Lost City of the Incas (Phoenix Press) Read online

  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.

  As Bingham cheerfully admits (his candour is one of the most attractive features of his writing), ‘we were not on the lookout for new Inca ruins and had never heard of Choqquequirau.’ But he accepted the invitation with alacrity, and despite the rigours of travelling there in the wet season, found his resulting experiences compelling.

  He also proved to be a very observant explorer. His view that Choquequirao was primarily a ‘fortress’ may have been contested by later archaeologists, but Bingham’s detailing of the site was conscientious and accurate. I found his plans still the most useful when I travelled to the site in 1982, as did the American explorer Vincent Lee when he went there in the 1990s.

  Bingham’s account in Lost City of the Incas of his initiation into the world of the Incas ends with a famous clarion call to further exploration, inspired by the view from Choquequirao of the rest of the Vilcabamba range:

  Those snow-capped peaks in an unknown and unexplored part of Peru fascinated me greatly. They tempted me to go and see what lay beyond. In the ever famous words of Rudyard Kipling there was ‘Something hidden! Go and find it! Go and look beyond the ranges – Something lost behind the ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!’

  The casual reader of Lost City of the Incas might assume that the die was now cast and that Bingham was determined to return to Peru. In fact it merely confirmed in him a desire to be ‘an explorer’, as he now chose to state his profession in Who’s Who in America. He didn’t mind where he went as long as it would make his name. On returning to the States, he tried to raise money for a number of expeditions: to Mexico to study the Maya; to the Ecuadorian jungle to explore the sources of the Napo river; even a reckless plan to find a new route northwards across Amazonia from La Paz to Manaus. No one would back him. When he did then suggest returning to Peru, the principal goal was not to explore the Inca heartland, but to be the first to climb a mountain that he thought (erroneously) might be the highest in South America: Mt Coropuna. This was conveniently close to the Vilcabamba and likewise lay along the 73° Meridian, which had never been mapped, so Bingham proposed, as an additional sweetener for the sponsorship package, that he would make a further investigation of the Inca area.

  When no academic body would support him, he turned to his Yale classmates. Some of the wealthier ones helped fund the expedition. Others joined him on it. The team that he took to Peru in 1911, while sounding as if every member had come with an assigned role (‘the naturalist’, ‘the doctor’ etc.), was more of an ad hoc alliance of college friends who, like Bingham, quite fancied an adventure. They got one.

  Cuzco, the ancient capital of the Incas, lies on a high plateau on the edge of the Andes at over 10,000 feet. Bingham’s plan was to descend from this plateau along the valley of the Urubamba. This river weaves a circuitous route west, north and finally east of Cuzco to reach the Amazon, and passes through the quadrant of dramatically plunging canyons and broken mountain ranges known as the Vilcabamba.

  Bingham’s previous expedition experience had taught him the value of obsessively pre-planning everything, from food-boxes to the ‘folding cot-beds’ they would use to keep them off wet ground, and he had a talent for such logistics. Luck was also on his side, as recent developments in scholarship had revealed much useful information. In London, Sir Clements Markham, the President of the Royal Geographical Society, had just published The Incas of Peru in 1910. This placed far more emphasis than had previous accounts on the late ‘neo-Inca’ period when the Incas fled from Cuzco into the Vilcabamba after the Spanish invasion: Bingham drew heavily on it for the historical sections of Lost City of the Incas.

  On arriving in Peru, Bingham also consulted a Peruvian scholar, Carlos Romero, who told him of a recently found report left by one of the last Incas, Titu Cusi, which, together with the chronicles of an Augustinian friar, Antonio de la Calancha, indicated that there were further ruins to be found in the Vilcabamba, including the so-called ‘last capital of the Incas’, Vitcos.

  Using his bibliophile connections as Curator now of both the Harvard and Yale South American Collections, Bingham had tracked down the account of an earlier traveller, the Comte de Sartiges, an energetic young French diplomat who had been the first to leave a written account of Choquequirao in 1834: ‘Voyage dans les Républiques de l’Amérique du Sud’. Sartiges’ record of his travels right across the Vilcabamba is a powerful and humane one which uses Humboldt as its model, and he deserves to be far more widely read than he is today. His influence on Bingham has been underestimated, as his example would have shown the new ‘explorer’ a multitude of possible routes across the region – and also suggested that exciting literature could be made of such exploration. Sartiges’ description of the Vilcabamba was precisely of the sort to whet Bingham’s appetite:

  Whoever wants to admire American nature in all its contrasts and magnificence should take this route … a traveller could believe himself in the north pole one moment, then find himself in a tropical zone of coffee, banana and sugar-cane plantations the next.

  When Bingham and his team set off down the Urubamba in 1911, they had an advantage over travellers such as Sartiges who had preceded them: a mule trail had recently been blasted down the valley canyon, to enable rubber to be brought up more easily from the jungle.

  Almost all previous travellers had left the river at Ollantaytambo and taken a high pass across the mountains by Mt Verónica to rejoin the river lower down, thereby cutting a substantial corner but also therefore never visiting the area around Picchu (or Pijchu as it was sometimes spelt – almost all Quechua terms have variants). This was as much for convenience as for the difficulties of negotiating the river descent before the mule trail was made, which Bingham exaggerates: Pachacuti, the renowned warrior Inca of the fifteenth century, had led whole armies down the Urubamba without problem.

  The Picchu valley was still little visited in Bingham’s time, particularly as the effects of recession caused by Peru’s disastrous War of the Pacific with Chile were still being felt and local activities such as mining had fallen away. Bingham seems to have been blissfully unaware of this and thought that the valley he had stumbled on was a timeless version of pastoral, rather than a mining community forced into farming by bad times (although this also suited his telling of the subsequent events).

  There is a disarming moment when Bingham turns to the reader, in his best bar-story manner, to begin his tale of exploration: ‘People often say to me: “How did you happen to discover Machu Picchu?” The answer is, I was looking for the last Inca capital.’ Bingham already knew that the ‘last Inca capital’, Vitcos, lay well beyond the Picchu valley. So when his small expedition passed through the valley, only a few days out from Cuzco, they were still at idling speed, playing themselves in.

  A recent memoir, Portrait of an Explorer, by one of Bingham’s seven sons, Alfred, includes some revealing journal entries that Bingham made at the time. According to these, 24 July began quietly, with Bingham trying to arrange sufficient mules for the next stage of the journey – a constant headache on such expeditions. Of his six companions, four were elsewhere in the valley; the two with Bingham, Harry Foote and William Erving, showed no interest in accompanying him up the nearby hill to see some ruins that a local farmer, Melchor Arteaga, had told them about the night before. A drizzle of dawn rain had
doubtless dampened their enthusiasm.

  Bingham also seems to have been less than ardent in his mission. He left camp only after ten o’clock, so committing himself to a midday climb of several thousand feet as the sun burnt off the cloud. Nor did he bother to take any lunch, a decision he later regretted. In Lost City of the Incas, he vividly relates that he made the ascent without having the least expectation that he would find anything at the top.

  But in his re-telling of the story, Bingham is being disingenuous when he claims that he had heard of the ruins there for the first time only the previous night, from Melchor Arteaga. Journal entries make clear that ten days before, on 14 July, when dining upriver, he had been told by a ‘drunk’ sub-prefect that some leagues down the Urubamba was the mountain of ‘Huainapichu’, where there were ‘better ruins to be found than at Choquequirao’.

  Even more precise information had been given to him by Albert Giesecke, the rector of Cuzco University, who had told him of a journey he had just made down the Urubamba in the wet season, when he had likewise met Melchor Arteaga, who had offered to take Giesecke up to see the same ruins in the dry season if he ever returned, as the climb was too difficult in the wet.

  The French traveller Charles Wiener had even published a reference to ruins he had heard of at ‘Huaina Picchu and Matcho Picchu’ in his book of 1875, although he had not visited them because they lay off his route. In Lost City of the Incas, Bingham says he only learned of this after finding the ruins, although it is uncharacteristic of him to have ignored such a useful source of local information, given his thorough preparation for the expedition. The scholars he consulted, such as Carlos Romero, would certainly have known of the reference.

  The fact that Bingham had heard more rumours of potential ruins at Machu Picchu than he cares to reveal in the book does not detract from his achievement in actually finding them. All explorers operate in a continual mist of rumour and half-truth, and cutting through to the reality takes commitment. Perseverance in the face of uncertainty was one of Bingham’s most successful traits.

  He deserved to find what awaited him at the top. Yet in reading Bingham’s description of his sense of wonder at what he found at Machu Picchu, it is important to remember that Lost City of the Incas is a work of hindsight, written almost forty years after the events it describes, when Bingham was an old man.

  His journal entries of the time reveal a much more gradual appreciation of his achievement. He spent the afternoon at the ruins jotting down the details and dimensions of some of the buildings. Then he descended and rejoined his companions, to whom he seems to have said little about his discovery. His colleague Harry Foote did not even mention it in his journal: he just noted ‘an interesting time’ collecting butterflies near the river. The very next day they all continued down the valley as if nothing had happened – an extraordinary thing to do, when you have just discovered an unknown Inca city. But at this stage, Bingham did not realize the extent of the site, nor had he realized what use he could make of the discovery. The fact that he had not expected to find anything had left him unprepared.

  Bingham was more excited by some bones which he had found earlier in a glacial deposit near Cuzco. He hoped they might prove to be those of an early man of ground-breaking antiquity and had arranged for photos of the bones to be sent back to the States. This was the discovery that he thought might make him famous, although in the event the bones proved to be relatively recent. He had also focused on his search for Vitcos, the ‘last Inca capital’, which he knew must lie ahead. There was no mention of any Inca ruin in the vicinity of Machu Picchu in any of the early Chronicles, and it seems as if the Spanish were completely unaware of it, so Bingham had no frame of reference in which to place his discovery. To quote the old explorers’ adage, ‘You only ever find what you are looking for.’

  Thus he did not make much of it to his companions or even revisit it, despite having spent just a few hours there, considerably less than the average modern tourist. He arranged for other members of the expedition to do more site clearance in the weeks that followed, while he himself only returned a full year later, on another expedition.

  Bingham may also have realized he was not the first to visit the ruins. As he wrote in his journal, he had seen the name ‘Agustín Lizárraga’ scrawled in charcoal on one of the walls, with a date, 1902. When he descended from Machu Picchu, he asked Melchor Arteaga about this and noted: ‘Agustín Lizárraga is discoverer of Machu Picchu and lives at San Miguel bridge.’ This bridge lay just downstream from the expedition’s camp. Passing by there the next day, Bingham met Lizárraga’s brother, Ángel, who gave him further information. It must have been apparent that the existence of the ruins was generally known in the valley, even if no one realized their interest or importance. Some of the central plaza was being cultivated by local farmers.

  However, as Bingham slowly began to realize, no one had publicized Machu Picchu. The archaeological authorities in Cuzco, let alone in Lima or the States, were ignorant of it. So while he was not the first person to have been to the ruins, he was the first to realize their importance and make them known to the world. To use the helpful euphemism devised by later Machu Picchu authorities, he was their ‘scientific discoverer’.

  By the time he was next able to write to his wife Alfreda, he told her: ‘my new Inca city, Machu Picchu … is far more wonderful and interesting than Choquequirao. The stone is as fine as any in Cuzco! It is unknown and will make a fine story.’

  The process of turning it into the ‘fine story’ that Lost City of the Incas became took many years. In 1913 Bingham wrote an initial account for the National Geographic magazine covering both the ground-breaking expedition of 1911 and also that of 1912, when he returned to clear and excavate Machu Picchu. At the time he was still a lecturer at Yale and so it is a relatively academic and precise account. Then in 1922 he produced a populist travel-book version, Inca Land, and in 1930 a specialist account of the excavations at the site, Machu Picchu, a Citadel of the Incas. Finally, in 1948, he revised these works to produce Lost City of the Incas.

  So by the time he wrote of the ‘Discovery’ (as he came to capitalize it) in this book, he had told the tale many times before and knew precisely how to present it to maximum effect. The original terse phrases he had jotted down in his notebook – ‘Houses, streets, stairs. Finely cut stone.’ – were now expanded into a theatrical sequence of architectural wonder, in which each new building was applauded at its entrance.

  In the early National Geographic account, he had kept to a more prosaic description:

  Presently we found ourselves in the midst of a tropical forest, beneath the shade of whose trees we could make out a maze of ancient walls, the ruins of buildings made of blocks of granite, some of which were beautifully fitted together in the most refined style of Inca architecture. A few rods farther along we came to a little open space, on which were two splendid temples or palaces. The superior character of the stone work, the presence of these splendid edifices, and of what appeared to be an unusually large number of finely constructed stone dwellings, led me to believe that Machu Picchu might prove to be the largest and most important ruin discovered in South America since the days of the Spanish conquest.

  Even in this, one can already see how Bingham was beginning to apply hindsight to his own perceptions at the time: the shift to what was really a discovery in retrospect was already starting. Did he really believe when he found it that this was ‘the largest and most important ruin discovered in South America’?

  In Lost City of the Incas, this early paragraph becomes a whole chapter in itself, and his account of the discovery of the ruins is full of elaborate sleight of hand and literary devices: the bridge that they manage to cross even though it was swept away a few days later; the snake they never see but which would have sprung at them if they had; his companions who decide not to accompany him and the guide who has to be persuaded that it will be worth his while; the trailed suggestion that, in a cou
ntry where ‘one can never tell whether a report is worthy of credence’, he may well be the victim of a loose rumour. One masterful moment occurs when Bingham is offered ‘cool, delicious water’ at a hut, and contemplates abandoning what may be a pointless quest for the delights of the view and a siesta (lesser men, he quietly implies, would have done just that). But he presses on to the discovery itself.

  And here he makes the most of the contrast between the local guide, who cannot appreciate the glories he is revealing, and Bingham himself, who immediately does. It has the effect of making Bingham seem to be the only person present as these architectural glories are unveiled to him, a private audience for both explorer and reader, and he tells the story in a masterful and compelling way, given the static nature of his subject. The word ‘suddenly’ is repeated no less than three times over as many paragraphs. The language is hallucinogenic, spiralling: ‘It seemed like an unbelievable dream … it fairly took my breath away … surprise followed surprise in bewildering succession … the sight held me spellbound …’

  This is his literary re-invention of the discovery – it is what he thinks it should have been like for him. In the process some inconvenient facts are suppressed, as his son Alfred has pointed out in his candid memoir: in reality the ruins had already been cleared by Indian farmers living there, as Bingham’s own first photographs reveal, whereas in Lost City of the Incas they are described as being covered by the overgrowth of a tropical forest. But Bingham is merely doing what almost all explorers do. Excavation and archaeological evaluation is a slow process, and rather than describe paint drying, Bingham has merely compressed his slow realization of Machu Picchu’s importance, which took some years, into the heady euphoria of a single afternoon.