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."