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Stepping into the Michael C. Rockefeller wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, your eyes are immediately drawn to a line of figures dominating the far wall. These are intricately carved wooden statues, spindly, lace-like in their detail. They are shaped like men standing one on top of the other, feet on shoulders or sometimes heads, one, two, three, four men tall. They’re eye-catching. They’re impressive. You’d likely stroll over to read the accompanying plaque. You’d learn that they’re called bisj poles and they were carved by the Asmat people of New Guinea. Neat. What you won’t learn at that exhibit is the real story behind how these sacred carvings ended up in Manhattan, so very far from the dense jungles and muddy mangrove swamps where they were born. The only clue to that story is in the name of the wing itself “Michael C. Rockefeller.” Because the story of those bisj poles is a story of ill-fated adventure. It’s the story of a third son born into a prominent family, arguably the most prominent family, and his quest to prove himself, to live up to his pedigree. And it’s the story of a people, respected, admired, and yet completely misunderstood, border-line exploited. This is the story you will not learn at the Met. Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. I’m back again this week with yet another mysterious disappearance. A disappearance that, just like Theodosia Burr, was explained by drowning with no definitive proof to back it up, no body ever found, just lost at sea. And once again we’re dealing with a very prominent, well known family, this time a famous son, Michael Rockefeller. To really understand the position in life that Michael inhabited, you need to know a little bit about the Rockefellers. Michael was the great grandson of John D. Rockefeller who founded the Standard Oil Company in 1870. By the 1880s, Standard Oil controlled around 90% of the US’s oil refining capacity and pipelines. Yes, these are the people we can blame, in part for all of the incessant fossil fuel burning, the suppression of the ideas of people like Nikola Tesla, the delayed introduction of the electric car, pollution, climate change, etc., etc. John D. Rockefeller made boat loads of money from oil. Actually, by the time Micheal’s father was born in 1908, the front page of the New York Times announced that John D. Rockefeller was officially the richest man on Earth with a fortune estimated at 900 million dollars. Today that would be something more like 30 billion dollars. Now, that doesn’t even touch Elon Musk’s 240 billion as the current richest man on Earth but it was a big deal for 1908. The Rockefellers were the IT family of the day. But, I do want to point out that he also did a lot of good with that money. John D. was one of the first American philanthropists and donated 540 million dollars throughout his life to charitable organizations.
Micheal’s father, John D.’s grandson, was Nelson Rockefeller. And he would live up to his famous name. Actually, Nelson was born on the same day as his grandfather, John D., and he always took this as a sign that he was meant to do great things, just like his grandfather had done. Nelson served as governor of New York from 1959 to 1973. During that time, he also did a lot of good philanthropical things like, public works projects - he built low income housing, schools, universities, hospitals, monuments, roads, a modern highway network. He later went on to become Vice President of the US under Gerald Ford. Nelson was also very into art, just as his mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, had been. She actually helped found the Museum of Modern art in 1929. Picking up where she left off, Nelson founded a Museum of Primitive Art in a townhouse on west 54th street to display his personal collection of art from around the world. Carl Hoffman writes about a private reception held at the exhibit the day before it opened to the public in his book “Savage Harvest” saying quote “The things they were celebrating came from a world away. A carved paddle from Easter Island. The elongated, exaggerated face of a wooden mask from Nigeria. Pre-Columbian Aztec and Mayan stone figures from Mexico. Around these objects were no ethnographic dioramas, no depictions of African huts or canoes and fishing nets. They rested atop stark white cylinders and cubes, illuminated by track lighting against white walls. They were to be viewed as works of art,” end quote. Nelson himself said that night that the museum was the quote “first of its kind in the world,” end quote meaning that it was dedicated to primitive art. He went on to say quote “We do not want to establish primitive art as a separate kind of category, but rather to integrate it, with all its missing variety, into what is already known to the arts of man. Our aim will always be to select objects of outstanding beauty whose rare quality is the equal of works shown in other museums of art throughout the world, and to exhibit them so that everyone may enjoy them in the fullest measure,” end quote.
Micheal Rockefeller was 18 years old the night of this reception for the opening of his father’s Museum of Primitive Art. 18. A very impressionable year. A year you have to figure out what it is you’re going to do. What it is you’re going to be. And for Michael, graduating high school, getting married, having a few kids, working an office job somewhere, that just wasn’t enough. He was a Rockefeller for gods sakes. There must have been immense pressure to prove himself as worthy of the name. Michael had two older brothers and was he himself a twin. He was no first born son. He didn’t even own the right of his own birth. He shared it with his twin sister Mary. And I imagine this only increased the pressure to rise up out of the mix, to distinguish himself, to prove himself. And when you’re eager to prove yourself, what that really means is to impress your father. Michael must have wanted to earn his father’s approval and he saw this new endeavor, the Museum of Primitive Art. He saw his father’s pride and excitement over the opening of it and it seems he wanted to be part of that. Hoffman writes quote “it’s easy to imagine the power the event had for him. His father’s pride over the new museum, the exotic beauty and pull of the objects, the cream of New York’s elite admiring them. Michael was tall and slender, clean-shaven and square-jawed like his father, with thick, black-rimmed glasses. He’d grown up with his two sisters and two brothers in the family townhouse in Manhattan and on the Rockefeller estate in Westchester County. As Abby Rockefeller had done with Nelson, so Nelson did with Michael, schooling him in art the way other boys were schooled in baseball, taking him to art dealers on Saturday afternoons. His twin sister, Mary, remembered how they loved to watch their father rearrange his art,” end quote.
And so it wasn’t the oil business or finance or politics Micheal set his sights on, but art, primitive art. As he neared the end of his four years at Harvard, he met a filmmaker named Robert Gardner who was set to start filming a new documentary called Dead Birds. This film was going to be about the ritual warfare cycle of the Dugum Dani people who lived on the western half of the island of New Guinea which is now part of Indonesia but at the time was a Dutch colony. Michael saw this as the perfect opportunity to travel to the far edges of the world, to experience a people who had very little contact with the modern world, no metal, no roads, no modern technology or conveniences, no paper, and this was the 1950s. These people were living as hunter gatherers, as people had lived thousands of years ago and they were making art. They were making impressive art, intricate figures carved of wood. It was perfect. It was just what they were missing at the Museum of Primitive Art. And if Michael could be the one to go and get it, to retrieve it from the far off jungles of New Guinea, to present it proudly to his father “here, I got you this, I’m such a good son.” It was his calling, what he was meant to do. So Michael signed on as a sound engineer for the film and, in 1961, he crossed the globe to begin his real quest as a primitive art collector. By the time he left for the film expedition, he had already been in touch with the deputy director of the Dutch National Museum of Ethnology, because remember this area is being controlled, colonized by the Dutch right now. That guy had recently begun some fieldwork in an area called Asmat. So when Michael Rockefeller called him up asking about primitive artwork he was like “ohhh, you have to go to Asmat. They have what you’re looking for.” Because the Asmat people were known for a particular type of artwork called a bisj pole and they were very impressive, astoundingly ornate, intricately carved wooden statues. And this coming from a people who lived as hunter-gatherers with minimal contact with the modern world, it was exactly what he was looking for. To him at least. Not at all to the Asmat people.
Let’s talk about the Asmat people. Because it’s really critical to understand their side of the story. This region lies on the west coast of the island of New Guinea and it was isolated well into the 1950s very little contact with even surrounding areas and very very little contact with westerners, white people, Dutch people mostly as the Dutch attempted to colonize this area. But the Asmat were tucked away in the jungle, living this very isolated life, just sort of doing their thing, hunting and gathering, and living this very primitive, tribal life. But that doesn’t mean that they are somehow less advanced or less intelligent than the westerners. Hoffman writes of the the Asmat in his book “Savage Harvest,” quote “They weren’t savages, however, but biologically modern men with all the brainpower and manual dexterity necessary to fly a 747, with a language so complex it had 17 tenses, whose isolated universe of trees, ocean, river and swamp constituted their whole experience. They were pure subsistence hunter-gatherers who lived in a world of spirits—spirits in the rattan and in the mangrove and sago trees, in the whirlpools, in their own fingers and noses. Every villager could see them, talk to them. There was their world, and there was the kingdom of the ancestors across the seas, known as Safan, and an in-between world, and all were equally real. No death just happened; even sickness came at the hand of the spirits because the spirits of the dead person were jealous of the living and wanted to linger and cause mischief. The Asmat lived in a dualistic world of extremes, of life and death, where one balanced the other. Only through elaborate sacred feasts and ceremonies and reciprocal violence could sickness and death be kept in check by appeasing and chasing those ancestors back to Safan, back to the land beyond the sea,” end quote.
That reciprocal death is key. It’s a key difference between the religion and culture of the Asmat and the religion and culture of westerners. The Asmat were headhunters, not unlike the Nazca that I talked about in episode 63. And they often practiced cannibalism on their head hunted victims. It seems absolutely barbaric to us but that’s because we’re examining it outside of its cultural and spiritual context. It’s also because Christopher Columbus needed to demonize cannibalism in order to justify enslaving Caribbean natives back in the 1400s/1500s solidifying western views of the practice from then on but that’s episode 56. So why did the Asmat hunt people down, collect their heads and cannibalize their bodies you may ask? Well, for good reason. Hoffman explains quote “The Asmat saw themselves in the trees—just as a man had feet and legs and arms and a head, so did the sago tree, which had roots and branches and a fruit, a seed on top. Just as the fruit of the sago tree nourished new trees, so the fruit of men, their heads, nourished young men. They all knew some version of the story of the first brothers in the world, one of the Asmat creation myths, in which the older brother cajoles the younger into killing him and placing his head against the groin of a young man. The skull nourishes the initiate’s growth, even as he takes the victim’s name and becomes him. It was through that story that men learned how to headhunt and how to butcher a human body and how to use that skull to make new men from boys and to keep life flowing into the world.” end quote. He elaborates even more in an NPR interview with host Dave Davies quote “It's important to understand in the Asmat world that cannibalism was a byproduct of headhunting and not the other way around. So important to Asmat were the taking of heads and the balancing of the world, what is called, thought of as reciprocal violence. And so if you and I live, and you live in Philadelphia, and I live in Washington, D.C., and we're enemies, I would go, and I could kill you and take your head, and I would become - might take your name, the name Dave. And if I went to your village of Philadelphia, for instance, your family would call me Dave and treat me as Dave after I had taken your head and consumed you. And yet at the very same time, someone from your village, someone from Philadelphia, would have to come to my village in Washington, D.C., and reciprocate and balance the world that was now out of balance and kill me or somebody in my village,” end quote. A head for a head. Just part of the circle of life. Just part of it.
And the bisj poles were part of this. Hoffman explains quote “Expert woodcarvers in a land without stone, the Asmat crafted ornate shields, paddles, drums, canoes and ancestor poles, called bisj, embodying the spirit of an ancestor. The bisj poles were 20-foot-high masterpieces of stacked men interwoven with crocodiles and praying mantises and other symbols of headhunting. The poles were haunting, expressive, alive, and each carried an ancestor’s name. The carvings were memorial signs to the dead, and to the living, that their deaths had not been forgotten, that the responsibility to avenge them was still alive… The completion of a bisj pole usually unleashed a new round of raids; revenge was taken and balance restored, new heads obtained—new seeds to nourish the growth of boys into men—and the blood of the victims rubbed into the pole. The spirit in the pole was made complete… and the poles were left to rot in the sago fields, fertilizing the sago and completing the cycle,” end quote.
So this was the world Michael Rockefeller entered, a world so very unlike his own. A world he really had no chance fully comprehending no matter how hard he tried. He thought of the bisj poles as these incredible works of art and he thought he was being respectful to the Asmat by viewing them that way, valuing their handywork. But to the Asmat, it wasn’t like that. Bisj poles were so much more than works of art. They were incredibly sacred and spiritual and they served a purpose, a promise to the dead. They weren’t meant to be displayed in a sterile Manhattan art gallery. They were left to rot in a sago field, to complete the circle of life. Michael just couldn’t understand no matter how hard he tried to respect Asmat culture. I can’t either. I won’t even begin to try.
So Michael goes to New Guinea as part of a film crew to shoot this documentary, Dead Birds, and during a break in filming, he goes to Asmat, because he’s learned about these bisj poles from the Dutch ethnology guy. Of this first trip he wrote quote “Now this is wild and somehow more remote country than what I have ever seen before,” end quote. Which is honestly a bit of a understatement. Hoffman writes quote “In many ways, the Asmat world at the time was a mirror image of every taboo of the West. In some areas, men [slept] with each other. They occasionally shared wives. In bonding rituals, they sometimes drank one another’s urine. They killed their neighbors, and they hunted human heads and ate human flesh,” end quote. Yeah Mike, it’s a bit more remote, I’d say than what you’ve seen before. He’s like “I don’t know it’s kind of nutty here, right?” Um, yes, they are eating each other, Mike. But he doesn’t hate it. He really admires the Asmat people. And he really digs their art. He is able to purchase 4 bisj poles on that first trip which are now on display at the Met which absorbed the collections of the Museum of Primitive Art after it closed in the 1970s. After that first scouting expedition in May, he returns in October. He’s not alone, he’s accompanied by some Dutch guys, government issued anthropologists, who are familiar with the Asmat as well as two Asmat teenagers as guides. He is a Rockefeller after all. His daddy’s not going to let him venture into head hunter territory alone and completely ignorant.
That October he stocked a Catamaran with trade goods, things the Asmat did not have - metal axes, fishing hooks and fishing line, cloth, tobacco. It’s the oldest trick in the book - trinkets and beads. That’s the name of a film I watched in a college level Spanish class about how American missionaries and a Texas oil company exploited the Huaorani tribe in Ecuador with trinkets and beads. I guess it’s stuck with me. So Michael trinkets and beads the Asmat with metal and tobacco and he visits 13 villages over a 3 week period collecting art - drums, bowls, bamboo horns, spears, paddles, shields, and he definitely wants to get his hands on more bisj poles. Nothing impresses a prestigious daddy like an Asmat bisj pole. Am I right?
In November 1961 he sets back out on his catamaran for a third expedition to Asmat. And, I haven’t really made this clear yet so I just want to say, the Asmat people have treated him very kindly. They have been welcoming hosts to Michael. There is a photo of Michael with the Asmat, skinny little white boy Michael with his thick black glasses frames. He’s kneeling on the ground with his camera around his neck and the Asmat are dancing around him it looks like in a circle and he just has the hugest smile on his face. He is elated to be here and to be experiencing this. And it’s clear from that photo that he really just embraced the Asmat and they clearly at least tolerated him. So he sets back out in November. It’s Michael, Rene Wassing who was a government anthropologist, and the two Asmat teenagers in the Catamaran heading for southern Asmat which is even more isolated and remote than regular Asmat. They hit rough currents while crossing the mouth of a river. Waves whip up out of nowhere, drowning their outboard motor. Now drifting, the catamaran is hit by another wave and flips over, capsizes.
The two teenagers take off immediately, swimming to shore which, at this point, isn’t all that far away. But Wassing is not a great swimmer. He clings to the overturned catamaran and Michael, despite being a decent swimmer, stays with him. The teenagers make it to shore where they trudge through mud for hours until they are finally able to raise the alarm. The Dutch government sends out ships, planes, and helicopters to search for Michael and Wassing on the wreck of the catamaran. But, of course, Michael and Wassing don’t know this. They have no idea that a rescue party is looking for them. They cling to the hull of the overturned boat all night. By morning, Michael tells Wassing that he’s worried they’ll drift into open ocean. They’ve already drifted considerably farther from shore. But Michael is confident he can still make the swim which he estimates to be anywhere from 3 to 10 miles at this point. He strips down to his underwear and ties two empty gas cans to himself as flotation devices then promises Wassing he will send help and sets off for sure.
That afternoon, Wassing was spotted from the air and was rescued the following morning. Why they made him sit out there for another whole night I do not know. I’m sure there was a good reason. But Michael was never seen again despite a massive search effort. His father, Nelson, and twin sister, Mary, even flew to Merauke, 150 miles southeast of Asmat where they held press conferences about the search efforts. I like how they stayed 150 miles away. They didn’t actually go to Asmat where Michael would have been if he were findable. They’re like “yeah, we’re good on that.” A Dutch official in New Guinea said quote “If Michael reached shore there is a good chance of survival… The natives, although uncivilized, are very kind and will always help you, end quote. But 5 days after Michael’s disappearance, the Dutch minister of the interior told the New York Times quote “There is no longer any hope of finding Michael Rockefeller alive,” end quote. 9 days after his disappearance, Nelson and Mary went back home and after two weeks, the search was called off.
His family decided, much like Theodosia’s family, that he had drowned. It was the most logical explanation. It was also the best case scenario, when considering the alternatives. He must have drowned. But for many, that explanation never really made sense. Michael was an excellent swimmer. He was also wearing flotation devices, those gas cans. Even if he had drowned, his body would have floated, washed up somewhere, been spotted. Carl Hoffman, author of “Savage Harvest” which I have heavily referenced in this episode, is one of the people who longed for a better explanation of what happened to Michael. He writes in his book quote “I spent hours looking at that photo (the one I mentioned earlier), wondering what Michael had seen and felt, wondering what had really happened to him, wondering if I might be able to solve the mystery. That he had been kidnapped or had run away didn’t make sense. If he had drowned, well, that was that. Except he’d been attached to flotation aids. As for sharks, they rarely attacked men in these waters and no trace of him had been found. Which meant that if he hadn’t perished during his swim, there had to be more. There had to have been some collision, some colossal misunderstanding. The Asmat people were warriors drenched in blood, but Dutch colonial authorities and missionaries had already been in the area for almost a decade by the time Michael disappeared, and the Asmat had never killed a white [person]. If he had been murdered, it struck to the heart of a clash between Westerners and Others that had been ongoing ever since Columbus first sailed to the New World. I found it compelling that in this remote corner of the world the Rockefellers and their power and money had been impotent, had come up with nothing. How was that even possible? I started poking around in Dutch colonial archives and the records of Dutch missionaries, and I found more than I’d ever imagined. After the ships and planes and helicopters had gone home, a series of new investigations took place. There were pages and pages of reports, cables and letters discussing the case, sent by the Dutch government, Asmat-speaking missionaries on the ground and Catholic Church authorities—and most of it had never been made public. Men who had been key participants in those investigations had remained silent for 50 years, but they were still alive and finally willing to talk,” end quote. Based on this digging into colonial records and his own research, talking to Asmat people who were alive at the time, Hoffman forms a theory about what really happened to Michael which he outlines in his book. And this theory centers around a conflict that had happened between the Dutch government and the Asmat around 4 years before Michael arrived there.
Just a few months after Nelson Rockefeller opened the Museum of Primitive Art exhibit in Manhattan in 1957, a conflict arose between two Asmat villages - Otsjanep (OCH-an-ep) and Omadesep (o-MAD-e-sep). These were enemy villages, essentially, a few hours paddle down the river from each other. According to Hoffman, they had been tricking and killing each other for years, part of this headhunting death bringing life and more death avenging deaths, part of this warring culture that they had. So what happened was, one of the leaders of Omadesep invited 6 people from och-an-ep on a mission to go get dog teeth which were symbolically significant. They wore them, like strung up the dog teeth and wore them. So these six people och-an-ep accompany the Omadesep guys and they end up getting killed. One of them manages to survive though and he escapes back to och-an-ep and tells the village what happened. They assemble a group of 124 men to basically march to Omadesep to avenge these deaths but they are essentially massacred by the people in Omadesep when they get there. Only 11 survive. Now this is not crazy for the Asmat, this is just sort of what they do. This is on brand for them. This is there culture. But the Dutch government that’s infiltrated this region, it’s a bit much for them. There’s a new guy at the head of that Dutch government named Max Lepre and he is not feeling it. He can overlook a murder here and there but a massacre like this, he can’t just let this go. He puts his foot down.
In January of 1958, Lepre goes with some men to Omadesep. They confiscate as many weapons as they can and set some canoes on fire. He sends another group of Dutch government officials to Och-an-ep, with some steel axes and a Dutch flag and they are not received well. The people of Och-an-ep want nothing to do with the Dutch government. Lepre writes in his official report quote “the Dutch flag was not accepted.” Which like duh, why would it be? So then Lepre goes to och-an-ep himself with a group of armed men. Hoffman writes of this event quote “The clearing was thick with men, but Lepré noted seeing no women, children or dogs—“always a bad sign.” Word traveled fast in the jungle; the villagers knew what had happened in Omadesep. But they were confused. What to do? On the left a group approached—in capitulation, Lepré believed. But on the right stood a group armed with bows and arrows and spears and shields. Lepré looked left, he looked right, equally unsure what to do. Behind the houses a third group of men broke into what he described as “warrior dances.” Lepré and a force of police scrambled onto the left bank, and another force took the right.“Come out,” Lepré yelled, through interpreters, “and put down your weapons!” A man came out of a house bearing something in his hand, and he ran toward Lepré. Then, pandemonium: Shots rang out from all directions. Faratsjam was hit in the head, and the rear of his skull blew off. Four bullets ripped into Osom—his biceps, both armpits and his hip. Akon took shots to the midsection, Samut to the chest. Ipi’s jaw vanished in a bloody instant. The villagers would remember every detail of the bullet damage, so shocking it was to them, the violence so fast and ferocious and magical to people used to hand-to-hand combat and wounding with spear or arrow. The Asmat panicked and bolted into the jungle. “The course of affairs is certainly regrettable,” Lepré wrote. “But on the other hand it has become clear to them that headhunting and cannibalism is not much appreciated by a government institution all but unknown to them, with which they had only incidental contact. It is highly likely that the people now understand that they would do better not to resist authorities.” In fact, it was highly unlikely that they had reached any such understanding. For the Asmat, Max Lepré’s raid was a shocking, inexplicable thing, the cosmos gone awry. They built their entire lives around appeasing and deceiving and driving away spirits, and yet now this white man who might even be a spirit himself had come to kill them for doing what they had always done. The Dutch government? It was a meaningless concept to them. And what of the spirits of the five men Lepré’s officers had killed? They were out there, wandering around, causing mischief, haunting the village, making people sick, as real in death as they were in life. The world was out of balance. How to explain it? How to right it?” end quote.
Hoffman read about this in Dutch records from the time. He went to Asmat and he spoke to people who were alive at the time and remembered the conflict. He also spoke to people who seemed to know exactly what happened to Michael Rockefeller, his translator and guide Amates told him everyone knew but they were afraid to talk about it. He also talked to a Dutch priest who was there at the time named Hubertus von Peij. Apparently, 2 men from Omadesep and 2 men from och-an-ep came to confess something to the priest about a month after Michael disappeared. They told him that the day Michael swam to shore, 50 men from och-an-ep were returning home after delivering palm building supplies to another village. They came upon Michael as they waited for the tide to turn at the mouth of a river 3 miles from och-an-ep. He was swimming on his back and waved to them, obviously relieved, thinking they were about to rescue him. Instead, they made a split second decision to use Michael to avenge the attacks by Max Lepre, a white man. They pulled Michael into the canoe and speared him in the ribs. Then they took him into the jungle where they killed and dismembered him and likely cannibalized his remains.
The priest, von Peij, asked them what Michael was wearing. They replied that he was quote “wearing shorts, but shorts they’d never seen before and that you couldn’t buy in Asmat—shorts that ended high up on his legs and had no pockets. Underpants,” end quote. They told him that Michael’s head now hung in the house of Fin, that Pep had one thigh bone and Ajim another. Jane had one tibia and Wasan had the other. These were used to make daggers and spear heads. Now all these random names, these are actually significant. Hoffman looks into the names of the 5 men who were killed in the Lepre raid - Faratsjam, Osom, Akon, Samut, and Ipi. Four of them were leaders of och-an-ep. Then he looks into the men who supposedly ended up with Michael’s bones - Fin, Pep, Ajim, Jane, and Wasan. These men were the successors of the men killed in Lepre’s attack. According to Hoffman quote “Each of these men would have had a sacred obligation to avenge the deaths of the men killed by Lepré. Och-an-ep’s motive for murder felt increasingly solid,” end quote.
Von Peij reported this confession to Dutch authorities, as did another priest who heard the same story named Cornelius van Kessel. Van Kessel wrote in a report quote “After my conversation with Father von Peij, the one percent of doubt I had has been taken by the very detailed data which matched with my data and inspections. “IT IS CERTAIN THAT MICHAEL ROCKEFELLER WAS MURDERED AND EATEN BY Och-an-ep,” he wrote in all caps. “This was revenge for the shooting four years ago.” end quote. So how is this not the answer? Why is Michael’s death still considered a mystery. Well the Dutch authorities got these reports and they did look into it but it was a delicate issue. Hoffman writes quote “Van Kessel wanted to alert Michael’s family, even travel to the United States to speak with them. But in a series of letters church authorities warned von Peij and van Kessel that the issue was quote “like a cabinet of glass” and to keep silent, so quote “the mission will not fall from grace with the population,” and [they] soon shipped van Kessel back to Holland,” end quote. But apparently the Dutch government continued to investigate, sending a patrol officer named Wim van de Waal to och-an-ep to try to find proof that this is what actually happened. Van de Waal apparently got his hands on a skull and some bones that were supposed to be Michael’s. Hoffman writes quote “He handed the remains over to Dutch authorities, but it was now June 1962 and global politics intervened. “The political situation was becoming awkward,” van de Waal said; the Dutch were about to lose their half of New Guinea to newly independent Indonesia. Van de Waal’s superiors recalled him from the village. “I was never asked to make a report of my time in Otsjanep,” he said, and in meetings with higher officials “we never, ever, touched upon my investigation.” No records in the Dutch government archives mention it, though van de Waal’s story is corroborated in the memoirs of van Kessel’s replacement, a priest named Anton van de Wouw,” end quote.
When the associated press reported in March 1962 that Michael Rockefeller had not in fact drowned but had been killed and eaten by the Asmat, Nelson Rockefeller contacted the Dutch embassy in the US and was like “umm, what the heck?” But they assured him that the rumors had been thoroughly investigated and that there was no truth to the claims. I would very much like to know what happened to the skull and bones Van de Waal turned over to the Dutch authorities. Was that actually Michael? Would we be able to like DNA test those today to confirm? Because, I mean there are a lot of stories being told about this, second hand accounts, but without solid evidence like remains, bones, it’s hard to say with certainty that this is what actually happened. Hoffman is quick to point out quote “there was a question of reliability: The Asmat depended on deception to gain advantage over their enemies, to elude and placate the spirits; accounts of their saying whatever white [people] wanted to hear were abundant. Maybe the priests and the patrol officer wanted to believe the Asmat had killed and eaten Michael. It certainly strengthened their case for evangelizing and modernizing them… Michael’s notes on his travels had left me with the impression that he had embraced the Asmat without understanding them, and I wondered if I’d been guilty of the same thing, trying to obtain their deepest secrets without taking the time to know them,” end quote.
To this day, Michael Rockefeller has never been found, I mean unless you count that skull Wim van de Waal claimed to have handed over to authorities that may or may not have actually been Michael. His official cause of death remains drowning. That’s the story his family stands behind. But maybe that’s fitting, either way, you know. Michael was so far out of his element. He admired the Asmat but, like Hoffman said, he never fully understood them. He admired their art, the bisj poles, he wanted to collect them, to buy them and ship them to Manhattan and display them in his father’s art museum. He thought he was being respectful, valuing their work, respecting them as artists. But he didn’t understand that they wouldn’t have viewed it that way. The bisj poles weren’t art. They weren’t meant to be sold to museums and displayed for rich white people to admire in far off lands. They were deeply spiritual, deeply significant, promises to the dead to restore the order, the balance of life and death. This is seriously deep stuff and something Michael, anyone not raised in that culture, could ever fully understand. Michael Rockefeller was out of his element, drowning, maybe literally, maybe figuratively in as foreign an environment as water in lungs meant for air.
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Information used in this episode was sourced from the book Savage Harvest by Carl Hoffman, Smithsonian Magazine, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Rockefeller Archive Center, PBS, and NPR, As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.
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