Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [15]
Sadly, Bingham’s prose does not seem to have been inspired by Richard Harding Davis’s vivid war reportage. (A New York Times review of a later book could apply to all of Bingham’s written work: “His facts are extremely interesting; his presentation of them is clumsy and tedious.”) The few bright spots in Bingham’s narrative are his first encounters with South American “savages,” the Yaruro people, whom he found “very slightly clothed and bearing spears, bows and arrows.” He caught one native woman just as she was about to hurl a fresh cow patty at him, presumably trying to stir up trouble. In a friendlier encounter, a Yaruro chief:
put his hand on my shoulder, patted me on the back, took off my pith helmet, put it on himself, ran his fingers through my hair, said “bonito” [pretty], patted his heart saying “contento” [happy], patted my heart, smiled, and asked for my cartridge belt and then for my gloves.
By journey’s end, the group had traveled nearly one thousand miles in 115 days. Bingham was extremely proud of completing what he boasted to The New York Herald was not merely an interesting expedition, but “a feat hitherto not accomplished.” Rice, who had grown weary of Bingham’s sometimes reckless behavior—the novice explorer had been quite willing to unholster his gun to get South Americans’ attention—ditched his partner in Bogotá. Rice would concentrate his future explorations in the Amazon, where he played the wellfunded foil to the British explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett in the fruitless search for the vanished jungle metropolis that Fawcett called the City of Z. Neither man could have dreamed that the greatest prize in South America actually lay undiscovered less than a hundred miles west of Cusco.
Bingham had faced down “great savages, swollen rivers . . . and the scarcity of everything,” including food. The idea of resuming the drudgery of his duties at Princeton, once merely unpleasant, was now unthinkable. Within days of his return from Colombia, he was off to Yale to plead his case with President Hadley once again. Unbeknownst to Bingham, Hadley had already surveyed the members of the history faculty, who had reacted coolly to his inquiries about hiring Bingham as a junior professor in their department.
Hadley presented Bingham with two other possible positions at Yale: assistant professor of geography or lecturer in South American history. The geography job was secure: a full-time salaried position with a full teaching load. The lecturer position would be more or less like a job in the William Morris mailroom—a low-paying gig that might lead to something bigger should the young striver prove himself. It would also allow Bingham fewer teaching responsibilities and more flexibility to continue exploring—a pursuit that Hadley encouraged with gusto. Money wasn’t a serious factor, since Alfreda’s parents provided free housing and $10,000 annual allowance—about five times the yearly salary of an assistant professor.
Bingham happily accepted the lecturing position. After nearly a decade away, he was returning to his beloved Yale. His timing was perfect.
EIGHT
Legend of the Lost City
Cusco
Almost from the moment he took his new post at Yale, Bingham flourished. A reason to return to South America pre-A sented itself when Secretary of State Elihu Root, who had provided Bingham with an extremely handy letter of introduction on his previous trip, selected him as the youngest U.S. representative to the Pan-American Scientific Congress, to be held in Santiago, Chile, in December 1908. By the end of his first year of teaching in New Haven, Bingham was at the White House shaking hands with President Theodore Roosevelt, no slouch himself as an adventurer, at a reception for the delegation. Good news continued to arrive: Bingham had been named a fellow of the Royal Geographical