Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [90]
Something seemed to be missing. I looked around the room, and then made two circuits of the museum. Strangely, of the hundreds of photos on display, not a single one was of Bingham. The first man to photograph Machu Picchu had been airbrushed out of its official visual history.
When I returned to Giesecke’s smiling face, I noticed a display beneath that delved into some “highly irregular” dealings that Bingham had gotten involved in when he became fixated on solving the mystery of what Machu Picchu had been. Apparently, it wasn’t what Bingham did in 1911 that pissed people off; it was what he did when he returned the next year.
I was starting to think I might need another visit, too.
THIRTY-SIX
A Star Is Born
New York and Washington, D.C.
Bingham’s arrival in New York City aboard the steamship Metapan on December 21, 1911, could not have been better timed. Newspaper reporters were awaiting word of a victor in the Scott-versus-Amundsen race to the pole and had spent months whetting the public’s appetite for adventure stories. Bingham had cleverly churned the waters with the interviews he’d given prior to departing, promising lost cities. He had also telegraphed news of the Coropuna triumph at the first possible moment. His peers in the Royal Geographical Society received a sneak preview of his discoveries, with photographs, which Clements Markham published in the society’s December Geographical Journal, along with the encouraging comment, “I trust that [this] is the forerunner of a fuller topographical description of the Vilcabamba region.”
Though Bingham could, and did, boast about the expedition’s many achievements—the Cusco bones, the proof of Vitcos, the Coropuna climb—the news angle that received the most play in newspapers from Oshkosh to Topeka was his encounter at the lost city of Machu Picchu. The New York Sun’s headline was typical: EXPLORERS FIND CITY THAT WAS: WHITE-WALLED TOWN OF THE INCAS DISCOVERED IN PERU SNUGGLED UNDER CORNFIELDS. YALE PROFESSOR ASTOUNDED AT BEAUTY OF ARCHITECTURE. Had the explorer returned with any samples of this incredible stonework? “Nothing would have suited us better than to have brought specimens of the architecture home with us,” Bingham assured the mob. “This could not be done, however, as the Peruvian Government expressly forbids it.”
Bingham’s discovery immediately raised a number of questions: Who among the Incas built this palace in the sky? What was the significance of the unusual buildings? Why did the Incas choose such a dramatic location? And how had Machu Picchu been lost for centuries? Bingham seems to have been pondering the answers to some of these questions on the way home. The London Observer offered one possible answer. Bingham had found “what are believed to be the ruins of the Peruvian town referred to in the writings Sir Clements Markham as ‘the hill of the three-windowed temples.’”
In Markham’s book The Incas of Peru, which surveyed more than fifty years of study and had deeply influenced Bingham’s plans for the 1911 expedition, the former RGS president had recounted the story of Tampu Tocco—the Incas’ creation myth. “The legend relates that out of a hill with three openings for windows there came three tribes,” Bingham wrote in an article for Harper’s, his first attempt to explain Machu Picchu’s significance to the American public. “These tribes eventually settled at Cusco and founded the Inca empire.” At Machu Picchu, of course, Bingham had been transfixed by the building he named the Temple of the Three Windows. Since the structure was so extraordinary, and since no archaeologist had yet found the ruins of Tampu Tocco, then perhaps, just maybe, Machu Picchu and Tampu Tocco were one and the same. “It seems to me that there is a possibility that . . . Machu Picchu is the original Tampu Tocco, although this is contrary to the accepted