The Last Days of the Incas

by KIM MACQUARRIE

  As the newly conquered province was being reorganized so that its indigenous people and resources could be smoothly exploited by the Inca elite, construction also began on the new provincial capital. In general, the Incas preferred their provincial capitals to be situated on level areas with good visibility over the surrounding region. In the upper Vilcabamba Valley, Pachacuti himself probably selected a hilltop site located at an elevation of ten thousand feet and that overlooked the fertile valley below. The official town built there became known as Vitcos and eventually contained royal houses, a plaza, an administrative complex, storage facilities, a sun temple, a hilltop fortress, and residential dwellings.

  As with most provincial capitals, the various buildings were constructed in the Incas’ pirca style—rough stones set in adobe—while the royal dwellings contained at least some of the classic, imperial style stonework used in the capital. According to Titu Cusi, both Pachacuti and his son Tupac Inca had houses built in Vitcos, as did Manco’s father, Huayna Capac. Although Inca emperors would have remained in Vitcos only for brief visits, each would have appointed an ethnic Inca governor who would have permanently lived in the hilltop capital.*

  Sometime after the reconquest of the area by Tupac Inca, Inca administrators selected a site for a frontier outpost and trading center located more than five thousand feet lower down the Andes than Vitcos and about a three days’ journey away. They called the site “Vilcabamba,” meaning the “sacred plain.” Here imported mit’a laborers set about hacking down the thick, tropical trees with stone or bronze axes in order to clear the area before building. After designing a plaza and engineering a water delivery system for the settlement, Inca architects then supervised the construction of buildings that were mostly of rough pirca construction and had typical, gabled roofs covered in a thatch made from imported ichu grass from the highlands. Inca administrators next ordered mitmaqcuna colonists to settle the area in order to clear the land and plant coca plantations and also to begin trading goods manufactured in the Andes in exchange for produce and raw materials from the local Amazonian tribes. Local indigenous groups apparently also resided within Vilcabamba, at least temporarily, for the remains of what may have been their cylindrical stone dwellings have been found, lying scattered among the ruins of the city.

  When roughly half a century later Manco Inca abandoned Pachacuti’s royal estate and makeshift fortress of Ollantaytambo, the twenty-one-year-old emperor ironically sought refuge in one of the very first provinces that his great-grandfather had conquered: the rugged Vilcabamba.

  Vilcabamba, then—located some one hundred miles northwest of Cuzco—and not Machu Picchu—located a mere fifty miles from the capital—became Manco Inca’s capital-in-exile. Surrounded by thick tropical forests, accessible only by steep and difficult trails, and near several rivers upon which Manco could escape, if necessary, Vilcabamba must have seemed to Manco to be an ideal location where he could set about constructing a new capital city and from which he could carry out his guerrilla war. Yet even though Manco eventually built a palace for himself, there was no escaping the fact that his jungle city had originally been designed as an administrative center, not as a royal estate. Of the roughly four hundred buildings that have partially survived, the majority are of rough pirca construction—uncut stones laid in clay mortar. Only a limited number were built in the Incas’ imperial style. Manco’s move to Vilcabamba in 1537, therefore, was a bit as if the president of the United States, circa the 1840s, had suddenly abandoned the White House and had been forced to move his entire administration to a roughly hewn fort located somewhere on the western frontier.

  Vilcabamba, therefore, had few of the physical luxuries that Manco’s royal ancestors had been accustomed to. Here there were no commanding heights from which to survey the surrounding countryside; the weather was warmer and more humid than the Inca elite normally preferred, and here, too, there was little imperial architecture, such as Pachacuti had ordered to be built at Machu Picchu, Ollantaytambo, Pisac, and in Cuzco. The inhabitants of Vilcabamba, fighting a nearly perpetual guerrilla war with the nearby Spanish invaders, spent most of their energy and resources simply trying to keep their tiny kingdom alive; there was little time or inclination to undertake grandiose architectural projects in a city that, like Cuzco and Vitcos, might at any moment have to be suddenly abandoned.

  It is hardly surprising then, that when Hiram Bingham spent a scant few days at Espíritu Pampa in August of 1911, the dozen or so roughly hewn ruins he discovered there made him doubt whether these could have ever formed a part of Vilcabamba—the fabled capital of the last four Inca emperors. Although the location of the ruins seemed to roughly match the descriptions of Vilcabamba in the chronicles, Bingham expected that Manco’s city would have had much better architecture. Machu Picchu, Bingham felt—with its more spectacular location and with its abundant imperial architecture—must surely have been the Incas’ final capital.

  The fact that Machu Picchu was not Vilcabamba, however, but rather one of Pachacuti’s royal estates, makes it much more understandable why it was difficult to find any reference to Machu Picchu or Huayna Picchu in the Spanish chronicles. By the time the Spaniards invaded Cuzco in 1534, the citadel at Machu Picchu more than likely had already been largely abandoned. Any members of Pachacuti’s royal panaca who had been living at Machu Picchu at the time no doubt would have hurried back to Cuzco during the chaos following the Spaniards’ arrival. Their servants, meanwhile, who were drawn from throughout the empire, would have also abandoned the royal enclave, either returning with their masters to Cuzco or else departing for their own homes. Like an expensive resort that requires high maintenance yet whose owners no longer have any income, Pachacuti’s royal estate was likely abandoned as Inca systems of taxation, labor, and leisure time all simultaneously collapsed.

  Stripped by its owners of its sacred metals and with no political or military significance, Machu Picchu would have held little interest for the invading Spaniards. It is unlikely, in fact, that any Spaniard ever visited the site—otherwise its religious temples would no doubt have been destroyed.* Soon, cloud forest vegetation would have obscured the Inca roads into the area and would have overgrown the palaces and buildings. Within probably less than a decade after its abandonment, Pachacuti’s finest architectural jewel would have scarcely been visible to anyone traveling far below on the valley floor.

  Since the Spaniards tended overwhelmingly to write about what the Spaniards were interested in, and omitted almost everything else, it shouldn’t be surprising then that both Bingham and Savoy had difficulty finding any references to Machu Picchu in the Spanish chronicles. Eventually, however, modern scholars did find in a few scattered Spanish documents a number of references to a place called “Picho” that more than likely referred to Machu Picchu. A report in 1565, for example, written by a Spanish emissary traveling from Cuzco to Vilcabamba stated, “that night, I slept at the foot of a snowy summit in the abandoned [Inca] town of Condormarca where there was a bridge in the ancient style that crossed the Vitcos River [that is, the Vilcabamba River] in order to go to [Ollantay]tambo and to Sapamarca and to Picho, which is a peaceful land.”

  In 1568, four years before the final sacking of Vilcabamba, another Spanish document mentioned a site called “the village of Picho,” located in the same area where Machu Picchu is today. Three centuries would elapse, however, before the actual name “Picchu” would surface, this time on a map published in 1865 by the Italian geographer and explorer Antonio Raimondi. The latter included on his map a peak called “Machu Picchu,” jutting up alongside the Urubamba River. Ten years later, the French explorer Charles Wiener would travel from Ollantaytambo up over the Panticalla Pass until he arrived at the Urubamba River at the old bridge crossing of Chuquichaca. In a book he published in 1880, Wiener wrote of how locals in Ollantaytambo had told him about “still other [ancient Inca] towns, about Huaina-Picchu and about Matcho-Picchu, and I decided to make a final excursion towards th
e east [to look for them], before continuing my route towards the south.” Wiener, however, chose to travel downriver from Chuquichaca to the plantation of Santa Ana instead of heading upriver, in the direction of Machu Picchu, as a road along the Urubamba River between Santa Ana and Ollantaytambo would not be built for another fifteen years and the river was not navigable. Wiener did, however, make a detailed map of the Urubamba Valley, on which he included two peaks and marked them with the names Matchopicchu and Huaynapicchu.

  Although local Peruvians had told Wiener that there were Inca ruins at this location, the explorer was nevertheless unable to follow up on the leads he had been given. If he had, then no doubt there would be a bronze plaque dedicated to him at the ruins of Machu Picchu today—and few would have ever heard of Hiram Bingham.

  Nearly a century after having been led to the ruins that would eventually immortalize his name, however, Hiram Bingham and his discoveries still provoke controversy. Bingham’s 1911 visit to Machu Picchu, in fact, continues to prompt a frequently asked question: should Bingham be given the credit for having discovered the most famous archaeological ruins in the New World? Or should that credit be reserved for those who had obviously discovered Machu Picchu before him?

  Three Peruvian families, after all, were already living beside the peak of Machu Picchu and had partially cleared the ruins before Bingham’s visit. In addition, the farmer-guide Melchor Arteaga had not only visited the ruins, but apparently had even been leasing the land to the families living there. Bingham, as mentioned, had found the name of an even earlier explorer written on one of the ruin’s walls, along with the date of his visit: “Lizarraga 1902.” The inscription was that of Agustín Lizarraga, a local muleteer whom Bingham later met. Lizarraga had lived nearby on the valley floor for more than thirty years and obviously felt the ruins of sufficient importance to have written his name in charcoal on one of the walls nine years before the arrival of the tall North American.* The difference, of course, was that Lizarraga had staked his claim of discovery with a bit of charcoal and had no access to national or international publications. At least three other people had told Bingham where to look for the ruins, although none of them had actually visited them, and one of them, Albert Giesecke, even told Bingham to contact a farmer who lived there named Melchor Arteaga, who could lead him to the ruins.

  Clearly, then, a number of people in the region knew about the ruins at Machu Picchu and at least some of those had visited or even lived among them. A few of these in turn had passed this information on to Hiram Bingham. Surprisingly, however, after Bingham’s discovery of Machu Picchu, Bingham himself made no mention of anyone else’s help. In his final book, Lost City of the Incas, in fact, Bingham bluntly wrote that “The professors in the University of Cuzco knew nothing of any ruins down the [Urubamba] valley.” This was only technically true, of course, if one did not include the rector of that same university.

  In a similar fashion, Bingham “forgot” to mention other information that he either brought with him or else had examined prior to his discovery. While Bingham stated that during his 1911 trip that “We had with us the sheets of Antonio Raimondi’s great [1865] map which covered the region we proposed to explore,” he omitted the fact that Raimondi’s map clearly had the peak of Machu Picchu written in large type on it and in the correct location. Bingham further claimed that “We did not know until after our return to New Haven [in 1911] that the French explorer Charles Wiener had heard there were ruins in Huayna Picchu and Machu Picchu which he was unable to reach.” Only a year earlier, however, in an article published in the American Anthropologist, Bingham had obviously carefully examined Wiener’s book for he even cited a footnote in it: “Charles Wiener, in his very unreliable but highly interesting Perou et Bolivie (Paris 1880),” Bingham wrote, “says ([in a] footnote, p. 294) that Choquequirau has also been visited by another Frenchman….” Whether or not Wiener’s book was “unreliable,” the map that Wiener included in it—which clearly showed the locations of the Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu peaks—and the story he related of having been told that there were ruins located there, were anything but unreliable.

  By deliberately omitting the substantial help he received from a number of individuals, by downplaying the information he had at his disposal, and even resorting to the use of some fictional techniques, Bingham effectively rewrote the actual history leading up to his famous discovery. Bingham no doubt instinctively understood that it would have been far less interesting and far less dramatic to have related in his books the simple truth: that he had been told in Cuzco where to look and that he even had a map or maps with him that showed him where to look.

  Similarly, Bingham the historian was not beyond suppressing other information if such information tended to contradict his own ideas and conclusions. In a scientific monograph he wrote in 1930, for example, he cited a 1565 report by the Spaniard Diego Rodríguez de Figueroa. In the report Figueroa had stated that along the Urubamba River, between Ollantaytambo and the hanging bridge at Chuquichaca, lay a town called “Picho.” “This may be a reference to Machu Picchu,” Bingham wrote cautiously in a small footnote, [since] “It is the only thing approaching it that we have succeeded in finding anywhere in the early chronicles.” Bingham clearly knew, however, that if Machu Picchu in 1565 were indeed called “Picchu” or “Picho”—at the same time that the rebel capital of the Incas was called Vilcabamba—then obviously Machu Picchu was not Vilcabamba.

  In Lost City of the Incas, however—by which time he had staked his reputation on the fact that Machu Picchu was Vilcabamba—Bingham once again quoted Figueroa’s 1565 report, but this time he completely omitted the section that referred to “Picho.” As the American anthropologist and Inca specialist John Rowe later wrote about the surprising omission, Bingham obviously knew that including it “would have been fatal to his fantasy identification of Machu Picchu with ‘Vilcabamba the Old.’”

  Despite Hiram Bingham’s shortcomings, however, it is also true that in 1911 the ancient Inca citadel of Machu Picchu was unknown except to local people. No scientist or historian—Peruvian or otherwise—had visited the spectacular, ridgetop citadel located just fifty miles from Cuzco. No one had mapped it, no one had photographed it, no one had studied it, nor had anyone published an account of a visit there. For nearly four centuries before the arrival of Hiram Bingham, the ruins of Machu Picchu had been hidden from the rest of the world.

  Bingham was not only the first person to inform the world about the existence of Machu Picchu, but he also led three, multidisciplinary scientific teams that mapped, excavated, measured and explored the site and the surrounding area.* Thus, even though Hiram Bingham was certainly not the first visitor since the fall of the Inca Empire to wander about the abandoned ruins of Machu Picchu, he was incontestably the site’s first scientific discoverer. Other scientists and explorers had come close—Antonio Raimondi, Charles Wiener, Albert Giesecke—but Bingham had beaten them all. As the writer Anthony Brandt wrote in the introduction to a modern edition of Bingham’s 1922 Inca Land, “Bingham was an explorer, not an archaeologist; it was not his destiny to understand Machu Picchu, only to find it.”

  Thirty-seven years after discovering Machu Picchu, Hiram Bingham briefly returned to Peru, in order to attend the inauguration of the first paved road to zigzag up the hill to the ruins from a railway station on the valley floor. As the still gaunt, now gray-haired explorer stood in full view of the Incas’ sacred peaks, representatives of the Peruvian government christened the new road the Carretera Hiram Bingham (“The Hiram Bingham Highway”). Eight years later, in 1956, at the age of eighty-one, Hiram Bingham passed away. The boy who had longed for “magnificence”—and who had become a lieutenant colonel, a U.S. senator, and had discovered the ruins of Machu Picchu—was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery. The ancient Inca ruins that Bingham had been fortunate enough to stumble upon one fine July day in 1911, meanwhile, are now visited on average by more than one th
ousand people per day and overall by more than half a million people a year.

  If Hiram Bingham tended to seize the lion’s share of the credit for his discoveries and took liberties with or suppressed certain facts in order to enhance his own reputation or to support his theories, the American explorer Gene Savoy tended to venture even further off the path of historical accuracy and to plunge head over heels into his own self-created myths. Even though by the time Savoy ventured into the Vilcabamba area he was able to travel by railway alongside the Urubamba River and then by truck on a road that was being built up into the Vilcabamba Valley, Savoy’s description of the Vilcabamba region could have been lifted directly from a Victorian travelogue. As with Bingham’s popular books, the familiar theme of the brave white explorer in search of fabled lost ruins in the midst of a hostile jungle is forcefully pounded home in Savoy’s 1970 book, Antisuyo: The Search for the Lost Cities of the Amazon:

  We are in a tropical country where without medical treatment the slightest infection can spread like wildfire. We will soon be in snake country where the deadly bushmaster, the largest venomous snake in the Americas growing up to twelve feet in length, abounds. The chimuco, as it is known, attacks anything on sight. This deadly pit viper is the most feared of all the baneful creatures in the jungle. Then there is the fer-delance, the jergon, and many others whose bites spell death. The dangers of tarantulas, scorpions, vampire bats, biting ants and poisonous plants are exaggerated without proper medicines. Fortunately we have many other medical supplies with us. (However, there is nothing in our medicine chest that will handle yellow fever, malaria, leprosy, beriberi, and many other tropical diseases. Nor is there medicine for the bite of a special fly that is believed to cause uta, a malady that eats away the soft tissue of the mouth, nose, and ears.) The water and food is infested with parasites that invade the delicate intestines, liver, and blood. Nevertheless, these are dangers we are prepared to contend with.