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boulders and torn down walls would seem to show a violent attempt at treasure hunting in the past,” Bingham wrote in his journal. The entire region along the Vilcabamba River had been swept by deadly plagues of smallpox and typhus, and the native workers Bingham was able to round up were “insolent.” A week’s work turned up not a single artifact of note, only “a handful of rough potsherds.”

Back at Machu Picchu, Bingham was taking no chances. The crew carefully shielded its museum-quality finds from the prying eyes of its government overseer. The Yale team strip-mined the site, following the director’s instructions to note carefully where every bone chip and pot fragment had come from. Among the best finds were several small bronzes, a few pots, two carved stone boxes, some silver shawl pins and a copper bracelet. The vast bulk of what workers packed into ninety-three boxes at the end of the dig were broken ceramics and human remains.

Upon returning to Lima, however, Bingham learned that he might not be leaving Peru with any artifacts at all. Yale’s concession had been arranged with President Leguia as a sort of gentleman’s agreement. Bingham had presumed that Leguia—a political strongman whose unpopular dictatorial tendencies would, years later, lead to his incarceration—could arrange for the Congress to approve the fifty-fifty split when the legislature opened for business in July. It was a serious misreading of Peru’s political climate. Antipathy toward Leguia was so strong that a national uprising forced him out of office. When Bingham met with the new populist head of state, Guillermo Billinghurst, the president informed the explorer that he considered Yale’s concession to be “a disgrace.” Anticipating the legal trouble that would arise a century later, Lima’s newspapers portrayed Bingham as a Yankee imperialist looking to steal the country’s treasures and dispatch them to Yale. “I am blue, blue, blue,” Bingham wrote to Alfreda. “This has been the hardest, most discouraging and least productive of my expeditions.”

Just as the expedition was devolving into a complete disaster, Billinghurst offered a surprising solution. Yale would be required to stop excavating as of December 1, earlier than expected. At that time, Bingham would be allowed to export, pending a thorough inspection, not just the half of the objects that he had agreed to, but everything that Yale had found.

There was one catch with the new agreement. Peru reserved the right to “exact” from Yale “the return of the unique and duplicate objects that it has extracted.” In other words, the Peabody Museum was welcome to display the fruits of Bingham’s labors at Machu Picchu. But Peru could demand them back whenever it wanted.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Yale v. Peru

Near Washington, D.C.

To understand how Bingham’s actions in 1912 dragged his beloved Yale into court a hundred years later, I had to travel about four thousand miles to the café of a Barnes and Noble in suburban Washington, D.C., where I met with Eliane Karp-Toledo. In a country populated by circumspect brunettes, the former first lady of Peru was almost as famous for her fiery red hair and flamboyant native-inspired accessorizing as she was for her far-left politics and inability to keep her strong opinions to herself. Her strawberry tresses (the closest shade in the Crayola palette would fall, appropriately, somewhere between Outrageous Orange and Radical Red) were held up by a pair of mirrored sunglasses, and she was wearing Stanford sweats (she had recently taught there) and an olive-drab military-style shirt that from twenty paces appeared to be emblazoned with that dewy-eyed portrait of Che Guevara. Lady Bird Johnson this was not.

I have no idea if any president in Peruvian history other than Alejandro Toledo has been married or not, because no one has ever expressed an opinion to me about any first lady other than Karp-Toledo. The day we met she had been gone from Peru for four years and people there still talked about her all the time. She was usually compared to one of three women: