Of the many things Nelson A. Rockefeller, grandson of Standard Oil cofounder John D. Rockefeller, shared with his privileged son Michael, the most pivotal was a deep curiosity and respect for world arts and cultures.

As Carl Hoffman details in the groundbreaking new book Savage Harvest, after graduating from Harvard, Michael disappeared in 1961 while traveling in New Guinea to follow in the footsteps of his father, then governor of New York and future Vice President under Gerald Ford, on a quest to collect what was then called “primitive” art.

On his own mission to solve the mystery of Michael’s death, National Geographic Traveler contributing editor Hoffman follows the complex trail of cannibals and colonialism interwoven with the Rockefellers’ passion for gathering far-flung cultural artifacts spanning more than 3,000 years.

In 1961, on his first trip to the remote Asmat region of New Guinea, the twenty-three-year-old Michael found many of those items -- including bowls, shields, spears, and "bisj" poles prized for their sacred meaning -- now housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Michael C. Rockefeller Wing in New York City (which has its roots in the shuttered Museum of Primitive Art, opened by his father on West 54th Street in 1957).

On Michael’s second trip to the region a few months later, while traveling with the Dutch anthropologist Rene Wassing, their catamaran capsized. After he swam toward rescue in open water for more than eighteen hours, Michael’s death was ruled a drowning, and his body never found. Hoffman -- after researching hundreds of original memos, cables, and letters -- has exposed what he considers to be an intricate cover-up involving the Dutch government and the Catholic Church.

By retracing Michael’s steps through swampy wilderness and poring over files belonging to the National Archives of the Netherlands, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York, Hoffman concludes that young Rockefeller was ceremoniously gutted and eaten by a tribe of native Asmat warriors.

If this bold claim -- made after years of exhaustive research funded in part by a successful Kickstarter campaign -- inspires you to do your own investigating, you might want to begin at the root: the source of the passion that drove Michael’s travels. Before traversing any oceans, explore The Nelson A. Rockefeller Vision: In Pursuit of the Best in the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, a year-long exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum closing on October 5, 2014.

For the Rockefeller family, especially, there may be no satisfying closure to Michael’s case, but there is the opportunity to celebrate his devotion, passed from one generation to the next, to collecting, documenting, and photographing Asmat art and cultural practices.

"The thing that made it possible for us to accept Michael's death," according to his twin sister, Mary Rockefeller Morgan, in the Met's video below, "was that his life really continued in this gift that he brought back from New Guinea. And that the work he did there was going to continue in this wing, by having it become part of one of the greatest collections of art in the world, which is here in the Metropolitan Museum.”