Three amateur mountaineers stumble upon a mountain of gold

The date is December 5th 1936, and the three friends on the picture have reasons to be happy: they have just successfully made the first ascent of what was then the highest mountain between the Himalayas and the Andes: the 4,900 m Ngga Pulu in Dutch New Guinea. Incidentally one of them has also just discovered what would become one of the largest gold and copper deposits in the world!

Snow on the Equator

On a rare clear day in February 1623 Dutch explorer Jan Carstenszoon had first sighted the glaciers on the peak of the mountain from his ship near the southern coast of New Guinea. When returning to Europe nobody believed his sighting of snow that close to the Equator. 

Only in 1899 did a Dutch surveying expedition see the glaciers from the lowlands, and named them the Carstensz Mountains. In 1912 a British expedition led by A.F.R. Wollaston reached the foot of the glaciers, but they were unable to climb up to the inner glacier valley.

The Wollaston expedition was an expensive affair with 226 expedition members (including a 132 member Dutch military escort!) and with an appalling cost to the local population: about 30-40 accompanying lowland Amungme Papuans tragically died on the way, presumably from a combination of malaria and the cold conditions in the highlands. 

The 1936 Dutch Carstensz Expedition would be a much smaller and more successful enterprise.

The 1936 Dutch Carstensz Expedition

The leader of the expedition, the 42 year old Dr. Anton H. Colijn, was a lawyer and also the oldest son of Holland’s prime minister. He had worked for the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company (Shell) for 17 years and had been stationed in Cura?ao, the United States, and Romania. He was now managing the Dutch New Guinea exploration activities for an exploration company formed by Shell in 1935, operating out of Babo, on the south shore of Bintuni Bay.

Shell was using a Sikorsky S-38 amphibious plane to supply remote exploration camps, and as passenger on a high-altitude test flight Colijn had flown over the Carstensz Mountains. He discovered that the mountains consisted of a whole system of hidden valleys and glaciers with a high, flat alpine meadow offering an access point to the glaciers. Colijn was also an avid alpinist, and he immediately started making plans to get to the mountains and climb them.

He enlisted the 28 year old Dutch exploration geologist Dr. Jean Jacques Dozy. Dozy was also an amateur mountaineer. He had done his field mapping thesis work in the highest part of the Bergamo Alps in Northern Italy and now worked for Shell in Babo as one of the world’s first aerial photo-interpretation geologists.

The climbers had accumulated two months of annual leave, and the cost of the trip would have to come out of their own pockets. Hence the expedition would have to be fast and light.

Colijn also invited Frits Wissel, a 29 year old Dutch Marine flying officer, newly arrived in Babo to pilot the S-38 amphibious plane, to join the expedition. Wissel was an expert pilot and, conveniently, also an experienced alpinist.

Preparations

Over the following months Wissel, on the return leg from aerial survey flights, managed to scout and photograph the possible access routes to the mountains, and Dozy put together a sketch map of the area from the oblique aerial photographs. Wissel planned airborne supply drops of food and provisions to keep the weight down. The men figured that if they carried their own gear, they could get away with only eight porters. Colijn “borrowed” eight Dayak field assistants from the company for the task. Like any “fieldie” today they were delighted with the prospect of a long trip into the unknown to get to the “ice mountains”.

Figure 1: 1936 Dutch Carstensz Expedition line at Babo, New Guinea, including A.H. Colijn, J.J. Dozy and eight Dayak porters just before starting the expedition to the Carstensz Mountains. Source: artsandculture.google.com

On October 29th Colijn and Dozy, accompanied by the eight Dayak porters left Aika, a historical town on the southern coast of Dutch New Guinea. After several days travel by canoe and foot they arrived at the historical settlement of Nargi. Wissel executed two airborne supply drops with the S-38, flew back to Aika, and hurried in to join the expedition. Then followed many days of arduous route-finding, bush-hacking and trail-blazing climbing through near-vertical temperate rain forest in perpetual rain until, on November 26th, they reached the alpine meadow at 3,700m that Colijn had seen from the air.

Ore Mountain

The alpine meadow turned out to be more akin to a marsh or a bog, but the expedition settled into their meadow camp and prepared to climb the surrounding peaks. Dozy spent several days mapping the geology of the surrounding area. At the end of the meadow, amidst the Upper Tertiary limestone he discovered a 70m high, barren black rock wall standing above the meadow, about 100m in length, with green splodges: an outcropping magnetite-chalcopyrite skarn deposit!

Figure 2. Ertsberg (Dozy, 1939). The dark mountain wall consists of ores, which are capped by light coloured limestone.

“I knew in a blink of an eye what this was about. It was hard to miss, with all the green and blue spots. The copper was obvious…..I realized that no one could do anything with it. There were no roads, no harbours, no factories. It was just like a mountain of gold on the moon.” (Mealey, 1996)

Dozy named the deposit Ertsberg (Dutch for "Ore Mountain"). Further northwest of the alpine meadow Dozy also mapped a mineralised contact zone next to a mountainous feature that he named Grasberg (Dutch for “Grass Mountain”). He later correctly identified the specimens from that area as biotitized granodiorite porphyry. On the return from the expedition Dozy showed the report of his field work to his superiors at Shell, who agreed that nothing could be done with the deposit.

In 1939, Dozy published an article about his find, “Geological Results of the Carstensz Expedition 1936” in a very limited edition by the University of Leiden. The article concluded that the bulk of the ore consisted of magnetite and hydrated iron oxides, chalcopyrite and bornite, with some gold and traces of rare bismuth minerals. The copper-content appeared to be high (0-40%), while the gold-content might be rather considerable (0-15 g/ton).

Amazingly the article lay unnoticed in a few Dutch university libraries for the next 20 years!

In 1959 a mining engineer, Jan van Gruisen, was conducting literature search for a small, cash-strapped Dutch mining company, Oost Borneo Maatschappij (OBM), the East Borneo company, looking for nickel prospects in Dutch New Guinea. He came across Dozy’s article, and on a hunch took out a 10km by 10km concession application around Ertsberg for OBM. OBM had no funds to conduct any actual exploration, but van Gruisen was good friends with Forbes Wilson, the chief of exploration for Freeport Sulphur (later Freeport-McMoRan). OBM and Freeport jointly funded another expedition to Ertsberg in 1960 which led to the rediscovery of the Ertsberg and the development of the Ertsberg-Grasberg mine complex. In 1988, Freeport identified reserves valued at US$40 billion at Grasberg.

The summits

But the three adventurers had come for the mountaineering:

They were unable to establish definitively which of the three summits in the range was the highest, and they resorted to attempt to climb each. They reached both the glacier-covered East Carstensz and Ngga Pulu summits on December 5th , but failed in their subsequent attempts to climb the bare Carstensz Pyramid, as they were constantly ‘defeated not by the mountain but the weather’, which included rain, snow, avalanches, and rocks coated with ice.

It has been estimated that in 1936 (when glaciers still covered 13 km2 of the mountains) Ngga Pulu was indeed the highest summit, reaching over 4,900 m. However, due to global warming and the resulting extensive snow melt, Ngga Pulu has today become a 4,862 m subsidiary peak. It is estimated that the last of the glaciers will have disappeared by 2030.

Figure 3. Anton Colijn, Frits Wissel and Jean Jacques Dozy pose against the Carstensz Mountains in New Guinea 1936. Source.

The now-highest Carstensz Pyramid summit (4,884 m) was not climbed until 1962, by an expedition led by the Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer (of “Seven Years in Tibet” fame, and first ascent climber of the Eiger North Face).

On December 24th the three friends and their Dayak porters were safely back in Aika. The whole party, Europeans and Dayaks, returned from the expedition in perfect health.

Post Expedition - Anton Colijn

In 1937 Anton Colijn published a book in Dutch about the expedition: “Naar De Eeuwige Sneeeuw Van Tropisch Nederland” [To the Eternal Snow of the Tropical Netherlands] as well as a delightful account of the climbs in the Alpine Journal.

Colijn was stationed at the oil fields of Tarakan, on an island east of Borneo, when the Japanese invaded the Dutch East Indies on January 11th 1942. He assisted with the systematic destruction of the oil installations prior to being captured. He escaped to Balikpapan and was sent to Java, from where he tried to flee to Ceylon, but his ship was bombed by the Japanese. He reached the coast of Sumatra, was captured and interned at Palembang. On 11 March 1945 he died from exhaustion and illness in an internment camp at Bangka Island at the age of 50.

Colijn was posthumously awarded the Bronze Lion for deeds of extreme bravery and leadership in battle favouring the Netherlands. His wife and daughters were also interned, but they survived the war. Helen Colijn, a daughter of Anton Colijn, wrote The Power of Song, a book about survival in a women's camp, upon which the film Paradise Road (1997) is based.

Post Expedition - Frits Wissel

Just a week later, on December 31st 1936, Frits Wissel and his flight crew discovered the three large inland Paniai Lakes while making an aerial survey for Shell. He took photos and noticed many people in canoes, establishing that this mountainous region was populated. In November 1937 the Dutch Indies government named the group of lakes after Wissel.

Wissel worked in Australia from 1942-1946 for the Allied Geographical Section as Netherlands East (Indies) Forces Intelligence Service (Dutch Intelligence Service) liaison officer in Brisbane. He was awarded the Dutch Airman's Cross in March 1944.

After the war Wissel returned to New Guinea as a naval pilot, based on the Moluccan island of Morotai. He was a lecturer at the Higher Technical Schools in Delft, The Hague and Arnhem from 1957 until his retirement in 1972. Wissel died in Arnhem in 1999 at the age of 92.

Post Expedition - Jean Jacques Dozy:

Jean Jacques Dozy had a long, successful career with Shell International, stationed in Guatemala, Honduras, Egypt, Venezuela, and Indonesia, before becoming the chief of exploration for Shell in the Hague from 1962-1966. He became a professor at the Technical University in Delft and retired in 1979 at the age of 71. In 1983 Freeport McMoRan invited him back to Grasberg for a visit to the mine that he helped discover. He passed away in 2004 at the age of 96.

Comment

This ranks as one of my favourite mineral discovery stories of all time. It has all the elements of a good adventure story, the team mostly achieved their objectives, by luck they stumbled upon one of the biggest copper discoveries of the world, and everybody got back in one piece – and remained friends afterwards.

I tip my proverbial hat to Jean Jacques Dozy. I wonder how many of today’s petroleum geologists would recognize an outcropping skarn deposit or a porphyry copper system?

As Michael Thomsen, former Freeport Indonesia Inc. Chief Geologist, writes:

“Jacques was an ‘explorationist’ in the truest sense of the word. He was a petroleum geologist yet he discovered one of the largest copper-gold districts in the world at a time when he only wanted to trek to an equatorial glacier and climb one of the highest peaks in one of the most remote parts of the world. Sometimes, serendipity reigns for an explorationist. By keeping his eyes open and having an ever inquisitive mindset, Jacques made an impact on geologic history in a way that he could not have imagined at the time.”

 One of the lessons I got from the story was the 20 year time span between Dozy’s academic publication and someone in the minerals exploration industry realising the potential value of the deposit.

How many world class ore deposits are hiding in academic journals or in your legacy data sets?

Thanks for reading, for now stay at home and stay safe!

Dr. Asbjorn Norlund Christensen is a consulting geophysicist at Nordic Geoscience, a geoscience consultancy with bespoke solutions in exploration geophysics and data analytics. www.nordicgeoscience.com 

PS:

Sources:

Here is the link to Jean Jacques Dozy’s original 1939 article about his find, “Geological Results of the Carstensz Expedition 1936”:

https://www.repository.naturalis.nl/record/506000

Here is the link to Anton Colijn’s delightful account of the expedition in the Alpine Journal:

https://www.alpinejournal.org.uk/Contents/Contents_1937_files/AJ49%20177-189%20Colijn%20Carstensz%20Massif.pdf

Here is a link to Freeport Indonesia Chief geologist Michael Thomsen’s notes on Jean Jacques Dozy’s visit to the Grasberg Mine in 1983:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282704930_Notes_from_Meetings_with_Jacques_Dozy_by_Michael_Thomsen_Describing_the_Initial_1936_Discovery_of_the_Ertsberg_Dom_and_Grasberg_Outcropping_Copper_Deposits_Irian_Jaya_Indonesia

Finally, there are two excellent accounts written about the discovery and development of the Ertsberg/Grasberg complex: “The Conquest of Copper Mountain” by Forbes Wilson, and “Grasberg” by George A. Mealey.