Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [44]
Such diligence carried over into Bingham’s search for Vilcabamba. His first weeks in Peru were largely devoted to shoe-leather detective work. Within twenty-four hours of arriving in Lima, Bingham went to the National Library to meet with Carlos Romero, the historian whose archival research had raised the prospect that Vitcos, not Vilcabamba, was the Lost City of the Incas. (“He seems to be rather deaf and somewhat cross, but quite a scholar,” Bingham noted.) Bingham spent much of his brief time in Lima talking with Romero and copying passages out of one of the important new sources the scholar had found buried in the library’s collection, Father Antonio de la Calancha’s Coronica Moralizada, a “pious account of the missionary activities in Peru,” published in 1639. According to the historian Christopher Heaney, when Bingham asked Romero which had been the last Inca redoubt—Vitcos or Vilcabamba—Romero explained the reason for the confusion. Vilcabamba was the name of the province that the rebel Incas controlled. Vitcos was the name of the capital.
It was an elegant solution with one serious flaw: Romero was only half right, as Bingham discovered when he read further into Calancha’s text. Manco had indeed established a new, remote capital at Vitcos after escaping from Cusco. But he had also constructed another capital, deeper in the jungle, when even Vitcos became unsafe. Suddenly, Heaney writes, “Bingham wasn’t searching for one lost city; he was searching for two.”
Bingham continued his fact-finding, obtaining copies of maps from the Lima Geographical Society, including one made by the famous nineteenth-century geographer Antonio Raimondi, whom Bingham considered the “greatest of Peruvian explorers.” He added these to his copies of the Royal Geographical Society’s latest maps of southern Peru, believed to be definitive. He also had in his possession what may have been his secret weapon: a hand-drawn map he’d been given by a friend, the Harvard anthropologist William Farabee.
In his final and best-known book, Lost City of the Incas, Bingham claimed that finding Vilcabamba and/or Vitcos was his only concrete objective as he advanced down the valley of the Urubamba. He arrived on the now-famous ridge at Machu Picchu, he wrote, “without the slightest expectation of finding anything more interesting than the ruins of two or three stone houses.” In an interview that Bingham gave to The New York Sun just before departing, however, which ran under the headline WILL SEEK LOST CITIES, he told a reporter: “There are current in the country many reports of the existence of ruined cities along the Urubamba River, which reports we hope to run down. Indians frequently bring these reports. Dr. Farabee, who was in charge of the Harvard expedition of four years ago, told me of a rumor, pretty well authenticated, which he had got from Indians, of a big city hidden away on the mountainside above the Urubamba Valley.” Machu Picchu was (and to the present still is) the only major “ruined city” ever found in the Urubamba Valley. “The map I sent you,” Farabee wrote to Bingham in early 1911, “is a composite of many more or less inexact and some fairly exact elements.” Were those elements exact enough to lead Bingham to Machu Picchu? It’s impossible to know.
As Bingham approached Cusco by train, he was met outside the city by Albert Giesecke, the Philadelphia-born rector of the University of Cusco. Like the historian Romero, Giesecke is one of several essential supporting figures in the discovery of Machu Picchu. According to an interview Giesecke gave in 1962,