Lost City of the Incas (Phoenix Press) Read online

  Bingham’s account also needs to be appreciated within a literary as well as an archaeological context. Conan Doyle published The Lost World in the same year that Bingham excavated at Machu Picchu, and Lost City of the Incas was written with a clear sense of what the public expected from a work of adventure, right down to the similarity in titles. This, after all, was a continent where, as Conan Doyle put it, ‘the more you knew of South America, the more you would understand that anything was possible – anything.’

  There was a well-known canon of adventure novels which gave Bingham his literary tropes, from Jules Verne’s La Jangada, an account of the descent of the Amazon, to the works of Rider Haggard: trusty companions, unreliable natives and clues given by some ancient chronicle. (The relationship between writers and explorers was a symbiotic one – Conan Doyle had, in his turn, based The Lost World narrative on recent accounts of the Mato Grosso by the British explorer Colonel Fawcett.)

  It is not surprising that Bingham quoted from Kipling’s poem ‘The Explorer’ when talking of the lure of the Vilcabamba – ‘Something hidden! Go and find it!/ Go and look behind the ranges –/ Something lost behind the ranges –/ Lost and waiting for you. Go!’ – for that virile Edwardian literary style was precisely what he aspired to.

  In Lost City of the Incas, rivers are always raging, paths treacherous and mountains precipitous. A good example comes early on, in the journey to Choquequirao, when Bingham, as so often, uses the literary construction ‘it seemed as though …’: ‘it seemed as though our heavily laden mules must surely lose their footing and roll down the fifteen hundred feet to the raging Apurímac river below.’ Anyone who has travelled in this area knows that human travellers are more likely to lose their footing than mules, but no matter. Likewise at the bridge below on the Apurímac: ‘to cross it seemed like certain death.’

  Yet along with his occasional hyperbole, Bingham has an eye for the sublimities of the landscape he is passing through – his descriptions of the fecundity and drama of the Vilcabamba are unsurpassed. The engaging candour he has already shown with the admission that his initial interest in Inca ruins was accidental continues throughout the book. He is good too on the minutiae of an explorer’s life, which a more academic account might leave out – the gnats, the rain and the continual uncertainties.

  Above all Bingham has an admirably catholic approach to exploration. In the manner of Humboldt a century earlier, he is intrigued by a whole range of phenomena, from geology to etymology and the living conditions of the Quechua Indians he encounters.

  No one would ever call him a specialist archaeologist, as he is happy to reveal in the text – an admission that academic archaeologists have patronized him for ever since, even as they excavate the sites he found for them.

  Such is the fame of Machu Picchu that it is easy to overlook Bingham’s very substantial achievement in making his next discovery. For with some careful detective work, he succeeded in his original purpose – to find the site of the old Inca capital, Vitcos, and the nearby temple of Chuquipalta, or ‘Ñusta Isppana, the White Rock’, as Bingham called it.

  It may be less impressive architecturally, but Vitcos has a historical resonance that Machu Picchu does not: here Manco Inca, the great guerrilla leader of the last Incas, ruled and died, assassinated by treacherous Spanish guests in the plaza. Bingham’s discovery of it was a model of the conscientious use of source material, and no one has ever contested his identification of the site. The White Rock was a similarly evocative discovery.

  Nor did Bingham stop there. He carried on over a high pass into genuinely wild and untravelled country, descending towards the Amazon. This was what he enjoyed most – the chase for ruins. As anyone who has ever followed Bingham’s footsteps can verify, this called for real tenacity of purpose – no mountain range seems to have been too high for him, no jungle too uninviting.

  Travelling with just the Yale companion he found most congenial, Harry Foote, Bingham discovered more buildings at a place called Espíritu Pampa, or, as he translates it, ‘the Plain of Ghosts’. This settlement was covered by such dense rainforest that Bingham only uncovered a small portion and remained unaware of its full extent. Indeed, so large is the plaza at Espíritu Pampa that when Bingham crossed it and found houses on either side, he assumed that he had found a scattered settlement of isolated buildings with little in between, rather than the central civic space of a city. This was a natural mistake to make. Not until 1964 was the full extent of the site at Espíritu Pampa revealed by a later American explorer, Gene Savoy.

  Even from the few buildings that Bingham did find, logic dictated that this must have been the final refuge of the Incas, the ‘city of Vilcabamba’ which the chroniclers mentioned after the Spanish had driven them from Vitcos. In his journal notes from the time, Bingham admitted this logic to himself. But he also yearned to explain Machu Picchu. Perhaps it could have been ‘the place of last retreat’?

  By twisting the kaleidoscope of geographical and historical references to the ‘city of Vilcabamba’, Bingham was later able to argue, if tortuously, for such an attribution. It is not one that any modern scholar would agree with, as John Hemming has conclusively argued in his book The Conquest of the Incas. Additional source material discovered since Bingham’s time confirms the identification of Espíritu Pampa as ‘the old Vilcabamba’ of the chronicles, near to which the Spanish captured the last Inca, Tupac Amaru, and took him back to Cuzco for execution.

  Nor does Bingham’s other theory, that Machu Picchu was the birthplace of the Incas, have any champions. Yet his description of the actual buildings of Machu Picchu is thorough and astute, and he brought real intelligence to bear on problems such as the Inca use of roofs and doors. His impulse to assign a central role to Machu Picchu in Inca history was a natural result of his appreciation of the virtuosity of the architecture, even if the conclusions he reached were wrong. Compared to some of the wild theories that were to follow, his speculations seem tame.

  So what was the function of Machu Picchu? To discuss that question at length is beyond the scope of this introduction, but the short answer currently favoured by many experts, based on a document discovered in 1983, is that it was probably built by the greatest of all the Incas, Pachacuti, who began the explosive expansion of the Empire in the mid-fifteenth century. A further supposition is that he may have used it as a magnificent country estate, when he wanted to retreat from Cuzco to warmer quarters. His descendants built other similar estates for their own use, of which Choquequirao may also be one, and thus Machu Picchu was abandoned after Pachacuti’s death.

  Bingham’s own attributions of Machu Picchu’s function were to come much later, as he tried to digest what he had discovered. In 1911, on the return from Espíritu Pampa, he did not even bother to revisit the actual site when he passed by, despite having a day in hand. He left the clearing and mapping of it to the two least experienced members of his team and pressed on to try to climb Mt Coropuna, which he duly did. When he took altitude readings on the top, he discovered to his natural disappointment that it was not the highest mountain in the Americas – Mt Aconcagua beat it, as do others – but it still remains a very impressive climb of a 20,800-feet peak, over an untried route.

  Only when it came to writing up his experiences back home did he start to tease out the problem and the potential of Machu Picchu. His initial expedition reports talked more of the bones ‘of early man’ that they had found than of the Inca sites, but this quickly changed when he realized, to his embarrassment, that the bones were not necessarily as old as had been imagined. Then he wrote an account of his ascent of Mt Coropuna, but this likewise failed to ignite the reading public.

  Meanwhile Sir Clements Markham was the first to publish a report on Bingham’s archaeological discoveries in Vilcabamba, ‘a region of peculiar interest’, in the journal of the Royal Geographical Society of December 1911. He makes the briefest of references to a site Bingham had called ‘Macchu-Pichu, where there was a group of Inca edifices, built with large stones beautifully worked. One of the walls contained three windows of unusual size.’ Markham went on to note, in the tones of a concerned school-master, ‘this is the pith of the present instalment of information received from Mr Bingham. I trust that it is the forerunner of a fuller topographical description …’

  Bingham decided to give far more than just a ‘fuller topographical description’. After a further season’s excavation at Machu Picchu in 1912 had confirmed its importance, he launched a publicity offensive. He persuaded National Geographic both to sponsor his expeditions and to take the unusual step of devoting the entire April 1913 issue of their magazine to his discoveries, with the title ‘In the Wonderland of Peru’. Under the breathless heading ‘The Ruins of an Ancient Inca capital, Machu Picchu’, the magazine proclaimed:

  This wonderful city, which was built by the Incas probably 2,000 years ago, was discovered by Professor Hiram Bingham, of Yale University, and uncovered and excavated under his direction in 1912, under the auspices of the National Geographic and Yale University, and may prove to be the most important group of ruins discovered in South America since the conquest of Peru. The city is situated on a narrow, precipitous ridge, two thousand feet above the river and seven thousand feet above the sea … It contains about two hundred edifices built of white granite, including palaces, temples, shrines, baths, fountains and many stairways.

  Allowing for a little looseness with dates (Machu Picchu was built approximately 550 years ago, not 2,000), this was the Hollywood image that grabbed the public’s imagination. A dramatic triple fold-out poster was issued with the magazine, showing the city from the viewpoint that was to become so familiar, sprawled across a mountain ridge with Huayna Picchu ascending behind. Machu Picchu had begu
n its role as the pinup of twentieth-century archaeology.

  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:

  Flying in between the high clouds and fleecy clouds below was a wonderful experience. I could see the great white sea of clouds below me for miles and miles. Occasionally the sun broke through the upper layer and made the upper surface of the lower layer look like snow fields and peaks in the Andes.

  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.

  BINGHAM’S PHOTOGRAPHS OF MACHU PICCHU

  ‘Would anyone believe what I had found? Fortunately, in this land where accuracy of reporting what one had seen is not a prevailing characteristic of travellers, I had a good camera and the sun was shining.’

  Hiram Bingham, Lost City of the Incas

  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 3A 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.