Machu Picchu before Bingham
Archaeologist Paolo Greer looks at the history of Machu Picchu before it was officially ‘discovered’ by Hiram Bingham in 1911
In 1471, the year the Conquistador Francisco Pizarro was born, Pachacuti Yupanqui died. Pachacuti was the ninth Inca and Atahualpa’s Great Grandfather. When he was young, Pachacuti was known simply as Cusi Yupanqui. Then, the Inca kingdom was small and their enemies, the Chancas, attacked their home, Cusco. Cusi’s Father, Viracocha, and his six brothers fled, while he, the youngest, stayed to successfully defend the city.
In the decades that followed, Cusi Yupanqui and his sons, Yamque and Topa,
extended the Inca Empire to include vast territories and numerous civilizations. Cusi became known as “Pachacuti”, “He Who Changes the World”.
The “World Changer” confined Cusco’s rivers to stone channels and had his capital com- pletely rebuilt. He created the Inca system of warehouses and roads, with chasqui mes- sengers to maintain rapid communication. He defined the calendar, festivals, customs and laws for his people to follow and organized a warrior class for the conquests to come.
It was Pachacuti who ordered the holiest Inca site, the Sun Temple or Coricancha, to be constructed. For that, he gathered the best goldsmiths and told them to fashion a life-sized figure of a young boy, resembling
the brilliantly shining child he had seen in a vision while protecting Cusco.
Pachacuti personally placed the finished statue in an interior room of the Coricancha, where only he, certain lords and special caretak- ers were allowed to enter to revere the child’s figure, the most sacred icon in the realm.
Like Pachacuti, the golden sculpture was considered a representative of the sun.
On the same day that Pachacuti in- stalled the boy’s image in the Sun Temple, he had a sugarloaf shaped stone, an intihuatana or “sun hitch”, placed in the center of the principal plaza of Cusco. The specially carved rock represented the sun, for one and all to worship.
Although Pachacuti’s victories stretched throughout the Inca’s known world, his initial invasions were in the Urubamba Valley. It was there that the aged leader had a village built for his panaca or de- scendant family to care for his tomb and to serve his memory.
The Inca History is Recorded
Huayna Capac, Pachacuti’s grandson, chose the newborn Cuxirimay (‘Speaks Good Fortune’) to eventually wed his son, Atahualpa. After Huayna Capac’s death, Cuxirimay was in Atahualpa’s camp when he was captured by Pizarro. She stayed with the imprisoned Inca leader until his execution by the Spaniards.
Following Atahualpa’s murder, Cuxirimay became Doña Angelina Yupanqui, and Francisco Pizarro’s mistress. She bore him two sons, Juan and Francisco.
When Pizarro was assassinated in 1541, Angelina Yupanqui was nineteen years old.
In 1544, Doña Angelina became the wife of Juan de Betanzos, a Quechua in- terpreter for the Conquistadors. Following the conquest of Perú, Betanzos became the most respected translator for the Viceroyalty. In the same year that he wed Angelina, Betanzos was commissioned to write the Church’s religious conversion manuals and Spanish-Quechua dictionar- ies. In 1551, the Viceroy Mendoza ordered Betanzos to record the history of the Incas. Betanzos’ unique work, Suma y narracion de los Yngas, was finished in 1557. However, all but the initial eighteen chapters were lost for more than 400 years.
In 1987, a complete manuscript, with an additional sixty-four chapters, was found in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. The “Inca Garcilaso” produced his “Royal Commentaries” in 1609, based mostly on what he remembered as a child before leaving Perú in 1560.
Bernabe Cobo, like Garcilaso, among the most cited of Inca authorities, relied on the scant records available in his day, publishing his history in 1653, nearly
one hundred years after Betanzos’ direct translations from Atahualpa’s cousin-wife and their surviving relatives.
Perhaps, it was then that Cuxirimay, a.k.a. Doña Angelina Yupanqui, finally “spoke her good fortune” by preserving the history of her vanquished ancestors. Without the telling of her story by Juan de Betanzos, and his Narration’s recent rediscovery, much of the Inca’s own ac- count might have been lost forever.
The Rediscovery of Patallacta
From Inca Land – Explorations in the Highlands of Peru (1912) by Hiram Bingham: “On the afternoon of July 23rd we reached a hut called “La Maquina”, where travelers frequently stop for the night. The name comes from the presence here of some large iron wheels, parts of a “machine” destined never to overcome the difficulties of being transported all the way to a sugar estate in the lower valley, and years ago left here to rust in the jungle…”.
The rusted machine that the Yale ex- plorer wrote about had nothing to do with sugar cane. It was a sawmill, brought to Perú before Bingham’s birth by a German, Augusto R. Berns, for the purpose of pro- ducing ties for the Southern Perú Railroad.
The site of La Maquina is now Aguas Calientes, the community just below Machu Picchu.
In 1867, Berns purchased twenty-five kilometers of the northern bank of the Urubamba/Vilcanota River, next to the famous citadel. His estate, the “Cercado de San Antonio” or “Torontoy”, extended above and far downriver from the present ruins of Torontoy, and up to the mountain crests, directly opposite of Machu Picchu.
Even today, this region within plain sight of the best known ancient city in the Americas is virtually unknown.
Pre-Bingham Research
I first walked the popular Inca trail in 1974, several years before I encountered history of the area that pre-dated Hiram Bingham. Like many a good adventure, this one started with the serendipitous discovery of an old map.
I came upon the sketch during one of my numerous trips to the U.S. Library of Congress. It had no title or date, although it indicated the locations of mineral deposits along the Vilcanota River. Oddly, it was in English and in its center was a spot marked “Saw Mill”.
It took me another twenty years to find out who had drawn the map and why.
That same year, in 1978, I found another clue, one that also took decades to compre- hend. I had sent away for a large 900-page vol- ume, the “Directory of Archives and Manuscript Repositories”. The index described hundreds of historical collections in the United States.
I read it carefully, page by page, gleaning any reference I could about Perú.
One brief citation mentioned “promo- tional materials relating to an attempt to exploit a mineral area of Perú, 1881”. It caught my eye because, in those years, my passion was exploration for long for- gotten mines in the “Caravaya”, a remote section of high jungle in the department of Puno near the Bolivian frontier.
Alas, this particular prospect was some- where else entirely, on the river Vilcanota near a place called Torontoy.
The Oldest Map of Machu Picchu
In 1989, I was granted an interview with Juan Mejía Baca, the Director of the National Library of Perú. I had spent many weeks in the library and had finally worked up my courage to make a few sug- gestions to Don Juan about how he might make his archives more accessible.
At the time, I also happened to be searching for a certain book, one written in 1877 by a Herman Göhring, concerning the ill-fated 1873 Baltazar La-Torre attempt to descend the treacherous rivers below Paucartambo.
When I mentioned it to Sr. Mejia Baca, he laughed, saying that he knew of the book, had had his library completely searched and was sure it was not there.
I said I thought it was and I could find it. The Director politely rolled his eyes.
Within an hour, I located three separate copies, using an obscure index I knew. One of the books still contained Göhring’s map of the expedition, as well as of his own ex- plorations the following year, as a mining engineer in the employ of President Pardo.
When the brave La-Torre was killed by thirty-four Native arrows, Göhring escaped. He was nursed back to health by a Señora Yábar in Paucartambo, coincidentally
a relative of a friend of mine, Rodolfo Bragagnini. Indeed, it was only for Rodolfo that I sought the lost manuscript.
Even so, Göhring’s work on the Vilcanota sparked an old memory.
More importantly, his map, dated 1874, clearly indicated two peaks, “Machu Picchu” and “Huaina Picchu”, and his 1877 text referred to the “forts of Chuquillusca, Torontoy and Picchu”.
In 1989, the same year that I found the Göhring map, I gave out hundreds of copies to historians, archaeologists and to anyone who feigned an interest. Still, for more than a decade, the oldest known map of Machu Picchu remained remarkably unnoticed.
The only exceptions that I am aware of were Dan Buck, who published the copy I sent him in the South American Explorers Magazine (1993 “Fights of Machu Picchu”) and another I passed on to the Via Láctea newspaper of Cusco in 1999.
In the years that followed, when I wasn’t working pipeline in northern Alaska or squandering my grubstakes prospecting the Inambari headwaters of southeastern Perú, I continued my research on the region of Machu Picchu before Bingham.
I even diligently plied the new phenom- enon, the Internet. After two years of early cyber-searching, I learned of a few papers that heirs of an American backer of Berns had put up for sale.
The documents contained Berns’ pro- spectus and a detailed plan of the Torontoy estate that he had made himself: “I make by hand after a good yellow gumi gusty color. These points more distinct. This is a small work of some hours and will make all falling in the eye at once. Also makes an elegant map. Yours truly. A. R. Berns.”
Berns had his waybill copyrighted, so that no one else could reproduce and publish it. By 1881, he had abandoned his attempts to cut railroad ties and, instead, was promoting the “lost mines of the Inca”.
This pseudo-revelation begs for a side note, on the chance that the tabloids stumble upon this learned magazine.
Machu Picchu is made of granite. So is the surrounding terrain for quite some distance. No Inca or Spanish miner took much gold, if any, from granite. To pre- tend there were rich claims in such barren geology conjures up Mark Twain’s apt description of a gold mine: “A hole in the ground with a liar standing next to it.”
When I found Berns’ “treasure map”, I remembered a similar illustration, the one I had seen years before, in the late 1970s. I compared the two and, though by different hands, realized the first was an inset to Berns’ own drawing.
The sketch I had found earlier was done by Berns’ partner, “Poker Harry” Singer. Singer was an American who had studied chemistry for six years at Gottingen University in Germany and participated in the 1849 California gold rush.
I cannot say for sure what Singer, a real miner, thought of Berns’ shenanigans but the partnership came to an abrupt end.
In 1881, while the two men sat out the Perú-Bolivia-Chile war in Panama, Berns wrote in a letter to his sponsors: “Here had been shot Mr. Singer about 4 weeks ago as he had drunk together with some Italians, etc., insulting each other and so they shot him.”
I had a more difficult time locating the “promotional mining materials” that I had first noted in the 1978 archives directory.
Then, that history was in a University of California library. In the interim, it had been returned to Perú. I traced the line of possession from California back to Lima and eventually found the unique records, uncatalogued, in a large cardboard box, full of bookworms and home to a nest of mice.
I spent a week, sitting between the desks of two librarians, pouring over the rank trove. Regrettably, I was allowed to copy nothing, nor even to take pictures (today, the Peruvian National Library permits reproductions of older books and ephemera to be made with one’s own cam- era for a charge of two dollars per photo).
I took notes, of course, all the time pro- testing that this national treasure should be better preserved. In any case, I considered the opportunity just a tantalizing first peek.
A couple years ago, the Biblioteca Nacional of Perú opened its new quarters. Most things probably made the move okay. One box of musty papers, full of wormholes and mouse droppings, apparently did not.
Much has been said and written about the ceramics, shards and mummified bones that Bingham took back to Yale from Machu Picchu. I was delighted to read that those artifacts, at long last, would be returned to their rightful owners, the Peruvian people (update: apparently, Peru’s former first lady’s, Eliane Karp de Toledo’s, February
2008 editorial to the New York Times, may have stopped the exchange).
In any case, I am also concerned that a car- ton of moldy documents, perhaps the greatest collection of pre-Bingham Machu Picchu infor- mation, having already been repatriated, may no longer exist. Much of what I know of Berns’ escapades on the Vilcanota came from my brief preview of the files I examined in that box.
There were twenty-four folders con- taining the German’s sketches, notes and correspondence. He mentioned a Mr. Oliver, who had been “two years living in those parts”. I found a sample certificate for “The Incas Mines Gold & Silver Mining Company 187-”. One folder, alone, had fifty-seven envelopes, addressed to potential patrons.
There was a good drawing of Berns’ camp. I suspect it was of the “Maquina” huts that Bingham saw in ruins, forty-plus years later.
It would have been in the same spot where, today, Aguas Calientes thrives and hundreds of thousands of tourists have caught the shuttle for a short ride up the hill to Machu Picchu.
There were seven handwritten drafts of the “Particulars of Torontoy”, Berns’ detailed advertisement to sell his prop- erty. From one version to the next, it was telling how he embellished a word here or added another lost mine there.
The box even contained Harry Singer’s original map, in two colors! Although Berns’ own “yellow gumi gusty” plan was nowhere to be found, there were several clear white copies. He hand drew lines on them, from the “Saw Mill” to just downriver, where he hoped the government would build a bridge.
One envelope caught my curiosity as much as anything else. It contained only rusted metal shards. It was without expla- nation and addressed to a Mr. Mahon.
Why would Berns send heavy pieces of corroded metal to another country?
I had an idea, and it had to do with crossing the river.
In 1877, Göhring had dispelled his fellow countryman’s incredible claims of mineral wealth. Still, there was something else, something easier to work and possibly richer!
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