Turn Right at Machu Picchu

When we’d been sitting out the rainstorm en route to Espiritu Pampa, John had explained to me what might be called Leivers’s Law of Expedition Entropy: “The bigger the expedition, the greater the chance of something going catastrophically wrong.” Bingham’s 1915 expedition offered an excellent case study. Things began well enough at Patallacta, ¹⁴ a site of “half-moon terraces” that had been located on the 1912 trip. Bingham’s team had collected two hundred skulls in the area. Many showed signs of trepanation, the medical practice of punching holes in the cranium, often to relieve pressure on the brain. In an extraordinary photograph published the following year in National Geographic, one expedition member appears to be wading through a pond filled with white bowling balls.

Bingham’s first project for 1915 was to investigate a trail that seemed to lead out of the south end of Machu Picchu. One of the expedition’s native assistants had found an old Inca road that might extend to the citadel from the opposite direction. The region in between was completely unexplored. From Patallacta, Bingham and a small team passed through “a picturesque primeval forest” and encountered the ancient stone highway.

The path climbed to an extraordinary height. At the crest of the ridge they found ahead of them “a lovely abandoned valley,” in which not a single creature stirred. As the group descended into this untouched paradise, Bingham spotted a circular ruin where, he wrote to Alfreda, “We pitched our tent . . . and enjoyed the lovely view, which the Incas had before us.”

The trail plunged precipitously the next day, briefly vanishing “in a maze of boulders and the remains of a fairly recent landslide.” Here the highway forked. The left branch ascended a set of steps to a rock outcrop like the prow of a ship. Atop this perch the Incas had constructed a labyrinth of stone buildings, including a bullet-shaped structure with nine windows. After a wet night and two hours of walking the following morning, Bingham recalled, “I at last came out on a ridge from which a great part of the grand canyon of the Urubamba was visible—and in the distance the familiar outlines of Machu Picchu Mountain—but oh so far below us!” Bingham then encountered a third striking set of unknown ruins. The impressive stonework—including five stone fountains—was crowned by an Inca overlook that took in Salcantay and most of the other important peaks near Machu Picchu. He sensed that he was getting close to his goal.

“We walked along the ridge by the old trail for a couple of hours until at last the ruins of Machu Picchu itself came into view,” Bingham wrote. Then, “within rifle shot of the city,” the trail vanished, buried by “rotting vegetable matter.” Bingham detoured down to the Intihuatana ranch (now the location of the Hidroeléctrica train station) and climbed to “dear old Machu Picchu” from the west. The explorer “nearly wept to see how it had gone back to jungle and brush” in just three years. “Even the Sacred Plaza was so dense we had to cut our way into it with a machete,” he wrote to Alfreda. Only one group of buildings was clear—“and that occupied by six pigs!”

To prove that his city in the clouds was indeed Manco Inca’s Vilcabamba, Bingham next needed to trace the route to Machu Picchu that Manco would have taken from Vitcos when the Spaniards surprised him there in 1537. As an Indian guide led them through the boggy no-man’s-land between Puquiura and Machu Picchu, the trail passed a large, dark green lake. Bingham inquired what its name was. “The answer gave me a thrill,” he remembered. The guide had said “Yanacocha”; Bingham convinced himself that he’d meant to say “Ungacacha.” (“They look so different on paper that it is somewhat difficult to realize how closely the Indian pronunciation of one approaches the other,” he later rationalized.) Ungacacha was the name of a lake that Father Calancha had reported his two friars passing on their way from near Vitcos to Vilcabamba, where they were assaulted by battalions of lovelies from the Peruvian coast. Bingham reasoned that it was the monks who had heard the name incorrectly, rather than he. When the trail ended at the familiar hacienda of Huadquiña, just a half day’s walk from Machu Picchu, Bingham was certain that he’d compiled enough evidence—the Inca highways from Cusco and Vitcos, the skeletal remains of the chosen women, the architectural splendor of Machu Picchu—to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the city he’d found in 1911 was indeed Vilcabamba, the Lost City of the Incas.

Bingham’s logical next move was to visit the cave near Pacaritambo, where he could refute once and for all the notion that Machu Picchu was not also Tampu Tocco. His victory march was halted by an unlikely culprit—an organizational screwup. Considering the size of the 1914–15 expedition and the unpleasant exit that Bingham had made in 1912, it seems obvious that someone should have secured permits to excavate before digging up two hundred skulls. Unfortunately, this was one detail that Bingham had delegated. When Bingham arrived back at Yankihausi on June 15, 1915, he was informed that he faced charges of excavating and exporting artifacts illegally. One of his accusers, the archaeologist and newspaper editor Luis Valcárcel, had published reports in his Cusco paper El Sol that the Bingham expedition was smuggling gold from Machu Picchu out of the country through Bolivia. Bingham rushed off to Cusco to attempt to clear his name and salvage his expedition. As if fulfilling Gilbert Grosvenor’s bleak prophecy, Bingham collapsed into a hotel bed, fevered and exhausted, unable to move for a week.

In Cusco, Bingham discovered that the Peruvian rumor mill had been working at full capacity. “Among other things,” Bingham wrote wearily to Grosvenor, “we were charged with having brought a steam shovel from Panama.” The expedition was more or less exonerated of the more serious charges, but Bingham was ordered not to undertake any new digging. And because the investigation was still open, government inspectors would be appointed to monitor any future work. Chief among Bingham’s new babysitters was his accuser, Luis Valcárcel. Bingham briefly worried that he might not be allowed to leave the country.

The irony of Bingham’s prosecution is that he really was smuggling artifacts out of the country, hundreds of them—just not those that Valcárcel had accused him of. The previous year, the historian Christopher Heaney has written, Bingham had negotiated the purchase of 366 Inca artifacts from Tomás Alvistur, the son-in-law of Huadquiña’s owners. After a bit of haggling, the antiquities were smuggled out of Peru and arrived in New Haven, where they outshone the pieces that Bingham had excavated at Machu Picchu. At the same time he was under suspicion of smuggling gold in 1915, Bingham purchased another collection in Lima and shipped the artifacts out under a false name.¹⁵

In the end, it was hard not to view the 1914–15 expedition as a near-complete failure. The year’s only bright spot was the old Inca highway that Bingham had blazed anew, along with the three sets of strange ruins that he had found en route to Machu Picchu. As far as Bingham was concerned, he had proven his theory. After exiting the legal circus in Cusco, he had returned to Ollantaytambo and retraced his steps along the now-completed Inca Trail. “I had the satisfaction of going into ‘Vilcabamba the Old’ over the very road used by the Virgins of the Sun when they fled here from Cusco and the conquistadors,” he later wrote. His work in Peru was finished.