by Mark Adams
“What would you say if I told you I wanted to quit my job and go follow in the footsteps of the guy who found Machu Picchu?”
“I guess . . .” She paused. Somewhere in the background, an angry kitten meowed. “I guess I’d say, ‘What took you so long?’”
SEVEN
Explorer
Across Venezuela and Colombia
As he convalesced from appendicitis at the Mitchell family estate in Connecticut, Bingham undertook an accounting of his life. He was soon to be a father to his fourth child. He lived like a man of wealth, but in many ways he was a snazzily dressed marionette whose strings were pulled by his in-laws—in particular, Annie Mitchell, an imposing woman who ruled over the affairs of her husband and daughter. Bingham believed more strongly than ever that his unorthodox choice to specialize in South American history had been the right one. The United States’ crushing defeat of Spain’s decrepit imperial forces in the Spanish-American War of 1898 had made the southward spread of North American influence and commerce inevitable. The U.S. Congress, after seriously considering digging a shipping passageway through Nicaragua, had just voted to take over the financially catastrophic Isthmian Canal project from the French. The conveniently slim nation of Panama had only been founded in 1903 when President Theodore Roosevelt assisted Panamanian revolutionaries in liberating their province from Colombia—a bit of gunboat diplomacy that left many South Americans suspicious of their northern neighbor’s motives in the region. Bingham’s careerist gamble looked smarter every year.
Bingham didn’t really enjoy teaching, though. Professors were anonymous creatures that played to small audiences. It was the research and writing half of academia that he loved. Bingham had inherited a deep respect for books and authors from his father and grandfather; in addition to their translation work, Hiram I had written the 600-page doorstop classic A Residence of Twenty-one Years in the Sandwich Islands.2 If Hiram III used his medical hiatus from Princeton to trace the route of the doomed Scotsmen who settled in the Daríen, he might tack on a fact-finding mission to Venezuela and Colombia to begin researching what would be the first major biography in English of Simón Bolívar.
Alfreda’s childbirth in the summer of 1906 was a difficult one, and Bingham accompanied her to New York City for postpartum surgery. While his wife was recuperating in Manhattan, Bingham made the acquaintance of Hamilton Rice, a Boston-born physician with interests strikingly similar to his own. Roughly the same age, Rice, whom The New York Times described in his obituary as a man “as much at home in the elegant swirl of Newport society as in the steaming jungles of Brazil,” could have been Bingham’s more accomplished doppelganger. He had descended from a prestigious lineage, studied medicine at Harvard and later married into one of America’s richest families. Rice had already visited the Caucasus and paddled the far reaches of Hudson Bay. He’d also made his first journey to South America, crossing the Andes from Ecuador and traveling down through largely unmapped territory to the Amazon, following the route of the legendary one-eyed sixteenth-century Spanish explorer and conquistador Francisco de Orellana.
To Bingham, Rice’s MD would have been less impressive than the letters FRGS, which Rice was allowed to place after his signature as a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. The RGS was the world’s most prestigious explorers club. Its members had included Richard Burton, who had snuck into Mecca disguised as an Arab; David Livingstone, who’d sought the Nile River source (and who was in turn sought by reporter Henry Stanley, who greeted him with the immortal words “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”); and Charles Darwin, who had done pretty well for himself after his own South American travels.
During Bingham’s talks with Rice, the idea emerged that the two men should follow the route of Bolívar’s desperate 1819 march across the Andes of Venezuela and Colombia, a military gambit comparable in difficulty and historical impact to Hannibal’s elephant parade through the Alps. As he would do again and again in years to come, Bingham rationalized as duty his need to spend six months away from his family. “Let us not complain at our long separation but rejoice in the opportunity to accomplish a good piece of work,” he wrote Alfreda from South America. He was more passionate, and perhaps more honest, in writing to his father: “I feel the Bingham blood stirring in my veins as I start for little-known regions, as nearly all my Bingham ancestors for ten generations have done before me.”
By the time Bingham and Rice departed Caracas on January 3, 1907, their group had expanded to include two Caribbean assistants who were shepherding one thousand pounds of gear on five mules, supplemented by a wooden cart and two Venezuelan drivers. Bingham had been influenced by an article in Scribner’s Magazine by the globetrotting celebrity war correspondent Richard Harding Davis that listed items useful on an adventurous journey, including “a folding cot and a folding chair.” Dressed in a British pith helmet and riding boots, Bingham looked like he was off to fight the Zulus. The party brought along nearly enough arms to do so: “two Winchester rifles, a Mauser, and two Winchester repeating shotguns, beside three revolvers and a sufficient supply of ammunition.”
If Bingham had been hoping for a taste of adventure, he found it. The book that eventually emerged from the journey, The Journal of an Expedition Across Venezuela and Colombia, was neither a Bolívar biography nor a scholarly examination of the Darien scheme. It was a chronicle of a perilous trip into a deeply foreign world. Venezuela was a land of leper colonies and colonial ruins, where howler monkeys and screaming macaws populated the upper reaches of trees with trunks that grew up to twenty feet thick. When the party tried to carry its large cache of firearms across the border into Colombia, a squad of four Venezuelan soldiers accused Bingham’s group of smuggling arms to Colombian revolutionaries. Bingham’s team had to sneak the arsenal out in their luggage. Colombia was even stranger and more dangerous. For days at a time, almost all of the famished team’s sustenance—a diet of stringy “storks, cranes and wild birds”—depended on Bingham’s skill as a hunter.
Sadly, Bingham’s prose does not seem to have been inspired by Richard Harding Davis’s vivid war reportage. (A New York Times review of a later book could apply to all of Bingham’s written work: “His facts are extremely interesting; his presentation of them is clumsy and tedious.”) The few bright spots in Bingham’s narrative are his first encounters with South American “savages,” the Yaruro people, whom he found “very slightly clothed and bearing spears, bows and arrows.” He caught one native woman just as she was about to hurl a fresh cow patty at him, presumably trying to stir up trouble. In a friendlier encounter, a Yaruro chief:put his hand on my shoulder, patted me on the back, took off my pith helmet, put it on himself, ran his fingers through my hair, said “bonito” [pretty], patted his heart saying “contento” [happy], patted my heart, smiled, and asked for my cartridge belt and then for my gloves.
By journey’s end, the group had traveled nearly one thousand miles in 115 days. Bingham was extremely proud of completing what he boasted to The New York Herald was not merely an interesting expedition, but “a feat hitherto not accomplished.” Rice, who had grown weary of Bingham’s sometimes reckless behavior—the novice explorer had been quite willing to unholster his gun to get South Americans’ attention—ditched his partner in Bogotá. Rice would concentrate his future explorations in the Amazon, where he played the wellfunded foil to the British explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett in the fruitless search for the vanished jungle metropolis that Fawcett called the City of Z. Neither man could have dreamed that the greatest prize in South America actually lay undiscovered less than a hundred miles west of Cusco.
Bingham had faced down “great savages, swollen rivers . . . and the scarcity of everything,” including food. The idea of resuming the drudgery of his duties at Princeton, once merely unpleasant, was now unthinkable. Within days of his return from Colombia, he was off to Yale to plead his case with President Hadley once again. Unbeknownst to Bingham, Hadley had already surveyed the members of the hi
story faculty, who had reacted coolly to his inquiries about hiring Bingham as a junior professor in their department.
Hadley presented Bingham with two other possible positions at Yale: assistant professor of geography or lecturer in South American history. The geography job was secure: a full-time salaried position with a full teaching load. The lecturer position would be more or less like a job in the William Morris mailroom—a low-paying gig that might lead to something bigger should the young striver prove himself. It would also allow Bingham fewer teaching responsibilities and more flexibility to continue exploring—a pursuit that Hadley encouraged with gusto. Money wasn’t a serious factor, since Alfreda’s parents provided free housing and $10,000 annual allowance—about five times the yearly salary of an assistant professor.
Bingham happily accepted the lecturing position. After nearly a decade away, he was returning to his beloved Yale. His timing was perfect.
EIGHT
Legend of the Lost City
Cusco
Almost from the moment he took his new post at Yale, Bingham flourished. A reason to return to South America pre-A sented itself when Secretary of State Elihu Root, who had provided Bingham with an extremely handy letter of introduction on his previous trip, selected him as the youngest U.S. representative to the Pan-American Scientific Congress, to be held in Santiago, Chile, in December 1908. By the end of his first year of teaching in New Haven, Bingham was at the White House shaking hands with President Theodore Roosevelt, no slouch himself as an adventurer, at a reception for the delegation. Good news continued to arrive: Bingham had been named a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society for his work in Venezuela and Colombia.
Aside from attending the Santiago conference, Bingham’s plans for his next trip south were hazy, though typically ambitious. He had another major expedition in mind. This time, he would follow “the most historic highway in South America, the old trade route between Lima, Potosí, and Buenos Aires.” Bolívar had used the route during some of his later military campaigns. Beyond that, it seems that Bingham just wanted to have a good look around.
The travelogue that Bingham published after the journey, Across South America, reads like two books welded together. The first half, presumably written with his political sponsors in mind, is devoted to tabulating business opportunities for American companies and making Twain-like observations such as “I have been in eight South American capitals and in none have I seen such bad manners as in Buenos Aires.” One of his Yale students, Huntington “Coot” Smith Jr., joined him for this first leg of the journey. After a one-thousand-mile train ride through Argentina, the pair encountered “two rough looking Anglo-Saxons” at the border with Bolivia. One of the men, a robber “driven out of the United States by the force of law and order and hounded to death all over the world by Pinkerton detectives” was likely an associate of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The gang leaders had been killed days before in a shoot-out with the Bolivian Army. Bingham’s guide took advantage of the opportunity and bought the bandits’ mules.
In Bolivia, Bingham had his first exposure to the two primary indigenous peoples of the Andes. He was not impressed by the Quechuas he met, despite their having descended from the populace of the oncegreat Inca empire. After watching a “poor, half clad Indian” submit meekly to a savage whipping from an army officer, Bingham concluded that “there is no doubt about the Quechuas being a backward race . . . bred to look upon subjection as their natural lives, they bear it as the dispensation of Providence.” The Indians’ reliance on chewing mildly narcotic coca leaves, he wrote, had left them “stupid, willing to submit to any injury” and, what must have been a high crime to Bingham, “lacking in all ambition.” Even worse were their neighbors the Aymaras, who in addition to possessing all the faults of the Quechuas were “insolent and unruly.” Bolivia’s oligarchic government was an absolute necessity in Bingham’s eyes, “the only possible outcome of an attempt to simulate the forms of the Republic in a country whose inhabitants are so deficient both mentally and morally.”
After attending the Pan-American Scientific Congress, Bingham entered Peru for the first time in January 1909. He had picked up a new companion in Santiago, swapping Coot Smith for another well-connected young man, Clarence Hay, the son of a former U.S. secretary of state. The two men rode the train to Cusco. The city that had once been the gold-plated nexus of the vast Inca kingdom, the royal seat of one of the largest empires on earth, was now a seedy provincial capital notorious for what Bingham called its “unspeakably filthy” streets.
Hardly had the explorer disembarked from his train, however, than he began to fall under Cusco’s spell. Approaching along the bank of the Huatanay River, he caught his first glimpse of the Roman Catholic monastery of Santo Domingo, constructed atop the convex Inca walls of the Koricancha, the ancient Temple of the Sun. He was mesmerized by the city’s “long walls of beautifully cut stone, laid without cement, and fitted together with the patience of expert stone cutters”—walls whose perfection he would remember two years later when he came upon Machu Picchu. The palaces of the Incas—for that was the title of the supreme ruler, the Sapa Inca, or more commonly just the Inca—had once ringed the square. Conquistadors had constructed new homes atop their royal foundations.
The stone buidings of the Incas, Machu Picchu in particular, are the empire’s most easily recognizable legacy. The most important ones, constructed for religious purposes or for members of the royal family, are famous for their jigsaw-puzzle masonry; the stones are held together without mortar, wedged so tightly that it is impossble to insert a knife blade between them. (It is equally impossible for a visitor to take a guided tour of Cusco during which this fact is not demonstrated.) How the Incas, who possessed no iron tools, no draft animals and no wheeled vehicles, carved and transported these stones is still something of a mystery.3 The likeliest explanation is that the Incas had an enormous, well-organized work force that employed different methods from those that developed in Europe. Where an artisan in Florence might have taken a chisel to a chunk of marble, his counterpart in Cusco chipped off bits of granite with an especially dense hammer stone until he achieved the exact shape he wanted. The interlocking stonework serves an engineering purpose in addition to an artistic one. During earthquakes, mortar crumbles, causing walls to topple. The interlocking stones in an Inca wall are said to “dance” during seismic turbulence before falling back into place. When a huge earthquake struck Cusco in 1950, many Spanish buildings collapsed, revealing intact Inca walls underneath.
Shortly after arriving, Bingham learned that word had been sent out from Lima that the American delegado to the scientific conference—a doctor from a prestigious institution—was to receive the warmest hospitality from local officials. This included a guided tour of Sacsahuaman, the extraordinary stone edifice that overlooks Cusco.
It’s safe to say that if it still looked as it did in the sixteenth century, Sacsahuaman, and not Machu Picchu, would be the most famous archaeological site in the Western Hemisphere. At its peak, historian John Hemming has suggested, the quarter-mile-long structure—a massive, three-tiered citadel with three towers at the center, constructed in the imperial-quality stonework that the Incas reserved for their most important buildings—would have resembled a gigantic granite battleship. Huge, perfectly carved boulders remain fixed in the original zigzag walls. One has been estimated to measure twenty-eight feet in height and to weigh more than three hundred tons. The blocks seem even more incredible in that when the Incas wanted to move something big, they pulled it themselves. Even after generations of local builders had carried off any stones not too large to budge, Bingham was stupefied by what he saw. “There are few sights in the world more impressive than these Cyclopean walls,” he wrote. “What remains is the most impressive spectacle of man’s handiwork that I have ever seen in America.” When I visited with Alex a hundred years later, it was hard to disagree.
Continuing with his itinerary, Bingham departed Cus
co for Ayacucho, the site of Bolívar’s final crushing defeat of the Spanish forces in 1824. The road he followed had once been a major Inca thoroughfare; Francisco Pizarro, the wily Spanish conqueror of Peru, had endured its roller-coaster climbs and descents on his way to the Inca empire’s capital. As it often does near Cusco, the topography transformed almost immediately. “The trail, a rocky stairway not unlike the bed of a mountain torrent, led us rapidly into a warm tropical region whose dense foliage and tangled vines were grateful enough after the bleak mountain plateau,” Bingham wrote. “Parti-colored lantanas ran riot through a maze of agaves and hungry creepers. We had entered a new world.”
Four days out of Cusco, Bingham’s party was given an enthusiastic welcome in the town of Abancay. The local prefect, J. J. Nuñez, buttonholed the visitor and begged him to make a detour to Choquequirao—an old Inca fortress that clung to a steep ridge more than a mile above the roaring Apurimac River, a glacier-fed source of the mighty Amazon. The name Choquequirao means “cradle of gold” in Quechua. Nuñez had raised thousands of dollars to blaze a trail to the nearly inaccessible ruins and take part in what was—and still remains—one of the great Peruvian pastimes: searching for treasures left behind by the Incas.4 It was from Nuñez that Bingham first heard a legend that had grown around Choquequirao: that it was the final refuge of the Incas, thousands of whom were thought to have escaped to this hidden citadel in the clouds when the Spaniards invaded in 1532. With them, according to the tale, the Incas had carried the most spectacular treasures of the empire, “instead of letting it fall into the hands of Pizarro,” Bingham wrote. Supposedly, when the last Incas had died out in their mountain sanctuary, the secret location of this ancient loot was forgotten as the buildings of Choquequirao were enveloped by the mountain’s fast-growing vegetation.
