Lost in Shangri-La: Escape from a Hidden World - A True Story

He initially placed the population at sixty thousand people, though in fact it was perhaps double that, including natives who lived in the surrounding mountains. Even at Archbold’s estimate, that was enough people immediately to establish the valley as the most densely populated area in all of Dutch New Guinea.

It almost defied belief. New Guinea was remote, but hardly unknown. Explorers had penetrated large parts of the island’s interior on foot, and mountaineers had climbed its highest peaks. Separate expeditions in 1907, the early 1920s, and 1926 came close to Archbold’s Grand Valley and made contact with some travelling natives, but they never found the valley itself. One group of explorers, the Kremer Expedition of 1921, reached a nearby area called the Swart Valley. The anthropologist Denise O’Brien, who studied the Swart Valley some forty years later, wrote that when they first encountered Kremer and his team, the natives ‘were puzzled as to why the light-skinned men, who must really be ghosts or spirits, had no women with them. Finally they decided that the spirits’ women were carried in containers, containers that the spirits also used for carrying and cooking food. Sometimes the spirit women came out of the containers, and to the (natives) they looked like snakes as they slithered along the ground, but to the spirit men they looked like women.’ The natives’ overall reaction, O’Brien wrote, was fear, compounded by a severe epidemic of dysentery after the explorers left.

Even if land-based surveyors missed the valley, surely a military or commercial pilot should have spotted an area of more than 1,000 square kilometres filled with hundreds of villages, inhabited by tens of thousands of men, women and children. Not to mention pigs. Yet some of the world’s most celebrated aviators missed it. In July 1937, a year before Archbold’s discovery, Amelia Earhart flew over part of New Guinea as she attempted to circumnavigate the globe. Her last known stop was at an airstrip in the town of Lae, at New Guinea’s eastern edge, after which her plane disappeared somewhere in the Pacific. But she, too, never saw the Grand Valley.

By the late 1930s, most anthropologists believed that every significant population centre on the planet had been discovered, mapped, and in most cases, modernized to some degree by missionaries, capitalists, colonizers or a combination of the three. No one doubted that pockets of undisturbed aborigines still roamed the rainforests of the Amazon and elsewhere. But the people of Archbold’s Grand Valley were stationary farmer-warriors, living in clearly defined villages, in a wide-open area, covered only by the clouds above. Sixty years later, mammalogist and environmental scientist Tim Flannery, an authority on the natural wonders of New Guinea, declared that Archbold’s find represented ‘the last time in the history of our planet that such a vast, previously unknown civilization was to come into contact with the West’.

One explanation is that an unusual combination of forces kept the valley off the map. When Archbold described his find for National Geographic Magazine, an editor there tried to make sense of it, writing: ‘Forestation is so heavy and terrain so rugged that earlier explorers passed on foot within a few miles of the most thickly populated area without suspecting the existence of a civilization there.’ The surrounding mountains played an important role, as well, discouraging flights overhead and commercial incursions by land. The valley natives were self-sufficient farmers, as opposed to hunter-gatherers or traders who might travel far and wide to feed themselves and obtain needed goods. Their stay-at-home tendency was cemented by their wars, which ensured that most spent their lives within short, relatively safe distances of their huts.

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When Archbold first saw the valley, rough weather prevented him from changing course or dipping Guba low for a better look. But in the weeks that followed, he flew several reconnaissance missions, photographing the valley and sending pigs and their owners running for cover – just as Colonel Elsmore’s flights would do six years later.

Archbold’s chief botanist, L.J. Brass, described what they saw from the air:

The people were living in compact, very orderly and clean, fenced, walled or stockaded villages of about three or four to about fifty houses. Dwellings were of two types, built with double walls of upright split timbers, grass-thatched, and without floors. The men’s houses were round, ten to fifteen feet in diameter, with dome-shaped roof; the women’s houses long, narrow and rectangular. The everyday dress of the men consisted of a penis gourd, and perhaps a hair net of looped string. The women affected either short skirts of pendent strings, worn below the buttocks, or an arrangement of cords around the thighs, and always one or more capacious carrying nets hung over the back from the forehead. As arms and implements they had bows, arrows of several kinds, spears, stone adzes, and stone axes.

Archbold seemed only mildly interested in the people, but he was fascinated by their farming methods. Unlike all other known tribes on New Guinea, natives of the valley grew sweet potatoes – their staple food – in clearly defined plots of land, with labyrinthine drainage ditches and surrounding walls. Archbold said it reminded him fondly of the farm country he had seen on holiday in central Europe.

Archbold’s assistants established a camp some twenty-four kilometres west of the valley on a body of water called Lake Habbema, where Guba could set down and take off. One day, two natives presented themselves to the outsiders. ‘One was evidently a man of some importance,’ Archbold wrote. ‘The other, who was younger, perhaps a bodyguard, remained very much on the alert. They squatted on their haunches, their backs toward home, their bows and arrows handy, while we sat down on the camp side of them.’

Archbold gave the two men bead-like cowrie shells – small, pearly white, naturally smooth shells that are widely used as currency and jewellery in Africa and elsewhere. He plied them with sugar, cigarettes, and dried fish. The two men accepted the gifts, but after a polite period of time, handed them back, a gesture that Archbold interpreted ‘as a sign of independence’. He noted, however, that the more senior man did accept a few draws from the cigar of the senior Dutch officer on the expedition, a captain named C.G.J. Teerink. After a fifteen-minute visit, the two natives left the explorers’ camp.

Subsequently, Archbold dispatched two exploration teams, each consisting of Dutch soldiers, convict carriers, and Dyak tribesmen trained to collect flora and fauna. The teams, one led by Captain Teerink and the other by a lieutenant named J.E.M. Van Arcken, started their treks at opposite ends of the valley, the plan being to meet roughly in the middle.

In August 1938, the two teams marched through the valley’s high grasses, past one village after another. If the outsiders had been tribesmen from other parts of the valley, such an incursion likely would have been greeted with spears and arrows. But the white explorers and their bearers were so strange and exotic, so far removed from the day-to-day warfare among the tribes, they were met by little more than curiosity from the native men and shyness from the women and children. The explorers saw signs that the natives practised cannibalism, but the heavily armed Dutch army troops felt they had nothing to fear.

Occasionally some tribesmen would discourage the explorers from travelling to the next village – placing sticks in their path, pantomiming the firing of arrows, and standing arm in arm as a human blockade. Language barriers prevented Captain Teerink or Lieutenant Van Arcken from getting a full explanation, but the acts seemed to Teerink more protective than hostile. The natives apparently did not want their new acquaintances to be harmed by enemies who lived in the next village.

This pattern remained in place until 9 August 1938, when a patrol from Van Arcken’s exploration team neared the Baliem River in the valley’s centre. They were met by tribesmen ‘in large numbers’ carrying spears and bows and arrows. ‘We apparently were not to be trusted because we had come from the direction of enemy territory,’ Van Arcken wrote in his daily log. He defused the confrontation with a few cowrie shells. Later that night, four natives came into his camp asking to sleep among the soldiers. ‘These gentlemen were sent packing,’ Van Arcken wrote, ‘after a shot in the air to scare them off.’

The next day, Van Arcken found that the patrol’s trail had been ‘closed off with tree branches, behind which some youths with spears took cover’. His troops brandished their weapons and the young natives fled. As the column of soldiers moved forward, bringing up the rear were two soldiers, one of them a corporal named Pattisina. Van Arcken wrote that two natives grabbed Pattisina from behind. When the other lagging soldier came to Pattisina’s aid, one of the natives ‘wanted to spear the corporal with his lance, whereupon said native was shot by the corporal’. In short, Van Arcken’s report revealed that Pattisina had killed a native, and the official version was that he had done so in self-defence.

Captain Teerink, the highest-ranking Dutch officer on the expedition, didn’t buy the explanation. Teerink, who was leading the other patrol, wrote a critical addendum to Van Arcken’s report that suggested he held a more humane view of the natives: ‘In my view, this fatal shot is to be regretted. Corporal Pattisina should have fired a warning shot first. It has been my experience that with tribes like this, a warning shot is usually sufficient. It is requested that you issue instructions to this effect to your men.’

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Even before he returned to the United States, Archbold published articles about the expedition in the New York Times and elsewhere. In March 1941, he wrote a long piece for National Geographic Magazine. In it, he described a number of encounters with natives, most of them friendly though a few laced with tension. He seemed most surprised when his expedition passed villages and the natives paid them little mind: ‘Here the natives seemed to take our party for granted. Some stood by and watched the long line of carriers file by, while others, digging in the gardens of rich black earth, did not even look up.’

But in none of his accounts did Archbold describe what the natives must have considered the most awful moment of the outsiders’ visit.

Four years after the shooting, in June 1942, Archbold finally acknowledged that an incident had occurred between the natives and Van Arcken’s patrol that day near the river. But the way he described it and the publication he chose guaranteed that the significance would be over-looked. Writing in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, Archbold described how on 10 August Van Arcken’s patrol encountered a trail barricaded with branches and guarded by men with spears. Archbold wrote: ‘Here occurred the one incident of the whole expedition where more than a show of force was necessary.’ Without stopping to explain what he meant, much less acknowledge and discuss the gunshot death of a native, Archbold forged ahead to report the time of day that the patrol reached the river and the precise width of the river’s floodplain.

Van Arcken took an even more misleading approach when he created the first known map of the valley. On it, he drew an arrow to the spot of the 10 August 1938 confrontation and wrote: ‘Location where one native died due to a lance attack.’ Unless a map reader knew better, Van Arcken’s note seemed to suggest that the explorers had witnessed a fatal duel between two natives.

Elsewhere in Archbold’s report to the museum, he outlined his overall philosophy where natives were concerned. There he whitewashed the shooting entirely: ‘In venturing into an unknown area, the kind of reception the natives will extend is unpredictable. Certain it is that natives in general tend to be more friendly toward a large, well-armed party than toward a small, weak one. Our parties inland were usually of the former category and no unpleasant incidents of importance arose in our contacts with the people.’

Archbold apparently had no interest in determining whether the natives considered the Grand Valley’s first fatal gunshot to be ‘unpleasant’ or an ‘incident of importance’.

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Archbold’s expedition and his writings about the valley went unnoticed by Colonel Elsmore. When initially told about Archbold after the crash of the Gremlin Special, Elsmore brushed it off, certain that his Hidden Valley, his Shangri-La, was distinct from Archbold’s Grand Valley. After all, New Guinea was so huge and unexplored, who could say how many isolated, undiscovered valleys might still exist?

But the Grand Valley and Shangri-La were one and the same. And the first known contact between its natives and the outside world had been marked by blood.

Chapter Nine Guilt and Gangrene

AFTER SEEING THE NATIVE FOOTPRINT, THE THREE survivors spent what Margaret described as ‘this aching, miserable night’ on the sloped, muddy banks of the mountain stream. Soggy and exhausted from their repeated rolls into the cold water, they woke in the dim predawn light on Wednesday, 16 May, to resume their trek towards the clearing that McCollom had spotted farther down the slope.

As Margaret tried to stand, pain racked her body, and with it came fear. Overnight, her joints had stiffened, and the burned skin on her legs had tightened around her muscles. The burns choked off blood flow, starving healthy flesh. It hurt even to think about walking and sliding farther downstream. She couldn’t straighten up. She wrote in her diary, ‘My legs were so stiff they were a sickening sight.’

A quick inspection showed that infection had set in. She downplayed the gory details in her diary – the oozing pus, the blue-black hue of dead tissue. But she had a sickening idea of the causes and the dangers of what she described as ‘big, evil-smelling, running sores’.