First Contact: The Selling of the Last Savage

Outside Magazine February 2005

Page:

The Selling of the Last Savage (cont.)


	A somber escape toward Nabire and safety after a frightening encounter. (Stephen Dupont)

I FIRST MET WOOLFORD at Bali's Ngurah Rai Airport on September 5, 2004. He's wearing an orange Patagonia T-shirt, cargo shorts, and Fila sneakers. He bears a startling resemblance to the actor Willem Dafoe; his reddish-blond hair is shoulder length, his face rugged and angular, with a thick brow and deep-set hazel eyes.

Woolford has lived in Bali since 1997. He rents a cramped cottage for $70 a month in Ubud, a quaint Balinese village set amid rice fields and crumbling Hindu temples. To raise extra cash between treks, Woolford gives tennis lessons at the five-star Maya Ubud Resort. He doesn't drink and is a strict vegetarian, but he can't seem to get enough kreteks (clove-laced cigarettes), which he smokes throughout most of our hourlong drive to Ubud.

As the minivan weaves through traffic, Woolford lays out our game plan. In the last two weeks his porters have made two trips to the outskirts of the region we intend to visit. They've taken rice, gasoline, and money to pay off a tribal native named Hiri Didat—the kepala desa, or regional chief—whose permission we need to travel inland and who will accompany us on our trek.

While Woolford talks, he frequently interrupts himself with accounts of calamity in the jungle. One time in Papua New Guinea, he tells me, "I saw several tribal fights and even walked through the middle of one. They saw me coming, and both sides stopped shooting arrows so I could pass. When I passed the very last man, they resumed shooting." More recently, Woolford claims, he's visited tribes that practice cannibalism, a ritual that many experts say ended decades ago.

Later, over dinner in Ubud, I press Woolford for assurances about our upcoming trek. What exactly are his plans if we find a tribe that turns out to be hostile?

"The strategy is to approach the same men we saw last year," he explains.

"But weren't these the guys who chased you out of the jungle?"

"Yes, but the hope is we can soften them up with tobacco, then convince them to take us farther upriver to the next tribe."

Three days later, we fly to Nabire, then drive 45 minutes to meet our boat at a small, seldom used harbor north of town. William Rumbarar, 35, Woolford's local Papuan go-to guy, and six porters are already on board the 30-foot canoe, called a prahu; three more will meet us at base camp. Woolford, Ferdiny, 37-year-old Australian photographer Stephen Dupont, and I climb atop a heap of supplies shoved into the hull. I notice that the only potential weapons Woolford has packed are a few machetes, which we'll use to cut a path through the rainforest. He tells me the porters upriver have bows and arrows and a BB gun but that these are strictly for hunting crocodiles and birds.

We follow the coast north, cruising at about 15 knots. An unvarying coat of green stretches 20 miles inland, then vanishes under a low curtain of mist. Through the fog we see the distant peaks of the Kobowre Mountains, part of New Guinea's east-west backbone, which thrusts 16,000 feet skyward.

As one descends either north toward the South Pacific or south to the Arafura and Coral seas, the mountains yield to alpine grasslands, montane forests, and, finally, lowland jungle and mangrove swamps. The island's topographic diversity harbors more than 20,000 plant species and a panoply of birds, insects, reptiles, mammals, and marsupials: tree kangaroos and giant butterflies, flying foxes and spiny anteaters. One particularly nasty beast, a bird called the cassowary—the largest land animal in New Guinea—has been known to fillet trespassers with the flick of a giant claw.

And then there are the rumors of cannibals, which have resounded for decades. On November 18, 1961, 23-year-old Michael Rockefeller, son of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, was in the province on an expedition sponsored by Harvard University. The team discovered a previously undocumented tribe, part of the Kurelu people, in West Papua's Baliem Valley. Rockefeller remained in Papua to collect native art, but his boat overturned one day while he was traveling along the coast, and he was last seen, swimming for shore, by his colleague René Wassing, an anthropologist. Years later, rumors surfaced that Rockefeller had been captured, killed, and perhaps eaten by cannibals.

Papua has always been mysterious. Tales of black-sand beaches strewn with gold nuggets lured some of the earliest explorers. Portuguese mariners, eager to expand their empire east to dominate the legendary Spice Islands, reportedly first spotted New Guinea's coast in 1511. In 1526, Jorge de Meneses, the Portuguese governor of the Spice Islands, made landfall on the northwestern tip of what is now West Papua and christened it Ilhas dos Papuas, or "Island of the Fuzzy-Haired People." (Until 2002, the province was called Irian Jaya. Irian is a Papuan word meaning "hot land rising from the sea," and Jaya is Indonesian for "glorious." The name was changed to Papua by former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid, mainly to appease West Papuan separatists.)

For two centuries, Portugal and Spain vied for authority of New Guinea. Neither succeeded. Under the Treaty of Utrecht, in 1714, Holland and Britain gained control of the island. In 1895, New Guinea was split at the 141st parallel: The Dutch staked claim to the western half, calling it Dutch New Guinea, and the Brits and Germans acquired the eastern territory. It wasn't until the early 20th century that, as one historian I spoke with put it, "the Dutch finally decided to see what they got out of the deal." In the first half of the last century, more than 140 expeditions were mobilized to survey the territory.

It's hard to believe that after such intense scrutiny, there would be any tribes left in West Papua that qualify for Woolford's definition of first contact. During World War II, Allied bombers pounded the Japanese holed up on neighboring Biak Island between May and August of 1944. Natives living anywhere along West Papua's north coast would have seen and heard the bombers and realized there was a world beyond the jungle.

"[West Papuan] tribes are not uncontacted in any absolute sense," argues Paul Michael Taylor, an anthropologist and curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, D.C. "They've been trading crocodiles and bird of paradise feathers and have had access to metals and tobacco for a long time. So they've always been in contact; it's just a question of degree."

Before leaving Nabire, Woolford agrees that his definition of first contact may need to be modified. Should we actually encounter a tribe in the jungle, he says, it might be impossible to determine whether they have ever set eyes on an outsider. But there are certain clues to watch for.

"One is to see what kind of body decoration they're wearing. Check for plastic, metal, and synthetic materials," he says. "Another thing is to look at their tools. Do they have metal knives or a machete?"

Lastly, Woolford adds, we should watch their facial expressions to see if they appear unusually frightened or nervous. "Papuans are scared of the unknown."

Page: