Lost City of the Incas (Phoenix Press) (2 page)
Read Lost City of the Incas (Phoenix Press) Online
Authors: Hiram Bingham
Machu Picchu: the Industrial Sector, showing clearance in progress.
George Eaton excavating near the West Wall of the Principal Temple, 1912.
‘
The first burial cave at Machu Picchu containing a human skull
.’
‘
Dr Eaton and his Indian helpers during the excavation of a human skeleton
.’
LINE DRAWINGS MADE BY THE YALE PERUVIAN EXPEDITIONS
Machu Picchu: ‘
The Sacred Plaza
’ and ‘
Birds Eye view of Sacred
As well as the many prints from the Yale Peruvian Expeditions that are in private collections, full sets were placed at the Peabody Museum in Yale, the National Geographic Society and the Hispanic Society of America.
Whenever possible, Bingham’s original captions for the Yale Peruvian Expedition photographs have been used. These are indicated by italics.
INTRODUCTIONWhen Hiram Bingham arrived in the Peruvian Andes in July 1911, he was ready for what was to be the climactic achievement of his life: the exploration of the remote hinterland to the west of Cuzco, the old Inca capital. He had every advantage on his side, with his charisma, opportunism, knowledge of bibliographical sources and driving, restless energy. Above all he had what every explorer needs – luck and the ability to exploit it.
Bingham had already done a preliminary reconnaissance a few years before, in 1909, when he had made the mistake of coming in the wet season. This time he would be on dry ground and he had prepared meticulously for it, both with a well-provisioned team and with the invaluable research he had been given by a Peruvian academic, Carlos Romero. This included recently discovered chronicles from the time of the Spanish Conquest, which pointed to the existence of hitherto unsuspected Inca ruins.
Despite all this, he could never have expected quite what lay ahead. In the space of just a few short months he was to discover not only Machu Picchu, by any standards one of the greatest architectural achievements of pre-Columbian civilization, but also two other major sites: Vitcos, where the last Incas retreated after the Spanish had conquered the rest of their Empire and which was to become their capital in exile for a further thirty-five years; and another mysterious site down below in the jungle, whose significance evaded Bingham at the time, in an area he called the ‘Plain of Ghosts’.
In later years he returned to excavate at Machu Picchu. He
also undertook what he described in an article as ‘Further Explorations’, discovering a myriad of other minor sites and the Inca Trail, a magnificent stone track that threads high above the Urubamba river to arrive at Machu Picchu in a way that modern visitors still find heart-stopping.
However, it was in 1911, over the space of just a few months, that Hiram Bingham made the momentous discoveries that form the kernel of this book and make it a classic in the literature of exploration. It is impossible to read
Lost City of the Incas
without sharing in Bingham’s enthusiasm and curiosity about what he had found. He was a natural story-teller, with an extraordinary story to tell.
Like many, I first read it when I went to Machu Picchu and was immediately struck by the vivacity and freshness with which Bingham writes. Over the years since, I’ve come to realize that it is an even more intriguing and complex work than might at first appear. Much of this is due to Bingham’s own character.
Bingham was a man who needed to become famous. Born in 1875, he had grown up in Hawaii, the son of a missionary family who had once been celebrated and prosperous but had subsequently descended into genteel poverty. As Hiram Bingham III, he was conscious both of his ancestor’s fame (the first Hiram Bingham had almost single-handedly converted the islands to Christianity) and of the family’s current fall from grace.
In
Lost City of the Incas
, he fondly remembers climbing ‘a number of mountains in the suburbs of Honolulu’ as a boy and often notes occasional and unexpected similarities between the Peruvian Vilcabamba and the green islands of Hawaii. The impression given is of a youth lived under open skies.
But in reality his childhood was a constrained one. He was cramped by a constant need for academic success and by the fierce religious fundamentalism of his parents, from which Bingham tried to escape. Peru provided a freedom he had never had when young. As Che Guevara put it in an astute essay: ‘Machu Picchu was to Bingham the crowning of all his purest dreams as an adult child.’
He managed to fund his own way through Andover and then Yale, often by coaching fellow students, and decided to remain in teaching once he had graduated. At six foot four, he had the rangy build of a natural tennis player and he was eased up the political ladder of appointments by his charm and good looks, although his approach was at times too broad-brush for him ever to settle entirely comfortably into academic life (Bingham was never a great man for footnotes).
In 1900, when he was twenty-five, he married Alfreda Mitchell, the daughter of a wealthy family, and his financial worries were eased. Despite this new security and the acquisition of a thirty-room mansion in New Haven, the early years of his marriage were characterized by a restless urge to travel.
He was drawn early to the idea of South America, both because of its inherent romanticism and because in academic terms it was virgin territory. It was not yet a legitimate subject at the Ivy League universities and so Bingham could seize, as he put it, ‘the opportunity it presents to work in claims not already staked out’. While Humboldt’s books on South America in the early nineteenth century had instigated a wave of curiosity in Europe, and brought many travellers in his wake (particularly from France), North American interest in the southern continent had awoken more slowly. Only with the impressive histories of the Conquest of Mexico and Peru written later in the century by a Boston lawyer, William Prescott, had the process slowly begun.
Bingham managed to create a post for himself as Curator of the Harvard Library’s non-existent ‘South American Collection’, a collection that Bingham then set about creating. He quickly accumulated a card catalogue of some 25,000 items. When a consignment of Simón Bolívar’s papers came his way, his first thought was to write a biography of the nineteenth-century
Libertador
and his struggle for Independence. Then he decided, characteristically, that it would be more interesting to go to South America and follow the arduous route Bolívar had once taken across the continent, so as to gauge how difficult it must have been for him and his men.
This was his first expedition, in 1906, when he was just thirty-one, and it gave him a taste for exploration, despite or perhaps because of the hardships he encountered. He took a rifle with him, which he needed both for protection and to shoot game (he was later to issue a Winchester and a Colt to each member of his Peruvian teams). He published an account of it in his first book,
Journal of an Expedition across Venezuela and Colombia
.
Upon returning to the States, he became a Lecturer in South American history at his
alma mater
, Yale, a post that had been created especially for him and the first such post in any North American university. Bingham continued to press the case for more attention to be paid to his new subject in articles such as ‘The Possibilities of South American History and Politics as a Field for Research’.
He was soon to head back to South America to do research himself, this time for a more ambitious expedition from Buenos Aires across the continent to Lima. With typical opportunism, Bingham had managed to get appointed as the American delegate to a political conference in Chile, and he used this as a springboard for the trip. He was already becoming interested in politics and the resulting book,
Across South America
, concentrated on the business opportunities America was missing by not investing more in the region, particularly compared to Britain.
It was while on this journey that he was accidentally propelled into a new-found subject, the Incas. Up until then, his focus had been on post-Columbian history, and while in Peru he wanted to visit Ayacucho, the scene of one of the climactic battles of Bolívar’s Wars of Independence. To get there, he passed through the town of Abancay, where the Prefect persuaded him to join a treasure-hunting expedition he was mounting, doubtless because Bingham, as ‘an American professor’, would give a spurious legitimacy to the enterprise. The proposed destination was Choquequirao, the one Inca site in the Vilcabamba province that was already known, if little visited because of its difficult position high above the Apurímac river.