Savage Harvest Part 11

If he'd made it to sh.o.r.e, he would have met the men from Otsjanep-they were there and that was fact. Max Lapre's raid had killed the most important men in the village, spread across four out of five jeus, which meant that nearly every person in the village was related to the men killed-even more so Pep, Fin, and Ajim, who had taken over the dead men's leaders.h.i.+p positions. Bisj poles had been carved, a lot of them, and they were still sitting in the jeus when Michael arrived, which meant that the ceremonies had not been completed. And though he had bought and ultimately even taken delivery of some of them, other poles had failed to appear.

As for Bishop Sowada's point that "it seems quite improbable at this early stage in their development that the Asmat people would wish to kill, and further, possess the courage to kill a white man," well, that was condescension at its worst, I was finally realizing. It was the height of Western conceit. It limited the Asmat, made them less than human, relegated them to a people incapable of operating outside of their normal cultural boundaries, as if remote tribal societies could only follow the script of their myths and didn't possess the creativity or pa.s.sion to ever deviate from them.

I had been living with Kokai now, watching the men in the village drum and sing and dance and tell stories, for almost a month, I had traveled with Amates and Wilem, and I had seen human beings. Individuals. If most of them danced the same dance, there was one man who flapped his hands and danced on one foot. If every elder danced and drummed and sang in celebration of the new jeu, Kokai sang alone to himself, enveloped in sadness for those he'd lost.

It all rolled over me. Human beings follow no script. Human history is the story of people breaking away from patterns and doing things that aren't traditional, that no one else has ever done. Sailing across the ocean to the New World. Sailing across the Pacific to new islands. Falling in love with someone from the wrong tribe, the wrong caste. White Englishmen throwing on Arab dishdashas to unite disparate tribes of Bedouin. Black men having the gall to run for president. There is always someone doing something different, breaking the pattern-in this case, killing a white man. The fascinating stories aren't the ones about people following patterns, but about people doing the unpredictable. How can you ever explain men who snap and murder their wives and children? Jealousy. Anger. Rage. Love. Sadness. Envy. Curiosity. Pride. People love and yet do violent, even savage things; we humans are all savages at different times and in different ways. The Asmat are the strangest people I've ever seen, their secrets deep, their cultural boundaries seemingly rigid. But they are men, and I saw those elemental human feelings in every one of them, feelings that were the stuff of literature and poetry, not logic and reason.

Whoever had embedded that spear in Michael Rockefeller-Pep, Fin, Ajim-had done so because he could. Because he was a man. A warrior. Because Michael was probably the first white man he'd ever encountered who was powerless, perhaps the least powerful man in all of Asmat when he'd completed his epic swim. Exhausted. Unarmed. With no family, no connections to his world. And he knew Michael wasn't a spirit, but a man just like them. He was conquered. Consumed. In taking Michael's life, he had confirmed his own, had triumphed over death in a fragile world, where at any moment anyone could be felled by an enemy or fatally injured by a cut from a bad ax swing, and he affirmed life no differently than any Indy car driver or mountain climber who feels more alive the closer he comes to death.

To kill is to claim, own, take. Killing is rage and pa.s.sion. A man kills his wife not because he hates her but because he loves her so much he hates her. The serial killer preying on women takes what he wants the most and can't have: love, nurturing. The Asmat that day killed Michael Rockefeller out of pa.s.sion and love, love for what they had lost and were losing-Ipi, Foretsjbai, Samut, Akon, and Osom, their culture and traditions, headhunting-as modernity and Christianity closed in from every direction. The killing fit tightly and seamlessly into Asmat cultural logic. It helped to send the souls of their jeu leaders on to Safan. It righted an imbalance in their cosmic world. They took a man's power, became him, and perhaps thought that since he was white they might acquire a power they didn't have in the world of white men. But it went beyond that, to something more elementally human: an effort to avenge their own impotence against the intrusion of the West. In that, the killing probably did fit some of Sanday's nativistic theory-it was an attempt to reclaim power in the flash of a moment. An a.s.sertion of pride.

In the end, however, the killing only hastened the change hurtling toward them. For the Asmat of Otsjanep, driving that spear into Michael was catastrophic. It was the end of one life, the beginning of another. It unleashed planes, s.h.i.+ps, helicopters, policemen, and more technology and power than they'd ever seen in their lives. The spirits retaliated, and almost 10 percent of the village died of cholera. Moreover, that epidemic ended hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years of funerary practices. It increased the role of van de Wouw and accelerated the end of headhunting and cannibalism and the introduction of Christianity and its shame. Soon after, Indonesia took over, sending government representatives to every village, where they burned every men's house and forbade all feasting and carving for a decade.

In 1964 tensions in Otsjanep reached a crescendo when Dombai was cuckolded-the story I'd heard on my first visit to Pirien now had a context-and the jeus went to war with each other. On December 4, Ajim was shot by an arrow and died a few days later. Pep, who most claimed had driven the spear into Michael Rockefeller, demanded the shooter's nine-year-old sister so he could kill her and balance the conflict. The priests intervened, but the two sides of the village fought for a month. Father van de Wouw wanted to arrest Pep. "Somebody has to interfere," he wrote in his diary. "I can keep threatening, but if nothing happens, we will not be able to keep this under control." And it seemed increasingly likely that a disagreement had arisen that day at the mouth of the Ewta between Dombai, the head of Pirien, and Pep, Fin, and Ajim of Otsjanep about the wisdom of killing Michael. If so, the cholera epidemic must have ratified the fear of Dombai and those close to him, which would have profoundly exacerbated the tensions between the jeus.

Six years after Father van de Wouw's involvement in the cholera epidemic, in September 1968, it was finally time for him to leave Asmat and return to Holland. After six years of deep intimacy with the place and its people, he'd become convinced about Michael's fate. "Although the two sides of the villages are not yet back together," he wrote his superior, "they are now close to each other. I only build temporary houses for the catechist and the school in hopes that after a year or so Pirajin [sic] will go back to the former place. During my last visit to Otsjanep I once again brought up Rockefeller. It is difficult to interrogate the Asmat, especially because the enmity between the two halves of the village is quite strong and it is possible that the one side blames the other. However, it is clear that [he] came to the sh.o.r.e alive."

In the end, that village split had never healed, and Otsjanep and Pirien were connected by a no-man's-land that still stood today-where only John, an outsider, lived.

The craziest, weirdest thing about all of it was that Michael had photographed so many elements important to his own murder. He had shot Faniptas, whose trip to Wagin would start the chain of events that led to Lapre's killing of Otsjanep's jeu leaders. He'd shot the bisj poles that would be carved as a result of that raid and that promised and foretold what would ultimately be his own murder. And he'd shot the men who would do it.

ALTHOUGH MOST OF the celebrating had been taking place in Jisar, Pirien and Jisar were two parts of a whole, and Pirien had to celebrate too. I spent a whole day in Ber's house, which served as Pirien's jeu, and sat, my legs aching, as Ber and Bif (Pirien's kepala perang) and the other men drummed and sang and sang and drummed, from the early morning until an hour or so before sunset, the day punctuated only by smoking breaks and drum-tuning over the open fire, which filled the room with smoke, and lunch, when women streamed in bringing logs of sago mixed with the larvae of the Capricorn beetle, baked in long tubes of palm leaves. This was sacred food, and the sago worm was synonymous with the human brain. "Take a photo, take a photo!" they yelled when the women started to arrive. They lined the logs up in the center of the circle, then broke into drumming and singing and hooting. Then pulled chunks off for every man, Ber feeding me, a mark of honor. Sago was dry and tasteless, as was all food in Asmat, but biting into the chunks of larvae released hot squirts of flavor and fat. It tasted like b.u.t.tery, liquid pistachios, like explosions of bacon and ice cream after nothing but sago and rice and ramen and small fish for weeks.

After we'd eaten, Marco, a man I guessed to be in his late sixties or early seventies, began telling a story in the Asmat language. Everyone listened, some lying down and even falling asleep. I lay down too, noticing a soot-blackened rattan bag at the top of Ber's roof, round, covered in cobwebs, like it was holding a ball. A skull? I wondered. Although I couldn't understand the words, and the story wasn't for me, I watched the drama unfold as dogs sc.r.a.ped around in the swamp below the house. There was the firing of arrows, the powerful side-arm stabbing of someone with a spear. I heard the words Otsjanep and Dombai. Marco walked. Stalked. Stabbed again. Pulled his pants legs up tight, thrust his hips forward, not like he was having s.e.x, but as if he were peeing or having his p.e.n.i.s sucked. Men grunted. Nodded. "Uh! Uh!" Finally, an hour into it, I picked up my camera and switched it to video and began filming. But the theatrics were over; he just talked and talked, and after eight minutes, running low on power with no way to recharge, I stopped.

Although I didn't know it yet, it was perhaps my most important moment in Asmat.

They broke just before sunset, then resumed outside on the boardwalk at eight p.m. The moon was only a sliver; it was so dark I couldn't see my feet, but a fire burned on a bed of mud on the boardwalk and cigarettes glowed and vast numbers of stars cut the blackness overhead, the Milky Way thick, heat lightning rolling across the horizon. At first there were five or six drummers and a handful of men, but a voice called into the darkness, booming, echoing, half song, half call, and soon a hundred had gathered. The drums cut through the night, and the deep, chanting songs called forth the spirits-Kokai had told me they were a "bridge" to their ancestors, and the men of Pirien rocked the boardwalk. Spirits were here, swirling around us in the dark. I couldn't see them, but they were here, as surely as the mosquitoes and lizards and crickets, filling the night. The air reverberated. The men, their deep voices, the beat of the drums, their imaginations and the images that appeared to them, were as much a part of the jungle as the insects and the lightning and the moist air and the trees and the river a few yards away. It was all gathered in one consciousness; you couldn't separate any of it out. The drums and voices knitted it all into a wholeness, a wholeness that stretched back years, generations, maybe centuries and even millennia. And I couldn't help it: I imagined Michael's spirit among them, swirling overhead in the jungle night, threading through the palms, the stars, a ghost who was finally free now that I was understanding the mystery of his disappearance.

Around midnight, women began streaming in, bearing huge bowls of rice, piles of pale yams, sago, even two bowls of green vegetables. The men divided them into five piles, one for each section of Pirien, and ate. Bif placed a pile by me. "For Kokai," he said. It was a huge moment of respect and acceptance. I was Kokai's representative.

Their stamina was amazing. Without alcohol or drugs, they went on and on, and around three I finally collapsed, climbing over and around the sleeping bodies of women and children when I got to Kokai's house and falling fast asleep to the rhythmic voices echoing through the darkness and over the swamp.

I HAD BEEN in Pirien a month, and Wilem was set to arrive anytime. It felt strange to be leaving. Time had pa.s.sed so slowly at first, but then it had stopped existing at all. The days had pa.s.sed into a blur of heat and rain and smoke and sameness, the river rising and falling and always flowing by. Ber popped in for a visit, and over my last coffee and smoke I looked at him and Kokai and said: "Why are the men in Otsjanep so afraid to talk about killing Michael Rockefeller?"

Kokai looked at me, his eyes dark, his face as expressionless as a face could be. Ber shook his head. "We don't know anything about that," said Kokai. "There is a story in Asmat that Michael Rockefeller died at the Kali Jawor and all the Asmat people say that he was speared by Fin and Pep, but I don't know anything about it." That's all he would say. Ber too.

We were staring at each other when the sound of an engine cut the silence. Bouvier, Kokai's son-in-law, burst in. "Wilem is here!"

The intimacy that I'd slowly built over the last month evaporated into chaos. Wilem leapt off the boat, along with Amates, who'd just arrived back in Agats as Wilem was preparing to fetch me. Villagers swarmed from every direction, crowding into Kokai's house, filling the porch, leaning in the door and window. They'd left at five a.m. and battled high waves and wind while crossing the mouth of the Betsj, where Michael and Wa.s.sing had floundered. "I was so scared!" said Amates. "I kept yelling, Wilem, we must go into sh.o.r.e!' Just last week, a boat broke right there, and seventeen men and women and children died. Only one man lived."

"We have to wait an hour," Wilem said. "For the wind to die down. Then we must go."

Kokai's wife brought out sago, and we ate and talked and laughed, surrounded by bodies. Then Kokai said, "We must go to Jisar. You must give money to the jeu."

I grabbed 300,000 rupiah, about $30, and Kokai and I and Wilem and Amates, trailed by a throng, walked through the morning sunlight to Jisar. Sauer, the kepala perang, and a half-dozen other men were there, the fires smoldering. It was the first time, as far as I knew, that Kokai had been to the jeu. Sauer stood, and I handed him the bills. The men broke into song, a powerful chant, punctuated with grunts and shrieks. Sauer said that I was welcome to come back anytime. I spoke as eloquently as I could in Indonesian, thanking them for a warm welcome, for always making me feel at home, for letting me share sago with them, and apologizing that my Indonesian was so bad. They chanted again, and Amates said, "They are saying a prayer for you, Mister Carl, so that you will travel safely on the sea."

We shook hands, leathery and warm, and I took my last breaths of the jeu, always rich with the smell of bodies and smoke and gra.s.s.

We walked back to Kokai's, and it all happened so quickly I couldn't slow it down. Men grabbed my bags and threw them in the boat, and Wilem jumped in after. "Photo," I yelled. "Of the family!" Kokai and his brood stood like statues in the hot sun while Amates snapped a few pics of us, and then Kokai took my hand, said, "Adik" (younger brother), rubbed my hand along his hot, scratchy cheeks, and turned away. The last time I'd left Pirien I had been feeling frightened, relieved to escape, under the inscrutable glare of wooden faces. This time everyone was yelling and screaming and calling good-bye and waving as Wilem drifted into the current, gunned the engine, and took me away.

I was feeling overwhelmed, sad to be leaving, elated to be heading for a bed and toilet and hot shower and as many green vegetables as I could eat. I still had so many questions-more all the time, really, the more I learned. The children exchanged between Omadesep and Otsjanep. More specifics about the split between Otsjanep and Pirien, and its role in Michael's death. Whether Sauer, the kepala perang of Jisar, who had replaced his father, Samut, after Lapre's raid, had been present at the killing. But I could turn over rocks forever, and once again I was out of time. I'd already overstayed my visa.

As we sped toward the sea, I pictured Kokai sitting on his mat, singing in a voice that might have been issuing from the depths of the earth, rocking back and forth as the river flowed past. The world had been one way when Michael Rockefeller came to Asmat, another by the time he was dead. Kokai spanned both worlds, had lived in both, though I couldn't help but feel that he wasn't quite fully in either. And I wondered. That very morning, which itself already seemed like another era, I had been sitting with Ber and Kokai, the son of Dombai and the son of Fom, both named as having been present at Michael's murder by van Kessel, and both were kepala desas, patriarchs, leaders, repositories of I couldn't imagine how many songs and stories and memories-the whole history of Pirien and Otsjanep. Both men had fed me sago, had brought me into their homes and their lives, had sung songs for me. Would they really lie about what had happened to Michael? Did they really know nothing? If their fathers had done it, why not just admit it and tell it to me? Could they, after so much time, look me in the eye and pretend they knew nothing, remembered nothing?

BACK IN AGATS, I showed Amates the eight minutes of video I'd shot of Marco during the drumming and singing in Ber's house. What I filmed after he told the story was a stern warning to the men gathered around him: "Don't you tell this story to any other man or any other village, because this story is only for us," said Marco. "Don't speak. Don't speak and tell the story. I hope you remember it and you must keep this for us. I hope, I hope, this is for you and you only. Don't talk to anyone, forever, to other people or another village. If people question you, don't answer. Don't talk to them, because this story is only for you. If you tell it to them, you'll die. I am afraid you will die. You'll be dead, your people will be dead, if you tell this story. You keep this story in your house, to yourself, I hope, forever. Forever. I hope and I hope. If any man comes and has questions for you, don't you talk, don't talk. Today. Tomorrow and for every day, you must keep this story.

"Even for a stone ax or a necklace of dogs' teeth, do not ever share this story."

Acknowledgments.

Savage Harvest wouldn't exist without Erik Thijssen. The letters, cables, telexes, reports, journals, diaries, tide tables, and other information from archives in the Netherlands are its foundation, and Erik, my researcher in Amsterdam, unearthed it all. Over nearly two years, he doggedly poked his nose everywhere, made telephone calls, found doc.u.ments and translated them, and even interviewed several people for me. Without him, I would never have found two of the most important sources for the story, Hubertus von Peij and Wim van der Waal, not to mention Cornelius van Kessel's widow, Mieke van Kessel, and others. Not only that, but he put me up on his sofa in Amsterdam. I can never thank him enough.

A huge thank-you to my friends who spent long hours reading early copies of the ma.n.u.script: Keith Bellows, Christian D'Andrea, Iwonka Swenson, Scott Wallace, Spencer Wells, and Clif Wiens. Their suggestions and comments made the book stronger in every way, and I'm equally thankful for their counsel, laughter, and friends.h.i.+p, which I could never have survived without.

Iwonka Swenson also deserves an extra thanks for everything.

A special thanks to Liz Lynch for her friends.h.i.+p and photos.

I owe a huge debt to Peggy Sanday. Her questions, doubts, insights, experience, patience, and wise counsel were incredibly important to my thinking and perception of the Asmat, Asmat cannibalism and cosmology, and its intersection with Michael Rockefeller. Even better, she became a friend, and I appreciate her deeply.

My second trip to Asmat was profoundly important, and I never would have been able to afford the journey without the generous support of so many people who contributed to my Kickstarter campaign, specifically: James Angell, Tim Buzza, Juli Hodgson, Diane Hoffman, and Alida Latham. And there never would have been a Kickstarter campaign without Kris Arnold, who spent hours filming and editing the all-important video, not to mention providing good friends.h.i.+p.

A huge thanks to Uppy Zein Yudhistira for teaching me Bahasa Indonesian, letting me pay her what I could, and spending so many hours and afternoons patiently working with me. My stay in Pirien would never have been possible without Uppy's help.

Everyone needs a veteran sea captain to pester with questions, which I did to David Erickson, who never failed to answer my queries and whom I have to thank for the distance-to-horizon tables and a host of answers to questions about tides and currents.

I owe a huge debt to Jennifer Larson at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Visual Resource Archive in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. Thanks to her and the Met, I have Michael's field notes, letters, accounts, photos, and a host of other details.

A thanks to Alain Bourgeoise, who granted me access to the papers of his father, Robert Goldwater, at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

A huge thanks to Amy Fitch, archivist at the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York.

Incalculable help was provided by Wim van de Waal, who did more than just tell me his story. He patiently answered my many, many questions over dozens of emails, showed me photos, confirmed facts and spellings, and told me to look for certain doc.u.ments and a host of other details that only someone who was there would know about. It's hard to imagine trying to write this book without him.

Thank you to Jasper van Santen, who translated Rene Wa.s.sing's lengthy report from his first journey to Asmat with Michael Rockefeller, and to Tanya McCown for her help with the papers of Eliot Elisofon in Austin, Texas.

My children, Lily, Max, and Charlotte, are inspirations every day, and now they even pick me up at the airport. I love you and thank you. Thanks to my sister Jean for her unfailing support, and to my mom, who doesn't like it when I go away.

Where would I be without my agents Joe Regal and Markus Hoffmann? Joe's encouragement and insight and friends.h.i.+p, all above and beyond the business wizardry he and Markus do, have been a huge part of my career for more than a decade now. A special thanks to Joe's edits, which were hard to find time for but which tightened the book immensely. I owe Joe and Markus and everyone at Regal Literary a huge thank-you.

Every writer should have an editor and supporter as smart and enthusiastic as Lynn Grady. She always made me feel in good hands. Thanks, too, to everyone else at Morrow, especially Sharyn Rosenblum and Kimberly Liu.

Thanks to Terry Ward and Chris Jackson for their warm hospitality in Bali, to Carla van de Kieft for hospitality in Amsterdam, and to Daniel Lautenslager for his translations.

I owe big thank-yous to Tim Sohn for sharing his thoughts about travel in Asmat, and to Blair Hickman for her web services.

Thanks to Leticia Franchi.

And thank you to everyone in Asmat who helped me, put up with my questions, kept me safe and fed, in particular: Amates, Wilem, Kokai, Harun, Ber, Sauer, and Bif.

A Note on Sources.

This is a work of nonfiction. Anything between quotation marks was taken from doc.u.ments or letters or was told to me by an eyewitness in an interview. I spent almost two years researching the story and made two trips lasting a total of four months to Asmat, Indonesian Papua, including living for a month in the village of Pirien in the house of a key Asmat informant. In a few cases I have used my most informed guess to reconstruct a scene, based on my close observations and experiences in the exact spot where the original events took place or on anthropological and ethnographic reports doc.u.menting Asmat cultural practices. Complete information on sources is in the notes.

Notes.

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific pa.s.sage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.

1. NOVEMBER 19, 1961.

3 It was eight a.m.: Netherlands naval communication, November 22, 1961, National Archive of the Netherlands, Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science, The Hague, Netherlands.

3 The tide was high: Tide tables for Dutch New Guinea (Getijuen Stroomtafels voor Nederlands New Guinea), 1961, Hydrographisch Bureau, Archief Dienst der Hydrografie, Koninklijke Marine, Ministerie van Defensie, The Hague, Netherlands.

3 white cotton underpants: Author's interview with Hubertus von Peij, Tilburg, Netherlands, December 2011. Also, Wa.s.sing's description of Michael removing his pants and shoes prior to making the swim is detailed, among other places, in Mary Rockefeller Morgan, Beginning with the End (New York: Vantage Point, 2012), p. 24.

3 He had two empty gasoline cans: Netherlands naval communication, November 22, 1961, National Archive of the Netherlands.

3 a hazy line of gray: Rene Wa.s.sing is widely quoted as saying he estimated they were three miles off the coast, but that seems too close, given the time they'd been drifting and the position where the catamaran was found that afternoon. What does seem certain is that they could see the sh.o.r.e, at least faintly; otherwise, Wa.s.sing would never have made the three-mile statement and Michael would never have swum away from the vessel, since he wouldn't have known which way to swim. The coast is low and flat, and trees onsh.o.r.e are no more than fifty feet tall. Based on distance-to-horizon tables, that would put them no more than nine and a half miles from the coast.

4 the tides weren't evenly s.p.a.ced: Tide tables for Dutch New Guinea.

4 he would speed along the Maine Turnpike: Milt Machlin, The Search for Michael Rockefeller (New York: Akadine Press, 2000), p. 154; Morgan, Beginning with the End, p. 221.

5 "Stewards.h.i.+p" was the word: Morgan, Beginning with the End, p. 223.

5 he and his Harvard cla.s.smates had rolled their eyes: Author's interview with Paul D'Andrea, Harvard cla.s.s of 1960, February 2013.

5 Luckily the wind: Author's interview with former Dutch patrol officer Wim van de Waal, who was at sea that night looking for Michael Rockefeller, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, December 2011.

5 Heat lightning flashed: During the four months I spent in Asmat, if it wasn't raining, lightning flashed along the horizon every night.

6 the sky lit, white: Author's telephone interview with Rudolf Idzerda, the pilot who dropped the flares, January 2012. Also described by Ben van Oers, who saw the flares from the sh.o.r.e; see HN magazine (December 1996), National Archive of the Netherlands.

2. NOVEMBER 20, 1961.

7 They saw him: Report of Cornelius van Kessel to Herman Tillemans, January 23, 1962, archives of the Order of the Sacred Heart (OSC), Dutch Heritage Monastery Life Center (Erfgoedcentrum Nederlands Kloosterleven), AR-P027, archive inventory of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart (Archiefinventaris Missionarissen van het H. Hart), St. Agatha, Netherlands (hereafter "OSC Archives").

7 It was six a.m.: This is a reasonable, approximate time. Van de Waal saw them leave Pirimapun for the trip back to Otsjanep on the evening of November 19; every report and account of Michael's death-including van Kessel, report to Tillemans, January 23, 1962, OSC Archives; Hubertus von Peij, report to Tillemans, December 1961, OSC Archives; and author's interview with Beatus Usain, Agats, Papua, March 2012-places the men from Otsjanep at the mouth of the Ewta in the morning. According to the Dutch tide tables of 1961, high tide was at eight a.m., so the men would have wanted to be paddling the three miles upriver before the outflowing tide turned against them.

7 "Look, an ew!": Author's interview with Hubertus von Peij, Tilburg, Netherlands, December 2011; author's interview with Beatus Usain, Agats, Papua, March 2012; Cornelius van Kessel's letter to Cor Nijoff, December 15, 1961, and his report to Tillemans, January 23, 1962, both in the OSC Archives.

7 The men reached: Ibid.

8 Michael was swimming: Ibid.

8 "No," said Fin: Ibid.

9 "Now is your chance": Ibid.

9 Ajim was the head: Author's interview with Kosmos Kokai, Pirien Village, Papua, March 2013; see also van Kessel, report to Tillemans, January 23, 1962, OSC Archives.

9 He had killed more people: Van Kessel, report to Tillemans, January 23, 1962; see also Kees van Kessel, "My Stay and Personal Experiences in Asmat: A Historical Review" (unpublished memoir), 1970.

9 He howled and arched his back: Author's interview with Beatus Usain, Agats, Papua, March 2012; my observations of many Asmat telling stories about men being speared.

9 A few miles south: Author's interview with Hubertus von Peij, Tilburg, Netherlands, December 2011; van Kessel, report to Tillemans, January 23, 1962, OSC Archives.

10 The c.o.c.katoos ate fruit: The detailed descriptions of Asmat headhunting and cannibalism come from Gerard Zegwaard, "Headhunting Practices of the Asmat of Netherlands New Guinea," American Anthropologist 61, no. 6 (December 1959): 102041. Other good sources include Tobias Schneebaum, Where the Spirits Dwell (New York: Grove Press, 1988); The Asmat of New Guinea: The Journal of Michael Clark Rockefeller, edited, with an introduction, by Adrian A. Gerbrands (New York: Museum of Primitive Art, 1967), pp. 1139.

10 "This is my head!": Zegwaard, "Headhunting Practices of the Asmat of Netherlands New Guinea." We'll never know exactly how Michael Rockefeller was killed, but if he was killed by Asmat, they would have followed the sacred traditions laid out by Zegwaard, on whose account the remainder of this chapter is based.

3. FEBRUARY 2012.

17 As for sharks, despite their fearsome reputation: Author's interview with George H. Burgess, Coordinator of Museum Operations and Director, Florida Program for Shark Research and International Shark Attack File, Florida Museum of Natural History, Gainesville, FL, August 2012. See also the International Shark Attack File's website, which maintains the best statistics on shark attacks: http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/sharks/attacks/perspect.htm.

18 maintained a gravesite: Morgan, Beginning with the End, p. 62.

18 His twin sister, Mary: Mary Rockefeller Morgan's book Beginning with the End is about her efforts to heal from the loss of her twin brother.

19 At night, to me, it was dark and locked tight: Author's interview with Father Vince Cole, Agats, Papua, March 2012.

4. FEBRUARY 20, 1957.

22 Temperatures in New York City: Farmers' Almanac, weather history results for New York, NY, February 20, 1961, www.farmersalmanac.com.

22 black tie: Copy of original invitation, Robert John Goldwater Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Inst.i.tution, Was.h.i.+ngton, DC.

23 John D. was the richest man on earth: Joseph Persico, The Imperial Rockefeller: A Biography of Nelson A. Rockefeller (New York: Was.h.i.+ngton Square Press/Pocket Books, 1983), p. 10.

23 Down East patrician drawl: "Rocky as a Collector," New York Times, May 18, 1969.

23 "exuded an exuberant self-a.s.surance": Persico, The Imperial Rockefeller, p. 2.