Lost in Shangri-la

Chapter 8

GENTLEMAN EXPLORER

DURING THE YEAR before the Gremlin Special crash, Colonel Ray Elsmore had basked in public acclaim as the valley’s self-styled discoverer. Unbeknownst to him or anyone else in the U.S. Army, Elsmore was the New Guinea equivalent of Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott. After believing that he’d snowshoed through virgin territory to the South Pole, Scott learned that his rival Roald Amundsen had beaten him there. In other words, Elsmore was the second outsider to discover Shangri-La, third if he counted Major Myron Grimes.

The valley’s true Western discoverer was Richard Archbold, a young man who enjoyed the good fortune of having been born exceedingly rich. And unlike Elsmore and Grimes, Archbold had visited the valley on the ground.

Archbold’s inherited wealth flowed from his grandfather, John D. Archbold, a president of Standard Oil and a partner of John D. Rockefeller. The family’s millions guaranteed that Richard Archbold would never be required to work a traditional job. This was convenient, as he was never much of a traditional student. As a boy, skinny, shy, and socially awkward, with piercing eyes and a brusque manner, Archbold bounced among several private schools, including one in Arizona where his favorite subject was camping. He took classes at Hamilton College in upstate New York and at Columbia University in Manhattan without staying long enough at either school to collect a degree.

One subject to which Archbold applied himself was the great outdoors. In 1929 Archbold’s father, hoping to set Richard on a productive path, agreed to help finance a joint British, French, and American research expedition to Madagascar. The elder Archbold had one condition: along with his money came his underachieving twenty-two-year-old son. The expedition’s organizers were delighted by the cash but not quite sure what to do with young Archbold, who’d reached adulthood as a tall, thin, moderately handsome man with a shock of wavy black hair, a thick mustache, and a partiality for bow ties.

After initially planning to use Archbold as a photographer, one of the expedition’s senior scientists suggested, “Why don’t you collect mammals?” So he did.

Archbold practiced collecting at the family’s Georgia estate—something akin to a big game hunter preparing for a safari at a zoo—and learned from his many mistakes. But once in Madagascar, he stoically suffered the bites of land leeches and mosquitoes, the many discomforts of camp life in the wild, and the stigma among serious scientists of being the rich kid along for the ride. Along the way, he found his calling as a biological researcher.

Upon his return from Madagascar, Archbold learned that his father had died. He collected his inheritance and with it a Manhattan apartment on Central Park West. He took a low-level job down the street, as a research associate in the mammal department at the American Museum of Natural History, where his grandfather had been a major benefactor.

Working in an office across the hall on the museum’s fifth floor was a young ornithologist from Germany named Ernst Mayr, who later became a legend in evolutionary biology. Archbold’s new acquaintance encouraged him to focus on the wilds of New Guinea, where Mayr had spent months studying bird life. Archbold put his inheritance to work by organizing, funding, and leading several major expeditions there under the auspices of the museum. From the outset, his plan was nothing less than “a comprehensive biological survey of the island.” Unlike Mayr, who’d done his work among small groups of scientist-explorers, Archbold assembled a veritable research army to attempt the ambitious task.

Archbold enjoyed notable success on his first two New Guinea journeys, one begun in 1933 and another in 1936, as he and his well-funded teams reached previously unexplored territory and supplied the New York museum with numerous new plant and animal species. But Archbold grew frustrated by the logistical challenges posed by the enormous island, not least of which were the inhospitable terrain and the lack of native pack animals. Napoleon said armies march on their stomachs; the same could be said for large, exotic scientific expeditions. Archbold’s journeys in New Guinea depended on efficient supply lines, which meant that someone or something needed to carry tons of provisions to explorers cut off from civilization for months on end.

In the absence of horses, mules, oxen, or camels, and in light of the impossibility of using trucks in the roadless interior, human bearers were the only land-based option. But Archbold learned that New Guinea natives couldn’t be relied upon. One reason was fear, not of the explorers but of each other. The island’s innumerable tribes and clans were usually at war with one another, so the instant a native bearer left his home territory, he had reason to fear death at the hands of a neighbor.

Archbold concluded that the best way to conquer New Guinea, scientifically at least, would be with air support. He became a pilot and began buying airplanes. In early 1938, he purchased the largest privately owned airplane in the world—the first commercial version of a U.S. Navy patrol bomber known as a PBY. With a wingspan of more than one hundred feet, a yawning cargo bay, and a range exceeding four thousand miles, Archbold’s PBY fit his needs perfectly. Its greatest appeal was the PBY’s design as a “flying boat.” Fitted with pontoons, it could take off and land on bodies of water, including the high-altitude lakes and rivers of New Guinea. Archbold added special navigation and communications equipment, then named his plane after a native word for a powerful storm: Guba. With Guba at his disposal, Archbold could ferry supplies, personnel, and specimens wherever needed, making possible his third and most ambitious expedition to New Guinea.

Archbold obtained approval and support from the Dutch government, which controlled the area he wanted to explore. The government’s motivation was that the expedition would provide authorities in the Netherlands with deeper knowledge about their colony, including not just the flora and fauna in Archbold’s sights but also the people and the resources hidden within.

In April 1938 Archbold’s team established a base camp in Hollandia with nearly two hundred people, including scientists from the American Museum of Natural History; seventy-two Dyak tribesmen brought from the neighboring island of Borneo as bearers; two cooks; a backup pilot; a navigator; a radioman; and two mechanics. The Dutch government contributed nearly sixty soldiers, including a captain and three lieutenants. Also on hand, courtesy of the Dutch, were thirty political prisoners—anticolonial activists, mostly—pressed into duty as “convict carriers.”

Explorer Richard Archbold in 1938, standing on the Guba after landing in what was then known as Challenger Bay in Hollandia. (Photo courtesy of Archbold Biological Station.)

The expedition focused on collecting mammals, birds, plants, and insects at a range of altitudes—from sea level to the barren twelve-thousand-foot peaks in the least-studied area of New Guinea, the north slope of the Snow Mountains, one of several ranges in the island’s interior. With Guba, the Dyak bearers, and the convicts carrying supplies to keep them fed, Archbold and his team of scientists gathered a trove of remarkable specimens, including tree-climbing kangaroos, three-foot-long rats, and a previously unknown songbird with a flycatcher beak. But nothing was as startling as what they encountered on the morning of June 23, 1938.

ARCHBOLD WAS PILOTING Guba toward Hollandia after a reconnaissance flight when the plane broke through thick clouds surrounding the three-mile-high mountain named for Dutch Queen Wilhelmina. Ahead, Archbold saw a wide, flat, heavily populated valley that appeared nowhere on his maps and was unknown except to its inhabitants. He estimated that the valley was roughly forty miles long by ten miles wide. Later, adopting patrician nonchalance and the detached language of science, he downplayed his shock and called it “a pleasant surprise.”

A Dutch soldier on board Guba called the area a Groote Vallei, or Grand Valley, and Archbold declared that that would be its name.

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 to immediately establish the valley as the most densely populated area in all of Dutch New Guinea. Archbold’s discovery was comparable to a botanist in 1938 searching for bumblebees in the American Midwest and stumbling upon Kansas City, Kansas.

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 traveling 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 three hundred or so square miles 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 center 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 rain forests 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. A hundred thousand people, hiding in plain sight. Sixty years later, mammalogist 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 lifestyle of the valley natives helped, too. They were self-sufficient farmers, as opposed to hunter-gatherers 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.

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 roofs; the women’s houses were long and narrow. 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’d seen on holiday in central Europe.

Archbold’s assistants established a camp some fifteen miles 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 beadlike cowrie shells—small, pearly white, naturally smooth shells that were widely used as currency and jewelry 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, so they’d 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 practiced cannibalism, but the heavily armed Dutch army troops felt they had nothing to fear.

Occasionally some tribesmen would discourage the explorers from traveling 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 didn’t want their new acquaintances to be harmed by enemies who lived in the next village.

That pattern remained in place until an incident that involved a band of natives and the exploration team led by Lieutenant Van Arcken.

On August 9, 1938, as Van Arcken’s patrol neared the Baliem River in the valley’s center, 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’d done so in self-defense.

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.”

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 overlooked. Writing in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, Archbold described how on August 10, Van Arcken’s patrol encountered a trail barricaded with branches and guarded by men with spears: “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 August 10, 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.”

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 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.