Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [8]
In Honolulu, the Binghams lived in a modest house purchased for them by the missionary board. “There, under the oppressive shadow of the first Hiram and the brooding presence of the second, the third Hiram spent his boyhood,” one of Hiram III’s sons later wrote. Growing up the only child in a household that contained four pious adults—his parents and his father’s two older, childless sisters—Hiram III was never allowed to forget that he was destined for great things. (Or maybe predestined, since the Binghams were strict Calvinists.) The family read the Bible literally, and Hiram II seems to have adopted Proverbs 23:13–14 as an unofficial Eleventh Commandment: “Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.”
It is perhaps not surprising that at a young age, Hiram Bingham III developed a passion for spending time outside of the home.
In Inca Land, Hiram III’s first book about his discoveries in Peru, he compared the scenery near Machu Picchu to the lush volcanic topography of his native Hawaii. His father had, he wrote, “taught me as a boy to be fond of climbing the mountains of Oahu and Maui and to be appreciative of the views which could be obtained by such expenditure of effort.” Also passed down were the Bingham family’s wanderlust and distaste for making small plans. At age twelve, Hiram III withdrew $250 he had saved for his college education and bought passage on the steamship C. W. Bryant. He’d drawn up a detailed plan. First he’d go to New York City and build a bankroll as a newsboy; then he’d move on to England and, eventually, Africa. When the Bryant’s departure was delayed, Bingham’s accomplice got cold feet and told his own father of the escape plan.
Hiram III sailed for the mainland a few years later, at age sixteen. His father, having finally completed his Gilbertese Bible, now needed to oversee its publication in New York City. Hiram III was enrolled at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, a prep school traditionally favored by America’s wealthiest and most powerful families. (Both presidents Bush attended.) Hiram Bingham III paid his own tuition and worked each day in a campus boardinghouse, and later as a tutor, to cover other expenses. A slim, gawky transfer student—“I am not fit for athletics,” he wrote as a teenager, after he’d sprouted past six feet in height—whose devout parents forbade him even to dance, he did not make a huge social splash among the children of the Gay Nineties elite. “It is my purpose to save souls for Christ,” he wrote to his approving parents back in Hawaii.
In the autumn of 1894, Hiram III matriculated at Yale, his father’s alma mater. By the end of his first year he’d made a name for himself on campus by helping the freshman debate team defeat Harvard. The unlikeliness of this victory, Yale’s first in debate against its most hated rival, may be guessed at by a headline in The Boston Globe: HARVARD FRESHMEN BEATEN. When Bingham was hoisted onto the shoulders of his classmates, he found that he rather liked the adulation. From that moment he blossomed in New Haven, pledging a fraternity and joining the glee club. He even caved in to social pressure to dance—it would insult party hostesses not to, he reasoned—and begged his mother’s forgiveness.
The reason we know these things about Hiram Bingham is that he carefully preserved his correspondence and clipped any news items in which his name appeared, to be saved in an annotated scrapbook. (He’d learned the habit from his mother.) His father, by toiling for decades in obscurity with little to show for it except a Bible that almost no one could read, had taught Hiram III a valuable lesson in the importance of self-promotion. If a man was