Featured Image Credit: Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology/Alamy
Topics: World News, History
Stefania Sarrubba
Topics: World News, History
Research into the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller might prove he met a horrific fate during his time in the Asmat region of southwestern New Guinea.
Born in 1938, he was the son of Nelson A. Rockefeller, an American businessman known for being the former Vice President. Michael's great-grandfather was Standard Oil co-founder John D. Rockefeller.
After graduating from Harvard, Michael headed to the Asmat region, now part of the Indonesian province of Papua to work on a documentary.
In 1961 — seven months into his research — a canoe in which the 23-year-old was travelling with anthropologist René Wassing capsized.
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Michael decided to brave the river and swim to shore - a journey he estimated would be between three and ten miles - but was never seen again.
Rockefeller was officially declared dead by drowning, though it seems that author Carl Hoffman has a different, much grimmer explanation as to what truly happened to the budding ethnographer.
In his 2014 book Savage Harvest, Hoffman details his theory according to which Rockefeller was killed and eaten by the cannibalistic Asmat tribe.
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Hoffman believes that the investigation into Rockefeller's death was swept under the rug by the Dutch, who were focused on keeping their colony and showing our efficient their government had been.
In an interview with the NPR, Hoffman claims to have seen 'hundreds and hundreds of pages of original memos and cables and letters' between the Dutch and the Catholic Church.
"It was this huge paper trail that showed that within, really, two weeks almost of Michael's disappearance, two priests on the ground and Asmat-speaking people — men who had been in the area for years and knew the villages and the men who lived in them well — heard rumors that Michael had swum ashore, encountered men from [the village of] Otsjanep and he had been killed by them," Hoffman said.
"And those priests looked into it further and wrote, actually, fairly long, detailed reports in which they named names — who had Michael's head, who had ... other parts of his skeleton.
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"They filed those reports both to their superiors in the church and to the Dutch government. And they're all sort of saying: What are we going to do? Let's not tell the Rockefellers."
He then said: "The Dutch did a full investigation and sent a police officer to the village of Otsjanep to live and find out and that was all kept secret."
In an AMA session on Reddit, Hoffman recalled the time he spent with the Asmat tribe, explaining cannibalism used to be practiced as headhunting and for ritualistic purposes, though it began to disappear during the 1960s.
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As to why the locals could've consumed Rockefeller's body, Hoffman hypothesised it could have been in retaliation after a 'Dutch government raid' on the village of Otsjanep in 1958.
"[The raid] killed five people, four of them the most important men in the village," Hoffman wrote.
"That made the world unbalanced, in the Asmat cosmos, and ultimately the men who took their places as the heads of the jeu, or longhouses — think of them as clans — were there when Michael swam up exhausted and vulnerable and alone. They killed him."