The Last Days of the Incas (59 page)

Titu Cusi’s narrative also seemed to make it clear, Romero continued, that Manco’s original capital of Vitcos had been a stopping-off point on the way to Vilcabamba. Since Choqquequirau could not be Vilcabamba, as it obviously could not be reached by Ocampo’s route, it also seemed unlikely that Choqquequirau could be Vitcos for that very same reason. Ocampo’s description of Vitcos, in fact, seemed to substantiate this, as the city the Spaniard described seemed to have very little in common with the Choqquequirau ruins:

Choqquequirau certainly did not lie upon “an extensive level space” but rather was clustered in three sections on a very narrow, jungle-covered ridge. Nor did Choqquequirau contain “sumptuous and majestic buildings, erected with great skill and art, all the lintels of the doors, as well the principal and ordinary ones, being of marble, elaborately carved.” Choqquequirau thus seemed to fit neither the descriptions of Vilcabamba nor of Vitcos, Romero told Bingham. Both cities therefore remained to be found. In Romero’s opinion, the only way someone was going to find either Vitcos or Vilcabamba would be to cross the Urubamba River at the Chuquichaca bridge and then to head up into the Vilcabamba Valley. Somewhere in that valley Vitcos must be located, Romero said. Manco’s capital of Vilcabamba, then—according to the chronicles—would only be a few days’ walk away.

Two years after his meeting with Romero, in June of 1911, Bingham had organized the Yale Peruvian Expedition and was on a steamer headed out of New York City on his way back to Peru. If he could discover Manco’s fabled lost city, Bingham knew, then no matter what else he might accomplish in his life, he would have made his mark upon the world. The man who as a boy had once dreamed of taking a tramp steamer to mainland America and one day becoming an explorer, now found himself standing on the deck of a steamer, bound for South America, on his way to seeking fame and glory by discovering lost Inca ruins in Peru. Bingham later wrote:

Accompanying Bingham were six men, including Dr. William Erving—a medical doctor and Yale classmate of Bingham’s who had once paddled a canoe from Cairo to Khartoum—and thirty-nine-year-old Dr. Harry Foote, a professor of chemistry at Yale, a personal friend of Bingham’s who was officially the expedition’s “naturalist.”

Shortly after arriving in Lima, Bingham went to visit the Peruvian president, Augusto Leguía, whom he had met during his previous trip in 1909. Leguía soon gave orders to allow the expedition’s baggage to pass unencumbered through customs and assigned a military escort to accompany the expedition. Bingham also met again with Carlos Romero. Delighted that Bingham had returned to look for Vitcos and Vilcabamba, Romero gave the North American additional clues that he had
recently uncovered and that might help Bingham in his quest. Romero had recently been examining the work of another Spaniard, Father Antonio de la Calancha, he said, who had written a lengthy chronicle of more than fifteen hundred pages that had been published in 1639.

Poring over Calancha’s fourth volume, Romero had come across the story of two Augustinian friars who had entered the Kingdom of Vilcabamba in the late sixteenth century and who had lived and preached there for years. One of the friars, Diego Ortiz, Romero said, had been martyred by the natives at a place called Puquiura, very near the town of Vitcos, after the natives had accused the friar of having killed Titu Cusi, their emperor. According to the chronicle, near Vitcos and Puquiura was a shrine called Chuquipalpa, where a giant white rock was located above a spring of water. Next to it was an Inca temple of the sun. The two friars had burned and destroyed the shrine, Romero said, believing that they were exorcizing the devil. If you can find the great white rock of Chuquipalpa, Romero told Bingham—looking up at the tall North American—then you can be certain that Vitcos must lie nearby. And if you succeed in discovering Vitcos, Romero added, then you will only be a two days’ walk away from Manco Inca’s lost capital of Vilcabamba.

Bingham thanked Romero, then carefully copied down the various passages of Father Calancha that Romero had pointed out to him. Bingham already had a copy of an article Romero had published two years earlier, “Report on the Ruins of Choqquequirau,” in which Romero had argued that previous explorers’ assertions that Choqquequirau was the lost city of Vilcabamba were incorrect. Romero had also argued that the city of Vitcos would be found not near Choqquequirau, but on the other side of the Vilcabamba mountain range somewhere in the Vilcabamba River Valley.

With the assorted clues from the sixteenth-century chronicles now safely in his possession, Bingham next visited the Lima Geographical Society, where he purchased several maps of the region he was intent on exploring. One of these was a map separated into folios and made forty-six years earlier by the Italian geographer and scientist Antonio Raimondi, who had visited the Vilcabamba region in 1865. Running his index finger carefully over one of the thick sheets, Bingham noted that in the upper Vilcabamba Valley, on the other side of the mountain range from Choqquequirau, Raimondi had indicated a small village called “Puquira.” Could this be the village of Puquiura, where Father Calancha had stated that Friar
Diego Ortiz had been martyred? If so, then both the lost city of Vitcos and the great rock shrine over a spring of water at Chuquipalpa had to be nearby.

Taking a ship from Lima to the port of Mollendo, on Peru’s southern coast, Bingham and his six expedition members soon boarded a train for the four-day journey up into the Andes, past Lake Titicaca and then on to Cuzco. Once in the capital, the team began to gather mules and provisions and to pack their equipment. Bingham, meanwhile, continued with his research, gathering as much information as he could from anyone who might know of Inca ruins in the Urubamba and Vilcabamba river valleys. Visiting the University of Cuzco, Bingham was surprised to discover that a young American professor was currently rector of the university.
^*
Albert Giesecke, a thirty-one-year-old from Pennsylvania, had settled in Cuzco only a few years earlier. Learning that Bingham was searching for Inca ruins, Giesecke told him about a recent trip that he and a Peruvian congressman, Don Braulio Polo y la Borda, had made on horseback into the Urubamba Valley the previous January, during the rainy season. At a place called Mandor Pampa, Giesecke said, about sixty miles from Cuzco and near a bridge called San Miguel, they had stopped at a small sugarcane farm cultivated by a peasant named Melchor Arteaga. Arteaga had told Giesecke that extensive ruins lay on a ridge high up on a nearby mountain and had suggested that if Giesecke were to return in the dry season, Arteaga would personally guide him there. It was now July, however, the middle of the dry season, and Giesecke had not had the time to return. He was instead happy to pass this information along to Bingham.

As Bingham and his team gradually acclimated themselves to Cuzco’s 11,300-foot elevation, Bingham next visited the son of a wealthy planter in the Urubamba Valley, Alberto Duque, whose family kept a home in Cuzco. Bingham later wrote:

While making a side trip to the nearby Yucay (Vilcanota) Valley to gather more pack mules, Bingham soon met a third informant, the sub-prefect of the town of Urubamba, who told Bingham that unknown Inca ruins existed just a short ways down the Urubamba Valley, near the bridge of San Miguel. The sub-prefect also told Bingham the ruins’ name:
Huainapicchu
. According to Bingham, the sub-prefect was

Bingham—a meticulous note taker who even kept a log at his house in Connecticut of guests that visited and for how long—was quick, however, to write down the unfamiliar name in his small, leather-bound notebook: “Sub-prefect drunk,” he wrote in a looping scrawl, then
added to that the name “Huainapichu.” Bingham wrote next to it “better than Choqq,” meaning that the ruins of Huainapicchu were supposedly better than those at Choqquequirau. Huainapichu, the sub-prefect told Bingham, was only eight leagues (twenty-eight miles) further downriver from the town of Urubamba, and was located just beyond a site called Torontoy. None of the names the sub-prefect mentioned, however, seemed to be related to the historical sites that Bingham was searching for: Vitcos, Puquiura, Vilcabamba, or Chuquipalpa, the place with the white rock shrine.

Back in Cuzco, on the eve of his departure, Bingham wrote a hurried letter to his wife:

Bingham had already divided his expedition into three independent teams, each of which would operate under his instructions but which would travel to different areas and would perform different tasks. Team #1 was to head down into the lower Urubamba Valley to the edge of the Amazon Basin and from there was to make a topographic survey up over the Andes Mountains along the 73rd meridian and down to the coast. Team #2 was to travel down the Urubamba River and then up along the Vilcabamba River while making contour maps of both valleys, including the location of local villages and towns. Team #3, meanwhile, which consisted of Bingham and his friend the chemist and expedition naturalist Harry Foote, was to make collections of insects and mosses and to search for Inca ruins. Foote would collect the biological specimens; Bingham would look for ruins.

Soon, the three teams divided up the mules as well as
the various wooden boxes of food, measuring and surveying equipment, cameras, film, developing chemicals and photographic paper, insect-collecting flasks, geological hammers, notebooks, medicines, guidebooks, maps, tents, lanterns, altimeters, thermometers, and compasses. Three Peruvian soldiers accompanied the expedition, one for each of the teams, as the president of Peru had promised. The soldier assigned to Bingham’s was an army sergeant named Carrasco.

On July 19, 1911, Hiram Bingham and his team finally set out from Cuzco on mule back, traveling up out of the city and then across the divide that separates Cuzco and the Yucay Valley before arriving at the town of Urubamba, where they spent the night. The next day, Bingham traveled another ten miles until they reached Ollantaytambo—the fortress town where Manco Inca had beaten off Hernando and Gonzalo Pizarro’s troops in 1536 and had flooded the nearby fields, thus neutralizing the Spaniards’ cavalry.

After spending a day investigating and photographing the ruins, Bingham, Foote, the physician Erving, and the Peruvian sergeant Carrasco set out from Ollantaytambo, following the route of the other team members, who had already gone on ahead. Bingham’s pack train consisted of two muleteers, two native helpers, and eight mules—four of which were ridden by Bingham and his companions. Not far downstream, the expedition came to a juncture in the road, with 18,975-foot Mount Veronica snow-capped and rising on their right while, across the valley, 20,672-foot Mount Salcantay towered overhead on their left. Before them, snaking along the right side of the Urubamba River as the valley narrowed, ran a relatively new road, blasted and cut into the canyon walls some sixteen years earlier. According to Bingham: