Ring of Fire

by Lawrence Blair; Lorne Blaire

  ‘It didn’t work so well the second time, did it, Piet?’ someone else continued. ‘You had a little trouble, didn’t you?’ And, to the general merciless merriment of his brothers, the old priest was required to raise his trouser leg to show us the large purple scar-tissue either side of his leg where one of his excitable flock had loosed an arrow right through it. The time seemed ripe to broach the subject of Michael Rockefeller.

  ‘You’ll hear all kinds of wild stories, but as far as I’m concerned he either drowned or was eaten by a shark.’ The bishop spoke lightly, but with finality, and we knew we were going to get nothing further out of him or his subordinates on the subject. It was clear, however, that they were none too keen on our choice of making Otjanep our headquarters.

  The known story so far was that on the morning of Saturday, 16 November 1961, Rockefeller left Agats bound south for Basiem, a village with a small mission outpost. He was aboard a makeshift catamaran, made of two canoes lashed together and powered by an 18-horsepower outboard motor. With him were two mission boys, Leo and Simon, and a Dutch anthropologist, Renee Wassing. When their outboard was swamped near the mouth of the Sirets river, they began drifting out to sea. Leo and Simon promptly made a swim for shore and help, leaving Wassing and Rockefeller to drift throughout the night, wondering whether the boys had succeeded in reaching land. The following morning, with the coastline still just visible, Wassing was unable to dissuade Rockefeller from attempting to swim for it himself. He stripped to his shorts, tied his steel-rimmed glasses round his neck and, with two empty petrol-drums for added buoyancy, struck out for shore in what was now the general direction of Otjanep.

  ‘I think I can make it,’ were his last words to Wassing.

  By the time Wassing was rescued from the drifting outrigger 24 hours later, Michael’s father (then governor of New York) and his twin sister, Mary, were already winging their way towards New Guinea in a chartered jet. Twelve Neptune aircraft scouted the open sea; Dutch naval and missionary boats combed the estuaries; an Australian Air Force Hercules flew in a cargo of helicopters; and the United States Navy offered the services of an aircraft-carrier. The astonished Asmat, who did not immediately flee the onslaught of outsiders, accepted immense tobacco bribes to mount a search-party of more than a thousand canoes. After 10 days the search was abandoned; everything returned to its sleepy primordial state, and all that remained were a few vague rumours pointing the finger of guilt at Otjanep.

  We had not come with the intention of unravelling the Rockefeller mystery, but we decided it would be wise to delve deeper into the matter before leaving Agats. I began cautiously digging around in the mission archives for clues, where I found an official record of events which contained this startling entry: ‘April 1958. A government patrol, investigating headhunting reports on the Cassuarina coast, killed four warleaders in Otjanep. This may have led to the death of Michael Rockefeller three years later.’

  Searching further I discovered that just a few months before Gaisseau’s arrival the Dutch colonial government was attempting to eradicate a headhunting war between Otjanep and the neighbouring village of Omanasep. In Omanasep the Dutch patrol burnt down all the longhouses, destroyed all the canoes, confiscated the weapons and arrested 11 men. When the patrol reached Otjanep, where news of the sacking had preceded them, they met with fierce resistance. The nervous Dutch officers opened fire on the Otjaneps with pistols and submachine-guns. The full body-count was not recorded, but amongst the dead were four important war-leaders.

  This suppressed skeleton in the Dutch cupboard, which provided an excellent motive for including the ‘white tribe’ in the Otjanep revenge cycle, was a disquieting discovery to make so shortly before setting out with the intention of living in the village. The only changes known to have taken place there over the preceding 13 years were that Otjanep had split up into two warring factions, Upper and Lower Otjanep, separated by a few miles of gently flowing river, and that all attempts to establish missionary schools in either of them had resulted in the terrified flight of the teachers.

  Aboard the mission post’s dilapidated launch we chugged down the Cassuarina coast towards Basiem, the closest mission post to Otjanep and Rockefeller’s original destination when his outboard was swamped. Here we found the Asmat wore the same sad faces we had seen in Agats, and all of them feared going anywhere near Otjanep. To reach our destination we would have to wait until the Otjaneps came to Basiem to trade for tobacco.

  The very next day five canoes came surging up the river, packed with standing warriors chanting ferociously as they thrust on their long paddles. Feathered headdresses fluttered with their exertions, and the sun glinted on their bone knives and shell nose-pieces, highlighting the red and white markings on their otherwise totally naked black bodies.

  They were no less fearsome at closer range. Behind each imposing nose-piece was a face of rugged individuality, stamped with the scars of a lifetime of naked warfare in the swamps. Although we were later to become friends with each one of them, we now had very mixed feelings about placing ourselves at their mercy. Having at last found them, we were no longer at all sure we wanted anything to do with these people.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ one of the missionaries had told us before we left Agats. ‘If they did kill Mike, then the whole thing’s settled now. One death is enough to avenge a hundred. The Asmat believe in revenge, but they don’t expect an eye and a tooth for every eye and tooth.’ It was a kindly remark, because all of them, even the bishop, had gently attempted to persuade us to film anywhere except Otjanep.

  The course of events overcame our discretion, and it was not long before the three of us were balancing our filming equipment on our knees in the unstable canoes and gliding through the very waters where Rockefeller had made his fateful swim.

  Then suddenly the same thought struck Jean-Pierre and myself simultaneously. ‘What...’ he shouted back to us.

  ‘Yes, what if they didn’t kill him?’ I completed his sentence for him. We looked at Bill, by far the whitest of the three of us, and made a few anthropophagous jokes at his expense to suppress the sombre thoughts that, first, there had been four Otjanep warlords killed by the Dutch and, second, if they had not eaten Michael, then it was still their turn to settle the score regardless of how many victims they chose to do it with.

  The jungle sounds closed in around us as we turned into the narrow Etwa river towards Otjanep. A King Cockatoo – an enormous black parrot with a saffron-coloured beak – lumbered noisily overhead, and the drumlike call of a Cassuari bird, as large as an ostrich, echoed through the undergrowth. Far ahead something slipped quietly into the river. As we drew level with the subsiding ripples one of our paddlers leapt into the water, grabbed a four-foot monitor lizard by the tail with his left hand and knifed it fiercely with his right. Pandemonium broke loose as the violent side of our hosts’ nature welled to the surface and the dead lizard was savagely battered by everyone within range.

  We arrived, rather shaken, in Otjanep to a fanfare of bamboo warhorns. The villagers, who had already been alerted to our arrival, greeted us in their most resplendent finery. We were appalled. They were covered in the filthiest of rags – old shorts tied together with rattan, disintegrating T-shirts worn as pants, pants worn as T-shirts. They had obviously dressed in the appropriate garb for white men.

  There was only one thing for us to do: we stripped. There was a moment of stunned silence, then a series of war-cries and hoots of delight as the villagers gazed at the first nude pink flesh (or was it?) of their lives. The ice was broken. We were to live naked for the rest of our stay, with our only clothes being ‘Asmat boots’, as we called the dried mud which caked our legs to above the knee at low tide, and soon most of the villagers returned to their natural state as well.

  Close to the banks of Otjanep’s tidal Etwa river stood the Leu, the single large longhouse behind which ranged the row of small stilt huts which served as individual family homes. The Leu is the Asmat equivalent of
the gentleman’s club, and consisted of one enormous room with a number of evenly spaced hearths. In common with its Western counterparts (which themselves seem to be on the way out), it is a refuge from the harangues of the wife, the din of the children and the perturbations of nubile females, as well as a sanctuary in which to swap salacious stories and to plot wars.

  We thought it wise to dress correctly. When in Rome... Jean-Pierre is on the left, Lorne is behind the camera.(BILL LEIMBACH)

  Living in the Leu we found ourselves thrust straight into the Asmat daily routine and were surprised at how comfortable life in the swamp could be. They were impeccably solicitous hosts. We had, after all, brought a small fortune in the pernicious black tobacco ‘of their choice’, as well as knives and fish-hooks, which required the wits of Solomon and a certain amount of physical courage to distribute even-handedly. But I suspect they were also intrigued by our presence. They were endlessly amused by these strange creatures who seemed to match none of their previous conceptions of the white man, and who now swam in the river with them, went as naked as they despite their revoltingly pink coloured skins, and took a childlike delight in their finely wrought rattan armbands and shell and dogtooth necklaces – and didn’t even mind eating their food.

  We had brought rations to last us for two months, but we ate so well on the local fare that we ended up giving most of them away by the time we left. Having no cooking utensils, they roast or toast or steam their food in leaves directly over the embers. Their ‘staff of life’ is sago, the chalky starch extracted from a palm tree, neither nutritional nor tasty, but excellent for cushioning the short sharp bursts of highly varied protein plucked directly from the environment. We lived on fish, shellfish, monitor lizards, wild boar, arborial marsupials and a host of rarer delicacies, including a form of leaf-steamed plankton, which I remember as one of the most delicious meals I have ever eaten.

  Their efforts to make us feel at home were not always as altruistic as they appeared. Few of them spoke intelligible Indonesian, but the most adequate interpreter was Kukoi, the young government appointed chieftain who had been to mission school at Agats. They had noticed our ineptitude when having to squat in the mud for the call of nature, as they did, on the public riverbank, so Kukoi decided they would make for us a device which he had seen at mission school – for the pink people’s ‘convenience and comfort’.

  With much shouting, laughter and drumming they dug a pit and then laid two raised, closely adjoining logs across it as a foot-rest when squatting. The only catch was that this thoughtful structure was excavated on a slight elevation a few yards from the Leu house’s front balcony, and in full view of most of the surrounding family dwellings. For the rest of our stay, our most intimate moments could be enjoyed by the entire community.

  One day I was approached by Kurum, a notorious war-leader with a battered prize-fighter’s face and a muscular body streaked with spear and arrow scars. I had been avoiding him since watching one of his uncontrolled rages over some minor incident which was forgotten within minutes. Kukoi had told me that Kurum had once nearly killed a missionary for trying to pressure him into sending his children to school up the coast, and the general claim that he had tossed one of his babies into the fire because it ‘cried too much’ was not denied by any of his present three wives. I was cross-legged on the Leu house floor, watching the burning embers, when Kurum rushed up to me, his nautilus-shell nose-piece trembling with excitement. Shouting in eager Asmat, he thrust a leaf-wrapped gift at me which, being conditioned to expect such packages to contain succulent morsels, I eagerly opened. Kurum howled with laughter as I nearly dropped his precious gift of a pile of bloated squirming thumb-length sago grubs. The missionaries had mentioned them as the local delicacy, the larvae of the obscenely big Capricorn Beetle, which they ‘raise’ by cutting down an appropriate sago palm, honeycombing its centre with enticing holes, ‘seeding’ them with pregnant Capricorn Beetles and returning some weeks later to harvest the wriggling treasure-trove of grubs.

  These nosepieces, intended to give the fierce appearance of a tusked boar, are made form carved nautilus shells. They are forced through the cartilidge between the nostrils. (LORNE & LAWRENCE BLAIR)

  Kurum squatted down by the fire next to me where I was examining the gift, removed a grub from the quaking leaf, placed it on the embers for barely a few seconds and popped it into his mouth. His rugged face dissolved into an expression of such tender contentment that I was emboldened to follow suit. Once I had it in my mouth, there seemed to be nothing to do but bite down. An explosion of hot rich fatty protein was followed by the sensation of a jolt of energy rushing through my system, as if I had swallowed a potion of some sort. Then my teeth crunched on its little black head, and I was instantly converted into a sago-grub addict. We were shortly joined by Bill and J.P., who, after an initial reaction similar to mine, shared this bizarre feast with the same delectation as Kurum and myself.

  Kurum spoke no Indonesian, but was highly communicative nevertheless. He pointed to the few remaining grubs, and banged his skull a number of times with his fist. He repeated this until he recognized from my stunned expression that I understood what he meant, then he burst out laughing again. He was telling us that sago grubs are the next best thing to human brains, which they closely resemble, and with which, as I knew, they are closely associated in Asmat rituals.

  The simple effectiveness with which the Asmat solved the problems of food and shelter left plenty of leisure time for art, games, storytelling, and of course warfare. In fact they met all the fundamental criteria for an ‘affluent society’ – without even having reached the technological level of the Stone Age. They drew from their surroundings only what they needed. We also discovered that their swamp, rather than being the hellishly inhospitable ‘white man’s grave’, was actually exceedingly comfortable so long as one didn’t attempt to dress or behave like a white man.

  One morning we followed the warriors deep into the swamp to find a mangrove tree with a buttress-root suitable for the carved phallic extension essential to every bis pole. They took turns with the village’s sole metal axe and hacked at the chosen tree as they would at an enemy. When we returned to the village with it the women were waiting for us, lined up on the bank brandishing their husbands’ weapons and screaming with rage. They began shooting arrows and throwing spears at us, then clubbing the men as they tried to struggle ashore.

  It took us a while to realize that this assault was all part of the bis pokumbai ritual and, although the men are often seriously wounded, the women’s targets are the jungle spirits which must be driven from the trees before the carving begins, otherwise the dead soul would have to share space with another resident. The fact that Rockefeller was ever able to ‘buy’ and make off with standing bis poles was because the unavenged spirits simply vacate the ‘export’ poles and move into the new ones which are promptly carved again by their living relatives.

  Over the following weeks this and other trees gradually took on the shapes of personalities so forceful that it was hard not to imagine someone living in them. Carved with prim pursed lips, or fierce open mouths with sharklike teeth, these human and animal figures stood on, or clasped, or squatted upside-down on each other in an ascending lattice of interconnected bodies. These distinctly erotic, filigreed totems included the creatures most closely associated with the victim whose souls they harboured: there were fruit bats, Cuscuses, King Cockatoos, and the ubiquitous praying mantis, which for the Asmat not only is the ‘forest come alive’ (like themselves) but also has the additional endearing characteristic of eating its own kind.

  None of the master artists carved in quiet solitude, but elbow to elbow, loudly praising or criticizing each other’s work as it took place. Precious shards of carefully worked metal tipped their tools: a quarter of a pair of scissors, a tin-can top, a broken chisel. All the poles for a given vengeance rite were worked on together, and carefully stored in the Leu during those periods when a little hunti
ng and gathering became necessary. Then, well fed and siesta’d, and on no apparent pretext, a great shout would go up and the poles would be brought down for a communal carving session on the riverbank. Those who were not carvers donned their finery, gathered round and beat out long rollicking riffs on their hourglass-shaped drums. The rest of the community danced around them, and sometimes the carvers would lay down tools and join them as well.

  To start with, we steered well clear of the subject of Michael Rockefeller, and never once broached the subject of who these poles were intended to avenge. But it was also clear that ‘spies’ from other villages occasionally crept amongst us to observe the proceedings. They were in no hurry to finish the poles. It was all part of the process of giving the guilty village plenty of time to contemplate what would, at some unexpected moment, most assuredly befall them. This lackadaisical approach to meeting a completion deadline is an essential part of their martial etiquette. But not only the bis poles must be finished by the time they launch the raid. Entirely new canoes, spears, shields and war-horns must also be intricately carved just for the occasion. The Otjaneps were having such fun that it was hard for us to grasp that they were actually preparing for a killing.

  The more fascinated we became by what they were doing, the stronger the bond seemed to grow between us, quite regardless of the absence of a shared verbal language – except via the narrow conduit of Kukoi’s mission-post Indonesian. We became so confident of this that we began to film long interviews with them, guided by the rhythm, cadence and emotion of their stories. When we later played back the tapes to a mission father in Agats who was fluent in the regional dialect, he explained that we had captured the Asmat equivalent of ‘Nixon’s missing 20 minutes’.

  There was an occasion Kurum, the hot-tempered war-chief who had brought me the sago grubs, was having difficulty in getting through to me. As he continued to ask me for something which was obviously very important to him, his customary scowl grew increasingly more menacing, until I thought it wise to call for Kukoi’s verbal assistance.