The Last Days of the Incas (61 page)
The very next day, in fact, Bingham and his team decided to move on, with Bingham intent on continuing the search for Vitcos and for the white rock located over a natural spring. If he could find those two sites, Bingham believed, then he was certain that Vilcabamba must be nearby. As Bingham waited impatiently for his Peruvian assistants to break camp, he ironically had no idea whatsoever that, on only his sixth day out of Cuzco, he had already found the ruins that would forever link his name
with one of the most famous lost cities in the world. So slight seemed to be his level of excitement, in fact, that Bingham’s friend Harry Foote had written in his diary the day after Bingham’s discovery of Machu Picchu “No special things to note.”
For the next week, Bingham, Foote, and Carrasco continued their search for Vitcos and for Vilcabamba, paying local guides who claimed they knew the whereabouts of nearby ruins but discovering very little in the process. The three men spent days clambering up the slopes of nearby mountains, yet virtually every time they returned empty-handed. Gradually, the explorers made their way down the Urubamba River as far as the hacienda of Santa Ana, fully aware now that they were on the edge of the upper Amazon Basin. Here, they no doubt saw troops of thickly furred woolly monkeys in the jungle-covered hills, while along the muddy riverbanks they must have encountered abundant tracks of tapirs and peccaries. As vividly colored macaws squawked and flew overhead in flocks and pairs, in a relatively short distance they had traveled from the high, snowy peaks of the Andes all the way down to the Amazon Basin. The Amazon stretched for nearly two thousand miles more, all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. Bingham was certain, however, that somewhere amid the rugged eastern foothills of this massive mountain chain must be hidden the two lost cities he was looking for.
Heading up the Urubamba River again, Bingham and his party eventually came to a bridge that they had passed earlier and that they had learned from the locals was called Chuquichaca. Bingham had immediately recognized that this was one of the ancient place names that he had been seeking, as he knew that the sixteenth-century Spanish captain Baltasar de Ocampo had written “They [the Incas] guarded the bridge of Chuqi-chaca, over the Vilcamayu [Urubamba] River, which is the key to the province of Vilcapampa.” Ocampo had also written that the Spanish general Martín Hurtado de Arbieto—who had led the final 1572 campaign that had sacked Vilcabamba and captured Tupac Amaru—had “marched from Cusco down the valley by Yucay and Ollantay-tampu to the bridge of Chuqui-chaca and the province of Vilcapampa.”
Encouraged by the fact that they had located “the key to the province” of Vilcabamba, Bingham and his team now began to slowly head up into the Vilcabamba River Valley, one mule step at a time. By now, Bingham had developed a simple yet effective strategy for locating lost
Inca ruins: first, he asked the people who lived in the area and who had walked and clambered over most of the surrounding hills and trails. If the locals claimed they knew of nearby ruins, then Bingham offered them a monetary reward if they would take him there. Second, Bingham always sought linguistic help, either from Sergeant Carrasco, who spoke Quechua in addition to Spanish, or from the local officials and landowners, who often spoke both languages as well. Bingham had quickly learned that the locals in the area were often much more fluent in the Incas’ ancient Quechua language than in Spanish. To obtain the maximum amount of information, then, Bingham always tried to question his informants in the language they were most fluent in. Now, entering the Vilcabamba Valley, Bingham soon put his strategy to good use.
Our next stop was at Lucma, the home of
Teniente Gobernador
[Evaristo] Mogrovejo. We offered to pay him a
gratificacion
of a
sol
, or Peruvian silver dollar, for every ruin to which he would take us and double that amount if the locality should prove to contain particularly interesting ruins. This aroused all his business instincts. He summoned his
alcaldes
[local mayors] and other well-informed Indians to appear and be interviewed. They told us there were “many ruins” hereabouts! Being a practical man himself, Mogrovejo had never taken any interest in ruins. Now he saw the chance not only to make money out of the ancient sites, but also to gain official favor by carrying out with unexampled vigor the orders of his superior, the sub-prefect of Quillabamba. So he exerted himself to the utmost in our behalf.
Two days later, on August 8, some fifteen days after discovering Machu Picchu, Bingham left with several guides while Harry Foote went off collecting insects.
We … forded the Vilcabamba River and soon had an uninterrupted view up the valley to a high truncated hill, its top partly covered with a scrubby growth of trees and bushes, its sides steep and rocky. We were told that the name of the hill was “Rosaspata,” a word of modern hybrid origin—
pata
being Quichua for “hill,” while
rosas
is the Spanish word for “roses.” Mogrovejo said his Indians told him that on the “Hill of Roses” there were more ruins. We hoped it might
be true, especially as we now learned that the village at the foot of the hill, and across the river, was called Puquiura. … It was to a Puquiura that Friar Marcos [García] came in 1566 [
sic
]. If this were his Puquiura, then Vitcos must be nearby, for he and Friar Diego [Ortiz] walked with their famous procession of converts from Puquiura to the “House of the Sun,” which was “close to Vitcos.”
Following his guides up the hill, Bingham soon discovered an extensive level area on top, and also an ancient square, with the remains of large, ruined, Inca-style buildings flanking it. One building, which Bingham noted was “indeed a residence fit for a royal Inca,” was 245 feet long by forty-three feet wide and had thirty trapezoidal doorways perforating it. While the walls of the buildings were not of the classic imperial-style Inca stonework, many of the doorways nevertheless were cut from white blocks of granite and were finished with all of the Incas’ finest stoneworking techniques. From this hilltop vantage point, Bingham could look out over the entire Vilcabamba Valley; he couldn’t help now but compare the ruins of Rosaspata with how Captain Baltasar de Ocampo had described Vitcos more than three hundred years earlier:
the fortress of Pitcos [Vitcos], which is on a very high mountain whence the view commanded a great part of the province of Vilcapampa. Here there was an extensive level space, with very sumptuous and majestic buildings, erected with great skill and art, all the lintels of the doors, as well the principal as the ordinary ones, being of marble, elaborately carved.
The ruined city where Bingham stood now was indeed on a very “high mountain,” commanded a view of “a great part of the province of Vilcapampa,” and contained an “extensive level space,” with the remains of large, once majestic buildings. Although the doorways of the ruins at Rosaspata were not made of marble—indeed there was no marble whatsoever to be found in the entire province—they
were
made of finely grained white granite. In addition, because of the roughness of the surrounding walls, the doorways’ perfectly cut proportions and finishing clearly stood out. What’s more, a village called Puquiura
lay nearby—exactly as had been described in the chronicles. All that was needed now to prove that Rosaspata was the site of ancient Vitcos was to find a spring of water nearby, overlain by a giant “white rock” shrine that the chroniclers had called Chuquipalpa. If he could find the Incas’ ancient shrine, then that would mean that Rosaspata was indeed Vitcos—the city where Manco Inca’s son Titu Cusi had been captured by the Spaniards and where Manco himself later had been murdered by seven Spanish renegades.
Two distinct versions exist as to what happened next. According to Bingham’s account, on the following day, August 9, he and the lieutenant governor, Mogrovejo, followed a local guide who led them to a nearby stream. They then followed the stream through thick woods until they came to a clearing where, in its midst, rose a great white rock, completely covered in Inca-style carvings. Bingham excitedly approached the massive rock, which stood about twenty feet high and was some sixty feet in length and thirty feet in breadth. Sure enough, alongside one end of the rock he found a pool of spring water, while flanking it on two sides he found the stone ruins of what certainly could have been an Inca temple of the sun.
Bingham still had with him the carefully copied passages of Father Calancha’s account of the Inca shrine at Chuquipalpa:
Near Vitcos, in a village called Chuquipalpa, was a temple of the Sun, and within it a white rock above a spring of water where the Devil appeared…. [And] who gave answers from a white rock … and on various occasions he revealed himself. The stone was above a spring of water and they worshipped the water as a divine thing.
Questioning his local guide, Bingham was told that the area was called Chuquipalta—an almost identical match with Calancha’s Chuquipalpa.
It was late on the afternoon of August 9, 1911, when I first saw this remarkable shrine. … With the contemporary accounts in our hands and the physical evidence before our eyes we could now be fairly sure that we had located one of Manco’s capitals and the residence known to the Spaniards, visited by the [Spanish] missionaries and ambassadors as well as by the [Spanish] refugees who had sought safety here from the followers of Pizarro and had unfortunately put Manco
to death. While it [Rosaspata] was too near Puquiura to be his “principal capital,” Vilcapampa, it certainly was Vitcos.
Only sixteen days after discovering Machu Picchu, Bingham had now confirmed what he no doubt considered a far more important discovery—he had finally located the lost Inca city of Vitcos.
In the second version of the story, however, it was Bingham’s friend Harry Foote who actually discovered the Chuquipalta shrine. According to Foote’s journal, the day before Bingham’s trip to the shrine Foote had gone off looking for butterflies while Bingham had spent the day investigating the ruins at Rosaspata. Foote later wrote the following entry in his journal about his activities that day:
I went out collecting and Hi[ram] went to ruins [of Rosaspata] which he [had] located the day before. I spotted a lot of new ones up in a high pastured valley between the mountains. A spring starts at the ruins. There is a fine rock in the ruins which is cut somewhat like the Rodadero in Cuzco on one side and curiously cut on the other side.
*
Very level terraces and heavy stone work separating them beyond. A number of seats cut in the large rock and in others—one in a rock which juts into a room. There were but few species of butterflies and I got all but one or two.
According to Bingham’s personal friend and neighbor, then, Foote had inadvertently discovered the Inca shrine of Chuquipalta a day before Bingham claimed that
he
had discovered it. Foote no doubt had told Bingham about his discovery, which had surely prompted Bingham to head directly there the next day. In his published accounts, however, Bingham carefully edited Foote out of the story, simplifying the narrative and then rewriting the sequence of events so that he could portray himself as the first scientist to discover the Incas’ ancient shrine. Although there is no doubt, of course, that Bingham was the first scientist in over three hundred
years to simultaneously locate and correctly identify the sites of both Vitcos and the shrine of Chuquipalta, Harry Foote was nevertheless the first scientist to locate the Chuquipalta shrine itself. Because Bingham wrote the only popular account of their expedition, however, Foote never received any credit for his part in the discovery.
In any case, no one can contest the fact that, in just over two weeks of hunting for ancient Inca ruins in Peru, Hiram Bingham and his team had already made a series of spectacular discoveries, finding first the ruins of Machu Picchu, then Vitcos, and the shrine of Chuquipalta. Despite his impressive trio of discoveries, however, Bingham was still eager to locate Manco’s lost city of Vilcabamba. And, since the chronicles stated that Vilcabamba was only two days’ march away from Vitcos, Bingham knew that the ancient city must be close. The question, however, was in what direction? And by what trail? Once again, Bingham used his strategy of pumping information from local informants and offering monetary rewards to anyone who would agree to show him the location of nearby ruins. A week earlier, while still in the lower Urubamba River Valley, Bingham and Foote had stayed with the owner of a hacienda in Santa Ana.
When Don Pedro Duque of Santa Ana was helping us to identify places mentioned in Calancha and Ocampo, the reference to “Vilcabamba Viejo” or Old Vilcapampa, was supposed by two of his informants to point to a place called Conservidayoc. Don Pedro told us that in 1902 López Torres, who had traveled much in the
montaña
looking for rubber trees, reported the discovery there of the ruins of an Inca city.
Elsewhere, Bingham wrote,
They all agreed that “if only Señor López Torres were alive he could have been of great service” to us, as “he had prospected for mines and rubber in those parts more than anyone else, and had once seen some Inca ruins in the forest!”
Thus, several days after discovering Vitcos, Bingham and his team headed further up the valley to the village of San Francisco de la Victoria de Vilcabamba, also known as Vilcabamba the New. After the Spaniards
had sacked and plundered Manco’s Vilcabamba, Bingham had learned, they had moved the remaining native population to a new location, higher up in the Andes and closer to Cuzco. Discovering silver mines nearby, they named the town Vilcabamba the New, in contrast to Manco’s burned and sacked capital, which they now referred to as Vilcabamba the Old. Eventually, as the location of Manco’s abandoned capital was gradually forgotten and the city became overgrown with jungle, all that remained was the town of Vilcabamba the New. Three centuries later, Hiram Bingham found that the latter now consisted of a collection of high-gabled, thatched-roofed houses, an old ruined church, a school, and a small post office where Bingham was able to post some mail. Bingham wasted no time in enlisting the aid of the local governor, Señor Condoré, in order to grill the local inhabitants for more information.