waved. I had been traveling for a week already; I hadn’t been able to get a seat on the Tregana flight out of Timika and had been forced aboard the four-hundred-foot-long Tatamailau at three a.m. for the fourteen-hour journey to Asmat.
I’d tried repeatedly to reach Amates and Wilem from the United States but could never get through, until Wilem finally received one of my text messages when I hit Timika, telling him that I was inbound again, seven months after leaving. He said he’d meet me at the boat.
We were still five hundred feet from the dock, just beginning to edge in, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Wilem, barefoot and beaming, had jumped on the moving ship and found me. “Mister Karo!” he said, giving me a hug. “You are back and you speak Bahasa Indonesian!”
In the seven months since I’d left Asmat, I’d been riddled with doubts.
The pieces of the puzzle I’d unearthed fit, and fit well. Michael Rockefeller had swum away from the catamaran on the morning of November 19, 1961, with two flotation aids; René Wassing had witnessed his departure. Wassing said they had been close enough to see the shore, even if faintly, and the curvature of the earth was easily checked in routine maritime-distance-to-horizon tables: if the trees on the flat shoreline were fifty feet tall, then he and Michael were no more than nine and a half miles from shore—far away, but not an unreasonable distance for a fit, determined twenty-three-year-old male to swim in warm, calm water with a set of ad hoc water wings. And they might have been closer.
The village of Otsjanep had a long tradition of violence and had been reluctant to give up its traditions, and a large group of men from the village had left to return from Pirimapun on the afternoon of the nineteenth; Wim van de Waal had seen them there, and seen them leave. By any calculation, that observation put them at the mouth of the Ewta early on the morning of the twentieth. I knew within a mile or two where Michael and Wassing had lost power on the eighteenth, and I had the latitude and longitude of where Wassing had been first spotted on the afternoon of the nineteenth and where he’d been picked up on the morning of the twentieth, so their location when Michael left the catamaran was clear. Had he swum at a half-mile an hour, he would have arrived close to the mouth of the Ewta early in the morning on the twentieth
. I had the tide tables along the coast for that morning, and the water near the Ewta had reached its highest point at eight a.m., which also meant the tide was helping him toward shore at the point when he’d been the most exhausted.
The men from Otsjanep who would have been there at about the same time were related—though I wasn’t yet sure exactly how—to the men killed by Max Lapré in 1958, just three years before, and those deaths had never been reciprocated. Seventeen men, women, and children had been killed in the past decade, eight by crocodile-hunting Chinese Indonesians (considered white by the Asmat) and five by Lapré, and Michael had found seventeen bisj poles still in the jeus. The Asmat were known to be opportunists, preferring victims to be alone and unprotected, and Michael would have been exhausted, vulnerable in a way they’d never encountered in a white before. And he’d been to the village already; they would have known him and may have remembered his name, an important factor in choosing a headhunting victim.
As for the two priests who felt certain he had been killed, both Father van Kessel and Father von Peij spoke Asmat, were close to the villages, and more than anyone else had deep experience with the culture. Everything von Peij had told me—that he and van Kessel wrote reports to the government and their superiors in the Church, that they were forbidden to speak publicly about their reports, that they had lists of names of men from the village, that Max Lapré had made a heavy-handed raid in reprisal for Otsjanep’s and Omadesep’s massacre of each other—I’d verified through official documents and letters in the archives of the Dutch government and the Order of the Sacred Heart (the order to which van Kessel and von Peij belonged), as well as from the villagers themselves. I’d found no anomalies, nothing that couldn’t be explained within Asmat cultural logic, and no inaccuracies or tall tales from any of the living witnesses.
And yet. For all of van Kessel’s and von Peij’s certainty, their stories were secondhand; not one of the accused had confessed directly to either priest, nor had either of them seen any concrete physical evidence. Bishop Sowada’s chief concern—that no Asmat had ever killed a white—couldn’t be easily dismissed. It nagged at me. How could that have happened? Van de Waal had photos of the skull he’d been given, but when he’d shown the photos to a forensic pathologist, the conclusion was that it was “most probably not of European origin.” And the more I knew of Asmat, the more certain I was that, if the men of Otsjanep had killed Michael, the bones and skull would have been sacred objects that could never have been surrendered to a Westerner. After all, my offer of $1,000 for the glasses—a fortune in Asmat—had turned up only a fake. I was sure the skull and bones of Michael Rockefeller weren’t sitting in some museum file drawer in Holland.
Then there was the question of reliability. The Asmat were expert liars. They had depended on deception to gain advantage over their enemies, to elude and placate the spirits; accounts of them saying whatever whites wanted to hear were abundant. Cannibalism is the apex of Otherness, the greatest transgression, the thing that makes people less than human, and maybe the missionaries wanted to believe the Asmat had killed and eaten Michael. It certainly strengthened their case for evangelizing them.
And maybe I wanted to believe too. Maybe that belief was what we all wanted. It confirmed our image of the Asmat as both horrific and exotic and reflected back on us, made us seem bolder, more intrepid, braver—we were cavorting with cannibals! It was what anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere called “cannibal talk”—our need to believe that these people existed and that we were among them. Even more so because Michael was so rich and his family so powerful; in a perverse way, it seemed to level the playing field that this scion of American power could have been not just killed but consumed, cooked and digested and shat out by his opposite—wild men who had nothing, no power, no money, no influence. Maybe all of the things hinted at that made van Kessel and von Peij suspicious had been in their own heads, projections of their own biases and needs, and maybe Asmat from other villages had just made the story up.
Von Peij’s initial report had come in Omadesep, Otsjanep’s longtime traditional enemy; maybe the story had been spread just to get Otsjanep in trouble. And the swim, though possible, was extremely difficult. To have reached the shore, Michael would have had to swim six to ten miles over twenty-four hours, some of it against strong tides, all through offshore waters where sharks were known to swim. Doable though it was, it was still a feat of will and physical strength—and luck.
Finally, there was the consistent denial to my face by the men in Otsjanep and Pirien. They never said the village hadn’t done it, never directly denied it, but they were consistent in telling me they knew nothing about it one way or another—except in the dark of night to Amates and my crew. Would they really just lie about it to me now, after so many years, when none of the original perpetrators were even alive? Why wouldn’t Kokai and Tapep, their sons, simply own up to it?
Struggling with these questions and the whole cultural logic of cannibalism, I’d turned to Peggy Reeves Sanday, an anthropologist and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of Divine Hunger, a weighty book on cannibalism that I’d read. It turned out that she lived an hour from me, and we began a series of long days together, reviewing the reports and evidence, my notes, and all of the ethnographic and anthropological literature relating to Asmat. Sanday, too, was disturbed by Sowada’s concern that Asmat had never killed a white before. But one thing was clear and irrefutable to both of us: all of Asmat “knew” the story that Otsjanep had killed Michael Rockefeller. And the men of Otsjanep and Pirien themselves had said, at various times, even as they vacillated and prevaricated to the missionaries (and denied it to me), that they had killed him, or that they’d seen a giant snake or a crocodile at sea that morning.
If Michael had drowned or been consumed by sharks and never made it to shore, it seemed unlikely that they would fabricate such a specific and consistent story. If the men from Otsjanep had never seen him the morning of November 20, every conversation with von Peij or van Kessel, every story and detail, was a lie, was made up. Although the details were sometimes different, the basic facts hadn’t changed in fifty years: the involvement of Fin, Pep, and Ajim; the stabbing with a spear; the killing at the Jawor River, a quiet, hidden place that even today carried a sacred power. The description of the shorts—that detail in particular stood out. The specificity of Fin having the head. Von Peij’s and van Kessel’s later reports of the skull being placed in the jungle, and then the whispered reports to me from Amates, fifty years later, of the head being placed in a tree in the jungle.
To make it all up and then to sustain the lie for a half-century seemed more impossible and more illogical than what was a simple and straightforward tale: Michael had swum to shore, he had encountered the men from Otsjanep, and they had killed him to balance the chaos that Lapré had unleashed. And the constant thread of deception woven into the fabric of Asmat life raised another question. If the men from Otsjanep had killed Michael, it would have been a huge transgression, a thing that had never been done before in all of Asmat, something incredible and unbelievable. In van de Waal’s experience, he told me, no villagers either within Otsjanep or outside of it would have believed the story if they hadn’t seen some concrete proof, if they hadn’t seen bones or body parts or the skull.
Sanday felt it was significant that, when questioned by van Kessel, the men had all said they’d seen something big and unusual in the sea that morning. She raised another possibility. It was important, she believed, that the story had persisted so long in Asmat, among the Asmat themselves.
“The Asmat,” she said, “are trying to tell us something.” What was important to her was not that Michael Rockefeller might have been killed and eaten, but that a people were suggesting they had done so. Even if they hadn’t killed and eaten Michael Rockefeller, they could have done so, they might have wished they had, and they had been thinking about killing a white man for years. She thought there might be
significance in their backtracking explanations to van Kessel that all they’d seen was a giant mythical snake, or a crocodile. Why those animals? Every story had Michael being mistaken first for a crocodile, an animal of great symbolic importance within Asmat. The crocodile, which represents an eater of men, is carved into the bottom of almost every bisj pole.
Sanday also believed it was too much to make up if they had never encountered him at all. But she postulated that they might have seen him killed by sharks or crocodiles near them. Or that he had died at sea and his already dead body had washed ashore—that fact and fiction, the physical and the spiritual, had intermingled, as they tended to do in Asmat. In Sanday’s opinion, the body theory solved the nagging question of what enabled them to kill a white man, and it fit into nativistic scenarios in which tribal people seek to reclaim their past power, influence, status. In a world where these white men were interfering with their culture, once-powerful men like Ajim and Fin could propagate their own power within their communities by not just finding the body, but saying they had killed him, eaten him, headhunted him.
Over the past fifty years, missionaries had recorded several examples of cargo cult–like eruptions in various Asmat villages—men claiming supernatural powers and being able to produce tobacco or other objects of white affluence, their traditional beliefs strangely distorted by contact with the modern world. In the most striking example, in 1966 a twenty-seven-year-old man in the village of Ewer had begun breaking into the pastor’s storeroom and stealing tobacco, clothing, and money. Handing out the cargo to others in Ewer, he told them he received the goods from Tuan Tanah, the “Lord of the Earth,” who’d given him a secret key with which he was able to unlock a hole in the ground. Everyone who believed in Tuan Tanah would eventually become white and rich with goods. By the time the pastor caught the man, he and his followers had become the most powerful figures in the village. Could the “killing” of Michael have been a nativistic story that a few men had promulgated to increase their status and power in a rapidly changing world?
