Investigating Michael Rockefeller’s disappearance could reveal that he suffered a terrible end during his time in the Asmat region of southwest New Guinea.
Born in 1938, he was the son of Nelson A. Rockefeller, an American businessman known for being the former Vice President. John D. Rockefeller, a co-founder of Standard Oil, is Michael’s great-grandfather.
Michael left Harvard to work on a documentary in the Asmat region, which is now a part of the Indonesian province of Papua.
Seven months into his investigation, in 1961, the 23-year-old was traveling with anthropologist René Wassing when their boat overturned.
Michael made the daring decision to swim across the river and reach land, estimating that it would take him three to ten miles. However, he never made it back.
Though it appears that author Carl Hoffman has a different, much grimmer explanation as to what actually happened to the aspiring ethnographer, Rockefeller was officially certified dead by drowning.
Hoffman describes his theory—that Rockefeller was slaughtered and consumed by the cannibalistic Asmat tribe—in his 2014 book Savage Harvest.
Hoffman thinks that in order to maintain their colony and demonstrate how effective their rule had been, the Dutch covered up the investigation into Rockefeller’s death.
Hoffman states that he has seen “hundreds and hundreds of pages of original memos, cables, and letters” between the Dutch and the Catholic Church in an interview with NPR.
“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,” said Hoffman.
The priests investigated the matter more and produced lengthy, in-depth reports that included names of the people who had Michael’s skull and other skeletal pieces.
“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 continued: “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.”
During an AMA on Reddit, Hoffman talked about his experiences with the Asmat tribe and how, although it started to decline in the 1960s, cannibalism was formerly utilized for ritualistic purposes and as a means of headhunting.
Hoffman speculated that the reason the villagers may have eaten Rockefeller’s remains was because of a possible ‘Dutch government invasion’ on the town of Otsjanep in 1958.
“[The raid] killed five people, four of them the most important men in the village,” wrote Hoffman.
“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.”
