Lost in Shangri-la

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  They came to a twelve-foot waterfall, too high and too steep to try McCollom’s shoulder trick. Margaret and Decker rested at the side of the stream, while McCollom fought his way into the encroaching jungle to search for a way around. But the growth was especially thick there, so he returned with a new idea.

  McCollom grabbed a thick vine that hung from a tree alongside the falls. After testing it with his weight, he held tight to the vine, took a running jump, and swung over and beyond the falls. When he cleared the cascading water, he let himself down at the bottom. He tossed back the vine and told the others to follow.

  Margaret didn’t hesitate. She grabbed the vine and launched herself into space. When she cleared the falls, McCollom caught her as she let go of the vine. Next came Decker, who followed suit.

  When he was safely beside them, the sergeant deadpanned with a western drawl: “Damned if I ever thought I’d understudy Johnny Weissmuller.” Decker’s mention of the vine-swinging movie star who played Tarzan made Margaret smile, though she overlooked the obvious implication: that made her Jane.

  As they trudged onward, Margaret felt worse with each step. She was cold, wet, and exhausted. Her whole body ached. Tears welled in her eyes, but it was a point of pride with her not to cry.

  From time to time they heard search planes overhead. As the thrum of each plane’s engines grew closer, McCollom frantically worked the signal mirror. But he knew that the foliage canopy made the effort useless. Still, the sound alone was enough to revive their confidence that the Army Air Forces wouldn’t give up.

  McCollom’s plan was to hike until early afternoon, then set up camp when the daily mist and rain rolled in. But the jungle bordering the stream was so relentless they couldn’t find a spot on the bank large enough to stretch out. They kept moving until they could go no farther, eventually settling on a location that was far from ideal.

  McCollom placed one tarp on the sodden ground and draped the other tarp over them as a cover. They ate a few Charms, then bunched together to keep warm as they slept. McCollom slid between Decker and Margaret, so he could care for them both if needed. Decker thought McCollom displayed “the old mother hen instinct,” but he appreciated it and kept quiet.

  Their campsite slanted sharply toward the stream, and several times during the night the trio rolled in a heap down the bank into the icy water. Each time they dragged out the tarps and their soggy selves and tried again to sleep.

  Also disturbing their sleep was something they’d seen earlier in the day. While walking through the stream, they noticed an unmistakable sign that they weren’t alone: outlined in the mud was a fresh human footprint. Further evidence of the natives came as they huddled under the tarps: they heard strange barking sounds in the distance.

  AS FAR AS the three survivors knew, they were the first outsiders to trek through this part of New Guinea’s mountainous rain forest. But they were mistaken. That distinction belonged to a wealthy amateur American zoologist who seven years earlier had led an expedition to New Guinea in search of undiscovered flora and fauna.

  One unfortunate result of that 1938 expedition was an act of deadly violence. The question now was whether that legacy would threaten the three survivors of the Gremlin Special.

  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 gr
ew 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.