Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru

Inca Land - Explorations in the
Highlands of Peru

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Title: Inca Land Explorations in the Highlands of Peru
Author: Hiram Bingham
Release Date: January 21, 2004 [EBook #10772]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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INCA LAND
Explorations in the Highlands of Peru

By
Hiram Bingham
1922
------ FIGURE
"Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the
Ranges--Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you.
Go!"
Kipling: "The Explorer" ------

This Volume
is affectionately dedicated
to
the Muse who inspired it
the Little Mother of Seven Sons

Preface
The following pages represent some of the results of four journeys into
the interior of Peru and also many explorations into the labyrinth of
early writings which treat of the Incas and their Land. Although my
travels covered only a part of southern Peru, they took me into every
variety of climate and forced me to camp at almost every altitude at
which men have constructed houses or erected tents in the Western
Hemisphere--from sea level up to 21,703 feet. It has been my lot to
cross bleak Andean passes, where there are heavy snowfalls and low
temperatures, as well as to wend my way through gigantic canyons into
the dense jungles of the Amazon Basin, as hot and humid a region as

exists anywhere in the world. The Incas lived in a land of violent
contrasts. No deserts in the world have less vegetation than those of
Sihuas and Majes; no luxuriant tropical valleys have more plant life
than the jungles of Conservidayoc. In Inca Land one may pass from
glaciers to tree ferns within a few hours. So also in the labyrinth of
contemporary chronicles of the last of the Incas--no historians go more
rapidly from fact to fancy, from accurate observation to grotesque
imagination; no writers omit important details and give conflicting
statements with greater frequency. The story of the Incas is still in a
maze of doubt and contradiction.
It was the mystery and romance of some of the wonderful pictures of a
nineteenth-century explorer that first led me into the relatively
unknown region between the Apurimac and the Urubamba, sometimes
called "the Cradle of the Incas." Although my photographs cannot
compete with the imaginative pencil of such an artist, nevertheless, I
hope that some of them may lead future travelers to penetrate still
farther into the Land of the Incas and engage in the fascinating game of
identifying elusive places mentioned in the chronicles.
Some of my story has already been told in Harper's and the National
Geographic, to whose editors acknowledgments are due for permission
to use the material in its present form. A glance at the Bibliography will
show that more than fifty articles and monographs have been published
as a result of the Peruvian Expeditions of Yale University and the
National Geographic Society. Other reports are still in course of
preparation. My own observations are based partly on a study of these
monographs and the writings of former travelers, partly on the maps
and notes made by my companions, and partly on a study of our
Peruvian photographs, a collection now numbering over eleven
thousand negatives. Another source of information was the opportunity
of frequent conferences with my fellow explorers. One of the great
advantages of large expeditions is the bringing to bear on the same
problem of minds which have received widely different training.
My companions on these journeys were, in 1909, Mr. Clarence L. Hay;
in 1911, Dr. Isaiah Bowman, Professor Harry Ward Foote, Dr. William

G. Erving, Messrs. Kai Hendriksen, H. L. Tucker, and Paul B. Lanius;
in 1912, Professor Herbert E. Gregory, Dr. George F. Eaton, Dr. Luther
T. Nelson, Messrs. Albert H. Bumstead, E. C. Erdis, Kenneth C. Heald,
Robert Stephenson, Paul Bestor, Osgood Hardy, and Joseph Little; and
in 1915, Dr. David E. Ford, Messrs. O. F. Cook, Edmund Heller, E. C.
Erdis, E. L. Anderson, Clarence F. Maynard, J. J. Hasbrouck, Osgood
Hardy, Geoffrey W. Morkill, and G. Bruce Gilbert. To these, my
comrades in enterprises which were not always free from discomfort or
danger, I desire to acknowledge most fully my great obligations. In the
following pages they will sometimes recognize their handiwork; at
other times they may wonder why it has been overlooked. Perhaps in
another volume, which is already under way and in which I hope to
cover more particularly