| FEW American mysteries have proved more durable than the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller. In March of 1961, less than a year after his graduation from Harvard, this 22-year-old heir to the Rockefeller fortune flew to Dutch New Guinea to work on a documentary film and to collect artifacts for the Museum of Primitive Art, a Manhattan institution endowed by his father, New York's governor, Nelson Rockefeller. That November, the young man's catamaran capsized off the southwest coast of the Asmat tribal area. After a monthlong search, he was declared lost at sea, probably drowned. But a more lurid explanation has persisted: Rockefeller managed to swim to shore, only to be murdered - and eaten - by headhunters. In "Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art," Carl Hoffman sets out to solve the mystery. Hoffman has long been captivated by this tale of an American aristocrat who sought to immerse himself in one of the world's most hostile environments. "I was a half-Jewish middle-class mutt with a public education, not a blue-blooded scion," he explains. "But Rockefeller's journey resonated with me. I knew what he was doing and why he was there, at least in part. It wasn't just to collect 'primitive art,' but to taste, smell, see, touch that world for himself." Hoffman retraced Rockefeller's journey into the jungles of New Guinea, tracked down people who remembered him and pored through the state archives looking for documents relating to his disappearance. "Savage Harvest" turns into a taut thriller, but it gets off to a shaky start. Cast adrift in the Arafura Sea, Rockefeller leaves a colleague clinging to their boat and swims toward shore with two empty gasoline canisters tied to his belt. "He even smiled a little," Hoffman writes, in an awkward leap of supposition. "He thought about the exhibition he wanted to mount in New York.... He was happy with how well he already knew these people; Asmat, this remotest corner of the world, had become his." As Hoffman tells it, minutes after washing up at the mouth of the Ewta River, Rockefeller is attacked by a band of Asmat warriors. The assailants spear the intruder through his rib cage and, "with one blow of an ax in the back of his neck," murder him. Then they butcher the body, cutting off his arms and legs and pulling out his entrails "with a vigorous jerk." The pieces of meat are set in a hot fire to roast. This grisly scene turns out to be entirely hypothetical, drawn from a 1959 article about Asmat rituals in American Anthropologist magazine. Why include it? "If they'd killed Michael," Hoffman argues, "that was how it had been done." Hoffman's sensational speculation risks losing his readers' trust right off the bat. Quickly, however, his book settles down and his reporting takes hold, drawing a vivid portrait of the world of the Asmat people, hunter-gatherers who lived in isolation until the mid-20th century. "Stands of bamboo rise high and tight in green clusters," Hoffman writes of the primeval environment that shielded them from outsiders. "The fronds of prehistoric-looking nipa palms are 30 feet long and rustle in the breeze, their roots twisted and black and bulging." The Asmat traditionally engaged in a cycle of warfare and revenge, raiding villages, feasting on the corpses of their enemies and keeping skulls as tokens of their conquests. They memorialized their dead with 20-foot-high "sexually suggestive" mangrove poles called bisj, carved with canoes, snakes and crocodiles. In the 1950s, missionaries began trying to wean the Asmat from headhunting and cannibalism, and colonial administrators attempted to pacify the tribe - sometimes resorting to violence. It was during this period of upheaval that Michael Rockefeller arrived in New Guinea, using his connections to land a job as a sound engineer on a Harvardsponsored documentary about the Dani tribes in the remote Grand Baliem Valley. The experience was liberating. "What was important was right here - a world of sweating, naked bodies, of feasts and smoke-filled huts, of pigs and pig grease," Hoffman writes. "Here, at last, he was free from social conventions. Free from being a Rockefeller." With mounting confidence, Rockefeller traveled on to Asmat territory, taking photographs, buying a large number of sacred objects. As portrayed by Hoffman, the young collector could display both a passion for primitive culture and an astonishing lack of sensitivity. Rockefeller's transactions distorted the local economy, and he failed to comprehend the magnitude of removing totems with religious significance. He also seemed dangerously insensitive to the growing tensions in the region, the hostility between the handful of whites and the indigenous people. "Michael reveled in the art and the ceremony," Hoffman observes, quoting a passage from Rockefeller's notes in which he remarks that the bisj poles "represented people who have been headhunted and will be avenged." Yet, Hoffman adds, "it never occurred to him" that he might end up sating that same lust for revenge. Within days of Rockefeller's disappearance, rumors began circulating that he had met a ghastly death. Hoffman uncovers the correspondence of Cornelius van Kessel, a missionary who had won the trust of the Asmat. Van Kessel asserted that warriors from a village called Otsjanep had killed and devoured Rockefeller to avenge a mission, several years earlier, in which a Dutch official, backed by local forces, shot to death a number of high-ranking Asmat villagers. Van Kessel's superiors dismissed his account and spirited him back to the Netherlands. One colonial official tracked down a skull and bones that were said to be Rockefeller's remains, but they disappeared without being tested. Why would there have been a coverup? In Hoffman's persuasive telling, the Dutch were about to relinquish control over New Guinea, and they were anxious to show the world they were leaving behind a civilized society. "Emphasize modem development of Dutch New Guinea as opposed to picturesque primitivity of south coast and interior," the Dutch minister of the interior wrote to his local representatives in a cable Hoffman uncovered. The prospect of meting out modern-style justice to Stone Age killers may also have proved daunting. And the sensitivities of the Rockefeller family were certainly taken into account. The New York governor and Michael's twin sister, Mary, held a poignant vigil, surrounded by members of the international media, in a New Guinea backwater far from the search area. After Michael was declared lost, they refrained from public comment on his disappearance. "The family refuses to believe any version of the story beyond his drowning," Peter Matthiessen, a close friend of Mary's, told Hoffman. In this book, Hoffman goes further than anyone in describing the charged political backdrop and the dynamics of Asmat society that surrounded Rockefeller's disappearance. He also builds a strong case for cannibalism - though the truth will probably never be known with absolute certainty. Locals promise to hand over Rockefeller's spectacles in exchange for $1,000, then give him a pair of "1990s-style plastic wraparound sunglasses" instead. Toward the end of the book, he ventures up the Ewta River, hoping to live within the community for a month and somehow elicit a confession. But Hoffman gets the cold shoulder and senses that the villagers are guarding a terrible secret. As he makes clear in this gripping book, keeping the real story buried may have been the safest choice for everyone involved. JOSHUA HAMMER, a freelance foreign correspondent based in Berlin, is the author of three nonfiction books. His next, "Taking Timbuktu," will be published in 2015. |
