The Last Days of the Incas Read Online Free Page A

mountain ridge in Peru that would earn him everlasting fame.
    “My dearest love,” Bingham wrote his wife the next morning from the valley floor, “We reached here night before last and pitched the 7 x 9 tent in a cozy corner described above. Yesterday [Harry] Foote spent collecting insects. [William] Erving did some [photographic] developing, and I climbed a couple of thousand feet to a wonderful old Inca city called Machu Picchu.” Bingham continued: “The stone is as fine as any in Cuzco! It is unknown and will make a fine story. I expect to return there shortly for a stay of a week or more.”
    Over the next four years, Bingham would return to the ruins of Machu Picchu two more times, clearing, mapping, and excavating the ruins while comparing what he discovered with the old Spanish chronicles’ descriptions of the lost city of Vilcabamba. Although he at first had some doubts, Bingham was soon convinced that the ruins of Machu Picchu were none other than those of the legendary rebel city of Vilcabamba,the final refuge of the Incas.
    In the pages of his later books, Bingham would write that Machu Picchu was “the ‘Lost City of the Incas,’ favorite residence of the last Emperors, site of temples and palaces built of white granite in the most inaccessible part of the grand canyon of the Urubamba; a holy sanctuary to which only nobles, priests, and the Virgins of the Sun were admitted. It was once called Vilcapampa [Vilcabamba] but is known today as Machu Picchu.”
    Not everyone was convinced that Bingham had discovered the Incas’ rebel city, however. For the few scholars who had actually read the old Spanish chronicles, discrepancies seemed to exist between the Spaniards’ description of the city of Vilcabamba and the admittedly stunning ruins that Bingham had found. Was the citadel of Machu Picchu
really
the last stronghold of the Incas as described in the chronicles? Or could it be that Hiram Bingham—a man now feted and lionized around the world as an expert on the Incas—had made a colossal error, and the rebel city had yet to be found? For those scholars who had their doubts, there was only one way to find out—and that was to return to the sixteenth-century chronicles in order to learn more about how and why the Incas had created the largest capital of guerrilla fighters the New World had ever known.

2. A FEW HUNDRED WELL-ARMED ENTREPRENEURS

    “In the last ages of the world there shall comea time when the ocean sea will loosen its bonds and a great land will appear and a navigator like him that guided Jason will discover a new world, and then the isle of Thule will no longer be the final limit of the earth.”
    THE ROMAN PHILOSOPHER SENECA, WRITING IN
HESPERIDIUM
[SPAIN] IN THE FIRST CENTURY A.D.
    ON APRIL 21, 1536, ON SATURDAY AT THE END OF EASTER week, few of the 196 Spaniards in the Inca capital of Cuzco realized that within the next few weeks they would either die or else would come so close to dying that every one of them would ask for absolution, the forgiveness of their sins, and would entrust their souls to their Maker. Just three years after Francisco Pizarro and his Spaniards had garroted the Inca emperor, Atahualpa (ah tah HUAL pa) and had seized a large portion of an empire 2,500 miles long and ten million strong, things were beginning to unravel for the Spanish conquistadors. For the last few years the Spaniards had consolidated their gains, installed a puppet Inca ruler, stolen the Incas’ women, gained dominion over millions, and sent a massive amount of Inca gold and silver back to Spain. The original conquistadors were by now all incredibly wealthy men—the equivalent of multi-millionaires in our time—and those who had stayed on in Peru had already retired to fabulously large estates. The conquistadors were established seigneurial lords, the founders of family dynasties. Already they had shed their armor for fine linen clothes, rakish hats spiked with gaudy feathers,