17, 1961, Rockefeller and Dutch anthropologist René Wassing were in a dugout canoe about from shore when their double pontoon boat was swamped and overturned. Their two local guides swam for help, but it was slow in coming. After drifting for some time, early on November 19, 1961, Rockefeller said to Wassing: "I think I can make it." He then swam for shore. The boat was an estimated from the shore when he made the attempt to swim to safety, supporting the theory that he died from exposure, exhaustion, or drowning. Wassing was rescued the next day, but Rockefeller was never seen again, despite an intensive and lengthy search effort. At the time, Rockefeller's disappearance was a major world news item. His body has never been found. Rockefeller was declared legally dead in 1964. Speculation It was originally reported that Rockefeller either drowned or was attacked by a shark or saltwater crocodile. However, because headhunting and cannibalism were still present in some areas of Asmat in 1961, there has also been speculation that Rockefeller may have been killed and eaten by tribespeople from the Asmat village of Otsjanep. In 1969, the journalist Milt Machlin traveled to the island to investigate Rockefeller's disappearance. He dismissed reports of Rockefeller living as a captive or as a Kurtz-like figure in the jungle, but concluded that circumstantial evidence supported the idea that he had been killed. Several leaders of Otsjanep village, where Rockefeller likely would have arrived had he made it to shore, had been killed by a Dutch patrol in 1958, thus providing some rationale for revenge by the tribe against someone from the "white tribe". Neither cannibalism nor headhunting in Asmat were indiscriminate, but rather were part of a tit-for-tat revenge cycle, so it is possible that Rockefeller found himself the inadvertent victim of such a cycle. The incident is described in "Dance of the Warriors", the second volume of the documentary series Ring of Fire by the Blair brothers. A book titled Rocky Goes West by author Paul Toohey claims that, in 1979, Rockefeller's mother hired a private investigator to go to New Guinea and try to resolve the mystery of his disappearance. The reliability of the story has been questioned, but Toohey claims that the private investigator swapped a boat engine for the skulls of the three men that a tribe claimed were the only white men they had ever