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

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’.