The Last Days of the Incas (58 page)

Thus on September 24, 1572, thirty-six years after Manco Inca had launched his great rebellion, the last Inca emperor—Tupac Amaru—lived no more.

ON JUNE 8, 1911—339 YEARS AFTER THE EXECUTION OF TUPAC
Amaru—a United Fruit Company steamship lay docked
in New York City, preparing for departure. As stevedores busily untied the ship’s moorings and passengers waved goodbye to the crowd of well-wishers jammed onto the dock, the steamer slowly began motoring out into the harbor in the direction of the Statue of Liberty and out toward the open sea. The ship was bound for Panama, where a transoceanic canal was currently being dug that would not be completed for another three years. At least a handful of the passengers on board intended to cross the Isthmus and then take another steamer bound for Peru. Seagulls cried, whirling over the boat and over the slate-gray water, while on board a thirty-five-year-old assistant professor of Latin American history from Yale University named Hiram Bingham looked out over the water. A tall, extremely thin man with close-cropped brown hair and a gaunt, almost ascetic face, Bingham’s goal was to search for the Incas’ capital of Vilcabamba—the legendary city that had been lost to history now for more than three hundred years.

From his research, the six-foot-four, 170-pound Bingham already knew that it had taken nearly forty years of warfare and counterinsurgency campaigns before the Spaniards had finally been able to extinguish
the last rebel capital of the Inca Empire. After the conquest of the Inca Empire, Spain had continued to consolidate its grip on its American possessions, gaining in strength and world power in part because of a steady diet of gold and silver sucked from its new colonies like a bat sucks nectar from a glistening tropical flower. A thick blanket of secrecy had then descended over South America, placed there by the continent’s Spanish and Portuguese masters. For more than two centuries, in fact, Spain and Portugal had forbidden any foreign scientists from entering their hard-won possessions, intent on keeping the lands they had conquered to themselves in an effort to prevent the intrusion of European competitors. The fabled capital of Vilcabamba, meanwhile, had gradually become just that: a fable. The story of the reign of the last rebel Inca emperors and of their heroic rebellion had eventually been converted into folk tales that were then passed on orally by the Incas’ descendants or else buried in old Spanish chronicles that had soon gathered dust.

It wasn’t until the turn of the nineteenth century, during the years 1799 to 1805, that a foreign scientist finally managed to explore South America.
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The Prussian Alexander von Humboldt visited the Amazon and the Andes and also traveled to Peru. He was the first to map some of its Inca ruins. Humboldt’s writings eventually fueled a resurgence of interest in the history of the Inca Empire and the last Inca kings. The story of a lost, legendary Inca city whose location had disappeared and that thus remained to be discovered seized the imaginations of not a few nineteenth-century explorers. By the time Hiram Bingham set off to search for Vilcabamba in 1911, however, the only ancient ruins that anyone had discovered in the Incas’ former province of Vilcabamba were those at a site called Choqquequirau, located about sixty miles west of Cuzco. Some explorers thought that the ruins of Choqquequirau might be those of Manco Inca’s rebel capital. Hiram Bingham and at least one Peruvian historian, however, were convinced they were wrong.

Despite his unsuccessful childhood attempt to flee his Hawaii home, Bingham had never let go of his dreams of adventuring. He had merely postponed them. Bingham, after all, was a great fan of the stories of the nineteenth-century British novelist Rudyard Kipling, one of whose poems—appropriately enough called “The Explorer”—was Bingham’s personal favorite. Consumed with a desire to escape his impoverished
background and to make a name for himself in the world—or, as he put it, to “strive for magnificence”—Bingham married an heir to the Tiffany fortune and then earned a Ph.D. at Yale. Bingham’s specialty was modern South American history, beginning with the wars for independence in the early nineteenth century when, at long last, the South American colonies finally severed their ties with Spain. By 1908, however, three years before he would set off for Vilcabamba, the thirty-three-year-old Bingham was bored with his job as an assistant professor and frustrated by the fact that he had yet to make his mark on the world. When Bingham learned that the upcoming 1908 Pan-American Scientific Congress in Santiago, Chile, was accepting delegates, he seized the opportunity for adventure. He quickly received a leave of absence from Yale, then traveled to Santiago for the conference. Soon afterward, Bingham made his way by sea and rail to Cuzco, where for the first time he visited the ancient capital of the Incas. “My previous studies of South American history had been limited largely to the Spanish Colonial days,” Bingham later wrote, “the wards of independence, and the progress made by the different republics. Archaeology lay outside my field and I knew very little about the Incas except the fascinating story told by [William] Prescott in his famous ‘Conquest of Peru.’”

Wandering about Cuzco, gazing in admiration at the remains of Inca palaces and at the splendor of their intricately cut stones, Bingham was stunned by the handiwork of an ancient civilization that was unlike any he had seen. On the hillside overlooking the city, Bingham was further amazed by the sight of the giant, megalithic fortress of Saqsaywaman, where more than three centuries earlier Juan Pizarro and thousands of natives had lost their lives while caught up in Manco Inca’s rebellion. Bingham wrote:

In Cuzco, Bingham soon met the prefect of the nearby province
of Apurímac, Juan Núñez, a man who was much impressed by the distinguished North American “doctor,” just arrived from an important scientific congress. Only the year before, Núñez had cleared and explored Inca ruins at a site called Choqquequirau. Whether Choqquequirau, which means “the cradle of gold,” was the actual name of the ancient site, Núñez didn’t know. Thus far, however, it was the only ancient Inca city that had been found in the province of Vilcabamba. The ruins were probably those of Manco Inca’s lost city of Vilcabamba, Núñez told Bingham. He then asked if Bingham would be interested in accompanying him there. Bingham recounted:

So it was that in February 1909, Hiram Bingham III, lecturer in modern South American history, found himself accompanying a mule train that was about to penetrate into a quarter of the Inca Empire the Incas had once referred to as the Antisuyu.
It would be Bingham’s first contact with lost Inca ruins:

The ruins, fortunately, which previously had been overgrown by jungle scrub, had recently been cleared by Núñez. And although Bingham was untrained in either archaeology or in surveying techniques, he had at least brought along with him a Kodak camera and a book that contained the basics of what to do when encountering little known ancient ruins:

One thing Bingham was quick to notice was that the first explorers to visit Choqquequirau had done so more than seventy years earlier. Inside one Inca building, Bingham found a list of their names scratched onto several slabs of rock:

Although Bingham couldn’t have known it at the time, his unanticipated visit to these abandoned Inca ruins, located on a nearly inaccessible ridge in a virtually uninhabited corner of Peru, was a turning point in his career. A chance invitation by a Peruvian prefect would soon alter the course of Bingham’s life—and of South American archaeological history. For the moment, however, Bingham carefully examined the site, as the prefect wanted to know whether the “esteemed” professor thought these were the ruins of Manco Inca’s rebel city or not. Bingham later recorded his impressions:

Elsewhere, Bingham wrote,

Although an amateur, Bingham was obviously less than impressed by the prefect’s ruins. Surely the Inca emperors, Bingham reasoned—even the final, rebel ones—would have lived in finely wrought palaces made in the imperial style that Bingham had so much admired in Cuzco. It therefore seemed unlikely to Bingham that Choqquequirau had ever housed an Inca emperor and hence could be the lost city of Vilcabamba that the prefect hoped it was.

Arriving back in Lima, Bingham soon met a forty-six-year-old Peruvian historian, Carlos Alberto Romero, who agreed with him. Romero showed Bingham two previously unknown sixteenth-century chronicles that had recently been discovered and published. One had been dictated by Manco’s son Titu Cusi in 1571 and had lain forgotten for more than three hundred years. The second was a report written
by Baltasar de Ocampo, a Spaniard who had participated in the sacking of Vilcabamba in 1572 and who had witnessed the execution of Tupac Amaru shortly thereafter. Both accounts contained descriptions of Manco Inca’s capital of Vilcabamba. None of the descriptions seemed to match the physical characteristics Bingham had seen at the ruins of Choqquequirau.

Baltasar de Ocampo’s account, for example, made it clear that the way to reach Vilcabamba from Cuzco was “down the valley by Yucay and Ollantaytampu [Ollantaytambo] to the [hanging] bridge of Chuqui-chaca.” The direction, therefore, that an explorer must take to discover the location of Vilcabamba appeared to be parallel to the route followed by the Urubamba River. Once one arrived at the modern Chuquichaca bridge, then one would presumably cross the river and head west. It made no sense to follow this route, Romero said, if one were traveling from Cuzco to Choqquequirau, which lay on the other side of the Vilcabamba mountain range and that could much more easily be reached by crossing the Apurímac River from the west. Thus Choqquequirau could
not
be Vilcabamba, Romero reasoned, contrary to what Prefect Núñez and other explorers had said.