Also disturbing their sleep was something they had seen earlier in the day. While walking through the stream, they noticed an unmistakable sign that they were not alone: outlined in the mud was a fresh human footprint. That night they heard strange barking sounds in the distance.
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As far as the three survivors knew, they were the first outsiders to trek through this part of New Guinea’s mountainous rainforest. But they were mistaken. That distinction belonged to a wealthy, amateur American zoologist who seven years earlier 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 Eight Gentleman Explorer
COLONEL RAY ELSMORE BASKED IN PUBLIC ACCLAIM as the valley’s self-styled discoverer. Unbeknownst to him or anyone else in the Army, Elsmore was the New Guinea equivalent of Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott. In other words, Elsmore was the second outsider to discover Shangri-La, third if proper consideration were given to Major Byron Grimes.
The valley’s true Western discoverer was Richard Archbold, a young man who enjoyed the good fortune of being 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 earn his living by holding a traditional job. This was convenient, given his less than glittering performance at any of the private schools he attended. Skinny, shy and socially awkward, with piercing eyes and a brusque manner, there was only one subject to which Archbold did apply himself: 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 had reached adulthood as a tall, thin, moderately handsome man with a shock of wavy black hair, a thick moustache, 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 practised 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 had 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 was 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 and assistants 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 neighbour.
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 aeroplanes. In early 1938, he purchased the largest privately owned plane in the world – the first commercial version of a US Navy patrol bomber known as a PBY. With a wing span of more than thirty metres, a yawning cargo bay, and a range exceeding 6500 kilometres, Archbold’s PBY fit his needs perfectly. Its greatest appeal to him, however, 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.
Explorer Richard Archbold in 1938, standing on the Guba after landing in what was then known as Challenger Bay in Hollandia.
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 hitherto unknown details 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 neighbouring 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 – anti-colonial activists, mostly – pressed into duty as ‘convict carriers’.
The expedition focused on collecting mammals, birds, plants and insects at a range of altitudes – from sea level to the barren, 3500-metre 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, metre-long rats, and a previously unknown songbird with a fly-catcher beak. But nothing was as startling as what they encountered on the morning of 23 June 1938.
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Archbold was piloting Guba towards Hollandia after a reconnaissance flight when the plane broke through thick clouds surrounding the 4730-metre-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 64 kilometres long by 16 kilometres wide. Later, adopting patrician nonchalance and the detached language