Turn Right at Machu Picchu
Page 34
Zárate, Miguel
About the Author
MARK ADAMS is the author of the acclaimed history Mr. America, which The Washington Post named a Best Book of 2009. A writer for many national magazines, including GQ, Outside, and National Geographic Adventure, he lives near New York City with his wife and children.
1 Among his other achievements, Hiram Bingham I was the first member of the family to inspire a fictional character. The inflexible missionary Abner Hale in James Michener’s Hawaii, later made into a movie starring Max von Sydow and Julie Andrews, was based on the Reverend Bingham.
2 Bingham’s eldest son, Woodbridge, remembered that Hiram III’s father had offered his son $10 if he read Hiram I’s book. Hiram III had repeated the offer to his own seven sons. No Bingham was believed to have ever earned the money.
3 The explorer Percy Fawcett, of City of Z fame, reported erroneously that the secret was a solvent obtained from plants, which softened rock long enough that it could be shaped like clay.
4 Non-Peruvians have been at least as eager as the natives to find this hidden loot. Even the French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau once spent eight weeks trolling Lake Titicaca in a miniature submarine, searching in vain for a two-ton gold chain that, according to legend, had been taken from the Koricancha and dumped in the lake to keep the Spaniards from discovering it.
5 There’s one other possible explanation. Like many Inca sites, the White Rock has multiple names, one of which is Ñusta Ispanan, or “the Place Where the Princess Urinates.” On a follow-up trip in 1912, Bingham noted: “Yesterday a little girl acting on her Indian mother’s orders went and sat and urinated where the Inca princess is said to have done it years before. My examination of the rock today seemed to show that this custom was fairly common.”
6 In 1780, a rebel leader who had taken the name Tupac Amaru II led an unsuccessful indigenous revolt. When captured, he was made to watch the executions of his wife and son in the Plaza de Armas, after which his tongue was cut out and—following a failed attempt to pull him to pieces between four horses—he was beheaded and his body dismembered. Two centuries later, the Black Panther Afeni Shakur was so inspired by this revolutionary that she named her son, soon to gain his own fame as a rapper, Tupac Amaru Shakur.
7 Incidentally, for those who have the time, this is a much cheaper way to get to MP—you take a bus to the big town of Santa Maria, transfer to a smaller bus at the smaller town of Santa Teresa, flag down a combi bus to the train station at Hidroeléctrica and walk along the tracks. As of this writing, a fit person with lots of spare time and a strong back could get to Machu Picchu for about twenty bucks. The conventional trip requires a taxi ride to the train station outside of Cusco (about $15), a one-way ticket on the daily Vistadome ($84), plus bus ticket from Aguas Calientes up the Hiram Bingham Highway ($12). You can walk up to the ruins for free, up the same slope that Bingham scaled in 1911, though almost no one does.
8 An example of this sort of picture can be found on the last page of this book’s section of photographs.
9 The paleoecologist Alex Chepstow-Lusty has theorized that the Inca empire’s growth spurt was made possible in large part by a period of global warming, which melted enough glacial ice to support a huge increase in high-altitude agriculture, which in turn fueled a population boom that provided the labor to make Pachacutec’s public works projects possible. Unless current global-warming trends are reversed, most of Peru’s glaciers are expected to disappear by 2050.
10 Should you mention the name Intihuatana to a Peruvian, you’re likely to hear a famous tale—not of Inca architectural glories but rather about how in 2000, a crew shooting a beer commercial allowed a crane to fall onto the sacred stone, cracking off one corner.
11 Bingham isn’t the only Inca expert whose reputation has suffered over the intervening years. Historians have laid much of the blame for Scott’s death at the feet of Sir Clements Markham, who pushed Scott and his team to use sledges pulled by men instead of dogsleds, as Amundsen did.
12 Montesinos compiled an extraordinary amount of original research on the Incas, which he then turned around and used to try to prove that they had descended from the great-grandson of the Biblical ark-builder Noah.
13 One of the most fascinating topics of study in Inca anthropology is that of the khipu. These were knotted cords used to register information down to “even one pair of sandals,” according to one sixteenth-century observer. The knots were decipherable only to a special class of khipu keepers, which is why none of the six hundred khipu known to have survived the conquistadors’ purge of Inca records has been fully decrypted. Harvard professor Gary Urton has theorized that the knots used a system analogous to a computer’s binary code—which leaves open the possibility that the khipu were used to record historical information as well as accounting data.
14 Astute readers may notice a similarity to the name Llactapata. Both mean “high place.” As we’ve seen in the case of “Vilcabamba,” residents of the Andes have never placed a high priority on differentiating places by name. There’s a theory that Patallacta was also the original name of Machu Picchu.
15 Bingham’s purchases were folded into the Machu Picchu collection at Yale’s Peabody Museum. Several of the finer artifacts still on display when I visited were identified as having been “acquired by Bingham in Cusco.” The explorer’s nemesis, Luis Valcárcel, went on to become one of Peru’s leading archaeologists and a worldrenowned expert on Machu Picchu. He and Bingham later struck up a mutual admiration. At the Machu Picchu museum, Valcárcel’s picture hangs above a glass case containing details of Bingham’s 1912 troubles.
16 In another fun coincidence, a scene from the generally reviled 2008 sequel Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was filmed in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, just down the hall from the Rare Books and Manuscripts Room, where a certain author examined Bingham’s notebooks and expedition papers. Jones makes an impressive entrance, skidding across the library floor on a motorcycle piloted by his son Mutt; on his way out he instructs a mousy student, “You want to be a good archaeologist, you’ve got to get out of the library.” The team behind Crystal Skull might have benefited from a few more hours in the library, since the story is riddled with embarrassing errors, not the least of which is Indy’s greeting at a Peruvian airport by a Mexican mariachi band.
ALSO BY MARK ADAMS
Mr. America: How Muscular Millionaire Bernarr Macfadden Transformed
the Nation Through Sex, Salad, and the Ultimate Starvation Diet