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By Root 422 0

one thing modern Machu Picchu experts definitely did agree on, however, it was that Bingham’s theories about the site were ridiculous. The latest hypothesis, which seemed to have been generally accepted, had been conceived by two Yale scholars who’d spent years going over the artifacts that Bingham had excavated. Their conclusion was that Machu Picchu had been something slightly less romantic than the Lost City that Bingham imagined. Rather, it had been the country estate of an Inca emperor.

I thought: That’s it? The lost summer home of the Incas? There had to be more to the story.

One morning, while procrastinating at my desk on the nineteenth floor of a Manhattan skyscraper, I closed the door to my office and took from my bag a copy of Bingham’s Journal of an Expedition Across Venezuela and Colombia. The book was Bingham’s chronicle of his first great adventure, a 1906–07 trip to South America. (When the librarian handed it to me, she said, “Looks like this one’s been on the shelf for a while.” The last due date had been stamped in 1914.) Like me, Bingham had been bored with his work. He was toying with the idea of writing a biography of the great South American liberator, Simón Bolívar, while on leave from his dead-end Princeton teaching job. The published sources were woefully inadequate to answer his questions. “I came to the conclusion that if I wished to understand this period in the history of South America,” Bingham wrote, library resources would be insufficient. To truly get inside his subject’s head and understand his actions, he would have to leave his desk and undertake “an exploration of the route of his most celebrated campaign.”

I picked up the phone and called Aurita at her veterinary office.

“Is this important?” she asked. The background noise sounded like a gang war had broken out between cats and dogs. “I’m on the other line with a collie that ate a Ziploc bag. Er, the owner of a collie. You know what I mean.”

“What would you say if I told you I wanted to quit my job and go follow in the footsteps of the guy who found Machu Picchu?”

“I guess . . .” She paused. Somewhere in the background, an angry kitten meowed. “I guess I’d say, ‘What took you so long?’”

SEVEN

Explorer

Across Venezuela and Colombia

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,