Lost City of the Incas (Phoenix Press) (5 page)

Bingham had achieved his fame. In a country which had previously been too busy discovering itself to pay much attention to the rest of the world, Bingham’s find made him both a pioneer and an instant celebrity at the same time. In the very year that Scott and Amundsen were racing for the South Pole, Americans were delighted to have a sensational discovery and an explorer hero of their own. The Hollywood persona of the adventurous archaeologist in search of lost tombs stems largely from him.

The discovery of Machu Picchu also propelled Bingham up the academic hierarchy. The
National Geographic
article in 1913 had anticipated this by prematurely describing him as ‘Professor Hiram Bingham’: two years later came the actual appointment by Yale, for which he was impressively young at just under forty.

Bingham fully justified his new fame and position with his work. He threw his intellectual energies into the Incas, using all his bibliographical skills to produce both popular and specialist
books on the significance of Machu Picchu and the other sites he had found. The Yale summer vacation coincided neatly with the dry season in Peru, and he took advantage of this to return in July of 1914 and 1915 for further exploration. His initial success with Machu Picchu meant that these later expeditions were much larger and part-funded by
National Geographic
, who continued to publicize his discoveries.

Even with fame, he was still restless. By the end of his final expedition, he had penetrated almost every cranny of the Vilcabamba and needed new challenges. He signed up with Colonel Pershing’s Expeditionary Force for the abortive attempt to chase Pancho Villa down into Mexico, after the Mexican revolutionary had ‘invaded’ Texas. Then, when America entered the First World War, he joined the fledgling Air Service although well past enlisting age. He took to it immediately and wrote back home:

On his return from France, he entered politics and enjoyed a meteoric rise in the Republican Party, with appointments tumbling over themselves so fast that at one point he held three ascending posts in as many days. Just as with John Glenn many years later, the aura of an explorer was a powerful one. Bingham was helped also by the fact that he stood a head taller than all his colleagues in photographs.

By 1925 he was a Senator, although his career was to be a rocky one. He received a full censure from his colleagues, an unusual disgrace, although his offence (employing a lobbyist) seems to have been more a casual disregard for procedures than anything more venal. The New Deal swept him aside, and other troubles beset him after he lost his senatorial seat: he separated from his wife amidst complicated financial arguments and a suspicion that he
had behaved less than honourably in administrating her fortune.

But in 1948 came a diversion. He had always kept his principal occupation as ‘explorer’ in
Who’s Who in America
, despite the appointments to Yale, the air force and the Senate. His account of his wartime experiences was titled
An Explorer in the Air Service
. Now he decided to return to his first love for a last book. The result,
Lost City of the Incas
, is Bingham’s final distillation of the full meaning of what he had found in that heart-stopping month in 1911, when he was a young man.

The book is divided into three sections: Part 1 gives a historical survey of the Incas; Part 2 tells the story of his initial journey to Choquequirao in 1909 and the Yale Peruvian expedition of 1911, although he reserves an account of the discovery of Machu Picchu for Part 3, which also analyses the results of the further excavations.

Modern scholars might question his description of Inca rule as ‘benevolent despotism’, and archaeologists deplore his rough-edged approach to excavation (his workers used crowbars), but there can be no doubt of the energetic sense of inquiry that the book reveals, and its acute breadth of reference. Bingham is always capable of surprising observations – like the sudden remark that the ‘ruins [of Choquequirao] today present a more striking appearance than they did when they were covered with thatched roofs’. And he did not accept descriptions blindly from those who had gone before him: his careful placing of the ‘fortress’ at Ollantaytambo in quotation marks and his statement that ‘it is likely that this “fortress” became a royal garden’, are remarkably close to the views of modern scholars: he was the first to state them.

Even though he may have been wrong in his attribution of Machu Picchu, his achievement was still immense. Almost a century after his discoveries in the Vilcabamba, many explorers and archaeologists are still just adding footnotes and elucidations to his pioneering work.

I like to imagine him writing this book at the end of his days when, like his fictional contemporary Charles Foster (Citizen) Kane, he could at last set aside the frustrated years of political
office, with all their controversy and failure, and look back again with compressed perspective to a moment of recreated triumph, the moment in which he first came over the crest of a rise to see a whole city laid out before him.

It is this added quality of emotion recollected many years later that helps make
Lost City of the Incas
such a powerful account of what was a remarkable achievement.

When Hiram Bingham climbed up from the Urubamba valley on July 24th, 1911, and found the ruins of Machu Picchu awaiting him, he had a Kodak 3
A
Special camera.

Confronted by a set of previously unreported Inca buildings, which he immediately recognised as being of the finest possible construction, the American explorer’s first action was not to describe them in his pocket notebook or to do a detailed plan, as might have been expected. That came later. The first entry in his notebook shows that he immediately set about taking a series of photographs.

The camera’s long love affair with Machu Picchu had begun.

As was his habit, Bingham carefully listed his shots, naming each feature as he photographed it: the ‘Royal Mausoleum’, the ‘Sacred Plaza’ the ‘Intihuatana’ (‘hitching post of the sun’) – the names they still have today. But his thirty-one initial pictures are hesitant and exploratory. It is as if the new city did not fall easily into the frame. Contrary also to his later recollections, the sun was not shining and the light was bad (one reason his other
companions from the expedition had refused to accompany him was because it had been raining that morning). Scrubby brush covered the ruins and he had only a single Indian assistant to help him clear the sections of stonework he tried to photograph.

Worse still, from the point of view of his later positioning of the site as the ‘lost city of the Incas’, some of the buildings had been re-occupied by farmers, who had roughly thatched the roofs and were growing crops on the terraces. In one photograph, maize can be seen growing in the area between the Intihuatana and the Sacred Plaza. In another, a woman sits spinning in a doorway with her small child beside her, a placid domestic scene that could be observed in any Andean village.

Other photographs were to be of more use to him: he took pictures of the Temple of the Three Windows and of the great rounded bastion of the Torreón, with a tree growing out of its centre; he also took a panorama made up of two photographs of the valley dropping away dramatically into clouds beyond the West Group, clearly showing that this was ‘in the most inaccessible corner of the most inaccessible section of the Central Andes’. Although the clouds and shafts of light make this an arresting image, Bingham would not normally have taken pictures in mixed lighting and was only forced to do so because of his imminent descent. His ideal was a flat, neutral light by which archaeological remains could be recorded under scientific conditions.

As we have seen, Bingham was initially unsure how to interpret his find and the next day, July 25th, proceeded on down the Urubamba valley with his colleagues towards their original destination. Only at the end of that same expedition season, in September, did he despatch two of his junior assistants, Herman Tucker and Paul Lanius, back to the site for further investigation and photography.

Paul Lanius arrived first at Machu Picchu, on September 8th, and spent some days clearing the buildings before Herman Tucker’s arrival with the camera a week later. Both of them ascended from the downriver or Western approach, a vertiginous route that few would choose to take today. Lanius described it as ‘one of the steepest slopes I have ever climbed’.

Herman Tucker was a more exuberant and occasionally frivolous photographer than Bingham. Tucker took pictures of what amused him – a dog lying on his Indian hosts’ floor at San Miguel, or an accompanying Peruvian helper posing on the top of the Temple of the Three Windows. Bingham was later to issue a stern warning to members of future expeditions: ‘Snap shots are not desired.’

From the progression of photos that Tucker took on September 15th, it is clear that he too initially struggled to make photographic sense of Machu Picchu. His first picture was a high wide-angle shot from above, which shows that apart from a small area cleared by the farmers, most of the site was still covered in vegetation. Then he entered the ruins and spent the morning taking a series of photographs that tried, unsuccessfully, to distinguish stonework from the scraggy brush all around. After resting for a well-deserved lunch, he took a final photograph at 3.30p.m. of the one open vista that presented itself: a set of terraces that the local farmers had recently cleared for cultivation by burning them, in the traditional Andean manner.

Anyone who has ever tried to photograph a newly discovered site will sympathise with Bingham and Tuckers’ initial inability to engage with their subject. Andean cloud-forest does not have the denseness of the Amazonian rainforest below, a denseness that can lead to striking effects of ruins emerging from the jungle, as in Catherwood’s famous illustrations of Maya ruins. Instead the cloud-forest creates a diffusing screen of tangled brush, lichen and creepers, a layer of detritus which can be hard to penetrate photographically and makes for a debilitating working environment. The defining outlines of buildings are dominated by the more striking verticals of the trees that grow out of them, moss obscures the fine cracks dividing the ashlars, while the stairways that might provide an architectural grid are covered.

For these first photographers in 1911, an additional problem was caused by working in monochrome. The granite stonework of Machu Picchu was so tonally close to that of the light green vegetation around it that little separation was possible. To overcome this problem, Bingham requested suitable camera filters
for future expeditions and also issued his team-members with a ‘Fernand L. Grolsch Ready Reference Color Chart’ so that they could record the colour of ruins for later hand-tinting.

Tucker and Lanius stayed several days at the site and began to make more progress. They cleared enough to be able to take a shot in which the striking curved wall of the Torreón is now visible and a small boy standing on it gives a sense of its magnificent scale. The image approximates far more to Hiram Bingham’s own rhapsodical description of when he was first shown this building by the small boy who was his guide: ‘Suddenly, without any warning, under a huge overhanging ledge, the boy showed me a cave beautifully lined with the finest cut stone. It had evidently been a royal mausoleum. On top of this particular ledge was a semicircular building whose outer wall, gently sloping and slightly curved, bore a striking resemblance to the famous Temple of the Sun in Cuzco.’

This was one of the pictures Bingham successfully used after his return to the United States, when he was invited to give a lecture about his expedition at the National Geographic Society in February 1912. Gilbert B. Grosvenor, the charismatic head of the National Geographic, suggested to Bingham that he should have certain key images hand-coloured as lantern slides to make them more appealing.

Indeed at this stage Grosvenor seems to have been more aware of the photographic value of Machu Picchu and its potential exploitation than Bingham, who had yet to fully comprehend the magnitude of what he had discovered. Grosvenor offered to fund Bingham for a far larger return expedition in the summer of 1912, on the condition that Yale matched the National Geographic contribution of $10,000. Bingham was to write a 7,000 word article on Machu Picchu for the magazine, to be illustrated with a substantial number of photographs.

In April 1912,
National Geographic
magazine ran an announcement to this effect, together with the first two published photographs of the ruins. Neither picture was particularly prepossessing – in one Sergeant Carrasco is standing by the Temple of the Three Windows, in the other by the Principal Temple.
Bingham had included Carrasco more to give a human scale to the buildings than to commemorate his presence, and the police sergeant’s lugubrious expression does nothing for the composition. Clearly the next set of photographs would have to be considerably better if they were to grab the public’s attention, and be less haphazard in their execution – at one point in 1911, Bingham had managed to lose his main camera.