by Carl Hoffman
The trouble with seas and waves and wind is that it can take an experienced eye to read them, to see what lies ahead. The sun was shining, and the sky was dotted with big white puffs; he and Wassing saw no storm clouds that would have made them nervous. They started across. Wassing took the throttle. The waves were small at first, and rolling in from abeam; the catamaran rose and fell in a gentle sway. As they motored farther out, the wind freshened. It felt good. Cool and bracing.
Things in boats happen quickly. Once you get into trouble, it’s hard to get out of it unless you know what you’re doing and act decisively. One minute the water was gentle and easy, the next the boat was bucking hard. Spray flew over the starboard hull every time the boat slammed into the troughs, which were becoming deeper, more irregular, as the waves grew bigger, tilting the boat hard, throwing it around. The craft was losing momentum and control and the engine was screaming as the prop flew out of the water, then surged forward as the stern dipped and the prop bit again. The catamaran made noises it wasn’t supposed to. It creaked and groaned, wood rubbing and nails moving in their holes. Michael and Wassing tried to turn more into the waves, but that just slammed them harder; the boat felt like it would break apart. Sideways to the short walls of water, though, the flat boat felt like it would capsize. Still, they weren’t really scared. The shore was right there, the two sides of the Betsj’s yawning mouth.
But things grew wilder, more uncontrolled, the boat shuddering, water pouring into the canoe hulls, which made the catamaran only ride lower, become more sluggish. Their only option was to turn inland, upriver, to run with the waves, against the outgoing tide. Wassing swung the boat, a wave picked it up, and they tipped forward, bow down, like a surfboard taking off, and flew forward on the power of the wave. They were moving so fast that Wassing throttled back, but the wave passed and the stern sank, plunging into a trough just as another wave swept over them.
Silence. The motor was dead, soaked. Wassing, Michael, Simon, and Leo all took turns pulling the cord, yanking and yanking, but nothing. They were still in the river mouth, shore a half-mile away, the outflowing Betsj pushing them to sea. The boys wanted to jump in and swim to shore. Come, they said. We need to go. If we get swept out to sea, no one will find us. No, Michael said, we can’t leave my cameras, my notes, all the barter goods. And I can’t swim well, added Wassing. They weren’t afraid; they were just dealing with a problem they had to solve.
The boys were born on the rivers; Asmat are amphibians. The solution was obvious. Simon and Leo jumped in and started swimming. Wassing and Michael watched, staring, their fates dependent on the two boys. Though they focused on the waves as long as they could, hoping, they didn’t see the boys reach shore.
Their catamaran continued to fill with water. Michael and Wassing gathered what they could and placed it on the roof of the little cabin, and then they climbed up too. But losing power is the worst thing that can happen to a boat in rough seas. It becomes flotsam, a piece of driftwood tossed at the mercy of the currents and waves and wind. It wasn’t long until a wave flipped over the waterlogged boat. They salvaged what they could, some food, some water and fuel, Michael’s backpack, and scrambled on top of the overturned hulls. Everything else was gone. Every minute was wet. Under a shining sun and blue sky, within sight of land, even as the seas calmed and they drifted away from the turbulent river mouth, they were in a nightmare. All they could do was hope that the boys had reached shore and would summon help.
Which they had. It was midafternoon when Simon and Leo waded through the mud onto shore. They headed north, a slow, arduous trek through the mud, but it was a mud and a landscape they knew, and they reached Agats at ten-thirty p.m. By one a.m. on the nineteenth, the radio was buzzing. Immediately, Dutch authorities in Agats scrambled the government vessel, the Eendracht, which headed downriver to look for Wassing and Michael. But the boat had been inspected the day before, and the spare barrel of fuel put on the dock. In the haste to launch in the dark, the barrel was left behind. When the Eendracht was ten miles from the catamaran’s last estimated position, it ran out of gas. And it had no operating radio.
Michael and Wassing, meanwhile, spent a long, cool night on the overturned hull. The stars were huge overhead. Lightning flickered on the far horizon. Save for the slapping of water on the hulls, it was silent, the sea calm. They pried a couple of boards from the floor of the deck and tried to paddle, but got nowhere. They told stories. They tried to sleep, Michael with the motor’s empty fuel tank strapped around his waist. They talked about what they’d do when they got rescued. They watched the moon rise and set. They slept some. They had no idea that just ten miles away bobbed a rescue vessel without fuel. They saw the purple shadows of first light at four a.m. and the sun rise at five. They didn’t know where they were, but the tides and currents had carried them south, out to sea and back in toward the coast, and they could still see land, a dim, low shadow to the northeast. Wassing thought they were three miles off the coast, though they were probably farther away. Where were the boys? Had they made it to shore, but just gone back to Sjuru and abandoned them?
“Let’s try to paddle again,” said Michael at five-thirty. They tried, but the upside-down boat was too big, too heavy and waterlogged, to make way under the power of two men and their narrow boards.
“I think we should swim to shore,” said Michael.
No way, said Wassing. I wouldn’t dare swim. I’ll never make it, I’ll be exhausted. And you should never leave the boat, it’s the number one nautical rule—so long as it’s afloat, it’ll keep us alive and can be seen by rescuers. Don’t go, he said. We’ll be found, I’m sure of it.
No, I can do it, Michael said. The water is warm. All I have to do is keep swimming. We could be out here forever and never be found. And it’s high tide now. We’re as close as we’re going to be right this minute.
He’d made up his mind. Maybe it was his youth. Maybe it was because he was a Rockefeller and he thought he could do anything, had no experience with the idea that things couldn’t always be done. Wassing couldn’t persuade him otherwise. “If you can make it, I don’t do it,” he said. “I don’t take responsibility for you.”
Michael had the one fuel tank already strapped to his waist; he found the spare gerry can stuck under one of the hulls, emptied it, sealed it again, and then added it to his webbed belt. He slipped off his pants and shoes and lowered himself into the water. It was eight a.m. on November 19. He was swimming against the outflowing tide at first, but by four p.m., when he was the most tired, it would reverse and start carrying him in. The sea felt warm, almost hot. He hugged a fuel can and said, “I think I can make it.” Wassing watched Michael swim away until he became a dim form, three dots, and then disappeared from sight.
16
November 1961
BER, SON OF DOMBAI AND THE HEADMAN OF PIRIEN.
THE DAY AFTER Michael and Wassing departed Agats, heading south, so too did the men of Otsjanep. Slowly, haltingly, they were being pulled into the modern world. The airstrip at the government post of Pirimapun was finished, and the post was expanding. Van Kessel built a house there, though he still lived most of the time in Basim. A Canadian missionary, Ken Dresser, who was both an airplane pilot and a medical doctor, had moved to the post with his wife and young child and small Cessna. Add a dozen or so native Papuan police officers and Pirimapun was now a thriving little town.
Van de Waal had let it be known in the surrounding villages that he would happily purchase building supplies—rattan, jungle wood, and gabagaba, the stems of sago palms that served as the principal building material—from villagers who brought it in. Sometimes he put out the word when he needed something specific, but it was difficult to arrange a delivery for a certain date because the Asmat didn’t have any calendars and could only count to five, the number of fingers on one hand, before jumping to “many” or “much.” Their only real-time anchors were the tides and the next full moon. Which meant that often they just brough
t material when they felt like it, and van de Waal would set aside what they brought for when he needed it. Payment wasn’t money, of course, but tobacco and fishing supplies and axes. Sometimes when he didn’t need anything, villagers would sit for days in front of his house, hoping he’d change his mind.
SO IT WAS that, on the evening of November 18, eight canoes of men from Otsjanep filled their boats with gabagaba and headed to Pirimapun along the same route they’d taken almost exactly four years before on their way to Wagin and the Digul. Among them were some of Otsjanep’s most elite men. There was Ajim, a short, powerfully built man with an equally short temper and a head of greased ringlets; he had killed so many, had taken so many heads, that he was regarded as the most powerful man in Otsjanep. Whites thought he was an unreliable troublemaker. He wore six-inch-wide rattan bracelets on his left wrist and biceps as armor against the snap of the bowstring. There were Fin and Pep and Dombai, Fom and Bese and Jane. Most of the men had multiple wives and skulls to their names, and every one of them was related in some way to the men who’d been killed by Lapré.
They paddled down the Ewta at slack tide, around five p.m., then turned south along the coast, staying well offshore on the Arafura. They were traveling at night because the sea was calmer then, and they still remembered what had happened in 1957, fearing the villages they passed along the coast. They were carrying what they always carried—spears and bows and arrows—and a lump of smoldering coals burned in the stern of each canoe.
It was an uneventful trip. They made Pirimapun on the morning of the nineteenth, and van de Waal bought their gabagaba. They lounged around the post, snoozed, and peeked at the weird cargo there, and left that evening for the nighttime journey back up the coast to the mouth of the Ewta, where they’d arrive at dawn as the tide was still coming in.
17
November 1961
DUTCH PATROL OFFICER WIM VAN DE WAAL SHOWING NELSON ROCKEFELLER AND MARY, MICHAEL’S TWIN SISTER, AROUND PIRIMAPUN A FEW DAYS AFTER MICHAEL’S DISAPPEARANCE.
(MSC/OSC Brotherhood, Order of the Sacred Heart)
THE MORNING AFTER Simon and Leo arrived in Agats, Dutch officials began organizing a search-and-rescue effort in earnest. At nine a.m. on Sunday, November 19, the Dutch Resident of Merauke, F. R. J. Eibrink Jansen, telephoned P. J. Platteel, the governor of Netherlands New Guinea, with the news, as last reported by Leo and Simon: René Wassing and Michael Rockefeller were drifting at sea. This wasn’t just a couple of missionaries or tourists, but Michael Rockefeller. If that wasn’t bad enough, the very next day Joseph Luns, the Dutch minister of foreign affairs, would address the UN General Assembly in New York to present his plan for the future of the Dutch colony.
Telexes flew at the highest levels of the government, between Interior Minister Theo Bot and the Dutch ambassadors to Australia and the United States. The US State Department telexed Nelson Rockefeller that his son was lost at sea.
On the island of Biak, three hundred miles to the north, the Dutch Royal Air Force kept a squadron of twelve Lockheed P-2 Neptunes. The plane was the first designed specifically for maritime patrol, reconnaissance, and antisubmarine warfare, and the squadron was stationed at Biak to patrol the waters of New Guinea to scout possible Indonesian incursions into the Dutch colony. Dutch colonial administrators in the outback, like van de Waal, might be living in wood huts with nothing but a radio, but the Indonesian military threat was taken seriously, and the squadron on Biak was modern and sophisticated. The Neptunes had a range of four thousand miles and radar so sensitive it could pick out a floating coconut.
Rudolf Idzerda commanded the squadron. At thirty-eight, the former fighter pilot had already survived two emergency bailouts by parachute—once when his Sea Fury was shot down by Japan during World War II, and once when his plane was tangled in a hurricane off the coast of Florida during training in the United States. He would go on to become a rear admiral. Late on the morning of November 19, the squadron got the call, and Idzerda’s Neptune was the first plane up, at 1:30 p.m.
Von Peij, waiting for Michael to come by Atsj and Amanamkai, heard the sound of an airplane circling out to sea around 4:00 p.m.
Farther down the coast, and also waiting for Michael, van Kessel heard and saw the airplanes too.
After three hours, Idzerda’s navigator picked up a radar contact, and Idzerda soon spotted the half-sunken, overturned catamaran, at 4:10 p.m. It had drifted sixteen miles southwest of where the boys had left it. René Wassing spotted the plane and couldn’t believe his luck; he thought the Neptune had simply stumbled upon him on a routine patrol. Idzerda opened the bomb bay doors and flew a hundred feet overhead. A crewman pushed an emergency raft out of the Neptune. It hit the water near Wassing and inflated.
As soon as Idzerda located the boat he radioed his coordinates to base, and as darkness fell he dropped flares that lit the night sky like a football stadium. Believing that Michael was still on the craft, he had no idea that he’d swum away from the boat. In Pirimapun, van de Waal received a radio call, and he and Ken Dresser jumped in Dresser’s aluminum skiff and headed out. It was dark and the sea was quiet, and Idzerda overhead vectored them toward Wassing. But Idzerda was running low on fuel and had to return to Biak. In the dark, van de Waal and Dresser couldn’t see anything, and they returned too.
That night, a few hours by canoe north of Pirimapun, a Dutch missionary named Ben van Oers was visiting small villages along the coast. He was asleep in the men’s house when he was jolted awake by horrendous screaming. He rushed out of the jeu to find two canoes full of men pulling up to the muddy banks. They were hysterical. Shaking. As if they’d just escaped death. “Fire has fallen from the heavens,” they told him. “A lot of fire on the sea near Pirimapun.” Maybe the Indonesians have finally invaded, van Oers thought. He jumped in a canoe with a handful of rowers and headed toward Pirimapun, arriving just as dawn broke. Ken Dresser was pumping fuel into his small plane, and he saw the patrol boat Tasman heading out to sea.
Wim van de Waal was in it, and at 9:07 a.m. he spotted the rubber raft. It was upside down, and Wassing lay on its floor, sunken into the raft because the floor was just a sheet of rubber with no rigidity. He was sunburned and dehydrated, but otherwise fine. Van de Waal hauled him aboard. “Mike is gone,” Wassing said. “He swam away. I tried to persuade him not to, but I couldn’t stop him.”
IT WAS SUNDAY morning in New York, ten hours behind New Guinea. The governor had announced the dissolution of his marriage and his affair with Happy Murphy only days before, though he and Mary had now been separated for two months. And now he was there, in the family home in Pocantico Hills, New York, on a Sunday. The children—Rodman, Ann, Steven, and Mary, Michael’s twin sister—hovered around their mother, “wary and watching. Why had he come?” Mary wondered. “Why had he called us all to meet?”
He held a yellow cablegram in his hands. “I have troubling news,” he said. He’d just finished talking to the US State Department. “They received word from the Dutch government in New Guinea; they don’t know the specifics yet, but Michael is missing.”
A few hours later, Nelson, his daughter Mary, Eliot Elisofon (the Life photographer who had covered part of the Harvard Peabody Expedition in the Baliem with Michael), Robert Gardner, and a few trusted aides and local New York reporters boarded a flight to San Francisco. At what was then called New York International Airport, just before boarding the plane, Nelson received a radio telephone call from Hollandia. Static crackled on the line, and he could only hear a small portion of the message: Michael’s boat had had problems, and he’d swum away from it.
At every step of the way, photographers and journalists surrounded the governor and Mary, a crowd of hundreds pushing in around them, a crowd that grew at every stop.
“I’m headed out there,” he told reporters in New York. “I hope they’ll find him before we get there, but at least we’ll be there when they do find him, so if there’s anything I can do, I will.”
In San F
rancisco he received a telegram from President Kennedy. “I am extremely sorry to hear about your son,” wrote the president. “Everyone connected with the Government is most anxious to be of every possible assistance. I hope you will call upon us for whatever assistance the Defense Department or any other agency can render.”
“If the boy has met trouble, I should be there,” Nelson told reporters. “If he is safe it will be a joyous reunion.”
“Mr. Rockefeller told reporters he had full confidence in Michael’s resourcefulness and stamina,” wrote Homer Biggart in the New York Times when the news exploded across the world’s newspapers. “He kept telling his aides that his son was able to swim long distances and was capable of surmounting any hardships onshore.
“ ‘Keep your fingers crossed,’ the governor said again and again, raising his crossed fingers and smiling wanly.”
Of the people in Governor Rockefeller’s party, only Gardner had been to Asmat before. “He emphasized,” wrote the Times, “that while the Asmat people on the coast had practiced headhunting until about ten years ago, the region was now ‘safe.’ The natives have taken to wearing clothes and are eager to trade with white men, he said.”