Queen of the lost world
Guinea trive members had never seen a white person before" />New Guinea trive members had never seen a white person before (
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Margaret Hastings" />Lost in Shangri-La
by Mitchell Zuckoff
Harper
When Margaret Hastings found her best friend dead, all she could think about were her shoes.
“I ought to have cried,” Hastings wrote in her diary. “I just sat there in shock, and all I could think was: ‘Now the shoes belong to me.’ ”
That’s what paradise had done to the Women’s Army Corps corporal — stripped her of emotion, survival was the only imperative. If she was to make it out of the jungle alive, crying was a luxury.
As World War II was drawing to a close, Hastings was part of a group of enlisted men and women who crashed in the middle of a “Shangri-La,” a hidden valley, untouched by the rest of the world, in Dutch New Guinea. But this Shangri-La was a far cry from the utopia coined by the 1933 novel “Lost Horizon.”
Of the 24 passengers, only Hastings and two other men would survive long enough to withstand gangrenous burn wounds, harsh jungle terrain and hunger. They would also be the only three to meet the natives, a tribe that dined on human flesh. History professor Mitchell Zuckoff, who stumbled across Hastings’ amazing tale in an old newspaper article, uses diaries, radio transcripts and interviews to tell the true story of Jane of the jungle.
Margaret Hastings grew up in upstate Oswego, the daughter of a widower who worked at a factory that made combat boots for the Army.
She was plucky, strikingly beautiful and petite — at just 5-foot-2 and 100 pounds her nickname was “Little Girl.” She was also different. While her girlfriends were getting married and pregnant, Hastings enlisted in the military just shy of her 30th birthday. She wanted to see the world, and she wasn’t even sure she was the marrying type.
“To tell the truth,” she told an acquaintance, “I’m not sure I go for the kind of man who’s supposed to make a good husband.”
So in 1944, she joined the 150,000-strong Women’s Army Corps, as the first generation of women other than nurses to join men in the US Army. Her hopes to travel were quickly realized. She was sent to an exotic island near Australia called New Guinea in a town called Hollandia.
She became an instant hit overseas, going to “blanket parties” with other men, double dating with her best friend Laura Besley, and even driving around topless in a Jeep around the island.
“With the surplus of men over here, you can’t help but find some nice ones,” she wrote to a friend. “I have had no difficulty along those lines.”
On May 13, 1945, five days after V-E Day and three months before the end of the war with Japan, Hastings and other base members boarded an Air Force C-47 as a special morale booster: a trip to Shangri-La.
Pilots had bragged about finding an area near the center of the island about 150 miles from the base where tribes of strange, superhuman naked men and women lived. The press had even gotten wind of this uncharted area and gave it the name.
Hastings was so excited that she boarded the plane first and took the seat closest to the cockpit, but realizing that the seat had a terrible view, she relocated closer to her friend Besley. The move unquestionably saved her life.
Shortly into the journey, the C-47 flew too close to the valley, colliding bottom-first into a mountainside. Passengers careened out of their seats, and Hastings at first got angry. The pilot had ruined her trip to Shangri-La. She hadn’t yet seen the natives.
When she awoke later in clutches of a dead man who had softened her fall, her anger turned to panic. The plane filled with flames as she pried the man’s hands loose from her body and sought the nearest exit.
What she found was a “botanist’s dream and a crash survivor’s nightmare” — an uncharted jungle.
Hastings also found herself among the few still living: her friend Besley; a gravely wounded Women’s Army enlist; Sgt. Kenneth Decker and Lt. John McCollom. Everyone was hurt. Decker had hit his head in the crash; McCollom had lost his twin brother. The two other women are close to death. Hastings had lost her shoes. Her feet and face pulsed with blistering burns.
There had been no time for a mayday.
By the second day, the other two women had died from injuries relating to the crash. The remaining three survivors decided the only way to find help was to start heading in the direction of the base.
They were a sad-looking bunch. Hastings had reconditioned her bra and underwear into bandages for her feet and for Decker’s head.
But everyone suffered in silence. She wanted to weep, “but made it a point of pride not to cry.” Of the lush paradise around her, Hastings wrote, “Everything in the jungle had tentacles, I was too busy fighting them off to enjoy.”
The shrubs clung to her and grabbed at her hair. She begged McCollom to use his pocketknife and cut her hair off into a “rather sad three-inch feather bob,” she wrote. When that wasn’t enough, she asked him to cut the rest of it clear off.
When resting, Hastings passed the time writing in a diary that she cobbled together from debris from the crash. Many of the supplies were destroyed — and their only food was Charms, sweet-sucking candies. They also recovered a life raft from the burnt-out plane.
Several days in, her burns had turned into “big, evil-smelling, running sores.” Gangrene was setting in. She became so weak that she fell face first on the jungle floor, crawling on her hands and knees to keep up with the two men.
When the three finally reached a clearing, they spied a B-17 in the air above them. Overcome with excitement, they sprawled the seemingly useless life raft out. The B-17 dipped to show that it had spotted them. They laughed for the first time since the crash.
But then it dawned on them: They were in the center of a sweet-potato farm. They were far from alone.
Suddenly they heard the whelps of wild dogs. As the noise came closer, they realized it was human voices.
Dozens of nearly naked men — with only huge penis gourds as cover — surrounded them. Their skin glistened with pig fat.
They had crashed landed in a world “time never knew existed,” writes Zuckoff. “They had tamed fire but hadn’t discovered the wheel . . . Their only numbers were one, two and three; everything beyond three was ‘many.’ ”
The 60,000 inhabitants of Shangri-La did not know what to make of these pale intruders. They had never before seen people with white skin. They wondered why they had feet but no toes (being unaccustomed to seeing shoes). There was an old legend that anticipated the return of spirits with long hair and light eyes that would bring about the end of the world. They certainly fit the part.
Lt. McCollom ordered Hastings and Decker to their feet.
“Smile,” he ordered. They held out the only food they had, the Charms, and held their breath. A leader came forward from the native camp and McCollom met him halfway. Before long, they were shaking hands.
“There on a knoll we held as fine a reception as any ever given by Mrs. Vanderbilt,” Hastings wrote. “The black man who never had seen a white man and the white man who never before had met a savage on his own ground understood each other. The smiles had done it.”
Suddenly, the leader was blowing on their open wounds. Although it was an unpleasant and confusing, Zuckoff, through his interviews with New Guinea natives, reveals that this is a highly personal ceremony, which works to keep the soul intact in the body.
The Army hadn’t forgotten about their lost soldiers. Although it was impossible to get a plane into the mountainous region, they dropped food, goods and an FM radio.
Finally, a group of Filipino-American paratroopers led by Capt. C. Earl Walter Jr. parachuted into the area, and medics were able to save Hastings’ limb from being amputated. When the soldiers first landed, the tribesman seemed to grope them, and Walter ordered his men to strip, thinking that the natives had mistaken them for women. But Zuckoff discovers in his reporting that the tribe had never seen clothes before. “We felt the clothes and said, ‘That’s not mud!’ ” one explains.
While the group waited for Hastings and Decker to recover enough strength to make the trek to a place where they could be shipped out, the natives became increasingly fond of the only female crew member.
During Hastings’ daily bath, the natives, both men and women, would gape at her.
Two tribesmen, one of whom she nicknamed “Bob Hope” took a particular liking to her, throwing rocks at her (which was apparently a courting ritual).
The real queen of the tribe also befriended Hastings, inviting her into a hut for hot sweet potatoes. “The queen and I liked each other immediately,” Hastings wrote. “All we lacked from an American point of view was a front porch and some rocking chairs.”
The queen was so attuned to Hastings that she hissed at the Army men who teased her about their relationship, even though she didn’t understand a word of English.
But there was trouble in paradise. When the queen’s husband began showing interest in Hastings (by brushing her hair), the queen became jealous. And things almost became violent when several women tried to cut off the tips of Hastings hand, a common practice done to women who are in mourning.
After more than a month in the jungle, Hastings and company were finally pulled out of Shangri-La. They were greeted by a pack of reporters and generals, all waiting to get a look at the queen.
But despite all that happened, Hastings was still very much the same. Asked what they wanted to do next, she responded, “I’d like a shower and a permanent.”
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