Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [37]
The world seemed to be running out of potential discoveries. The writer Arthur Conan Doyle, who was drafting a novel about four explorers in deepest South America—a book soon to become the adventure classic The Lost World—teased Robert Peary at a London luncheon held to honor the polar pioneer. “There had been a time when the world was full of blank spaces,” he told the attendees. “But owing to the ill-directed energy of [our] guest and other gentlemen of similar tendencies these spaces [are] being rapidly filled up.”
Around this time, Bingham received a copy of the historian Adolph Bandelier’s The Islands of Titicaca and Koati to review. Buried in a footnote was the interesting fact that Mount Coropuna in southern Peru, estimated to top out at twenty-three thousand feet, “is likely (unless some higher peak be found yet in northern Peru) . . . the culminating point of the continent.” In other words, the tallest mountain in the Western Hemisphere—which had never been climbed—was probably in Peru, not far from where any search for Vilcabamba would take place. Bingham was intrigued by the opportunity “to enjoy the satisfaction, which all Alpinists feel, of conquering a ‘virgin peak.’” He surely had more than personal gratification in mind. When he arrived in Lima for the first time in 1909, the city was still buzzing about the achievements of Annie S. Peck. This American mountaineer had just received a gold medal from Peru’s President Augusto Leguia (and barrels of newspaper ink in the United States) for the achievement of climbing Mount Huascaran, which she claimed was the highest peak in the hemisphere. Peck had recently conceded that perhaps Coropuna held that honor, and she was planning a high-profile assault on the mountain in 1911.
When a former Yale classmate expressed interest in funding the first topographical survey of Peru’s seventy-third meridian (a latitudinal line that circles the globe near Machu Picchu and also happens to pass within a few miles of New Haven), Bingham sketched out an audacious plan. The official prospectus written up by the soon-to-be director of the Yale Peruvian Expedition of 1911 made clear that Bingham’s primary objective was to earn immortality as an explorer, one way or another. In the span of about six months, he would sail to Peru, search for Vilcabamba (or maybe Vitcos—he’d sort that out when he got to Peru), summit Mount Coropuna (with any luck, Annie Peck would fail in her attempt), oversee the seventy-third meridian survey and measure the depth of the remote Lake Parinacochas. This last objective seems to have been an attempt to curry favor with Sir Clements Markham, whom Bingham pestered frequently for advice through the early part of 1911. Then he’d sail back to New York. He budgeted that he’d need six men and about $12,000.
Bingham scrambled to cover his trip expenses. As a matter of pride, he hoped not to have to dip into Alfreda’s savings as he had for prior excursions. In the end, he sold four prospective magazine articles about the voyage to Harper’s and put up for sale a plot ofland in Honolulu that his father, recently deceased, had promised to his church. In the timeless tradition of explorers everywhere, he reached out to every potential corporate sponsor he could think of—obtaining photographic equipment from George Eastman of Eastman Kodak and securing a discount on gear from Ezra Fitch of Abercrombie and Fitch. When time ran short, he asked Alfreda for money to hire a team doctor.
By late spring, Bingham had assembled his team. The Yale Peruvian Expedition would depart as soon as spring classes ended.
EIGHTEEN
Far Out
Yanama, Peru
“Here, Mark, take a pinch of