Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [14]
Alfreda’s childbirth in the summer of 1906 was a difficult one, and Bingham accompanied her to New York City for postpartum surgery. While his wife was recuperating in Manhattan, Bingham made the acquaintance of Hamilton Rice, a Boston-born physician with interests strikingly similar to his own. Roughly the same age, Rice, whom The New York Times described in his obituary as a man “as much at home in the elegant swirl of Newport society as in the steaming jungles of Brazil,” could have been Bingham’s more accomplished doppelganger. He had descended from a prestigious lineage, studied medicine at Harvard and later married into one of America’s richest families. Rice had already visited the Caucasus and paddled the far reaches of Hudson Bay. He’d also made his first journey to South America, crossing the Andes from Ecuador and traveling down through largely unmapped territory to the Amazon, following the route of the legendary one-eyed sixteenth-century Spanish explorer and conquistador Francisco de Orellana.
To Bingham, Rice’s MD would have been less impressive than the letters FRGS, which Rice was allowed to place after his signature as a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. The RGS was the world’s most prestigious explorers club. Its members had included Richard Burton, who had snuck into Mecca disguised as an Arab; David Livingstone, who’d sought the Nile River source (and who was in turn sought by reporter Henry Stanley, who greeted him with the immortal words “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”); and Charles Darwin, who had done pretty well for himself after his own South American travels.
During Bingham’s talks with Rice, the idea emerged that the two men should follow the route of Bolívar’s desperate 1819 march across the Andes of Venezuela and Colombia, a military gambit comparable in difficulty and historical impact to Hannibal’s elephant parade through the Alps. As he would do again and again in years to come, Bingham rationalized as duty his need to spend six months away from his family. “Let us not complain at our long separation but rejoice in the opportunity to accomplish a good piece of work,” he wrote Alfreda from South America. He was more passionate, and perhaps more honest, in writing to his father: “I feel the Bingham blood stirring in my veins as I start for little-known regions, as nearly all my Bingham ancestors for ten generations have done before me.”
By the time Bingham and Rice departed Caracas on January 3, 1907, their group had expanded to include two Caribbean assistants who were shepherding one thousand pounds of gear on five mules, supplemented by a wooden cart and two Venezuelan drivers. Bingham had been influenced by an article in Scribner’s Magazine by the globetrotting celebrity war correspondent Richard Harding Davis that listed items useful on an adventurous journey, including “a folding cot and a folding chair.” Dressed in a British pith helmet and riding boots, Bingham looked like he was off to fight the Zulus. The party brought along nearly enough arms to do so: “two Winchester rifles, a Mauser, and two Winchester repeating shotguns, beside three revolvers and a sufficient supply of ammunition.”
If Bingham had been hoping for a taste of adventure, he found it. The book that eventually emerged from the journey, The Journal of an Expedition Across Venezuela and Colombia, was neither a Bolívar biography nor a scholarly examination of the Darien scheme. It was a chronicle of a perilous trip into a deeply foreign world. Venezuela was a land of leper colonies and colonial ruins, where howler monkeys and screaming macaws populated the upper reaches of trees with trunks that grew up to twenty feet thick. When the party tried to carry its large cache of firearms across the border into Colombia, a squad of four Venezuelan soldiers accused Bingham’s group of smuggling arms to Colombian revolutionaries. Bingham’s team had to sneak the arsenal