Peru.
For centuries home of the high
civilizations of the Andes.
Here the Sun Kings of the Inca
ruled over a vast empire,
which stretched for 2,000 miles along
the mountain spine of South America.
In 1532, that empire was destroyed
with tragic ease by the Spanish.
As their world crumbled around them,
Inca nobles retreated into the remote
recesses of the mountains.
There they struggled to keep alive
their culture in its final refuge.
The last city of the Incas
Vilcabamba.
This is the story of two men
lured by the silent call of that
last Inca hiding place.
One to rediscover it
the other to destroy it forever.
Machu Picchu.
For centuries, this spectacular
Inca citadel lay forgotten,
hidden by the plunging ravines
and coiling mists of the mountain
cloud forest.
The year is 1948.
Machu Picchu is visited by
a retired American senator
a man, who in his youth,
revealed it to the world.
He has done many things in
his remarkable life,
but Hiram Bingham knows
he will be remembered for one:
this astonishing archeological
discovery.
Hiram Bingham is a sort of
accidental archeologist.
He's been scorned by better trained
excavators,
but he really doesn't care
he's used to coping with bad press.
Back in Washington he'd been elected
a Republican senator
in the Roaring Twenties.
His flamboyant style was perfectly
in tune with the times.
A bribery scandal, an affair with
the wife of another Congressman,
divorce, accusations that he'd
embezzled his first wife's fortune
had all left him unscathed.
In 1929, he landed a Zeppelin
on Capitol Hill as a publicity stunt.
Hiram loved headlines.
He was a very, very colorful
character
a man of enormous energy,
tremendous ambition.
He was capable of doing almost
anything, and he had an attitude
that led him to believe he could
accomplish whatever he set out to do.
Perhaps Hiram's adventurous life was
the perfect reaction to his upbringing.
Born to pioneering Christian
missionaries in the Hawaiian Islands,
Hiram was raised for a life of
Puritan austerity.
In the world of his childhood,
any extravagance,
lack of discipline, even dancing
were strictly forbidden.
Not surprisingly,
Hiram was eager to escape.
Resourceful and intelligent,
he saved and studied to get into
school on the mainland.
Before long, he was headed for Yale.
Hiram threw himself into
Yale college life.
Gone were the puritanical days
of his Hawaiian childhood.
Suddenly, a new world of temptations
was beckoning.
Intellectual excitement, adventure,
and girls.
Dear Mother, what can I do?
I know it will hurt you
to think that I dance,
but people here in the East do not
understand why
anyone should not dance,
unless one is sick or lame.
I can see nothing wrong with it
unless carried to excess.
Although reserved, Hiram was
determined to enjoy himself.
Thanks to his charm,
he was soon moving freely in this
atmosphere of wealth and privilege.
Before long, he met Alfreda Mitchell,
heiress to the Tiffany fortune.
Alfreda was irresistible, wealthy,
and from the high society
Hiram was now determined to be
a part of.
In 1900,
two years after they first met,
Hiram and Freda were married at the
Mitchell's grand estate in New London.
Hiram took to wealth like a duck to
water but there was a down side.
There was obviously an economic
asymmetry.
The wife brought with her a set
of expectations
about the style in which
she should live,
and her side of the family was
apparently very active
in making sure that those
expectations were met.
He liked the money and status,
but hadn't banked on the pressures
from his in laws.
Used to his independence,
Hiram soon began to feel like a bird
in a gilded cage.
He had every prospect of a
professorship at Yale,
but before long university life, too,
started to feel suffocating.
Feeling hemmed in by academia,
in laws,
and the pressures of domesticity,
Hiram soon started looking for
an escape.
He decided field research for
a book about Simon Bolivar
would be his ticket to
some adventure.
In 1906, he said good bye to Alfreda
and headed off for South America.
I feel the Bingham blood stirring
in my veins
as I start for little known regions,
as nearly all my Bingham ancestors for
ten generations have done before me.
Freda wasn't happy about the long
separation imposed by his travels.
Hiram wrote soothing letters as if
he wasn't either.
Dearly beloved, I love you with a
love that increases
from day to day.
Let us not complain about
our long separation
but rejoice in the opportunity to
accomplish a good piece of work.
But thousands of miles away,
Hiram was ecstatic.
He may have missed Alfreda,
but at last he met his true calling
adventurer.
It was through the actual process of
travel that he began to realize that
exploration rather than documentary
research was what really drew him.
Bingham abandoned his
academic research
to write a book about his travels.
When he reached Peru,
Bingham came face to face with
the Inca world for the first time.
He was entranced.
Here was the remains of a civilization
as vast and sophisticated as
ancient Egypt,
and yet little was known about it.
Its descendants still populated
the Andes.
The ancient sites
which littered Peru spoke to him
of a magnificent bygone world,
but he had no idea how to interpret
what they said.
He had to find a method on the spot.
Fortunately, I had with me that
extremely useful handbook,
"Hints to the Travelers," published
by the Royal Geographic Society.
In one of the chapters I found out
what should be done
when one is confronted by
a prehistoric site:
take careful measurements,
plenty of photographs, and describe
as accurately as possible all finds.
He was soon eagerly examining Inca
sites all over Peru.
One episode of Inca history fascinated
him above all others Vilcabamba,
last stronghold of the Inca kings.
Sixteenth century chronicles recounted
how a core group of Inca nobles
and priests
had escaped the carnage of conquest
and fled into the impenetrable
high jungles
to the north of the Inca capital,
Cuzco.
And there, at a place called
Vilcabamba,
they'd constructed an Inca court
in exile.
A palace, a temple, a final
refuge of their world.
They had taken their sacred relics
of gold with them.
Many had been lured by the accounts
of Vilcabamba and gone in search of it.
None had ever succeeded in
finding it.
Perhaps the relics and the gold
were still there,
hidden in the jungle,
waiting to be discovered.
Hiram was spellbound.
It was a treasure seeker's dream.
Suddenly, Hiram saw a fantastic
adventure opening up before him:
he would discover Vilcabamba,
lost city of the Incas,
and unearth its hidden treasures.
Hiram returned to the U.S.
and threw himself into fundraising
and his researches on Vilcabamba.
He pored over maps and chronicles
of the Conquest.
Based on these, Hiram made
meticulous calculations of
where Vilcabamba must be.
After months of research,
he was certain
the last refuge of the Incas
had been in a remote place now
called Espiritu Pampa.
Now all he had to do was
raise the money for the expedition.
He was too proud to be totally
bankrolled by his wife's family.
He went down to the Yale Club in
New York City, and he gave a speech.
A number of the people came forward.
When they saw the pictures of
his earlier travels,
they became very excited.
Last night a classmate,
of whom I have seen very little,
came over and talked with me.
When I told him about my plans and how
I needed $1800
to pay for a topographer
he smiled and said,
"Eighteen hundred dollars?
I'll give you that."
I could have shouted with joy.
The New York harbor
on June 8th, 1911,
Hiram Bingham stood on the deck
of a steamer
once again waving goodbye
to his wife.
This time it was harder.
They had just had another son,
Hiram IV.
I shall never forget how you looked
as you stood on the wharf with Harry,
so brave and courageous,
and yet so little and so appealing.
It did seem too cruel for words
that I should be
leaving you all alone.
But soon he was back in Peru doing
what he loved most.
In July 1911, he set off
from Cuzco northwards
on the long journey to
Espiritu Pampa.
Back in his element,
Hiram was overjoyed.
He was also extraordinarily lucky.
After less than three weeks easy
trekking down a newly opened road,
a local farmer told him about some old
stone terraces
on a mountain nearby.
Hiram asked the man
what the place was called.
He scribbled down the answer
in his notebook Machu Picchu.
He decided to have a quick look at it
the next day.
A young Indian boy led the party up
onto a plateau a few hours away.
Hardly had we rounded
the promontory
than we were confronted by
an unexpected sight:
a great flight of beautifully
constructed stone faced terraces,
perhaps a hundred of them.
I could scarcely believe my senses.
Would anyone believe
what I had found?
Fortunately, I had a good camera.
He knew he'd found an Inca ruin of
exceptional beauty,
but I think because of his
lack of experience,
he didn't fully appreciate
how unique the discovery was.
It was an entire city
which had lain untouched
since the Incas had abandoned it
almost 400 years before.
Not understanding what he had found,
Hiram left two of his team
to start clearing
and mapping the site
while he pressed on to his
real goal, Vilcabamba.
He forged on northwards
pushing his team through tangled...
jungle and perilous ravines
sure he was heading toward
greater discoveries
a fabulous lost city of
temples and palaces
that would put any other Inca ruin
to shame.
Finally, after weeks of
arduous trekking,
he approached the area where he knew
Vilcabamba must be.
For days his team hacked through
dense underbrush and tangled vines.
To their great astonishment,
they found nothing.
Espiritu Pampa was a desolate
upland plateau
with a few unimpressive stone
foundations and a lot of dense jungle.
It was a far cry from the magnificent
city Bingham had imagined.
He was disappointed and confused.
Could this be Vilcabamba?
Or had his calculations been wrong?
A perplexed Hiram turned back
the expedition.
The men were exhausted and supplies
were running out.
As his team trudged back to
civilization, morale hit rock bottom.
I often wonder why under the sun
I picked out a career
that would force me to spend so much
of my time away
from my dear ones.
The future is not clear to me.
As Hiram headed back to
the U.S. and Alfreda,
gloom and uncertainty hung over
his whole project.
Once back in the U.S.,
Hiram's spirits revived,
and with them his dreams of
Vilcabamba.
He rechecked his calculations of
its position.
If it was not Espiritu Pampa,
could it be Machu Picchu?
But Machu Picchu's position still
seemed wrong.
He decided to return to Peru
the following year
and investigate his find
more thoroughly.
When he arrived in Machu Picchu again
in the summer of 1912,
what the workmen had revealed was,
quite simply, stunning.
It clearly was some sort of city
its size, its spectacular location,
its magnificent terracing,
all made him sure it was a royal city.
No one but a king could have insisted
on having the lintels of his doorways
made of solid blocks of granite,
each weighing three tons.
What a prodigious amount of
patient work had to be employed.
Overcome with excitement,
Hiram immediately began to speculate
that this must be the last refuge
of the Inca kings.
Even if the location was wrong,
everything else was so right.
Here in this breathtaking hideout,
the Inca rulers had surely sheltered
the last remnants of their world.
Hiram devoted himself to his
spectacular find at Machu Picchu.
It was his passport to
worldwide fame.
National Geographic devoted an
entire magazine
issue to Bingham
and his work in Peru.
Suddenly, everybody knew about Machu
Picchu and the man who uncovered it.
At a special National Geographic
Society dinner he was honored
along with the world renowned
discoverers
of the North and South Poles.
Hiram had finally achieved the fame
he'd always wanted.
But his career as an excavator was
not to last much longer.
He returned to Peru in 1915 to a
storm of controversy.
For many Peruvians,
the apparent absence of
spectacular gold
among Bingham's finds
was deeply suspicious.
Rumors flew that Bingham
had found gold
and was smuggling it out of
the country.
Fed up, fearing arrest,
Hiram packed and left Peru.
On his return to the U.S.,
he decided to abandon his excavations.
The first World War was raging.
He signed up as an aviator.
World War I offered him a very
convenient way of extricating himself
from what had become an intractable
situation in Peru.
He could honorably say that
the world needed him
to become involved in the
military effort
that, as a patriot,
he should do that.
After a tour of duty in Europe,
Bingham had the perfect qualifications
for a political career.
Yale man, world famous explorer,
and now war hero.
He was elected in 1924 to the
U.S. Senate with little difficulty.
His political star rose steadily
through the 1920s,
but a bribery scandal and the Great
Depression brought it down fast.
The political tide turned against
Hiram and his buccaneering style.
He lost his Senate seat in 1932.
Before long, he lost Alfreda too,
and left taking a large part of
her family's money with him.
Remarried, eager to make up
for past mistakes,
he turned back to tend the one
reputation he knew was secure,
discoverer of Machu Picchu.
He believed to his dying day that
Machu Picchu was Vilcabamba.
As it turned out,
here too he was mistaken.
Later discoveries made it clear
the real Vilcabamba was exactly where
Hiram's first calculations had put it,
at Espiritu Pampa.
Beneath the tangled overgrowth of
Espiritu Pampa's desolate jungle,
the remains of Vilcabamba had been
lying only a few hundred yards
from where Hiram had searched.
Determined to dispel
any lingering doubts
that Machu Picchu was not
the last refuge of the Incas,
Hiram devoted many of the years
up to his death in 1956
to his researches into Vilcabamba
and its fall.
His studies took him back to
the 16th century.
The bloodstained and tumultuous era
of the Conquest
and to a brilliant, chilling,
now largely forgotten man
who changed the course of
Peru's history
Francisco de Toledo,
administrator of genius,
passionate believer in the law,
destroyer of Vilcabamba,
killer of the last Inca king.
Francisco de Toledo was born in 1515
into the high Spanish nobility
in the town of Oropesa.
In the 16th century, you couldn't get
much more privileged than this.
Spain was the wealthiest and most
powerful nation on earth.
Its massive armies had subdued
Moslems in the Middle East
and Protestants in Europe's north.
It was the powerhouse of the West.
The recent astonishing discoveries
of a whole new continent
promised an inexhaustible supply of
wealth, and it all belonged to Spain.
This was the confident, aggressive and
opulent world
Francisco was born into.
But despite his family's position,
his early life was not easy.
His mother died in childbirth, and
young Francisco was raised by nuns.
He grew up isolated in a world of
austere Catholicism
and fervent devotion.
Young Francisco took on the qualities
of the religious world that shaped him.
He became tough minded,
disciplined,
and an ardent believer
in the justice of Christ.
His family had always been loyal
servants of the Spanish crown,
so at 15 Francisco became a page
at the royal palace.
In 1532, Francisco would have been
at court for only two years
when he heard the astounding tales
of Pizarro's conquest of Peru
and the astonishing ransom in gold
of the Inca king, Atahuallpa.
These were reports from beyond
the edge of the known world.
How could his imagination not be
seized
by the faraway kingdom of Peru
and its amazing riches?
Francisco joined a religious
and military order
at the forefront of
Spain's expansion.
He took the necessary vows
and dedicated his life to Christ,
Spain and the law.
Toledo was brought up to be
what we would consider a humanist.
He had training in the law,
he could read Latin.
So, he was a man trained to be like,
today we would say a Harvard or
a Yale man, ready to rule.
Francisco rose fast
through the ranks.
By 1558, he'd become a permanent,
powerful member of the royal household.
He was one of the chosen few present
at the bedside of King Charles V
when he died.
Francisco went on to serve the
next king of Spain,
Philip II,
who on taking the throne was confronted
with the devastating
and unexpected realization
the empire was broke.
Overextended in Europe,
Spain had also financed
decades of conquest
and exploration in the Americas.
Very little was coming back.
All that Inca and Aztec gold
that had been melted down
turned out to be a drop in the ocean.
The real wealth of the colonies was
in the hands of the 'encomenderos,'
the new Spanish overlords who had
divided up the lands
and the Indians amongst themselves.
In a feeding frenzy
over the astonishing wealth
of their newfound land,
the encomenderos had spawned Spain's
very own Wild West,
where lawlessness and
the sword ruled.
They were busy making themselves rich,
and not paying tribute to the crown.
Philip realized he desperately
needed someone
who could straighten out the colony
in Peru
and get some revenues flowing
back to Spain.
That man, he decided,
was Francisco de Toledo.
In 1569, Francisco set sail for Peru
to take up the most challenging
and important job
in the Spanish Empire,
Viceroy of Peru.
The grueling journey took almost
an entire year
across the barely charted waters
of the Atlantic,
and then down the Pacific Coast of
South America to Peru.
On November 30th, 1569,
Francisco arrived in the
Spanish capital of Peru, Lima.
Anxious for his favor,
the local encomenderos gave him
an enthusiastic welcome.
But in a letter to King Philip,
he secretly confided his disgust
for the anarchic little frontier town
and its Spanish overlords.
The Spaniards in this kingdom
have tried to fill their greedy hands
in the looting of ancient tombs
and sacred worship sites.
And it is the most common thing
for them to wildly flaunt their finds.
But this is what he'd been sent to
put right.
The new viceroy threw himself into the
task of reforming the delinquent colony.
It quickly became clear to him that
the colony was being pulled apart by
two powerful forces.
On the one hand there were
the encomenderos
who fought amongst themselves
and enslaved the Indians.
On the other, there was the Church,
which also felt it had a moral right
not only to Indian souls,
but their labor.
The whole colony was feeding itself
on Indian toil and Indian ignorance.
Not surprisingly,
the native population simmered with
resentment and discontent.
Francisco could immediately see
where he had to focus his reforms.
I am informed that the Indians
are not free
as a result of their weakness,
and the great awe they have
toward Spaniards.
It is, therefore, my duty
as their protector
to see they are not cheated
in their work.
Francisco also learned
the Inca court in exile,
now established in Vilcabamba,
had already been at the center
of the violent rebellion
which had raged for years.
When Toledo arrived to Peru,
he was sympathetic to the Inca.
On the other hand, there had been
this famous uprising of the Incas.
The Incas had retired to Vilcabamba
and they were threatening the
whole process of the conquest.
Francisco had to somehow
introduce order
into this volatile
and chaotic situation.
He realized he could never
put things right
unless he came to understand it
in greater depth.
So he proposed something that,
for the time,
was absolutely remarkable
a research trip
to find out at first hand
what was happening in the colony.
I saw clearly that I would not be
able to govern the Spaniards
or the Indians with the zeal that
I had for serving God or Your Majesty
unless I saw the land, traveled
through it, and inspected it.
It was what we would do today
in a social survey.
It was completely innovative.
The government up to that point was
based on brutality and the use of arms.
What Toledo proposes is government
based on knowledge,
which makes him a man
ahead of his time.
So in 1570, Toledo set out on his
remarkable voyages of investigation
through the remnants of
the vast Inca Empire.
They would last for five years.
With translators and scribes,
he traveled from one end of
the colony to the other,
interviewing Indians and Spanish
alike, collecting data on population,
land holdings, resources
and local history.
In the years of his travels,
he accumulated an astonishing
As Francisco listened to
Indians talking,
he understood the magnitude of
their catastrophe.
Not only had they been subjected to
the encomenderos,
but they were dying by the
hundreds of thousands.
A series of devastating epidemics of
European diseases
to which they had no resistance
had already wiped out over half
the Indian population of Peru.
In just 30 years since the arrival
of Pizarro,
almost a million people had died of
colds, flus,
measles and small pox.
In despair, many people were focusing
unreal hopes of salvation
on the Inca court in exile.
Francisco started to believe that
Vilcabamba's hold on the Indian
imagination had to be broken.
Francisco traveled on.
In the course of his research
he covered all the territory
from what is now Quito in Ecuador
to Bolivia.
And as he traveled,
he learned something else.
The Inca Empire had been composed of
many different tribes.
The Incas were just one of them
who had come to dominate the others
only recently,
about 100 years before the arrival
of the Spanish.
Just like the Spanish, they had waged
fierce war to conquer the country.
There was no shortage of evidence
of Inca brutality to weaker tribes.
The Incas are tyrants,
and as such, intruders in the
government of these lands.
I think he was looking for arguments
in order to justify the Spanish
conquest within this particular region.
And he saw that the excuse
could be to blame
the Inca people as being tyrants,
as being dictators, as being people
who had imposed themselves
with force on the populations
they had conquered
in order to present
the Spanish Conquest
as a sort of liberated process.
He wasn't wrong.
What happens is when you use the word
'tyrant'
it has a whole moral connotation.
The Incas were an
authoritarian system,
with an imperial military force
which was extremely violent, cruel,
and would use the sorts of torture
which would scandalize us
if they were used in European wars.
As Francisco pondered the realities
he had discovered on his voyages,
any doubts he might have had
about the legitimacy of the
Spanish conquest evaporated.
With typical thoroughness,
he came up with a plan which was
brilliantly argued,
utterly coherent
and totally draconian.
His vision was of a great kingdom
of stern justice in Peru.
He would impose Spain's authority
on the quarreling encomenderos
and church alike.
He knew he would make enemies
of both of them.
He did it anyway.
And he would totally reorganize the
Indian world so it could experience
both the justice and authority
of the Spanish crown.
The Indians were to be resettled
from their remote villages
into more accessible towns
where they would pay taxes to Spain
and be protected by her.
And he would insist that, as subjects
of Spain, they had rights.
But there was one terrible price
to pay
for Francisco's vision of
a just social order in Peru
there would be no place
for Vilcabamba.
There could not be two kings
in the colony.
Vilcabamba and the remaining power
of the Inca kings must be destroyed.
Unknown to Francisco, the Inca king
he was deciding to destroy
was little more than a boy,
Tupac Amaru.
Brought up by the Inca priestesses
of Vilcabamba,
he was deeply religious and knew
nothing of the outside world.
He was gentle, famously beautiful,
charming, and it seems, not very smart.
Tupac Amaru was very young
when he was crowned Inca.
Tupac Amaru is referred as an 'Uti'.
Uti is meant to be sort of
not mentally retarded,
but not the quickest,
not the brightest.
Tupac Amaru was a very young person.
I don't imagine him as being
very well politically trained.
He was very young.
He was just a symbolic figure.
Tupac Amaru was an innocent,
but that wasn't going to save him.
On June 16th, 1572, Spanish troops
thundered towards Vilcabamba.
As they charge into the citadel,
Tupac Amaru manages to escape
with his wife
who is expecting their first child.
They don't get far.
The bewildered young Tupac is
dragged back to Cuzco,
and on September 21st, 1572,
condemned to death.
As Tupac Amaru is led through
the streets to his execution,
the town is seething.
Everybody has fallen in love with
the handsome young king,
not just Indians,
but Spaniards too.
They all want Francisco to relent.
Francisco locks himself in his office
and refuses to see anyone.
In the main square of Cuzco, Tupac
Amaru rises to the execution block.
An eyewitness records the scene:
as the multitude of Indians saw
that lamentable spectacle,
they deafened the skies making them
reverberate
with their cries and wailing.
There are two versions of
what happens next.
In one, Tupac quiets the crowd
and says nobly,
"Mother Earth, witness how my enemies
shed my blood."
In another, he makes
a rambling, tearful speech
and renounces the Inca gods.
Everyone prays that Toledo will
change his mind.
But from Toledo's closed office,
there is a resounding silence.
Toledo writes to King Philip:
what Your Majesty has ordered
concerning the Inca has been done.
But His Majesty had not ordered
the death of Tupac Amaru,
only a solution to the Indian problem.
From this moment the tide starts
to turn against Francisco.
Toledo accomplished the mission
that he had set out for himself.
That's why he wanted it to be so
public and so theatrical,
to send a message,
"This is over; this is it."
But it wasn't over.
As Tupac's head was mounted on
a pike in Cuzco's central square,
the Inca king's faithful subjects
held vigil all night.
And immediately the stories
circulated that
Tupac Amaru's head became more
beautiful with each passing minute.
As the centuries passed,
it became more beautiful still.
Tupac Amaru was converted into
a Christ like figure
of martired innocence,
the symbol of native resistance
to oppression.
For 500 years, almost every popular
rebellion in Peru,
from the Great Indian uprisings of
the 18th century,
led by Tupac Amaru II,
to the urban guerrillas of the late
It's a tragic myth,
because everybody who invoked
Tupac Amaru failed as well.
Tupac Amaru II failed,
the Peruvian Revolution of '68,
which relied on the image of the
two Tupac Amarus, also failed.
As history turned Tupac Amaru
into a tragic hero,
it turned Francisco into a caricature
of the cruel Spaniard.
Forgotten were his stands for justice
and the rights of Indians
against the brutal exploitation
of the encomenderos,
he became famous for one thing:
executing the innocent boy king,
Tupac Amaru.
You've got to remember
who was writing that history.
The history of Spain was written
by priests,
the missionaries who hated Toledo.
I think he held everybody
to the same standards.
In administrative terms,
he did the right thing.
In terms of his conscience,
only he can tell.
After a remarkably successful reform
of the colony in Peru,
Francisco returned to Spain
expecting honors for his years
of faithful service.
Instead, insults and disgrace
were heaped on him.
The church had worked its influence
on Philip.
The king who he had served with
such brilliance and devotion
dismissed Francisco
without an audience.
Go away to your house.
I sent you to serve a king,
and you killed a king.
It was a devastating blow.
Mortally wounded,
he returned to his family's home.
Six months later,
Francisco de Toledo,
Fifth Viceroy of Peru,
died a broken man.
His stern vision of a realm of
justice in Peru never came to be.
The greed and corruption of the
colony slowly reasserted itself.
The Indians were exploited
as never before.
As the screws of colonial oppression
tightened,
the memory of Francisco faded,
and Vilcabamba became the tragic myth
which would return to haunt Peru
forever.