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SEVENTEEN

No Small Plans

New Haven

The Mitchells built a thirty-room Mediterranean-style mansion for their daughter on New Haven’s tony Prospect Street. Annie Mitchell, furious with what she saw as Hiram’s mismanagement of Alfreda’s money—he’d lost a bundle investing in the stock market—kept title to the house and insisted on approving its final plans. Her son-in-law was able to set aside a study as his sanctuary. The walls were lined with bookshelves, over which hung roll-up maps of South America. A portrait of Alfreda gazed down from above the fireplace, flanked by a Peruvian pot and a Gilbertese idol. This private lair contained a hidden bathroom, entered through a hinged bookcase, and was accessed via a ladderlike staircase that led from Hiram’s bedroom.

When the 1910–11 edition of Who’s Who came out, Hiram Bingham’s name was listed for the first time. He chose to be identified as “Bingham, Hiram: Explorer.”

Bingham’s elevated interest in adventure was no accident. The years preceding World War I have often been described as the Heroic Age of Exploration, and for young men seeking glory at the ends of the earth, it was a wonderful time to be plying one’s trade. The seaman Joshua Slocum completed the first one-man circumnavigation of the globe in 1898, and earned fame and fortune through his book Sailing Alone Around the World. A few years later the Norwegian Roald Amundsen made the first crossing of the frozen Northwest Passage, successfully navigating the arctic waters linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, a sea route that mariners had sought since the fifteenth century. Mountaineers were taking aim at the world’s highest summits. In the first years of the new century, English teams that included the future occultist (and Led Zeppelin muse) Aleister Crowley reached unprecedented heights on the Himalayan peaks K2 and Kanchenjunga, the second and third tallest in the world. (Mount Everest would not be seriously attempted until the 1920s, because Nepal and Tibet refused access to foreign climbers.) Dr. Frederick Cook became a household name in 1906 after he reported having climbed Alaska’s Mount McKinley, the highest spot in the United States, though the claim was later disproved.

Most celebrated of all were the polar explorers. Dr. Cook competed against naval officer Robert Peary to plant the first flag at the North Pole. Within a week of Peary’s sending the cable trumpeting his triumph in April 1909, the dashing (and doomed) Robert Falcon Scott announced a new expedition to grab the South Pole for Britain.

The impetus behind Scott’s charge—and much of the exploration happening around the globe—was a muttonchopped septuagenarian living in London. Sir Clements Markham was the former president of the Royal Geographical Society. Coincidentally, he was also the English-speaking world’s reigning expert on the history of the Incas. In 1910, he published The Incas of Peru, a new chronicle of the Spanish Conquest. Incas was the first major work to examine the years following the puppet king Manco’s escape from Cusco, and it had a huge impact on Bingham’s thinking. So did Markham’s translations of newly discovered sixteenth-century works by a Dominican friar and a Spanish army officer. Both writers had traveled to a secluded Inca settlement called Vilcabamba. Bingham had singled out Vilcabamba as the true Lost City of the Incas, where Manco had established his rebel capital. Buried within Markham’s translations were hints to Vilcabamba’s location.

Then a new clue surfaced, one that initially seemed to confuse matters. A researcher at the national library in Lima, combing through an account left behind by another Spanish friar, had come across a passage that indicated that Manco had fled to a different city. In this version, the Inca capital was called Vitcos.

In the spring and summer of 1910, as Bingham sat in New Haven sifting through the evidence about Vilcabamba (or was it Vitcos?), the newly self-described explorer would have found it almost impossible to pick up a newspaper without reading about