Nation: Search for Michael

Dipping to dangerously low altitudes, the two-engine Dakota carefully traced the bulges and inlets of the New Guinea coastline. Aboard the plane a weary man and girl spelled each other at the windows with a pair of field glasses. First New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller, hollow-eyed and haggard after a 10,000-mile emergency flight to New Guinea from Manhattan, peered anxiously down at the mangrove and loraro swamps. Then Daughter Mary Rockefeller Strawbridge reached for the glasses. Together they strained for sight or sign of Mary’s twin brother, Michael Clark Rockefeller, 23.

It seemed an all but hopeless search. Five days earlier, on a trip between south New Guinea’s coastal villages of Agats and Atsj, Mike Rockefeller’s native catamaran capsized in the swelling Arafura Sea. Mike dived off to swim for help through waters infested with sharks toward a swampy shore swarming with crocodiles. After a companion who stayed with the boat was rescued, New Guinea’s Dutch officials ordered a search for Michael. Nelson Rockefeller chartered a jet for $38,000, flew out to join the hunt. “I could never forgive myself,” he explained, “if I didn’t do everything possible to help find my son.”

Michael Rockefeller was the most out-giving—and the most restless—of the Governor’s three sons and two daughters. In undergraduate days at Harvard he sometimes submerged his restlessness in speed; he was flagged down once by Maine police for racing 80 m.p.h. on the Maine Turnpike; another time troopers caught him speeding on a Connecticut parkway near Berlin. Summer vacations Mike worked for a Puerto Rican supermarket or worked as a hand on the Rockefellers’ Venezuelan ranch. He knew he would have to settle down, and he pointed toward Harvard Business School and a career in finance. But first, he wanted one real fling. Graduating cum laude in 1960, Mike spent six months in the Army, then signed on with an expedition into New Guinea’s back country sponsored by Harvard’s Peabody Museum. “It’s the desire to do something romantic and adventurous,” he explained, “at a time when frontiers in the real sense of the word are disappearing.”

Seven Dead, Dozen Wounded. To film and record customs of New Guinea’s partly tamed head-hunting tribes, the Harvard expedition hiked into the island’s midland wilderness. To a restless spirit, the jungle appealed. Rockefeller grew a beard, Indian-wrestled with companions until he became the expedition champion. He carried out enthusiastically his assignment as sound technician, taping Papuan war chants and the curious teeth grinding that passes for Papuan singing.

For six months in Baliem Valley, the Harvard expedition filmed the natives—and aroused missionaries and Dutch district officers, who complained that the U.S. scientists were stirring the headhunters into tribal warfare to film the battles. The Hague dispatched a parliamentary commission to investigate. It decided that the government invitation to the expedition had been unwise. Said its report: “It was known to the authorities that the leader of the expedition was very keen on filming tribal warfare. In the first two months after the arrival of the expedition, there were about seven deaths and a dozen or more wounded in and around a village called Kurulu.”

Axes for Skulls. The expedition ended in September, and sun-bronzed Michael Rockefeller made a quick visit home. There he learned a well-kept family secret that was made public fortnight ago: after 31 years marriage, his mother and father were headed toward divorce (TIME, Nov. 24). Rockefeller returned to New Guinea for a three-month expedition of his own along the south coast; he planned to gather shields, painted skulls and the Papuans’ 20-ft.-tall totemlike “bis” poles for Manhattan’s Museum of Primitive Art, founded by his father. His efforts inspired little enthusiasm on the part of Dutch officials. Reported one official: “Michael’s presence led to a tremendous increase in local trade, especially in beautifully painted human heads. A few weeks ago members of the head-hunter tribe approached the area administrator for permission to go head-hunting ‘for one evening only, please, sir.’ This was because Michael was offering ten steel hatchets for one head. We had to warn him off, as he was creating a demand that could not be met without bloodshed.”

“He Liked That Catamaran.” Traveling with Dutch Ethnologist Rene Wassing, 34, Rockefeller journeyed along the southern coast. In village after village, the two men traded shells and axes, got back more than 50 pieces of native art. In some villages they were guests at missions of the Crozier Fathers, to whom Michael showed off his catamaran, two native canoes lashed together by planks and powered by an 18-h.p. outboard motor. Mission priests warned that the coastal tides swelled 20 feet high, surged 75 miles upriver and out again with a force that overpowered even the best native rowers. A 30-ft. catamaran, they warned, was unsafe.

On their last day together, Rockefeller, Wassing and two natives left Agats, boarded the catamaran, pushed off for the village of Atsj, 25 miles down the coast. As Wassing told it later, the catamaran shipped water in a rolling sea; despite bailing, it foundered and the outboard was swamped. The two natives swam to shore to get assistance; the two white men stayed with the boat.

Early next day, deciding the natives had failed, Michael Rockefeller decided to swim for shore himself. Wassing argued that the tide was against him, that they were three miles from shore. But, said Wassing, “Rockefeller’s restless nature made it impossible to endure our drifting around.” Mike stripped to his shorts, tied a red jerrican and the out-board’s gas tank together for a buoy, and set out. Eight hours later Wassing was spotted 22 miles at sea by a Dutch patrol boat.

To find Michael Rockefeller, the Dutch, at Governor P. J. Platteel’s order, turned out boats, airplanes, marines and 5,000 bush-beating natives. The Australians dispatched helicopters. The U.S. Seventh Fleet, after President Kennedy telegraphed sympathy and offers of assistance to Governor Rockefeller, volunteered a carrier and planes. Rockefeller and his daughter soon left the actual search to experienced eyes, and they followed progress of the hunt from the district commissioner’s trim white house at Merauke.

Getting a few hours’ sleep at last, Rockefeller held a news conference, praised the Dutch, displayed a resignation he had not shown before he had seen the grim coastline where his son disappeared. But at week’s end, as Governor Rockefeller prepared to return to the U.S., a search boat spotted a floating gas tank 120 miles down the coast. Fastening on even slight hopes, Rockefeller postponed his leavetaking.