Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [112]
“And you think you’ll get there?”
“I can show you where Plateriayoc is.”
Later on, he did just that, showing me how the thousand-meter wall aligned almost perfectly with two famous Inca landmarks. And for just a moment, I felt the itch that Bingham—and Paolo, and John—knew well: the urge to drop everything, set off and find something lost and waiting behind the ranges.
FORTY-FIVE
Major Revisions
All Over the Map
Hiram Bingham’s career as a professor-cum-explorer burned brilliantly but extinguished its fuel in less than a decade. The fall 1916 semester was his last teaching at Yale. He struggled to finish a third big article for Gilbert Grosvenor, who was understandably eager to publish another adventure tale from his magazine’s star correspondent; National Geographic’s circulation had more than doubled again in the wake of Bingham’s 1913 Machu Picchu story. The editor was appalled by the quality of Bingham’s initial efforts. “You can do such fine writing when you want to but I am at a loss to understand the present heterogeneous collection of scraps,” he wrote after reading a first draft. National Geographic’s half a million subscribers “would murder me if I gave them anything as irrational as this story.”
Bingham was probably preoccupied with his new passion: politics. Encouraged by one U.S. president, his conservative mentor Theodore Roosevelt, and motivated by his antipathy toward the sitting White House occupant, his former Princeton boss Woodrow Wilson, Bingham lobbied successfully for a role as an alternate delegate to the 1916 Republican National Convention in Chicago. As war raged in Europe, he channeled his organizational skills into the “preparedness” movement, urging the United States military to be ready to join the battle against Germany. At age forty-one, he volunteered to join the Yale Corps of the Connecticut National Guard, which he hoped would pursue the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, who’d attacked an American cavalry unit in New Mexico. Instead, Major Hiram Bingham put his new pilot’s license to use starting in April 1917, when he was deputized to organize flight schools to train America’s first generation of military airmen. By Armistice Day in 1918, eight thousand men were under his command in France.
After the war, Bingham endured a forced health sabbatical like the one that had led him to South America in 1906. He was struck by the great Spanish flu epidemic, then was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and then underwent an operation for gallstones. “Some of these symptoms must have been psychosomatic, aggravated, if not caused, by anxiety and self-doubt at a turning point in his life,” his son Alfred later guessed. During a recuperative visit to his mother-in-law Annie Mitchell’s estate in Miami in the first part of 1922, the retired explorer finished his first book about his discoveries in Peru, Inca Land.
Bingham claimed to his publishers, Houghton Mifflin, that he’d written “a new kind of travel book—a combination of adventure, exploration and historical research.” In truth, he’d baked an unremarkable casserole from the leftovers of his stories for National Geographic, Harper’s , and various other periodicals. Reviews were tepid, as were sales. A planned sequel was scrapped.
Less than two weeks after Inca Land appeared in bookstores, Bingham began the third act of his remarkable career. He had long cultivated the powerful Republican Party chairman of his conservative home state of Connecticut. His wooing paid off in November of 1922, when Bingham was elected lieutenant governor. Two years later, he was tapped to run for governor. Bingham’s Yale credentials and fame as a man of action made him unbeatable in 1924, a very good year for Republicans’ Calvin Coolidge–led ticket. Before Bingham could occupy the governor’s mansion in Hartford, however,