The White Arrow

 

Let’s start with the ice, because the ice is dying, and it’s dying somewhere ice has no business being in the first place.

Nemangkawi. The mountains rise in Mimika Regency, Central Papua, a few degrees south of the equator, where you’d expect heat and rain and the wet green breath of the jungle. And up there, above all that, there’s ice. Eternal ice, people call it, which is a lovely phrase and a lie, the way most lovely phrases are. The glaciers are going. Scientists will tell you so in careful, hedged language, but if you strip away the hedging, what you get is soon. Not in your grandchildren’s time. Soon. You might outlive it, if you’re careful with your cholesterol.

But the ice isn’t the only thing going, and I’d be a poor storyteller if I let you think it was.

For a very long time, ever since the outside world learned there was a frozen place in the tropics at all, the people who lived beneath it have been losing something too. Not all at once. Nobody came with a bulldozer and a bill of sale on the first day. It happened the slow way, the way a rope frays: one strand, then another, then another, until one morning the thing that held you to the mountain isn’t there anymore, and you can’t say exactly when it went.

*

The Amungme live in the highlands, and they have never called the white summit Puncak Jaya. They have never called it Carstensz Pyramid either. To them it is Nemangkawi Ninggok, the Peak of the White Arrow, and it isn’t a landmark or a tourist objective. It is the head of Mother Earth herself. Think about what that means. You don’t plant a flag on your mother’s head. You don’t haul a drill up there. You keep your distance, and you teach your children to keep theirs, and the rule holds for generations because it is built into the way you understand the world.

Then the ships came. They always come on ships, in stories like this one.

Here’s the thing about names, and I’ve thought about this a lot, being a man who makes his living putting names on people who don’t exist. A name is the first claim you make on a thing. Name it and you’ve started to own it, and the people who already had a name for it, who’d had one longer than there had been a Europe to speak of, find themselves living in a place that has quietly been renamed around them. It’s a polite sort of theft. Nobody gets hurt. Somebody just draws a line on a map.

*

February 16th, 1623.

Imagine it. A Dutch navigator named Jan Carstensz is working his way along the waters south of New Guinea, aboard a ship called the Pera. The sea is probably doing what the sea does. The air is thick enough to chew. And somewhere on that horizon, standing above the coast like a rumor, there are mountains with ice on them.

Ice. At the equator.

Carstensz said so, and Europe did what Europe does with news it doesn’t like. It didn’t believe him. Snow in the tropics? Absurd. A sailor’s fancy, a fever dream from too many weeks at sea. Hope and his colleagues, writing in The Equatorial Glaciers of New Guinea in 1976, noted the doubt that greeted him, and I can picture that doubt, because I’ve been on the wrong end of it. You see something strange, you say so out loud, and a roomful of reasonable people look at you with that poor fellow expression.

But the Pera had a chief mate named Arent Martensz. de Leeuw, and de Leeuw did the thing that turns a story into a record. He drew it. The coastline, the panorama, the position of the mountains, all of it went onto the official chart of the 1623 voyage. Bronwen Douglas, in her study of European naming in New Guinea, points out that it was de Leeuw’s notes and sketches that put the words die sneeuw berg, the snow mountains, onto European maps. And that was the moment. That was when the mountain stepped, without knowing it, into the Western system of knowing things.

It was only a line of ink at the time, nothing more. But ink has a way of outliving everyone who wrote it.

*

It took centuries for anyone to confirm what de Leeuw had drawn. That’s the kind of patience geography demands.

According to Ibel and his colleagues, the first expedition to actually reach an ice zone in Papua didn’t go to Nemangkawi at all. In 1909, Hendrikus Albertus Lorentz made it to a different peak, Puncak Wilhelmina, which we now call Puncak Trikora. It was named, of course, for the reigning Dutch queen, because that is what men did when they got somewhere high: they handed it to someone powerful who would never see it.

Three years later, in 1912, Dr. Alexander Frederick Richmond Wollaston and Abraham van de Water tried the Nemangkawi range and reached the southern glacier tongue. Then another long silence. Twenty-four years. In 1936, Antonie Hendrikus Colijn and Jean Jacques Dozy reached the main ice field, and while they were up there mapping the glacier, they stumbled across something else, a copper outcrop called the Ertsberg.

Remember that name. Remember what it turned into. It became the seed of Freeport, and you can feel the story tilting there, can’t you, the way a stage tilts in a dream. They went up looking at ice and came down with a mine.

In 1962 the Austrian Heinrich Harrer and his party finally stood on the highest summit. The mountain, which had waited thousands of years for nobody in particular, had visitors at last.

*

And now the names start to spin, and this is the part that makes me want to laugh and then, a second later, not.

In 1963 the political ground shifts. West Irian passes to Indonesia, and the expeditions change flags along with their purposes. In 1964, a joint Indonesian-Japanese military and civilian team, the Cenderawasih Expedition, raises the red-and-white on the peak. The mountain stops being Carstensz Toppen and becomes Puncak Sukarno.

Two years later, after the upheavals that followed 1965, Sukarno is out of fashion, a thing the new order wants scrubbed. In 1966 the peak is renamed Mt. Jayakesuma, part of the wave of desukarnoization, and then it settles, finally, into Puncak Jaya, according to Hope and his colleagues.

Look at that sequence again. Carstensz. Sukarno. Jayakesuma. Jaya. Four names in a few decades for a mountain that hadn’t moved an inch. The mountain was the same old mountain. The only thing that changed was who was holding the pen.

That’s the point, isn’t it? That’s the whole rotten secret under the floorboards. The names were never about the mountain. Every one of them was a way of saying this is ours now. Foreign explorer or national government, the gesture was the same, and so was the silence around it, because nobody in any of those rooms asked the people who had lived under that summit all along.

Douglas says it plainly in her study: making maps and assigning names is never merely technical work. There is no such thing as a neutral map. Somebody drew it, and somebody was left off it.

*

Naming a peak after a queen, or after a sailor from Europe, was never decoration. It was a legal argument made in ink. It said: sovereignty starts here, and the record will prove it. And the record did. The names that went into Western books traveled the world, printed and reprinted until they felt like facts, while the people who had actually lived with the mountain went on knowing it in their own way, and nobody outside heard them. Invisibility is a terrible weapon, and an efficient one. It doesn’t leave marks.

But the Amungme knew. They had always known. Arni Syawal and colleagues, studying the ethno-conservation of the New Guinea singing dog, recorded that the local communities call their living space Amungsa and the white summit Nemangkawi Ninggok. That name came down by mouth, through stories and custom and value, long before any European ship slid along that southern coast. Think about that. The name was already old when Carstensz squinted at the horizon. It had been waiting there, patient as stone, for the world to catch up.

*

The erasing didn’t stop at the edge of the chart, either. It never does. It crawled into the machinery of government itself, the forms and the offices and the registers.

Arnold Mampioper, in Governing New Guinea, saw it clearly. Claims over names, and changes to administrative identity from the colonial years through every political handover after, were tools of control over local people. The act of naming and the act of recording became contests of power, and the ones who lost those contests were the ones whose customary rights were quietly written out of the story.

Carstensz and Wilhelmina didn’t arrive from nowhere, you understand. Immortalizing the names of explorers and rulers went hand in hand with colonial expansion and the drawing of administrative boundaries across the Central Papua highlands. The maps were not a record of the land. They were a way of taking it. Western knowledge widened its reach one printed label at a time, and in its shadow the name Nemangkawi Ninggok, and the whole living cosmology that went with it, was pushed to the margins of the page, where nobody was looking.

And that brings us back, as these things always do, to the ice.

The highest peak in the Indonesian archipelago has been called a lot of things by a lot of men. Underneath all of them, what the story really tells us is that a name on a map is a fight over one question: who gets to say what this place is?

The ice is going. Soon it will be gone altogether, and the glaciers can’t speak for themselves anymore than they ever could. But the name is still here. Nemangkawi Ninggok. Peak of the White Arrow. Head of Mother Earth.

It has outlasted a Dutch queen, a Sukarno, and a whole cabinet of cartographers. I wouldn’t bet against it outlasting the rest.