So many natives attended the death of their King and Lord that those who were present say that it was only possible to push through the streets and squares with the greatest of difficulty. And since there was no room left to stand, the Indians climbed the walls and roofs of the houses. Even the many large hills that can be seen from the city were packed with Indians.
An eyewitness recalled that:
The open spaces, roofs and windows in the parishes of Carmenca and San Cristóbal were so crowded with spectators that if an orange had been thrown down it could not have reached the ground anywhere, so densely were the people packed.
As crowds of gawking Spaniards, natives, and African slaves watched, Tupac Amaru rode “a street mule draped in black velvet, and he himself was completely covered in mourning.” The emperor’s hands had been bound together with rope while another rope had been tied around his neck, lest the Inca king should try to escape.
The Inca was taken from the fortress, through the public streets of the city, with a guard of four hundred Cañari Indians, having their lances in their hands…. He was accompanied by the two monks, one on either side…. They went along teaching and saying things of much consolation to the soul, until they reached the scaffold, which was reared on high in the center of the great square, fronting the cathedral. Here they got down, and the Fathers remained with the Inca, comforting his soul with holy preparation.
According to some accounts, just before he arrived at the scaffold, Tupac Amaru’s sister, María Cusi Huarcay, suddenly appeared at a window, crying out to him
“Where are you going my brother, Prince and sole King of the four suyus?” She tried to move forward [through the crowd but] the ecclesiastics stopped her…. [Tupac Amaru] remained very grave and humble [throughout]. The balconies were packed with people, [with Spanish] women and important ladies who, moved by compassion, wept for him, witnessing an unfortunate young man being led away to be killed.
Tupac Amaru now ascended the scaffold, which had been draped in black cloth, aware as he did so that the Spaniards had also murdered both his father, Manco Inca, and his uncle Atahualpa.
As the multitude of Indians who … completely filled up [the square] saw that sad and deplorable spectacle [and knowing] that their Lord and Inca was about to die there, they deafened the skies and made them resound with their cries and uproar…. [Tupac Amaru’s] relatives, who were near him, celebrated that sad tragedy with tears and sobbing.
Standing alongside his executioner—who was an ethnic Cañari and thus an enemy of the Incas—and with a black-robed priest at his side, Tupac Amaru looked out over the vast multitude and slowly raised his right hand. He then “let it fall. With a lordly mind he alone remained calm, and all the noise was followed by a silence so profound that no living soul moved, either among those who were in the square or among those at a distance.” Then, when all had become silent and everyone on the square strained to see the last legitimate heir of the four suyus and to hear what he might say, Tupac Amaru, the Royal Serpent, addressed the crowd:
“Lords, you are [gathered] here from all the four suyus. Let it be known that I am a Christian and they have baptized me and I wish to die under the law of God—and I have to die. And that everything that my ancestors the Incas and I have told you up till now—that you should worship the sun god, Punchao, and the shrines, idols, stones, rivers, mountains, and sacred things—is a lie and completely false. When we used to tell you that we were entering [a temple] to speak to the sun, and that it told you to do what we said and that it spoke—this … [was] a lie. Because it did not speak rather we did, for it is an object of gold and cannot speak. And my brother Titu Cusi told me that whenever I wished to tell the Indians [to do] something, that I should enter alone into the [sun temple of] Punchao and that no one was to enter with me … and that afterwards I should come out and tell the Indians that it had spoken to me, and that it had said whatever I wanted to tell them, because the Indians perform better what they have been commanded to do and … [they better obey what] they venerate—and [the god they most venerated] was the [sun god].”
… And … Tupac Amaru … [asked the crowd] to forgive him for having deceived them until now, and to pray to God for him. [And] all of this he said … with [great] royal authority and majesty, neither contrived nor artificial but very natural … despite his being a prisoner and in this predicament.
After delivering this surprising speech, spoken in runasimi so that few Spaniards other than a handful of priests understood it, and which no doubt stunned his native listeners,
The Inca then received consolation from the Fathers who were at his side and, taking leave of all, he put his head on the block, like a lamb. The executioner then came forward and, taking the hair in his left hand, he severed the head with a knife at one blow, and held it on high for all to see. As the head was severed the bells of the cathedral began to ring, and were followed by those of all the monasteries and parish churches in the city. The execution caused the greatest sorrow and brought tears to all eyes.
Thus on September 24, 1572, thirty-six years after Manco Inca had launched his great rebellion, the last Inca emperor—Tupac Amaru—lived no more.
16 THE SEARCH FOR THE “LOST CITY” OF THE INCAS
“Something hidden! Go and find it!
Go and look behind the ranges—
Something lost behind the ranges.
Lost and waiting for you.
Go!”
RUDYARD KIPLING, THE EXPLORER, 1898
ON JUNE 8, 1911—339 YEARS AFTER THE EXECUTION OF TUPAC Amaru—a United Fruit Company steamship lay docked in New York City, preparing for departure. As stevedores busily untied the ship’s moorings and passengers waved goodbye to the crowd of well-wishers jammed onto the dock, the steamer slowly began motoring out into the harbor in the direction of the Statue of Liberty and out toward the open sea. The ship was bound for Panama, where a transoceanic canal was currently being dug that would not be completed for another three years. At least a handful of the passengers on board intended to cross the Isthmus and then take another steamer bound for Peru. Seagulls cried, whirling over the boat and over the slate-gray water, while on board a thirty-five-year-old assistant professor of Latin American history from Yale University named Hiram Bingham looked out over the water. A tall, extremely thin man with close-cropped brown hair and a gaunt, almost ascetic face, Bingham’s goal was to search for the Incas’ capital of Vilcabamba—the legendary city that had been lost to history now for more than three hundred years.
From his research, the six-foot-four, 170-pound Bingham already knew that it had taken nearly forty years of warfare and counterinsurgency campaigns before the Spaniards had finally been able to extinguish the last rebel capital of the Inca Empire. After the conquest of the Inca Empire, Spain had continued to consolidate its grip on its American possessions, gaining in strength and world power in part because of a steady diet of gold and silver sucked from its new colonies like a bat sucks nectar from a glistening tropical flower. A thick blanket of secrecy had then descended over South America, placed there by the continent’s Spanish and Portuguese masters. For more than two centuries, in fact, Spain and Portugal had forbidden any foreign scientists from entering their hard-won possessions, intent on keeping the lands they had conquered to themselves in an effort to prevent the intrusion of European competitors. The fabled capital of Vilcabamba, meanwhile, had gradually become just that: a fable. The story of the reign of the last rebel Inca emperors and of their heroic rebellion had eventually been converted into folk tales that were then passed on orally by the Incas’ descendants or else buried in old Spanish chronicles that had soon gathered dust.
It wasn’t until the turn of the nineteenth century, during the years 1799 to 1805, that a foreign scientist finally managed to explore South America.* The Prussian Alexander von Humboldt visited the Amazon and the Andes and also traveled to Peru. He was the first to map some of its Inca ruins. Humboldt’s writings eventually fuele
d a resurgence of interest in the history of the Inca Empire and the last Inca kings. The story of a lost, legendary Inca city whose location had disappeared and that thus remained to be discovered seized the imaginations of not a few nineteenth-century explorers. By the time Hiram Bingham set off to search for Vilcabamba in 1911, however, the only ancient ruins that anyone had discovered in the Incas’ former province of Vilcabamba were those at a site called Choqquequirau, located about sixty miles west of Cuzco. Some explorers thought that the ruins of Choqquequirau might be those of Manco Inca’s rebel capital. Hiram Bingham and at least one Peruvian historian, however, were convinced they were wrong.
Despite his unsuccessful childhood attempt to flee his Hawaii home, Bingham had never let go of his dreams of adventuring. He had merely postponed them. Bingham, after all, was a great fan of the stories of the nineteenth-century British novelist Rudyard Kipling, one of whose poems—appropriately enough called “The Explorer”—was Bingham’s personal favorite. Consumed with a desire to escape his impoverished background and to make a name for himself in the world—or, as he put it, to “strive for magnificence”—Bingham married an heir to the Tiffany fortune and then earned a Ph.D. at Yale. Bingham’s specialty was modern South American history, beginning with the wars for independence in the early nineteenth century when, at long last, the South American colonies finally severed their ties with Spain. By 1908, however, three years before he would set off for Vilcabamba, the thirty-three-year-old Bingham was bored with his job as an assistant professor and frustrated by the fact that he had yet to make his mark on the world. When Bingham learned that the upcoming 1908 Pan-American Scientific Congress in Santiago, Chile, was accepting delegates, he seized the opportunity for adventure. He quickly received a leave of absence from Yale, then traveled to Santiago for the conference. Soon afterward, Bingham made his way by sea and rail to Cuzco, where for the first time he visited the ancient capital of the Incas. “My previous studies of South American history had been limited largely to the Spanish Colonial days,” Bingham later wrote, “the wards of independence, and the progress made by the different republics. Archaeology lay outside my field and I knew very little about the Incas except the fascinating story told by [William] Prescott in his famous ‘Conquest of Peru.’”
Wandering about Cuzco, gazing in admiration at the remains of Inca palaces and at the splendor of their intricately cut stones, Bingham was stunned by the handiwork of an ancient civilization that was unlike any he had seen. On the hillside overlooking the city, Bingham was further amazed by the sight of the giant, megalithic fortress of Saqsaywaman, where more than three centuries earlier Juan Pizarro and thousands of natives had lost their lives while caught up in Manco Inca’s rebellion. Bingham wrote:
A little farther up the stream one passes through a massive megalithic gateway and finds one’s self in the presence of the astounding gray-blue Cyclopean walls of Sacsahuaman…. Here, the ancient builders constructed three great terraces, which extend one above another for a third of a mile across the hill between two deep gulches. The lowest terrace of the “fortress” is faced with colossal boulders, many of which weigh ten tons and some weigh more than twenty tons, yet all are fitted together with the utmost precision…. To a superstitious Indian who sees these walls for the first time, they must seem to have been built by gods.
In Cuzco, Bingham soon met the prefect of the nearby province of Apurímac, Juan Núñez, a man who was much impressed by the distinguished North American “doctor,” just arrived from an important scientific congress. Only the year before, Núñez had cleared and explored Inca ruins at a site called Choqquequirau. Whether Choqquequirau, which means “the cradle of gold,” was the actual name of the ancient site, Núñez didn’t know. Thus far, however, it was the only ancient Inca city that had been found in the province of Vilcabamba. The ruins were probably those of Manco Inca’s lost city of Vilcabamba, Núñez told Bingham. He then asked if Bingham would be interested in accompanying him there. Bingham recounted:
The Prefect was particularly anxious that I should visit the ruins and be able to report their importance to the President of Peru. He insisted that as I was a “Doctor” (Ph.D.) and a Government Delegate to a Scientific Congress I must know all about archaeology and could tell him how valuable Choqquequirau was as a site for buried treasure and whether it had been as he believed, Vilcapampa the Old, the Capital of the last four Incas. My protest that he was mistaken in his estimate of my archaeological knowledge was regarded by him merely as evidence of modesty rather than as a true statement of fact….
My efforts to avoid visiting the ruins of Choqquequirau were also laid partly to the very inclement weather and partly to the extreme difficulty of reaching that site. Secretary [of State Elihu] Root had impressed upon us [the U.S. delegates to the scientific congress] the importance of developing international good will by endeavoring in every way to please the officials of the countries we visited. Accordingly, I agreed to the Prefect’s proposal, not knowing that it was destined to lead me into a fascinating field. It was my first introduction to prehistoric America.
So it was that in February 1909, Hiram Bingham III, lecturer in modern South American history, found himself accompanying a mule train that was about to penetrate into a quarter of the Inca Empire the Incas had once referred to as the Antisuyu. It would be Bingham’s first contact with lost Inca ruins:
Magnificent precipices guard the ruins on every side and render Choqquequirau virtually inaccessible to an enemy…. At the top of the southern and outer precipice, five thousand eight hundred feet immediately above the Apurímac river, stands a parapet and the walls of two [Inca] buildings without windows. The view from here, both up and down the valley … surpasses the possibilities of language for adequate description…. Far down the gigantic cañon one catches little glimpses of the Apurímac, a white stream shut in between guardian mountains, so narrowed by the distance that it seems like a mere brooklet. Here and there through the valley are marvelous cataracts, one of which … has a clear fall of over one thousand feet. The panorama in every direction is wonderful in variety, contrast, beauty, and grandeur.
The ruins, fortunately, which previously had been overgrown by jungle scrub, had recently been cleared by Núñez. And although Bingham was untrained in either archaeology or in surveying techniques, he had at least brought along with him a Kodak camera and a book that contained the basics of what to do when encountering little known ancient ruins:
Fortunately I had with me that extremely useful handbook “Hints to Travellers,” published by the Royal Geographical Society. In one of the chapters I found out what should be done when one is confronted by a prehistoric site—take careful measurements and plenty of photographs and describe as accurately as possible all finds. On account of the rain, our photographs were not very successful but we took measurements of all the buildings and made a rough map.
One thing Bingham was quick to notice was that the first explorers to visit Choqquequirau had done so more than seventy years earlier. Inside one Inca building, Bingham found a list of their names scratched onto several slabs of rock:
M. Eugene de Sartiges, 1834
Jose Maria Tejada, Marcelino Leon, 1834
Jose Benigno Samanez, Juan Manuel Rivas Plata, Mariana Cisneros, 1861
Pio Mogrovejo, July 4, 1885
Although Bingham couldn’t have known it at the time, his unanticipated visit to these abandoned Inca ruins, located on a nearly inaccessible ridge in a virtually uninhabited corner of Peru, was a turning point in his career. A chance invitation by a Peruvian prefect would soon alter the course of Bingham’s life—and of South American archaeological history. For the moment, however, Bingham carefully examined the site, as the prefect wanted to know whether the “esteemed” professor thought these were the ruins of Manco Inca’s rebel city or not. Bingham later recorded his impressions:
The walls … [at Choqquequirau] appear to have been built entirely of stone and clay. The constructi
on, compared with that of the Inca palaces in Cuzco, is extremely rude and rough and no two niches or doors are exactly alike. Occasionally the lintels of the doors were made of timber, the builders not having taken the trouble to provide stones wide enough for the purpose.
Elsewhere, Bingham wrote,
Personally, I did not feel so sure that Choqquequirau was the town of Vilcabamba. The ruins did not seem fine enough for an Inca’s residence.
Although an amateur, Bingham was obviously less than impressed by the prefect’s ruins. Surely the Inca emperors, Bingham reasoned—even the final, rebel ones—would have lived in finely wrought palaces made in the imperial style that Bingham had so much admired in Cuzco. It therefore seemed unlikely to Bingham that Choqquequirau had ever housed an Inca emperor and hence could be the lost city of Vilcabamba that the prefect hoped it was.
Arriving back in Lima, Bingham soon met a forty-six-year-old Peruvian historian, Carlos Alberto Romero, who agreed with him. Romero showed Bingham two previously unknown sixteenth-century chronicles that had recently been discovered and published. One had been dictated by Manco’s son Titu Cusi in 1571 and had lain forgotten for more than three hundred years. The second was a report written by Baltasar de Ocampo, a Spaniard who had participated in the sacking of Vilcabamba in 1572 and who had witnessed the execution of Tupac Amaru shortly thereafter. Both accounts contained descriptions of Manco Inca’s capital of Vilcabamba. None of the descriptions seemed to match the physical characteristics Bingham had seen at the ruins of Choqquequirau.
The Last Days of the Incas Page 44
