The journey to the center of the Asmat tribal homeland in New Guinea reveals the mystery of the heir's disappearance there in 1961
On its own, Asmat is a perfect place. Everything you might need is here. It is full of shrimp, crab, fish and clams. In the jungle there are wild boars, fluffy opossum-like cuscus, and ostrich-like cassowaries. There is also sago palm, its pith can be pounded into white starch, it is the host of the larvae of Capricorn beetle, both of which are important sources of nutrients. The river is a navigable highway. The 15-foot-long crocodile wandered along the shore, and the pitch-black iguana basked in the uprooted tree. There are flocks of bright red and green parrots. The hornbill has a five-inch beak and a blue neck.
There are also secrets, spirits, laws and customs, born of men and women separated by oceans, mountains, mud, and jungles, longer than anyone has known.
Until 50 years ago, there were no wheels. No steel or iron, not even paper. There is still no road or car. Within its 10,000 square miles, there is only one airstrip, and outside the main "city" Agats, there is no signal tower. It’s hard to know where the water starts and where the land ends, because the 15-foot high tide of the Arafura Sea submerged the coast of southwestern New Guinea. This invisible swelling slides into this flat swamp every day. And forcefully push the outflowing river. This is a world of smooth, knee-deep mud and mangrove swamps extending inland. It is a huge hydroponic glass container.
We are passing through the mouth of the Betsj River, a place where the tides are raging, the waves are beating violently, and our 30-foot long boat is rolling over. I crawled forward, reached under the plastic tarp, fumbled for the Ziploc bag containing my satellite phone in my suitcase, and stuffed it into my pocket. I didn't want to bring the phone, but at the last moment, I thought about how stupid it is to die because there is no phone. If Michael Rockefeller had a radio when his catamaran capsized at this exact location in 1961, he would never disappear.
He is 23 years old and is the privileged son of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. After 7 months of adventure, he went from a neat student to a shabby photographer and art collector. For a moment his boat was overturned by the waves like ours, and then he and his Dutch companions clung to the overturned hull. Then Rockefeller swam to the shore and disappeared. Despite a two-week search involving ships, airplanes, helicopters and thousands of locals wandering the coast and jungle swamps, he was never found. Such a simple and mediocre thing happened to him, which makes us feel that what happened to us is more real. There will be no ominous music. A bad wave, I will hold on to a boat in a remote place.
The official cause of Michael's death was drowning, but there have been many rumors for a long time. He was kidnapped and detained. He became a native and hid in the jungle. He was eaten by a shark. He had reached the shore, but was killed and eaten by the local Asmat headhunters. This story has grown and turned into a myth. There is a non-Broadway drama about him, a novel, a rock song, and even a TV show hosted by Leonard Nimoy in the 1980s.
I have been fascinated by this story since I first saw the photos of Michael during his first trip to the then known as Dutch New Guinea. Inside, he was kneeling, holding his 35mm camera under the close observation of the locals. He is shooting a documentary in the highlands of the Great Balim Valley. That movie, Dead Bird, was a groundbreaking ethnographic study of a stone age culture that had little contact with it, which participated in constant ritual battles. The mountains, the fog, and the naked men yelled and attacked each other with spears and bows and arrows, fascinated and fascinated me, just like the whole idea of contact between people from completely different worlds. When I was in my 20s, I tried to go there, but it was too expensive for my young budget, so I ended up going to Borneo briefly.
I spent a few hours looking at that picture, wondering what Michael saw and felt, wondering what happened to him, wondering if I could solve the mystery. It makes no sense for him to be kidnapped or run away. If he drowned, well, that's it. Except that he has been attached to a floating aid. As for sharks, they rarely attack humans in these waters, and no trace of him has been found. This means that if he did not lose his life in the swimming, there must be more.
There must be some conflicts, some huge misunderstandings. The Asmats were bloody fighters, but when Michael disappeared, the Dutch colonial authorities and missionaries had lived in the area for nearly ten years, and the Asmats had never killed a white man. If he is murdered, conflicts between Westerners and others have continued since Columbus first sailed to the New World. What I find convincing is that in this remote corner of the world, the Rockefeller family and their power and money have nothing to do and get nothing. How can this be?
I began to look through the Dutch colonial archives and the records of Dutch missionaries, and I found more than I thought. After the ships, planes and helicopters returned home, a series of new investigations were conducted. The Dutch government, local Asmat-speaking missionaries and the Catholic Church authorities sent page after page of reports, telegrams and letters discussing the case-most of which have never been made public. The main participants in these surveys have been silent for 50 years, but they are still alive and finally willing to speak.
On February 20, 1957, in a reinforced concrete city 6,000 times larger than Asmat’s largest village, Nelson Rockefeller introduced a new way of viewing to the world. He is 49 years old, square-chinned, ambitious, and the grandson of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil. When Nelson was born on the front page of the New York Times, John D. was the richest man on earth, with an estimated wealth of US$900 million. Two years later, Nelson will become governor of New York State. In 1960, he will run for president. In 1974, he became the Vice President of the United States.
In a family-owned four-story townhouse at 15 West 54th Street—just around the corner of the Museum of Modern Art—his mother, Abby Aldridge Rockefeller, helped build it—the guests began to arrive: At 30 o'clock in the afternoon, attend a private reception to announce that the first exhibition of the Primitive Art Museum will be open to the public the next day. The things they are celebrating come from a faraway world. Carved oars from Easter Island. The slender, exaggerated face of a wooden mask from Nigeria. Aztec and Mayan stone statues from the pre-Columbian period from Mexico. There are no ethnographic three-dimensional models around these objects, nor do they depict African huts or canoes and fishing nets. They sit on stark white cylinders and cubes, illuminated by track lighting on white walls. They will be regarded as works of art.
The height of Nelson wearing New York tribal clothing: black tie. As guests ate snacks and sipped wine, he told them that his new museum was "the first... of its kind in the world"-dedicated to displaying primitive art. "We don't want to establish primitive art as a separate category," he said, "but to integrate it with all its missing diversity into art known to mankind. Our goal will always be to select Works on display in other art museums are comparable to outstanding artworks of rare quality, and exhibit them so that everyone can fully enjoy them."
Michael Rockefeller was only 18 that night, and it is not difficult to imagine the impact of this event on him. His father's pride in the new museum, the exotic beauty and attraction of objects, and the admiration of the New York elite. Michael is slender, with a clean shaved beard and a square chin. Like his father, he wears a pair of thick black-rimmed glasses. He, his two sisters and two brothers grew up in a family townhouse in Manhattan and Rockefeller Estate in Westchester County. Just as Abby Rockefeller did to Nelson, Nelson did to Michael, like other boys receiving baseball education, give him an art education, and take him to an art dealer on Saturday afternoon. His twin sister Mary remembers how much they liked to watch his father rearrange his artwork.
When his four years at Harvard came to an end, in the words of his friends, Michael was "a quiet artistic spirit." He was torn apart. His father wanted his son to be like him-working in banking or finance in one of the family businesses, while indulging his artistic passion. Michael graduated with honors from Harvard with a bachelor's degree in history and economics, but he yearned for something else. He traveled all over the country, worked for a summer in his father's ranch in Venezuela, and visited Japan in 1957. He was surrounded not only by art, but also by primitive art. How can he make his father who collected "primitive art" more proud than the roots and commitment than this powerful governor and presidential candidate dreamed of?
At Harvard, he met Robert Gardner, a filmmaker, who started producing "Dead Bird" and signed a contract as a sound engineer. "Mike is very quiet and very humble," said Karl Heide, a graduate student in anthropology at Harvard, who shared a tent with him during a film expedition in 1961. In the evening, Hyde was surprised to see the richest member of the team mend his socks.
But Michael is also ambitious. "Michael's father made him a member of the board of his museum," Hyde told me, "Michael said he wanted to do something he had never done before and bring the main collection to New York." He has already worked with the Dutch National Ethnology Correspondence from Adrian Gerbrands, deputy director of the museum, who recently started a field visit in Asmat. The area is inhabited by hunter-gatherers, but their carvings are amazing. "Asmart," Hyde said, "the obvious choice."
Michael went on a reconnaissance trip there during the filming break in mid-May. It was not until the mid-1950s that some Dutch missionaries and government officials began to appease the Asmats, but even by 1961, many had never seen Westerners, and wars and headhunting between villages were still common. Michael wrote: "Now this is a desolate country, and more remote than I have ever seen before." In many respects, the Asmat world at that time was a mirror image of all the taboos in the West. In some areas, men have sex. They occasionally share wives. During the bonding ceremony, they sometimes drink each other's urine. They killed neighbors, hunted human heads, and cannibalized human flesh.
However, they are not barbarians, but biological modern people with all the brainpower and dexterity needed to drive a 747. Their language is very complex, with 17 tenses, composed of an isolated world of trees, oceans, rivers, and swamps. They have all their experience. They are hunter-gatherers who are purely earning a living, living in the spiritual world-rattans, mangroves and sago trees, whirlpools, their fingers and noses. Every villager can see them and talk to them. There is a world with them, a kingdom with cross-sea ancestors, called Safan, and a world in between. Everything is the same real. No death has just happened; even sickness has come to the ghost, because the ghost of the dead is jealous of the living and wants to stay and make mischief. Asmats live in an extreme dual world, life and death, one balances the other. Only through carefully designed sacred festivals and rituals and mutual violence can disease and death be controlled by appeasing and chasing those ancestors back to Safan and back to the land beyond the sea.
The Asmats are professional woodcarvers in this stone-free land. They made gorgeous shields, paddles, drums, canoes and ancestral poles, called bisj, which embody the spirit of ancestors. The bisj pole is a 20-foot-tall masterpiece made of stacked people intertwined with crocodiles, praying mantises and other headhunting symbols. The two poles are unforgettable, expressive, and vibrant, each with an ancestor's name. These carvings are commemorative signs for the dead and the living, showing that their deaths have not been forgotten, and the responsibility for revenge still exists.
The Asmat saw themselves in the tree—just like a person has feet, legs, arms, and head, so does the sago tree. It has roots, branches, fruits, and a seed on it. Just as the fruit of the sago tree nourishes the new tree, the fruit of mankind, their head, nourishes the young. They all know some version of the story of the world’s first brother, one of the creation myths of Asmat, in which the older brother coaxed his younger brother to kill him and put his head in a young man’s groin superior. The skull nourishes the growth of the newcomer, even if he takes the name of the victim and becomes him. It was through that story that people learned how to hunt heads, how to slaughter the human body, and how to use skulls to cultivate new men from boys and let life flow into the world.
Completing a bisj rod usually triggers a new round of raids; revenge is performed, balance is restored, and a new head is obtained—new seeds to nourish boys to grow into men—and the victim's blood is rubbed into the pillar. The spirit in the pole is complete. Then the villagers began to have sex, the poles were left to rot in the sago fields, fertilized the sago and completed the cycle.
Anything beyond the tangible immediacy that Asmats can see must come from that spiritual world-this is the only understandable explanation. An airplane is an opndettaji-a canoe that has been rowed mentally. White people come from the land beyond the ocean, where the soul lives, so they must be super creatures.
Michael is not in this field as a lone adventurer; he is Rockefeller, let alone the trustee of the Primitive Art Museum. His tour group includes Gerbrands and René Wassing, the latter a government anthropologist assigned to him by the Ministry of Indigenous Affairs of New Guinea.
The field records of Michael's first trip to Asmart and the letters he wrote reveal his increasingly serious attitude towards collecting. Before the second expedition, he set "objectives; survey topics; standards for style changes." He wanted to publish books and hold the largest Asmart art exhibition ever.
Michael returned to Asmat in October 1961. Vassin joined him again. In Agatz, he pestered a Dutch patrol officer and sold him his homemade catamaran. Michael stuffed it with a large amount of barter goods-steel axe, fish hook and Thread, cloth and tobacco, Asmats has become addicted. He and Vassin, accompanied by two Asmat teenagers, visited 13 villages in three weeks.
Michael collects everywhere, in large quantities, full of drums, bowls, bamboo horns, spears, oars, and shields. The bisj shot left him the deepest impression. He wrote without irony: "In my opinion, this is an item of Asmat art that is not invaded by Western commercialism." In the southern village of Omadesep, he bought a set of four on his first trip. They are now standing in the Michael C. Rockefeller Pavilion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which absorbed the collections of the Primitive Art Museum after it closed in 1976.
In mid-November, Michael and his companions returned to Agats, ready to stock up on supplies for another month. They set off again on November 17th, intending to drive along the coast of the Arafura Sea to the south of Asmat. The area is still wild and uncultured, and was protected by a man named Cornelius Van Kaiser. As the pastor of Er knows, Michael plans to rendezvous with him. When they began to cross the mouth of the Betsj River, conflicting tides and winds set off waves and cross currents. The mild water in the first minute boils in the next minute. A wave flooded their outboard, and the catamaran began to drift; then the wave capsized it.
Two teenagers born by the river jumped in and swam to the nearby shore. Out of the sight of Michael and Vassim, they succeeded. After several hours of trekking in the mud, they approached Agat for help that night.
When the Dutch colonial government urgently dispatched ships, planes and helicopters to search for them, Michael and Vassin spent a long night on the overturned hull. After dawn on November 19, Michael told Vassin that he was worried that they would drift into the high seas. At around 8 o'clock that morning, he took off his underwear, tied two empty plastic buckets to his belt to increase buoyancy, and then started swimming. He estimated that he was three to ten miles away from the dim coastline.
That was the last time people knew about Michael Rockefeller. In the afternoon, Vasin was found from the air and rescued the next morning.
As the search for Michael’s job climaxed, Nelson and Mary Rockefeller rented a Boeing 707 full of reporters. When they landed in Mellock, 150 miles southeast of Asmat, the number of reporters continued to increase. But they are far away from Asmat itself. They are there but not there. They can do nothing but wait helplessly and hold a news conference without news. On November 24, the Dutch Minister of the Interior told the New York Times,
"There is no hope of finding Michael Rockefeller alive."
The Rockefellers insisted on the idea that he might have gone ashore, and a Dutch official in New Guinea supported this hope: "If Michael goes ashore, then he has a great chance of survival," he said. "Although the locals are uncivilized, they are very kind and will always help you."
On November 28, 9 days after Michael wandered, his father and sister flew home. After another two weeks, the Dutch cancelled the search.
The five of us—Wilem, my navigator; Amates, my translator; and their assistant and me—have been working along the coast of Asmat for five days. The area is now nominally Catholic, headhunting is a thing of the past, and the villages we visited felt as if something had been deprived of something, as if a certain reason for existence had disappeared. In Bassim Village, the children played crazy, noisy, and loudly, climbed up palm trees, covered themselves with mud, and jumped into the brown river. But if the adults don’t go fishing or gather sago, they will sit there, listless. I didn't see the carving anywhere. Basim's jeu-its home of ceremonies, the location of Asmat's spiritual life and warrior culture, where the worlds of the dead and the living meet-magnificent, long and big, tied together entirely with rattan, nothing nail. But it is empty and crumbling.
Amates arranged for us to live in the principal's house, four empty rooms. We were sitting on the floor when a man walked in that night. He is small, 5 feet 7 inches, weighs about 140 pounds, has a prominent chin, a large nose, and deep sunken eyes. Veins came out of his neck and temples. There is a hole in his diaphragm, and he can wear shells or pig bone decorations in it if he wants to. His T-shirt was soiled and it was full of small holes. A woven bag decorated with cockatoo feathers and the seeds of the Job’s tear plant hung from his neck to his chest. He has a pair of smart eyes, he speaks fast, and his voice sounds like rubble rolling on the glass.
"This is Kokai," Amates said. "He is my brother, my father, the head of Pirion", meaning the former chief of a village called Pirion. "He has a new wife in Basem, so he comes here often." Kokai sat on the floor with us, and Amates took out tobacco and rolls of paper. I didn't mention anything I was pursuing to Amates, but it felt like this was a great opportunity: Pirien left a village called Otsjanep (OCH-an-ep), and the document tracking led by Michael was there.
"How old is he?" I asked Arms.
They talk, I wait. "He doesn't know," Amates said, "but he may be in his 60s."
"Does he remember a story about a Dutch raid and a man killed?"
Amates talked to Kokai in a lengthy and indirect way, and a simple question took ten minutes to ask. Xiao Kai looked at me. Rolled a cigarette with two rolls of paper, and a long one. The candlelight flickered. My leg was hurt by the hard wooden floor. Xiao Kai began to speak.
"He remembers," Amates said. "He's still a kid, he saw it."
It continued, a whirlpool of disjointed stories, and Amates stopped to translate. Asmats without TV, movies or any type of recording media are excellent storytellers. Xinghai drew his bow dumbly. He patted his thigh, chest, and forehead, then swept his hands over the top of his head, indicating that the back of his head was blown up. His eyes widened, expressing fear; he ran with his arms and shoulders, and then sneaked into the jungle. I heard the names of Faratsjam, Osom, Akon, Samut, and Ipi-these names I already knew from a typed page in a dusty Dutch archive, and the prologue of Michael's disappearance came to life.
A few months after Nelson Rockefeller opened the Museum of Primitive Art, Otsjanep and the nearby village Omadesep (o-MAD-e-sep) massacred each other. They are powerful villages, each with more than a thousand people, and they are enemies on parallel rivers a few hours apart—in fact, they have been killing each other for years. But they are also connected, because even in the hostile village of Asmat, marriage and death are the same, because the murderer and the victim become the same person.
In September 1957, a leader of Jesus in Omadesep persuaded six men from Otsjanep to accompany the same team of fighters along the coast to hunt down the Asmats. These objects have symbolic meaning and Value for money. In an intricately violent story, a person from Omadesep betrayed a traveling companion from Otsjanep, and everyone except one was killed. The survivor crawled home through miles of jungle to warn his comrades, and then they fought back. Of the 124 people who set off, only 11 people went home alive.
The murder here, the murder there can be ignored, but for Max Lepré, the controller of the New Holland government south of Asmat, the chaos is too much. Lepré's family colonized Indonesia for hundreds of years. After World War II, he was imprisoned by the Japanese and Indonesians. He is an old-school colonial administrator who is determined to teach the Asmats a lesson. On January 18, 1958, he led a team of officers to Omadsep, confiscated as many weapons as they could find, and burned down the canoe and at least one jeu.
Otsjanep is not that flexible. Three Papua police officers sent a Dutch flag and some steel axes as gifts, and they soon returned. The people of Otsjanep do not want to have any relationship with the government and are willing to “use violence to show their position”, Lepré wrote in his official report. "The Dutch flag is not accepted."
Father Van Kessel travels in a native canoe, decorating himself like an Asmat, with cockatoo feathers, ocher and black and gray stripes on his body. He has always been warmly welcomed in Otsjanep, Lepre Fear of the Asmat, his fear is self-fulfilling. He took an armed and reinforced police team to the village and arrived in heavy rain on February 6. There were men everywhere in the clearing, but Lepré noticed that he didn't see women, children, or dogs—"This is always a bad sign." The news spread quickly in the jungle; the villagers knew what happened in Omadsep. But they are very confused. What should I do?
On the left, a group of people approached-Lepré believed it was a surrender. But on the right stood a group of people holding bows, spears, and shields. Lepré looked left and right, also not knowing what to do. Behind the house, a third group of men broke into what he called a "warrior dance." Lepré and a police force rushed to the left bank, and another force occupied the right bank.
"Come out," Leprey shouted through an interpreter, "put down your weapon!"
A man came out of a house with something in his hand, and he ran towards Lepre. Then, chaos: gunfire sounded from all directions. Faratsjam was shot in the head and the back of his skull was blown up. Four bullets penetrated Osom-his biceps, armpits and buttocks. Akon shoots in the abdomen and Samut shoots in the chest. In an instant, Ipi's jaw disappeared. The villagers will remember every detail of the bullet damage, which shocked them. This kind of violence is so fast, ferocious and magical for people who are used to fighting and hurting with guns or arrows. Asmat panicked and rushed into the jungle.
"Of course it is regrettable," Leprey wrote. "But on the other hand, they already know clearly that government agencies don't pay much attention to headhunting and cannibalism. They hardly know that they have only been in contact by chance. People now probably understand that they'd better not resist the authorities."
In fact, they are extremely unlikely to reach any such understanding. For the Asmats, Max Lepré's raid was a shocking and inexplicable thing, and something went wrong in the universe. Their lives have revolved around appeasing, deceiving, and expelling ghosts, and now this white man, who may even be a ghost, kills them by doing what they have been doing. The Dutch government? This is a meaningless concept to them.
What were the souls of the five people killed by Lepré’s officers? They are outside, wandering around, making pranks, haunting the village, making people sick, as real as they were when they were alive. The world is out of balance. how to explain? How to correct it?
The entrance of the river to Otsjanep is very narrow, and I never noticed it from the sea. Wilem drove slowly, I imagined Max Lepré here, his heart beating on his chest, fully armed, ready, I imagined Asmat watching him coming, these strange people with their metal boats and their guns.
A canoe passed by us and headed towards the sea, some standing with women and children, some standing with men, their paddles dipping and stroking at each other's perfect time. We first stopped at Pirien, a quarter of a mile downstream of Otsjanep; it was originally one of Otsjanep's five Jesus, but broke away sometime after Michael disappeared. When the men began to appear, we barely entered a two-bedroom wooden house. one. two. five. Soon, I counted 40 people squeezed into the stuffy, unfurnished room, and groups of boys peeked through the windows. We sat on the floor with faces full of faces, sweaty bodies and flies, staring and waiting.
Amates, my Asmat guide and translator, took out the tobacco and handed bags of tobacco and rolled paper to the elderly, who passed piles of brown weeds to the room. Soon, we were enveloped in smoke. Amates spoke, and the men nodded. Some introduce themselves. I am not sure why they are here. They didn't ask me anything, but they seemed to want to see me, they wanted the tobacco I brought, but I was never sure if I understood everything Amates said.
When I asked about Lepré's raid, they became quiet. More than 50 years have passed, but the memory of that morning is still too clear for a stranger. Amates suggested that we take a break and then head upstream to Otsjanep itself. The river twists and turns, and then the trees are cleared. On the left bank, there was nothing but thatched huts and mud, smoke, and a few banana and coconut trees. A large group of people sat on the porch and looked at us. We drew to the bank, climbed over the canoes, branches and boardwalks, and Amates talked to the crowd. The children gathered together and approached.
The atmosphere is strange. No one moved. If I were a cat, my fur would stand up. I looked at people, they looked back, but there was no approval, no welcome. No one held my hand. No one invited us in. I asked Amates to ask if anyone knew about Lepré and his raid, or even witnesses. Expressionless, expressionless. Several people said a few words. "They don't remember anything," Amates said. "They don't know anything about it."
We climbed back to the boat and went back to Pirion’s cabin. It was already evening. The dog barked and fought. The children are playing on the boardwalk, but I can't see any adults anywhere. I cannot keep flies away from my face, my eyes, and my nostrils. They started to make me crazy.
"They are very scared," Amates said, as if there was nothing.
"Afraid?" I said. "what?"
"A tourist died here," he said. "An American tourist named--" He said the name was garbled. I can not understand. This is news to me. In everything I have read, I have never heard of an American tourist who died in Asmat.
"When?" I said. "What's his name?"
Amates' English is very slow, and it is difficult to understand whatever he says. He said it again, and then slowed it down again. The name was difficult to pronounce for the Asmats, but this time it was unmistakable: "Michael Rockefeller."
I never told Amates that I was investigating Michael's disappearance, it was just that I was a journalist and wrote about Asmat and its history. I never mentioned his name.
"Michael Rockefeller?" I asked pretending not to know.
"Yes, Michael Rockefeller," Amates said. "He is American. He is in Otsjanep. They are very, very scared. They don't want to talk about it."
"How did his name come from?" I asked.
"They told me," he said. "Today, when we talked, they were worried that you were here to ask Michael Rockefeller. They were scared."
"Otsjanep killed him. Everyone knows."
In December 1961, one month after Michael disappeared, a Dutch Catholic priest named Hubertus von Peij went to Omadesep at the southern end of his diocese. Von Peij has been in Asmat for many years and he is familiar with the local people and language. On a cold winter night in 2012, when I met him in Tilburg, the Netherlands, he told me about his journey. He is still alive at the age of 84 and lives in a small apartment decorated with some Asmat carvings.
When he was sitting in the house of the Omadsep missionary, four people walked in. Two of them are from Otsjanep and two are from Omadesep. They have something to say to the priest.
Little by little, it overflowed. On the day Michael set off from the catamaran, 50 men from Otsjanep brought palm tree construction supplies to the government post in Pirimapun, about 20 miles south of Otsjanep. They traveled at night, spent a day in the village, and then set off for home. At dawn on November 20, they stopped at the mouth of the Ewta River, 3 miles downstream of Otsjanep, waiting for the tide to reverse. This is a good time to smoke and take a bite of sago. Something is moving in the water. They saw the crocodile—ew in Asmat. Do not. It was not a crocodile, but a group, a white man. He is swimming on his back. He turned and waved. One of the Asmats said: "People of Otsjanep, you are always talking about headhunters. Well, here is an opportunity." A debate ensued. Dombai, the leader of Pirien jeu, believes that he should not be killed. Agim and Fern don't think so. When they tried to lift Tuan onto the canoe, Pep stabbed him in the ribs with a spear. This is not fatal. They rowed him to a hidden creek on the Javor River, where they killed him and started a fire.
"Did he wear glasses?" Feng Peiji asked. "What kind of clothes is he wearing?"
Their answer was imprinted in his memory: the white man was wearing shorts, but shorts they had never seen before, and you can't buy them at Asmat-the shorts were pressed high on his lap and had no pockets. Panties. Feng Peiji nodded. "Where is his head?"
"Fin-tsjem aotepetsj ara," they said. "It hangs at Fen's house. It looks small, like a child's head."
"What about his thigh bones?" von Peij said, knowing they were used as daggers. "What about his shins?" He knew they were used as the tips of fishing spears.
Pep has a thigh bone and Ajim has one. A man named Jane has a shin, and Wasan has one. There are 15 men on the list with his upper arms, forearms, ribs, shorts, and glasses.
"Why are they killing him?" he said. They said it was due to the Lepré raid that took place in Otsjanep nearly four years ago.
Von Peij felt overwhelmed. The details, especially the description of Michael's underwear, are too specific to believe.
A few days later, he wrote a note to his boss in Agatz: "I didn't intend to do this. I stumbled upon some information. I felt it necessary to report it. Michael Rockefeller was taken away by Otsjanep and killed. [The villages of Jow, Biwar, and Omadesep] are all aware of this." He also notified the district government controller.
Cornelius van Kessel (Cornelius van Kessel), the pastor Michael has been traveling to meet, has also been hearing something. He met with Feng Pei, sent his Asmat assistant to the village to test the soldiers there, took a handful of them to Basam to interrogate them in person, and wrote a long report to the controller on December 15 . "After talking with Father von Pey, the very detailed data that matched my data and inspection has eliminated one percent of my suspicion. "It is certain that Michael Rockefeller was murdered and eaten by OTSJANEP," He wrote in capital letters. "This is revenge for the shooting four years ago. Van Kessel made it all clear. Name. Who owns which body parts.
Less than a month after Michael disappeared—within two weeks after they cancelled the search for him—the Dutch authorities received reports from von Peggy and Van Kessel.
On December 21, the Governor of the Netherlands New Guinea sent a telegram to the Minister of the Interior of the Netherlands. The telegram is marked with the words "confidential" and "destroyed", but some of it is still kept in the Dutch government archives in The Hague. It summarized what the two priests reported and said:
In my opinion, some reservations need to be made. No evidence has been found so far, so there is no certainty. In this regard, I think it does not seem important to provide information to the press or Rockefeller veterans at this time.
Both priests have lived in Asmat for many years. Both speak the local language. Both are convinced that the story they heard is accurate. Van Kessel wanted to remind Michael's family and even went to the United States to talk to them. But in a series of letters, the church authorities warned von Pey and Van Kessel that the issue was "like a glass case" and remained silent, so "the mission will not fall out of favor" and soon shipped Van Kessel back. Netherlands. The Dutch government struggled with Indonesia and the United States to retain its last colony in the east. The premise of this policy was to describe Papua as a civilized, smoothly functioning semi-independent entity, but said nothing. When the Associated Press reported that Michael was killed and eaten in March 1962, according to a letter from Asmat’s third Dutch pastor to his parents, Nelson Rockefeller contacted the Dutch Embassy in the United States. The embassy contacted The Hague. The Foreign Minister Joseph Lens himself responded. He said that the rumors had been thoroughly investigated and they had nothing to say.
In fact, the Dutch government's investigation has just begun. The officials sent a young Dutch patrolman named Wim van der Waal-it was he who sold his catamaran to Michael Rockefeller. In 1962, van de Waal moved to Otsjanep and started a long and slow process, which took three months.
"Asmat of Otsjanep doesn't understand why I am there," he told me in 2012, at the dining table in his home in Tenerife, Spain, where he has lived since 1968. He is also very good, at age 73. "It is a complicated village, and they feel that talking about these things will bring them bad luck." He asked them bit by bit about the fighting and raids, and finally it spread. Come out-this story is hardly different from what Feng Peijie heard.
Van der Waal asked for evidence because he knew that the Dutch government would not take any action without it. Some people took him into the jungle and dug a skull and bones in the dirt. The skull had no lower jaw and there was a hole in the right temple—a sign of the remains of the brain that were opened by a headhunter to consume the brain.
He handed over the remains to the Dutch authorities, but it is June 1962 and global politics has stepped in. "The political situation has become awkward," Van der Waal said; the Dutch are about to hand over half of their New Guinea to the newly independent Indonesia. Van der Waal's superiors called him back to the village. "I have never been asked to report my time in Otsjanep," he said. During meetings with senior officials, "we have never, never mentioned my investigation." No record in the Dutch government archives mentions it. , Although Van der Waal’s story was confirmed in the memoirs of Van Kessel’s successor, a priest named Anton Van der Waal.
I returned home after two months in Asmat and I was still full of questions. The stories I heard were second-hand; everyone at Asmat "knows" that Otsjanep's people killed Michael, but no one there or Pirien admitted the killing to me. Only one person, Pep’s nephew, who allegedly assassinated Michael, told me a detailed version of this story, and he grew up in another village. In addition, there is a reliability issue: the Asmats rely on deception to defeat the enemy, avoid and appease the soul; there are many sayings about what they say white people want to hear. Maybe the priest and the patrol wanted to believe that the Asmats killed and ate Michael. This undoubtedly strengthened their reasons for evangelizing and modernizing them. Although I have been in Asmat for so many weeks, I have only been to Pirion and Oudtsjanep twice, once for 24 hours and once for four days, and there are always translators and attendants. Michael’s notes about his travel gave me the impression that he accepted the Asmats without knowing them, I wonder if I also committed the same thing, trying to get to know them without taking the time to understand them. Get their deepest secrets.
I decided that I must go back and go deeper. After returning to the United States, I learned Indonesian, which has quickly replaced Asmat’s mother tongue. Seven months later, I returned to Asmart. I want to better understand the Asmat culture, especially the village structure of Otsjanep: who were the people killed by Lepré and how they are related to the people mentioned in the van Kessel and von Peij reports.
After returning to Agatz, I met Kokai, where he was visiting his son. For the first time we can talk directly to each other, I think the veil has been lifted. He invited me back to Pirion to live with him for a month.
His house is composed of three unfurnished rooms. The bare walls are gray and full of dirt, soot, and grime. The floor is covered with traditional hand-woven palm mats. There is no electricity, pipes, or even no electricity. A shop in the village. In the corner are spears, bows and arrows, and six-foot-high shields, all carved by Kokai. This time, everything is different. I speak their language, alone, without Amates or Wilem, I leave myself to Kokai's care, the village accepts me, embraces me, and opens my heart to me.
I haven't asked any questions about Michael in the past two weeks. The men are building a new jeu. I spent hours and days waiting as they played drums, sang and danced. The men wore dog-tooth necklaces and the wild boar fangs on their arms and heads had sulphur crests. Headband parrot. Sometimes they play drums and sing songs all day and night, headhunting and war songs, which are the bridge between the ancestors and the here and now.
Kokai and I will talk about cigarettes and sago in the morning. Kokai knows everything-hundreds of songs and stories, his family and the offspring of the village. As the second week merges into the third week, it's time to start asking questions.
One morning, I took out a stack of about 50 black and white photos taken by Michael Rockefeller in Oudtsjamp in the summer of 1961. The man in the photo is naked, proud, smiling, with long curly hair, and some people have Triton shells hanging on their abdomens-this is a sign of a great headhunter. Other photos show elaborate bisj rods, some of which I know were tried by Michael but unsuccessfully.
Kokai and other villagers, including some in Otsjanep, identified in the photo that 6 of the 15 men named by van Kessel and von Peij had partial bones of Michael, which proves that Michael met those who were believed to have killed him— —This is an important detail, because Asmats prefer to take the head of someone they know the name. When I asked why the bisj was still in the jeu and not in the sago fields, they said that it was because the bisj ceremony had not been completed. Who are the two poles named after? They keep saying they don't know. This is possible, but—for someone who can remember the family lineage of several generations—impossible.
One night at Kokai's, I asked about the people killed in the Lepré raid. I want to know their positions in the village. Faratsjam was a Jewish kepala perang or war leader. So are Osom, Akon, and Samut. Of the five dead in the Lepré raid, four were the most important people in Otsjanep, and they were the leaders of four of the five Jesus. The most powerful and capable fighter in one of the most powerful villages in Asmat was killed instantly. Author: Max Lepré, a Western outsider.
And those who take their place? Fin, he allegedly took Michael's skull. Ajim and Pep, they were both accused of stabbing him with a spear. Jane, who is named one of Michael's tibias? He married Samut’s sister, and Samut married Jan’s sister. The killed and their successors: Each of these people has a sacred duty to avenge those killed by Lepré. Otsjanep's murder motive is becoming more and more determined. The only Jew who did not lose the war leader was Pirien-the only Jew who Lepré did not kill anyone, and van Kessel and von Peij reported opposition to Michael's killing. Jeu who left later.
Another night, Kokai and I sat with another man, smoking and chatting, and when they started talking to each other, I couldn't keep up. I heard words such as "tourist", "pep", "Dombai" and mati-dead. Then there is "Rockefeller".
I was stunned. I am sure Kokai is telling the story of Michael Rockefeller. finally! I don't want to interrupt, tell him to slow down, I'm afraid he will shut up. Kokai pantomime archery. I heard posi, he was talking about the helicopter coming in and people running into the jungle to hide. It's not the first time I have imagined how terrible the beating machines in the sky look like.
He didn't miss a beat, and went on to another story, about an incident that I knew but never contacted Michael. On a helicopter hiding in the jungle, Kokai talked about the cholera epidemic that swept Asmat. "Dead, dead," he said, repeatedly putting one hand on the other, showing that the bodies were piled up like a mountain. "So many people died. Bensin," it means gasoline in Indonesian.
Within a year after Michael disappeared, I knew that more than 70 men, women and children died in Otsjanep. Their bodies rotted on the platform. This is Asmart's habit. "From time to time, you will see parts of the dog's feet or hands walking around, and after being fully decayed, they will fall off the platform," wrote Anton Van der Waer, the pastor who replaced Van Kessel. At Van der Waal's insistence, the villagers agreed to violate tradition and burn the dead, which was too bad.
Kokai has moved from one story to another, as if they were part of the same event, which shocked me: what if this epidemic is seen as mental punishment for killing Michael Rockefeller? More importantly, Australian military helicopters have been sent to help fight cholera, which means that only two helicopters have been seen by the Asmats within a few days of Michael’s death, and there are more deaths than they have experienced. Flies faster and swept through their villages.
One month has passed, it is time to leave. Everything points to Michael being killed-even if Van der Waal wrote in 1968, after many years of being closely related to the village, "It is clear that [he] came to the shore alive." However, the man accused of killing him The sons will not directly admit anything. Even Kokai would only say, “We’ve heard of this story, but we don’t know anything about it.” Fifty years have passed, and Xinghai calls me the younger brother; after so long, they will really watch Are my eyes lying? Are they really that scared? What is holding them back?
The day before I left Pirien, a man named Marco was performing a story. He walked and followed, imitating stabbing people, shooting arrows, and beheading people with a spear. I heard the words "Dombai" and "Otsjanep" and turned on my camera, but the drama seemed to be over. He was just talking. Eight minutes later, I pressed the stop button.
Although I don't know yet, this may be the most important moment for me in Asmat. Back to Agats, I showed the video to the translator Amates. After Marco finished telling the story, I filmed a severe warning to the people gathered around him:
From Carl Hoffman's book "The Barbaric Harvest: The Story of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Exploration of Primitive Art." Copyright (c) 2014 Karl Hoffman. Will be published by William Morrow on March 18, 2014, an imprint of HarperCollins Press. Reprinted with permission.
In addition to Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art, Carl Hoffmann also wrote The Lunatic Express and Hunting Warbirds.
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