Lost City of the Incas (Phoenix Press) Read Free

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