Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [10]
Life in the Andes hadn’t changed much since the Spanish Conquest almost five hundred years ago. People still plowed their fields by hand with sticks and observed centuries-old rituals to pay their respects to the Pachamama, or Mother Earth. Older folks kept time by monitoring the shadow cast across a local volcanic peak, which was revered as an apu, or mountain deity. Evil spirits were obstacles to be dealt with on a daily basis, much as I might have to contend with trying to catch a taxi on a rainy day. When you had a problem, you could say a prayer at the Catholic church and then talk to the village chaman, a healer who knew how to broker deals with the apus.
Nati was a great believer in the power of omens and dreams, which often foretold future events. She was perplexed by one image that visited her sleep for weeks.
“I keep dreaming that Aurita has a fruit tree growing in her stomach,” she told us.
It was right around then that we found out, quite unexpectedly, that Aurita was going to have a baby.
FIVE
Itinerant Scholar
Berkeley > Cambridge > Princeton
A photograph taken of Bingham at Yale showed the six feet four, sandy-haired explorer-to-be standing a full head taller than his classmates, looking like a somber, skinny power forward from a Soviet basketball team. He likely had a lot on his mind. After graduating in the spring of 1898, Hiram III returned to Honolulu to join the family business, as superintendent of a mission devoted to aiding the down-and-out. But Bingham’s years at Yale had taught him to question his father’s fundamentalist faith, and he lasted only six months before tendering his resignation. He later explained that he had left “because I found it impossible to teach the very orthodox beliefs which those in charge of the Mission expected to be taught.”
Something else may have been crowding Hiram III’s thoughts during those first months back in Honolulu. The previous summer, on a trip to the Yale-Harvard yacht races near New London, Connecticut, he had met a shy, sheltered young woman named Alfreda Mitchell. Her mother, Annie Tiffany Mitchell, was an heiress to the Tiffany jewelry fortune. Annie’s husband, Alfred, was an entrepreneur; his peripatetic career prior to settling down comfortably as a man of wealth had included stints operating whaling ships, serving in the Union Army and prospecting for gold in California.
Alfred Mitchell had fond memories of his seafaring days in Hawaii, and around the time Hiram Bingham III began doubting his future as a missionary, the four Mitchells were entering Honolulu Harbor aboard their yacht Archer. Two days after their arrival, Bingham paid the first of many social calls at their winter cottage on Waikiki Beach. Considering that Mitchell’s father-in-law, Charles Tiffany, had thought Mitchell wasn’t good enough for his daughter, Bingham might have expected a little more sympathy. Instead, Mitchell packed his daughters off to Japan.
Bingham took the hint, bought a ticket to San Francisco and enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. He would pursue a master’s in history. Annie Tiffany Mitchell cabled encouragement to the new scholar in California: “When you get your M.A., you can have your A. M.”
Hiram II, on the other hand, was flabbergasted by his son’s secular turn. Hiram III did not help matters by explaining that his love for Alfreda was the light by which he now navigated his life. The elder Bingham, convinced that his son was aboard an express train to hell, reminded him that “the greatest force in a man’s life should be supreme love to Jesus, supreme