Hiram Bingham III Machu Picchu Explorer

Hiram Bingham III Machu Picchu Explorer

Hiram Bingham III was a distinguished scholar and public servant attached to a line of the Bingham family that has lived in Salem, Connecticut, for generations. Born on November 19, 1875, in Honolulu, Hawaii, where his parents served as missionaries, Bingham resisted his family’s urgings to pursue a similar career. After completing his PhD at Harvard University, he became an adjunct professor of Latin American history at Yale University in 1907. Shortly thereafter, Bingham made one of the most famous discoveries in archeological history.

 

Historic photo

Photograph by Hiram Bingham of the Sacred Plaza at Machu Picchu, Peru

In a series of three expeditions from 1911 to 1915, Bingham discovered and excavated the ancient Inca village of Machu Picchu, which was unknown beyond a small number of indigenous people and, possibly, missionaries who had earlier traveled through the area. Often referred to as “the mountain city,” Machu Picchu is located high in the Andes Mountains of Peru and is thought to be the last refuge of the Incas—an empire that lasted for almost 500 years. This majestic landscape is dotted with granite temples and palaces and, perhaps most famously, a series of terraced farms arranged down the side of the mountain.
Bingham discovered Machu Picchu as part of the Yale Peruvian Expedition. The expedition had its roots in the expansion of US influence in Latin America during the early 20th century. American politicians saw opportunities in Latin America to expand US markets and cultivate new political alliances. The Yale Peruvian Expedition was just one of a number of scientific forays sponsored by American universities during this time in which institutions like Yale, Harvard, and Stanford competed for discoveries to boost their scholarly prestige.

From Explorer to State Politician

After his initial discovery, Bingham returned to Machu Picchu two more times (under the auspices of Yale University and the National Geographic Society) to further the excavation and cataloging of the site. His last trip ended in 1915, along with his service to Yale.
Bingham spent the remainder of his life working primarily in politics. He became lieutenant governor of Connecticut in 1922 and was elected governor in November of 1924. Before he could serve, however, the death of Connecticut Senator Frank B. Brandegee necessitated a special election, which Bingham won. In 1926, voters re-elected Bingham to serve a full six-year term.
Bingham died in Washington, DC, on June 6, 1956, at the age of 80. His primary legacy remains that of the Machu Picchu discovery. Since its excavation, the site has become one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world. In his honor, the Peruvian government named the main road to Machu Picchu the Hiram Bingham Highway.

Hiram Bingham Facts

 

Hiram Bingham (1875-1956) was an American explorer who discovered the famous Inca ruins of Machu Picchu and other important Inca sites.
Hiram Bingham was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on November 19, 1875, the son of retired missionaries from an old Hawaiian family. He graduated from Yale University and then returned to Hawaii for a short time. He decided on an academic career and received his Master of Arts degree from the University of California at Berkeley. He completed his studies at Yale, earning a doctorate in Latin American history.
In 1905, Bingham made his first trip to South America, following the route of Simón Bolivar, from Caracas, Venezuela to Bogotá, Colombia. He wrote about his journey in The Journal of an Expedition Across Venezuela and Colombia. He returned in 1908 and retraced the Spanish trade route from Buenos Aires to Lima. While in Peru, in February, 1909, he visited Choqquequirau, a recently discovered Inca site that had once been thought to be the last refuge of the Inca rulers after they were defeated by the Spanish explorer, Francisco Pizarro. This visit inspired him with the desire to find the legendary "lost city of the Incas."
In 1911, Bingham went back to Peru with two goals: to climb Mount Coropuna to see whether it was higher than Mount Aconcagua and to seek out the last capital of the Incas, the almost mystical city of Vilcabamba. Arriving in Arequipa, in June 1911, he decided that it would not be wise to try to make the climb in winter and instead decided to look for ruins in the valley of the Rio Urubamba. According to legend, the last Inca ruler, Manco II, had established his capital, Vitcos, in the Vilcabamba range. Various stories of ruins circulated, but the best opinions fixed the capital somewhere in the valleys of the Vilcabamba and Urubamba rivers.
Setting out with a mule train, Bingham left Cuzco in July 1911. He traveled through the terraces of the valley of Yucay and past the gardens of Ollantaitambo. At Salapunco in the Urubamba valley he saw the ruins of a small fortress of pre-European origin. One night, Bingham camped between the road and the Urubamba River. The owner of a nearby hut, Melchor Arteaga, came out to see who the stranger was and told him about some nearby ruins called Machu Picchu. On the next morning, July 24, 1911, Bingham persuaded Arteaga to take him there. After a walk of 45 minutes, they left the main road, crossed the rapids of the Urubamba River on a rickety bridge, and climbed up a rough path through the forest. They ate lunch in the hut of some Native Americans who were farming on ancient Inca terraces.
Leaving the hut, Bingham spent an hour and twenty minutes climbing to the top of row upon row of terraces almost 1,000 feet high. He crossed the terraces, went through a nearby forest, and came upon a vast complex of granite houses constructed with extremely careful stonework. There he also saw a three-sided temple that rivaled any that had ever been found in Peru. This was Machu Picchu, the most famous of all the Inca ruins.
Bingham did not stay long at Machu Picchu because he felt that he could still find the capital city of Vitcos, which was supposed to be marked by a white boulder over a spring of water. At Huadquiña Bingham learned of "important ruins" a few days' journey down the Urubamba River. They turned out to be merely the ruins of a small Inca storehouse. He then traveled up the Vilcabamba River to the village of Lucma, where he consulted Evaristo Morovejo, the subprefect of the village. Morovejo's brother was supposed to have found some ruins while hunting for buried treasure in 1884.
Morovejo took Bingham to the small village of Puquiura, three miles from Lucma. The ruins they saw were of a Spanish mill. However, on a hill above Puquiura, called Rosaspata by the locals, there were more ruins that Bingham went to investigate. They turned out to be the remains of a fortress containing 14 rectangular Inca buildings, including a "long palace" that had 15 doors along one side. Bingham was convinced that this was Vitcos. On the second day, August 8, 1911, Morovejo showed him a white boulder and, some distance away, a spring. Bingham followed the stream to an open spot where he saw what he had been looking for—a gigantic white boulder with Inca carvings on its side overlooking a pool near the ruins of an Inca temple. Bingham had found Vitcos.
From Vitcos, Bingham went to the small Spanish town of Vilcabamba (named after, but not the same as, the Inca city of Vilcabamba). He traveled from there into the surrounding jungle lowlands and reached a remote sugar plantation on August 15, 1911. Its owner took him on a two-day trip into the forest to a spot called Espíritu Pampa (the Plain of the Spirits). Here they found more Inca ruins, which later were found to be those of a large town. Bingham's guides and porters were impatient, however, and he was not able to stay long at the site.
After these incredible discoveries within the space of a few weeks, Bingham's climb up Mount Coropuna was anticlimactic. He made the climb with an American mountaineer, H.L. Tucker, a British naturalist, an American astronomer, and a Peruvian guide. The astronomer was injured and forced to return to Arequipa. Since they were going to altitudes not previously scaled, their guide was not much help, and the muleteers demanded extra pay before they would climb past the snow line. The Native American guide went with Tucker and Bingham to the peak, which they reached from a base camp they had set up at 17,300 feet. They were clothed warmly enough that they did not have to worry about frostbite, but they did suffer from soroche, the illness caused by lack of oxygen. The three men reached the summit on October 14 after a climb of six and one-half hours. The mountain turned out to have three peaks, and it was only by chance that they had climbed the highest one. Once they got to the top and made their measurements, Bingham was disappointed to learn that it was not as high as Aconcagua. He left feeling that he had conquered the second highest peak in the Andes. In later years, however, it was established that Coropuna is only the nineteenth highest peak in the Andes.
Bingham led expeditions back to the Vilcabamba region in 1912 and 1915, to clear the ruins he had discovered and to make further explorations and scientific studies in the area. These expeditions found many small Inca ruins in the hills near Machu Picchu, and traces of Inca roads and buildings at various places along the mountain range. As a result of these expeditions, Bingham became more and more convinced that Machu Picchu was the lost city of Vilcabamba and supported this view until his death. More recent expeditions and interpretations make it seem more likely that Vilcabamba should be identified with Bingham's other great discovery at Espíritu Pampa.
Following the 1915 expedition, Bingham made no further trips to South America. He volunteered to serve in World War I and became the chief of air personnel in the air service after learning how to fly. He then entered Republican politics and was elected lieutenant governor of Connecticut in 1922. He ran for governor in 1924 and won that race as well. However, he served for only one day. During the election campaign, one of the Connecticut senators committed suicide, and a special election was held to replace him. Bingham entered the race and won once again. He served as United States senator from 1925 to 1933.
While in the Senate, Bingham became involved in a scandal when it was revealed that he was using a paid lobbyist to help him draft legislation and had taken him to closed committee meetings as a staff member. He was censured by the Senate and lost the next election. He spent the following years writing and serving on the boards of several large corporations. He was recalled to Washington by President Truman and put in charge of the Loyalty Review Board of the Civil Service Commission in 1951. This was during the anti-Communist "Red Scare" of the early 1950s, and the Board's job was to search out possibly disloyal employees. Bingham carried out his distasteful job with notable zeal. He left the board in 1953 and died three years later on June 6, 1956 in Washington, D.C.
 

Hiram and Machu Picchu ruims 

Quotes About Perú

 

1.      “Of course, tourists traveling in their comfortable rail coaches could only glean the vaguest idea of the conditions in which the Indians live, from the fast glimpses they catch as they speed past our train, which has stopped to let them pass. The fact that it was the U.S. archaeologist Bingham who discovered the ruins and expounded his findings in easily accessible articles for the general public, means that Machu Picchu is by now very famous in that country to the north and the majority of North Americans visiting Peru come here. (In general they fly direct to Lima, tour Cuzco, visit the ruins and return straight home, not believing that anything else is worth seeing.”

— Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries

2.     “Few romances can ever surpass that of the granite citadel on top of the beetling precipices of Machu Picchu, the crown of Inca Land.”

— Hiram Bingham

3.     “A prophet once said ‘Don’t tell me what a man says, don’t tell me what a man knows. Tell me where he’s traveled?’ I wonder about that, do we get smarter, more enlightenment as we travel? Does travel bring wisdom? I think there is probably no better place to find out than Peru.”

— Anthony Bourdain

4.     “After seeing the ruins at Machu Picchu, the fabulous cultures of antiquity seemed to be made of cardboard, Papier-mâché…”

— Pablo Neruda, 1954

5.     “I cannot say I enjoyed the very little I saw of Peru: in summer, however, it is said that the climate is much pleasanter.”

— Charles Darwin, Journal 1832–6 (Darwin was in Lima at the time)

6.     “The only way to handle a Peruvian is to agree with his pessimism.”

— Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express, 1979

7.     “For more than half the year Lima has a peculiar climate. It is never cold enough to have a fire, but usually cold enough to make you wish for one. It never rains, but is never dry; that is to say, it is not wet enough to make one hold up an umbrella, yet wet enough to soak one’s clothes.”

— James Bryce, South America: Observations and Impressions, 1912

8.     “Going to Peru is, well, if you ever have an opportunity in your life to go there, you should do it because it is absolutely mind boggling.”

– Dean Stockwell, actor

9.     “Calica keeps cursing the filth and, whenever he treads on one of the innumerable turds lining the streets, he looks at his dirty shoes instead of at the sky or a cathedral outlined in space. He does not smell the intangible and evocative matter of which Cuzco is made, but only the odor of stew and excrement. It’s a question of temperament.”

— Che Guevara, in a letter to his mother from Cusco in 1953

10.  “I had the right amount of detachment to go back and really appreciate what I had grown up with. There’s a particular style that is very Peru that you don’t see anywhere else; it’s got so many different imprints. When you mix Incan minimalism with the heavy, ornate Spanish Baroque, it is very interesting.”

— Mario Testino, Peruvian fashion and portrait photographer

11.   “Am going to cross Pacific on a wooden raft to support a theory that the South Sea Islands were peopled from Peru. Will you come? I guarantee nothing but a free trip to Peru and the South Sea Islands and back, but you will find good use for your technical abilities on the voyage. Reply at once”

— Thor Heyerdahl, from an advert placed by Heyerdahl looking for people to join him on his voyage

12.  “Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.”

— George Eliot, Middlemarch

“I can never see fashion models,
lean angular cheeks, strutting hips
and blooming hair, without thinking of
the skulls at the catacombs in Lima, Peru.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye, from her poem Morning Paper, Society Page

13.  “It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and what’s happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there — with your eyes open — and lived to see it.”

— Anthony Bourdain, The Nasty Bits

14.  “Separating fact and fiction in Inca history is impossible, because virtually all the sources available are Spanish accounts of stories that had already been vetted by the Inca emperors to highlight their own heroic roles. Imagine a history of modern Iraq written by Dick Cheney and based on authorized biographies of Sadam Hussein published in Arabic, and you’ll get some idea of what historians face.”

— Mark Adams, Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time

15.  “Being Peruvian means to come from the farthest place possible to get to Europe. Peru is the land of the Incas. It was the capital of South America; it was where the Spanish founded their empire and took over the Inca Empire and made it into a colony of Spain.”

— Mario Testino, fashion photographer

16.  “I am humbled beyond belief by the reception here in Lima, Peru, and also by the ongoing welcome. For me, it is incredible – once more. If Chile, Argentina and Brazil are as giving, I shall ask no more and die happy. Peru, Peru – my heart’s lighthouse.”

— Morrissey (just days before being struck down with severe food poisoning in Lima, forcing him to cancel his South American tour)

17.  “The world of cuisine was looking for diversity and they discovered Peru as the country with the most diversity. People wanted to taste what we have in Peru and it was then we decided to become a movement for this change and after a couple of years we came up with a strategy. We decided we will cook as Peruvians to put a value on our own ingredients, culture, traditions.”

— Gastón Acurio, Peruvian celebrity chef and ambassador, in an interview with The Daily Meal.

18.  “You have such a wonderful country to travel through… Be proud to be Peruvians and of your culture.”

— German film director Werner Herzog, speaking to young Peruvian filmmakers in April 2018.

19.  “Have you ever been to Mexico City and haggled with the locals over souvenirs? Well, in Peru, you had to negotiate like that to get the freshest fish at the market.”

— Nobu Matsuhisa,  celebrity chef and restaurateur known for his Japanese-Peruvian fusions.

20. “There aren’t many of us left where I come from.”
“And where is that?” asked Mrs. Brown.
The bear looked round carefully before replying.
“Darkest Peru.”

— Paddington Bear

21.  “Since it is impossible to know what’s really happening, we Peruvians lie, invent, dream and take refuge in illusion. Because of these strange circumstances, Peruvian life, a life in which so few actually do read, has become literary.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa

22. “Machu Picchu – A relic of a civilization long gone. But humanity survived, and grew. Was this what Arion had in mind for Metropolis? Paris? Tokyo?”

– Superman, Superman Vol 1 667 (November 2007)

With affection,

Ruben