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.’
____
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’.
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