The Last Snake Man Read online

  A book that came out a couple of years ago claimed that as soon as he got ashore, the locals put a spear through his gut and an axe through the back of his head, killing him, then performed a ritual on his body and ate bits of him. According to the chief I’d befriended, however, he was captured and tied up, and they cut off, cooked and ate bits of him while he was still alive.

  I also made good friends with the man who was in charge of that area, Simon, a very well-spoken Indonesian who knew all about it. He said it was payback for villagers who were shot by a Dutchman, and Rockefeller was the first white man who’d turned up since. They kept him alive, tied him down, cut meat off him, and cooked it and ate it. One missionary I spoke to, Dr Ken Dresser, in reference to the staged battle, said: ‘He got what he deserved.’

  The Rockefeller family has always said that Michael’s body was never found because he drowned at sea and never made it to the shore. They had a helicopter search done for his body, and his father flew into Biak, an island just off the northern coast, in his own Boeing 707, then made his way down to the Asmat area. There were stories flying around about what really happened, but the Indonesians always denied them. Rockefeller met local officials in Asmat, had private briefings with them, and 24 hours later went home. That convinced me that he was pretty sure of what had happened to his son. Would he fly all the way over there to look for him and go back only 24 hours later?

  Quite a few years after I was there, there was a call for information in the Sydney Sun newspaper. An investigator was being paid by the Rockefeller family, and if anyone knew anything about what had happened to Michael, they were requested to ring the investigator at his hotel. So I rang him up.

  ‘Yeah, I know a fair bit about him,’ I said. ‘I’ve got photographs and I know exactly what happened. If you want to come out and see me, I’ll give you my address.’

  ‘Okay then, I’ll get in touch with you,’ he said. I gave him my phone number but I never heard from him again. I reckon he was just going through the motions, maybe for publicity or so he could charge his client, and never expected anyone to ring him up. He must have got a shock when I told him I knew the whole story.

  Initially we flew to Biak Island, north-east of Irian Barat, where we spent two days organising wildlife for our later return. From there we flew direct to Jayapura, the capital, where we needed to locate various animals. We spent a week there with little success, but we started to put our collecting process together. We realised the best way to obtain information was to make contact with missionaries and their pilots, and we worked out that we’d have to go further south for crocodiles and brolgas, and to the highlands for tree kangaroos and giant echidnas. For the rest of the required animals, we’d have to rely on chance, and where transport could take us.

  We then flew to Merauke on the south coast, close to the border with Papua New Guinea. Back in 1972, the only way to travel along the coast was by ship. Traders travelling from Merauke to Agats, where we wanted to go, are available only every two months, but we were lucky. The next night a ship berthed that was due to travel that route. I’ll never forget the next three days. I had five stitches in my hand and they’d broken open, while Doug’s complexion was continuously green from the rough sea swell and the stink of the ship.

  The ship was basically a freighter, and it had one toilet and one shower for 150 passengers; the rest of them were all crammed under a tarpaulin on the deck, but we were lucky to get a cabin below, even if we had to sleep on the floor. The whole place stank like a sewer and I held off going to the toilet until late at night and then hung over the side of the ship, with my backside exposed to the sea, doing what needed to be done. At one point I tried to have a shower. I got all my clothes off in the dark and went in holding my breath, standing up to my ankles in rubbish, but there was no water.

  The trader was also a travelling menagerie. Cages containing a variety of animals including snakes and crocodiles littered the decks. At Agats, a village of stilt housing, a bunch of villagers clambered aboard, carrying bunches of live crabs and tortoises to be sold for food. We settled for crab. We went ashore and enjoyed a welcome wash and our first night’s sleep since we’d got on board.

  Next morning we rejoined the ship and steamed up the Eilanden River to begin our hunt for animals and set up base camp at a place called Josaker about 160 kilometres inland. To me, the highlight of the journey was a brief glimpse of the pig-like snout of one of our most keenly sought animals—the rare freshwater turtle, Carettochelys. This turtle was originally found only along the south coast of Papua New Guinea, living in the larger freshwater courses, but the largest numbers are to be found along the south coast of Irian Barat, and it’s also now known from rivers in northern Australia. (It’s worth noting that many of the place names have changed in the intervening years and some of the villages seem to have disappeared completely.)

  Josaker made a good base because it had a mission with a transceiver and an airstrip. We settled in there, renting an okay hut, and the locals looked after us, but it was still hard getting food. There was plenty of fish but after a while we craved something else.

  There were worse dangers than a boring diet, though. Doug, a local guide, an interpreter and I were on a trip up the Eilanden River in our 11-metre motorised dugout canoe, when the outboard motor broke down around 140 kilometres from the nearest safe village of Fos and couldn’t be fixed. With three paddles and practically no assistance from a slow-flowing current, we set off in searing heat for a marathon trip downstream. Doug got badly sunburnt and, with his fair complexion, blistered up, so we were all pretty relieved as night-time approached to give relief from the direct sun and stifling heat.

  We continued paddling in the dark and noticed a camp fire glowing around 100 metres away across on the other side of the riverbank—the river was as wide as 400 metres in places. Our guide asked me to flash our torch to signal to the camp, which I did. The response was immediate: a bullet whizzed past my head and into the riverbank beside us! Everyone hit the deck and we drifted until we reached a bend in the river.

  That incident put us on high alert until we reached Fos at sunrise, our guides paddling nonstop. Luckily it was Sunday and the Reverend Bob Fraser arrived at 8 a.m. to hold a service. He invited us to join him on his large motorboat to go south to Josaker with him. For reasons we couldn’t work out, however, he didn’t ask our indigenous guide or interpreter to join us. He could have carried all of us on board and towed our canoe back to Josaker. Instead, Doug had to hire six locals to paddle their boat and ours down to Josaker from Fos, an eight-hour return journey.

  Many of our boat journeys were sheer delight, with bunches of flowering orchids above our heads in so many different colours that they appeared like a fiesta archway. One time we went by canoe with an outboard motor to Sanggo, where the missionaries looked after us. We took a missionary’s old chug-a-lug boat—it was a bit like the African Queen in the old Humphrey Bogart movie. We went past one village where the river was 200 metres wide and we were well out from the shore.

  ‘Hide anything valuable underneath the decking,’ the missionary said. ‘The natives come across in their canoes and they take anything they want and we can’t resist them. So if they come, give them what they want or they’ll kill you. Make sure anything of value is hidden. But if they want your shirt, you’ve lost it.’

  They never came. There seemed to be no one in that village at all, and it was a big village too. We had no trouble there whatsoever.

  On another trip, up the Eilanden River, we towed a canoe carrying four hunters for 32 kilometres. The canoes were lashed side by side and, much to our discomfort, a host of dog-meat crocodile baits were tied to the sides of our passengers’ vessel. The leader of the group, Watamena, an elderly man from Biak, spoke only Indonesian with our guide. As we rode along, Doug and I spoke to one another about the local hunting methods and how we thought they were barbaric. When we camped at nightfall, Watamena suddenly turned to me, asking in pe
rfect English, ‘How many crocs do you want, Mr John?’

  Doug and I were dumbstruck and embarrassed. Watamena made no mention of our criticisms, but said that during the war he’d spent five months with the Dutch Navy in Sydney. While he was there, he said, he’d twice spoken to the Snake Man of La Perouse. I still find it hard to express my amazement that there in the middle of the New Guinea jungle was a man who 30 years before had spoken with my father at home. We learnt that Watamena was a linguist, speaking four languages perfectly, and he was a wonderful help. He ensured we had as many crocodiles as we needed, and even helped us to obtain the Carettochelys freshwater turtle.

  The reason the six weeks turned into six months was that it was very hard getting all the animals we wanted. We didn’t do that much trapping ourselves, although I did catch some of the freshwater crocodiles when the tides dropped and I could sneak up on them when they were basking on thick tree branches that they would swim onto when the tides were high and be left there when the tide was out. Doug would distract them in the canoe while I swam downstream towards them.

  We recruited our collectors in each of the many different villages we visited. The people had seen very few Europeans, and young hunters armed with bows and arrows would return each evening with introduced deer or other game across their shoulders. When we showed them the photos, they’d turn them over and look behind them to see where the animal was. They’d never seen photographs before. There were lots of photos—of birds of paradise, tree kangaroos, pig-nose turtles, blue-winged kookaburras, lizards and so on.

  One of our interpreters, Martin, was Indonesian and lived in the jungle on the south coast. When we were further up the river, we picked up another interpreter for some of the tribal languages. So there were four of us: them, Doug and me. We traded fish hooks, salt and tobacco—we had a kerosene tin full of tobacco someone gave us—and the locals would come in with lizards, snakes and other animals. Sometimes the snakes they brought in were too damaged and we’d say ‘No, it’s dead’ or ‘Devil’ or ‘Damaged’.

  We never had more than a few small turtles, so we didn’t need tanks. We did have one big pig-nose turtle that I kept in a toilet bowl for a couple of days when we were staying with the missionaries. There was nowhere else, so I flushed the toilet nice and clean and put him in the water. The smaller ones I could just put in a bowl and they could travel for days just on slimy damp material until they got back to America.

  On one expedition up the river, when we landed the locals put on a display for us of how they used their oars, which were sharp at one end and doubled as spears, for either hunting or tribal warfare. They threw them by taking a longish run and hurling them javelin-fashion at a target.

  After they’d finished, I asked if I could have a throw. It was fifteen years since I’d thrown a javelin in anger, but I was pretty fit and you never lose the technique. I took about five steps and flew the spear way past the marks reached by the very best of the local throwers. They were amazed and asked me to show them again, probably because they thought it was a fluke. I did and they seemed pretty impressed as the spear disappeared into trees at the end of the clearing. If this had been a Hollywood movie, I would have been declared a god. As it was, I was happy to receive their praise and a free meal of fish and sago.

  Another hairy moment was when we travelled down to where the Eilanden and another river meet, down from the Rockefeller village. When the tides are strong, the counter-flows create a massive whirlpool at the confluence, and we had to use the motor outboard in full reverse to overcome it. Even so, we were swept around two or three times and we thought we were goners. On the way back, we gave the whirlpool a very wide berth.

  For all these physical dangers and the occasional culture clashes and communication problems, they weren’t the biggest obstacle to our success. Good old Third World bureaucracy and corruption were about to rear their ugly heads.

  CHAPTER 17

  A CRUEL END

  One of our problems was housing and feeding the animals we’d collected. We had many specimens from the Asmat district, but finding enough food to keep them became a problem. We decided to leave Josaker and try to fly to Merauke. The next day a powered canoe arrived from Agats and we were given a bill for $50 to be paid to the local authorities. As we needed our local currency, we gave the bearer $60 in US currency. This generosity was our undoing.

  The next day, five uniformed soldiers arrived and presented us with a bill for a further $200. After a discussion with Doug, I went into the other room, folded a couple of sheets of paper and placed them in an envelope on which I wrote on, ‘Not this time, mate’. While drinking a cup of coffee under the watchful eye of the ‘debt collectors’, we folded $200 into another envelope, then Doug distracted them by displaying some snakes while I switched envelopes. They left and we had an uneasy night.

  Fortunately, tides prevented the ‘debt collectors’ returning as soon as they might, and at 11 a.m. a plane, chartered for us by the mission, arrived to take us to Jayapura, as smoke made all flights to Merauke impossible. We learnt later that both demands for money were illegal, but given the circumstances, we still wonder what might have happened had the aircraft not arrived. Sadly, that wasn’t the end of the corruption we encountered.

  Our specimens fell into two groups: the protected and the lucky. Why lucky? Because the non-protected species got out of Indonesia alive, thanks to being looked after by a bloke recommended to us until they were ready to be shipped out. The protected species, however—the rare animals—had to be approved by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) and kept at Jakarta Zoo until they were ready to be sent to American zoos under the permits we carried from them.

  Doug had met a Mr Galston, the director of Jakarta Zoo, several times and explained what we were doing. Galston was very encouraging and supportive from the get-go. Unfortunately, he turned out to be more of a snake than any of the reptiles we’d collected.

  We took the first load of protected animals through to Jakarta and, while I was interviewed by the authorities there, Doug went back to Port Moresby where he had his business to look after. Despite all the arrangements having been made in advance, at LIPI I was interrogated on a daily basis about what we were doing, why we were doing it and who we were doing it for—every day it was a different bloke with the same questions, over and over. It took me six days and it was very hard.

  Towards the end of the week I had to go south to Bogor (their scientific capital), so I took all my paperwork with me in a briefcase. The meeting was held in a monstrous long room with about six or seven government officials there, all dressed up in their suits and ties.

  ‘John, we would like to ask you a few questions about West New Guinea,’ one of them said.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘What’s the trouble?’

  ‘Do you have any maps there?’ he asked. ‘What are the airfields like?’

  I pulled out this big map that I had and said, ‘Well, all those red dots are airfields.’

  This chap who claimed to be in charge of airfields or something came around the table and looked and said, ‘That’s bullshit. There’s not that many airfields in West New Guinea.’ He said I was looking at the red dots of the Church of England churches.

  I told them that the Catholics had more airfields, but they refused to believe me. They seemed to know nothing about that country. They went away to get copies and came back ten minutes later. I asked him what he was so curious about. One thing they wanted to know was what the dangers were with snakes and so on. I ended up giving them information about where to get antivenom. But in fact, they wanted any information they could get out of me. They’d just kicked the Dutch out and here they were quizzing Johnny Cann from La Perouse, who knew nothing except where we’d been, and they were busily writing down everything I said—I couldn’t get over that.

  Then they asked me what the accommodation was like in Jayapura, the capital of Irian Barat and the biggest town on the north coast. They said King Le
opold III of Belgium was coming to visit and they wanted to know where they could put him up.

  ‘I’ve been in the top hotel in Jayapura, and it’s pretty rough,’ I said. ‘I most certainly wouldn’t recommend it for any royal people.’ The last time I was there, I was friends with the missionaries and we stayed at their compounds, so I suggested they choose the best of them. ‘They’re high-class,’ I said.

  King Leopold was a keen amateur zoologist who even had an African snake named after him. Had I known that at the time, it might have set some alarm bells ringing. The Indonesians questioned me about all sorts of things and I told them about the animals we had and where we’d been and what the locals were like to deal with.

  They seemed pretty happy with me so I asked them for a favour. My visa was for three months and it was about to run out. I had to leave the country to renew it. Was there any chance of bypassing that to save me the expense of the time lost before I went back into West New Guinea? They said no trouble, they’d make arrangements. I just had to go to LIPI’s offices and it would all be sorted. But when I went back to LIPI and told them they said, ‘We know nothing about that. You have 24 hours to leave the country and get a new visa or you’ll be arrested.’

  So I had to race back to Australia to renew my visa. And it was just as well that I did, because, typical of this expedition, people were saying one thing and doing another. For a start, I discovered that the Americans hadn’t been sending my wages to Helen as agreed. She had no money and she had three little kids at the time and had to borrow off her mother who lived across the road. When Doug found out he blew up and Helen got all the back money immediately. She went from having nothing to more money than she knew what to do with. And my brother George was pleased that I was back—he got me to take over the snake show one Sunday to give him a break.