Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [115]
What had been a general impression that Bingham hadn’t strained especially hard to disprove became cemented into presumed fact when Bingham published Lost City of the Incas in 1948. In this final version, Lizarraga was written out of the story. The long description of Charles Wiener’s “detailed map” was cut and replaced by the claim that Bingham didn’t even know of its existence until after his return to New Haven. The tip from Albert Giesecke, the University of Cusco administrator who urged Bingham to pay a visit to Melchor Arteaga, wasn’t mentioned. Instead, Bingham inserted a condescending note that when he arrived in 1911, “the professors in the University of Cusco knew nothing of any ruins down the valley.”
The unanswerable question is why? Bingham was already rich and famous. Was it simple mendacity? An editing oversight? Perhaps as good an explanation as any can be found in a stanza near the end of Kipling’s “Explorer,” the same poem that sent Bingham marching off to search for the lost city “behind the ranges” forty years earlier:
Well I know who’ll take the credit—all the clever chaps that
followed
Came, a dozen men together—never knew my desert-fears
Tracked me by the camps I’d quitted, used the water-holes I’d
hollowed.
They’ll go back and do the talking. They’ll be called the
Pioneers!
Though Bingham’s Grand Unified Theory didn’t go uncontested during his lifetime, Time magazine was correct in stating, five years after Bingham’s death in 1956, that he had compiled “the best known—and most romantic—history of Machu Picchu.” And so it remained until 1964, when another handsome young explorer, Gene Savoy, arrived in Peru determined to prove Bingham wrong. Savoy was convinced that the Lost City of the Incas had actually existed at Espiritu Pampa, not Machu Picchu. Like Bingham half a century before him, Savoy had reviewed all the clues in the old Spanish chronicles as to the whereabouts of Vilcabamba, and like Bingham he had no special training as an archaeologist. He did have some advantages over his predecessor, though. He had the aid of the Cobos family, which owned a farm next to the ruins. He had plenty of time and money; in the kitchen of the Sixpac Manco hostel, Juvenal Cobos told me that Savoy had hired forty macheteros to cut through the jungle at Espiritu Pampa. And he had a colossal ego that dwarfed even Bingham’s. After retiring from exploring, Savoy founded his own religion.
On his very first day at Espiritu Pampa, led by Juvenal’s older brothers Benjamin and Flavio, Savoy was able to see everything that Bingham had seen during his visit, including the strange ceramic tiles that had baffled the Yale man. Over the coming days, the macheteros hacked through vines and matapalos trees to find one new structure after another: houses, temples, storage facilities and fountains. The discovery of a giant stone like the White Rock near Vitcos, he wrote, “suggests we are inside an important ancient Inca community; for such stones were used for oracles.”
When Savoy found clay tiles, he made a connection that Bingham had not. They were evidence that Manco Inca’s guests at Vitcos, the Spanish refugees who later stabbed him in the back (literally), had taught the Incas an improved form of roofing technology, which they had employed in building their new capital. Savoy believed that he’d found Vilcabamba, but his thesis wasn’t confirmed until the historian John Hemming linked the evidence of the tiles to documentary sources that had come to light since Bingham’s exploring prime. The architect-adventurer Vince Lee made several trips to Espiritu Pampa in the 1980s—often with the help of Juvenal Cobos—and returned with evidence that not only had this been the site of Manco’s Vilcabamba, but that