Turn Right at Machu Picchu

As he convalesced from appendicitis at the Mitchell family estate in Connecticut, Bingham undertook an accounting of his life. He was soon to be a father to his fourth child. He lived like a man of wealth, but in many ways he was a snazzily dressed marionette whose strings were pulled by his in-laws—in particular, Annie Mitchell, an imposing woman who ruled over the affairs of her husband and daughter. Bingham believed more strongly than ever that his unorthodox choice to specialize in South American history had been the right one. The United States’ crushing defeat of Spain’s decrepit imperial forces in the Spanish-American War of 1898 had made the southward spread of North American influence and commerce inevitable. The U.S. Congress, after seriously considering digging a shipping passageway through Nicaragua, had just voted to take over the financially catastrophic Isthmian Canal project from the French. The conveniently slim nation of Panama had only been founded in 1903 when President Theodore Roosevelt assisted Panamanian revolutionaries in liberating their province from Colombia—a bit of gunboat diplomacy that left many South Americans suspicious of their northern neighbor’s motives in the region. Bingham’s careerist gamble looked smarter every year.

Bingham didn’t really enjoy teaching, though. Professors were anonymous creatures that played to small audiences. It was the research and writing half of academia that he loved. Bingham had inherited a deep respect for books and authors from his father and grandfather; in addition to their translation work, Hiram I had written the 600-page doorstop classic A Residence of Twenty-one Years in the Sandwich Islands.² If Hiram III used his medical hiatus from Princeton to trace the route of the doomed Scotsmen who settled in the Daríen, he might tack on a fact-finding mission to Venezuela and Colombia to begin researching what would be the first major biography in English of Simón Bolívar.

Alfreda’s childbirth in the summer of 1906 was a difficult one, and Bingham accompanied her to New York City for postpartum surgery. While his wife was recuperating in Manhattan, Bingham made the acquaintance of Hamilton Rice, a Boston-born physician with interests strikingly similar to his own. Roughly the same age, Rice, whom The New York Times described in his obituary as a man “as much at home in the elegant swirl of Newport society as in the steaming jungles of Brazil,” could have been Bingham’s more accomplished doppelganger. He had descended from a prestigious lineage, studied medicine at Harvard and later married into one of America’s richest families. Rice had already visited the Caucasus and paddled the far reaches of Hudson Bay. He’d also made his first journey to South America, crossing the Andes from Ecuador and traveling down through largely unmapped territory to the Amazon, following the route of the legendary one-eyed sixteenth-century Spanish explorer and conquistador Francisco de Orellana.

To Bingham, Rice’s MD would have been less impressive than the letters FRGS, which Rice was allowed to place after his signature as a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. The RGS was the world’s most prestigious explorers club. Its members had included Richard Burton, who had snuck into Mecca disguised as an Arab; David Livingstone, who’d sought the Nile River source (and who was in turn sought by reporter Henry Stanley, who greeted him with the immortal words “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”); and Charles Darwin, who had done pretty well for himself after his own South American travels.

During Bingham’s talks with Rice, the idea emerged that the two men should follow the route of Bolívar’s desperate 1819 march across the Andes of Venezuela and Colombia, a military gambit comparable in difficulty and historical impact to Hannibal’s elephant parade through the Alps. As he would do again and again in years to come, Bingham rationalized as duty his need to spend six months away from his family. “Let us not complain at our long separation but rejoice in the opportunity to accomplish a good piece of work,” he wrote Alfreda from South America. He was more passionate, and perhaps more honest, in writing to his father: “I feel the Bingham blood stirring in my veins as I start for little-known regions, as nearly all my Bingham ancestors for ten generations have done before me.”

By the time Bingham and Rice departed Caracas on January 3, 1907, their group had expanded to include two Caribbean assistants who were shepherding one thousand pounds of gear on five mules, supplemented by a wooden cart and two Venezuelan drivers. Bingham had been influenced by an article in Scribner’s Magazine by the globetrotting celebrity war correspondent Richard Harding Davis that listed items useful on an adventurous journey, including “a folding cot and a folding chair.” Dressed in a British pith helmet and riding boots, Bingham looked like he was off to fight the Zulus. The party brought along nearly enough arms to do so: “two Winchester rifles, a Mauser, and two Winchester repeating shotguns, beside three revolvers and a sufficient supply of ammunition.”

If Bingham had been hoping for a taste of adventure, he found it. The book that eventually emerged from the journey, The Journal of an Expedition Across Venezuela and Colombia, was neither a Bolívar biography nor a scholarly examination of the Darien scheme. It was a chronicle of a perilous trip into a deeply foreign world. Venezuela was a land of leper colonies and colonial ruins, where howler monkeys and screaming macaws populated the upper reaches of trees with trunks that grew up to twenty feet thick. When the party tried to carry its large cache of firearms across the border into Colombia, a squad of four Venezuelan soldiers accused Bingham’s group of smuggling arms to Colombian revolutionaries. Bingham’s team had to sneak the arsenal out in their luggage. Colombia was even stranger and more dangerous. For days at a time, almost all of the famished team’s sustenance—a diet of stringy “storks, cranes and wild birds”—depended on Bingham’s skill as a hunter.

Sadly, Bingham’s prose does not seem to have been inspired by Richard Harding Davis’s vivid war reportage. (A New York Times review of a later book could apply to all of Bingham’s written work: “His facts are extremely interesting; his presentation of them is clumsy and tedious.”) The few bright spots in Bingham’s narrative are his first encounters with South American “savages,” the Yaruro people, whom he found “very slightly clothed and bearing spears, bows and arrows.” He caught one native woman just as she was about to hurl a fresh cow patty at him, presumably trying to stir up trouble. In a friendlier encounter, a Yaruro chief:

put his hand on my shoulder, patted me on the back, took off my pith helmet, put it on himself, ran his fingers through my hair, said “bonito” [pretty], patted his heart saying “contento” [happy], patted my heart, smiled, and asked for my cartridge belt and then for my gloves.

By journey’s end, the group had traveled nearly one thousand miles in 115 days. Bingham was extremely proud of completing what he boasted to The New York Herald was not merely an interesting expedition, but “a feat hitherto not accomplished.” Rice, who had grown weary of Bingham’s sometimes reckless behavior—the novice explorer had been quite willing to unholster his gun to get South Americans’ attention—ditched his partner in Bogotá. Rice would concentrate his future explorations in the Amazon, where he played the wellfunded foil to the British explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett in the fruitless search for the vanished jungle metropolis that Fawcett called the City of Z. Neither man could have dreamed that the greatest prize in South America actually lay undiscovered less than a hundred miles west of Cusco.

Bingham had faced down “great savages, swollen rivers . . . and the scarcity of everything,” including food. The idea of resuming the drudgery of his duties at Princeton, once merely unpleasant, was now unthinkable. Within days of his return from Colombia, he was off to Yale to plead his case with President Hadley once again. Unbeknownst to Bingham, Hadley had already surveyed the members of the history faculty, who had reacted coolly to his inquiries about hiring Bingham as a junior professor in their department.

Hadley presented Bingham with two other possible positions at Yale: assistant professor of geography or lecturer in South American history. The geography job was secure: a full-time salaried position with a full teaching load. The lecturer position would be more or less like a job in the William Morris mailroom—a low-paying gig that might lead to something bigger should the young striver prove himself. It would also allow Bingham fewer teaching responsibilities and more flexibility to continue exploring—a pursuit that Hadley encouraged with gusto. Money wasn’t a serious factor, since Alfreda’s parents provided free housing and $10,000 annual allowance—about five times the yearly salary of an assistant professor.

Bingham happily accepted the lecturing position. After nearly a decade away, he was returning to his beloved Yale. His timing was perfect.