Turn Right at MacHu Picchu 12-Copy Floor Display - Mark Adams [91]
Among the persons most intrigued by Bingham’s reports on Machu Picchu was Gilbert Grosvenor, the head of the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. Grosvenor, a little man with a tidy mustache and big plans, had been handpicked at the boy-wonder age of twenty-three by the society’s founder, the telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell. His assignment was to transform National Geographic from a dry, scholarly periodical into a general-interest magazine that would deliver information about science and the natural world to a wide audience. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Grosvenor succeeded brilliantly, growing the circulation from one thousand to more than eighty thousand. He possessed the rare editor’s genius at divining popular tastes—in 1910, after much trial and error, he gave National Geographic the eye-catching yellow border that is still instantly recognizable a hundred years later.
Grosvenor had made his magazine a success largely by pursuing two strategies. First, after making a study of famous travel narratives (such as Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast), he began to emphasize stories about heroes and their triumphs; the society helped to sponsor Robert Peary’s successful ride to the North Pole. Grosvenor’s second editorial innovation was to devote more pages to photography. A 1905 photo essay about the hidden mystical city of Lhasa, Tibet, had helped kickstart the magazine’s growth spurt. Grosvenor was now considering throwing a third innovation into the editorial mix. The relatively new science of archaeology was becoming popular and National Geographic’s editor saw potential in adding to the magazine tales of ancient cultures rediscovered.
Grosvenor had politely declined earlier inquiries from Bingham asking the society to sponsor his South American peregrinations in 1906 and 1908. After reading about Machu Picchu, however, Grosvenor immediately sensed that Bingham’s story was perfect for his magazine. Within days of Bingham’s return, Grosvenor had solicited a long story from the explorer about his adventures in Peru, with plenty of photographs. The project would require a return expedition, which the National Geographic Society would help fund. Bingham had hardly returned from Peru before he was planning another, bigger trip back.
This time, no Mitchell family money would be required. Back in New Haven, Bingham the junior faculty member found that the 1911 expedition had improved his status on campus as well. A column in The Wall Street Journal predicted that the bones found near Cusco would provide a “new chapter” in the paleontological work begun by Bingham’s fellow Yale scholar Othniel Marsh. In January, Bingham presented his findings before a meeting of the members of the Yale Corporation, a group that included President Taft. Bingham must have been convincing, because Yale agreed to split the costs of a new expedition with the National Geographic Society. By May 1912, Bingham was once again steaming southward to Peru.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Digging for the Truth
In and Around Machu Picchu
One of the major factors in the rise of archaeology had been the birth of the public museum. Starting in the eighteenth century, antiquities that had been stashed away in private collections across Europe were converted into public property, accessible to the general populace. The British Museum in London and the Louvre in Paris were just two repositories of culture founded on the accumulated trophies of wealthy hoarders. As Daniel Boorstin notes in his book The Discoverers, the very word “tourist,” which had come to represent the decline of serious adventure travel in the eyes of John Leivers, was popularized after 1800 to describe